 Good afternoon and thank you for joining Energy 21 for our third communications web chat. This session is brought to you by Energy 21, a campaign highlighting the benefits of wind and solar power in South Africa. Some of these important benefits include increased energy security, job creation and economic development. I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Brandi Newton and I'm the Energy 21 campaign coordinator. I work with my colleague David Shelby who had the chance to meet on the two previous web chats. This week's engaging web chat titled Enhancing Your Message Through Video is packed with lots of examples and creative information. Whether you work on renewable energy issues or other social impact campaigns, we hope that today's web chat will inspire you to use video as a common language to tell your story. I'm very excited because today we are honored to host Ron Diamond, executive producer and founder of Acme Filmworks, Incorporated. If you haven't done so already, we hope that you'll take some time to view Acme's website and watch the creative videos that Ron and his team have created. These videos inspire audiences, tell stories, communicate ideas and develop brands. For nearly 30 years, Ron Diamond has circled the globe seeking out the very best animated short films in search of artists exploring and pushing new creative boundaries. And today we're excited to have Ron with us so that he can talk more about his experiences working with video. Welcome, Ron. Thank you for joining us. Thanks very much, Brandi. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks. So I'll take it from here. Great. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for taking the time today to be with me. I'll take a couple of minutes to share with you a little bit of background on myself. I got my bachelor's and master's degrees at UCLA in Russian Pictures and Television. The first 10 years in my profession career was spent producing numerous short films, feature films, television programs and discovering and distributing short films to movie theaters and on cable television. I found the short form to be uniquely satisfying, whereas most of my peers went on to make movies and television. I found my early enjoyment of commercials and discovery of the short form as a means of engaging an audience by telling personal stories, usually told from a singular point of view with a succinct message. As a child, I love TV, and especially commercials, and if they were humorous, all the better. Here's a favorite of mine from the 1960s. Just to give you a little flavor of what I grew up on. Incredible. I still love that commercial. There's something about the kind of storytelling that's going on in there that really struck me and made a very big impression. In 1990, I chose to deviate my career path and pursue the creation of animated commercials. I chose animation because of its boundless artistry and beauty, told by filmmakers with great skill and commitment to their craft. So let me show you a short commercial that we did here at our studio that really kind of exemplifies that. I just, you know, there's no absolute relevancy between the subjects of these commercials and what it is you're doing specifically. The objective here is sharing methods of telling stories and how effective animation can be without even spoken words. That can be quite useful. For the last 27 years, through my animation studio, Acme Filmworks, I've worked with some remarkably talented animators from around the world. I love how we can subtly sell a product without identifying what we're selling. In this commercial, the client product isn't known to the last three seconds. Storytelling in a commercial is satisfying for the audience, taking away the hard sell and making the commercials and scenario relatable. So here we're going to take a look at Brenda and Elaine going shopping. Much like the opera sets of commercials that we saw first, the Weight Watchers commercial has two women painted with simple lines and profile, and most often with their backs to us. When the Weight Watchers commercial went public, it was embraced by so many women across the US named Brenda and Elaine. They actually had their names painted on their t-shirts and they would have their pictures taken from their backside and many, many different ones came in. And so the wonderful thing that was remarkably evident when we got those photographs is that the various photos had women of all ethnic backgrounds. Beyond the animation and the accent then, and saw themselves, this demonstrates a very special strength that animation has is unique and truly agnostic towards ethnicity. I've seen over the years, while over the years, while overseeing the production over 1600 commercials and hundreds of print illustrations, I hope I can share with you some observations that you'll find that you might find valuable. So first off, don't worry, you don't need to be an expert to make successful marketing materials, but it's good to decide a few essential things before getting started. Just to reassure you, I am not an animator. I only took one class at UCLA in animation. I work with animators and filmmakers to help them understand the needs of our clients to achieve the desired message, and often they have great ideas and a lot to contribute. That should never be discounted. First off, don't overestimate the customer. Make sure your message is simple and straightforward. And I will tell you right now, in case it hasn't been mentioned more than more than once, that everything that I'm saying here, this kind of bullet points and will be provided later as cards that you'll have access to online. So you do not need to take a lot of notes about about the points that you see on screen or things that I mentioned. So you can relax and enjoy whatever it is you might find interesting. So, you know, what you want to do is really understand what it is you're selling. And you have to put your mind in the position of the filmmaker, your audience, your customer. And, you know, one of the questions that we always ask when we're making a commercial, are we selling a product or are we selling the benefits of that product? And these are important points of view because if you do a hard sell, sometimes it's less attractive than introducing the merits of a product and attracting your audience to that. So, is what you're selling relatable to your audience? Will they understand exactly what you're selling? It's very important to make sure that you understand these things before you go forward to develop your marketing strategy and whether you in fact will want to produce a video of some sort to help communicate your message. The things I'm talking about are things that you really do want to focus on. So additionally, you know, who are you selling to? Perhaps you know exactly, but it is important to know who your target audience is, the age and demographics of those people. And the more you know about them, the more you can isolate and target specifically for those people. Thanks to the internet being such an effective medium, we can create multiple messages for the same product that target different audiences. And some will go to the one and others will go to another because you'll be trying to attract them to those particular messages. So keep in mind, you may actually create multiple messages for different audiences. So, what is that message? You know, what is the takeaway and the action you expect and desire? Because that's really important to understand what your expectations are from what it is you're messaging. And as long as your message is clear and succinct and is relatable, then it'll be easier for your audience to understand it and for them to be able to act on that. So, you know, how are you planning to get your message out? That's probably the biggest issue for most people. You know, you have the internet, targeted placement on trading publications, news sites, home style magazines, and social media. These and many more can be considered in regards to, you know, really getting the word out. You should not underestimate the amount of effort that may go into communicating your message. These are complex efforts and issues that go into making sure that you reach your audience and they understand what they're getting. So, first off, I really want to make sure your website is ready and able to handle the media that you're hosting, that it's a modern site, that it is attractive and easy to navigate. And again, put yourself in the position of the individual user and you will quickly understand what the problems are. And if you have problems doing that, ask somebody who doesn't know anything about what you do to take a look at your website and tell you what they saw. It's good to do a little bit of focus group testing of your own. It doesn't need to be fancy. It can be anybody that you know or ideally people that don't have an investment in you and are willing to give you an honest assessment. And sometimes you pay those people a few pennies or you give them a gift of some sort and they're happy to give you their input. So, you know, I guess the big question is how do we make, you know, a message into a film, you know, a viral sensation. I mean, that's what everybody wants is to have something that attracts a large audience and is going to be quite compelling. So, you know, you'll want to choose whether you want to use animation if that's applicable for you. And I'll go through some of the stages of animation and live action filmmaking so that they're clear to you, hopefully. And at least you'll understand the questions that you want to ask later on of yourself and people that you might want to work with. So these are kind of the stages. The first concern will be, you know, what is your idea? And that's really up to you to decide, you know, and you may employ a writer or a director to work with you. But at some point you'll need to come over the budget because you'll know what you have to spend and the budget can help drive your idea. So if you're really only talking about a very small amount of money, kind of a DIY approach, then it's probably a good idea to bring a producer on, somebody who can help you really navigate your way through the process of creating your film, your message, and making sure it comes across. Of course, once you have the producer and an idea, you'll probably need to draft a script, which you may rough out yourself and then work with a writer and maybe a director to begin to understand what that is. Now, if you're going to work in animation, you'll probably want to create some designs. And the best way to start with that is really to identify work that you've seen that appeals to you and that you feel carries itself successfully. So we have many clients who scour our website at actmeformworks.com to understand what we offer and then they come back to us with a whole range of different directors. And sometimes we bid different directors on the different jobs and bidding means that the director will pitch ideas, sometimes do a drawing or two to illustrate what they have in mind for the client. And based on that, and of course, a budget, we determine whether it's feasible that they can do it. And schedule plays a big part in that whole discussion. Longer schedules are not necessarily better and shorter schedules are often very tough on everyone. So a short schedule would be six weeks, a long schedule would be over 12 to 16 weeks. So once you settle on a design, you may need to hire them a designer to help you design your piece. Again, many of these things still apply to live action filmmaking. That would be a cinematographer who would help you with how you visualize this or an art director who would help choose your sets and your locations and such and help you really create the mood and atmosphere that you're looking for. In animation, we would then go into character development. So we'd understand how many characters we have, if you're the better, if you're especially on your budget, because it becomes complicated. So you might want to hire a character designer and eventually the director will probably do with you through most of the process will do a storyboard. And that is taken script and putting them into frames so that you can actually see frame for frame, what the actions are that are going to occur within the context of the finished production. Once you have that, you kind of like the look of that, then assemble that onto a video reel so you can see your timed out. So you kind of get a flow for it. And if there's a voiceover or dialogue, you do a simple scratch track, a real rough temper chord with you or someone else in their office to just get something for timing purposes, it's not for performance. This would be called pre visualization, basically, and they do it for the special effects for movies and such so they understand the complexity of those things. So, and it's a big part of movies as well. Many, many motion pictures will do storyboard and an animatic to understand the timing of a particular scene. And then once if you lock down on the animatic, then at least you know what it is that you're aiming toward, and everyone has a target in terms of what they're going to do. So the next stage would be animation for animators or shoot for the filmmakers. Of course, you'll improve the budget in advance or, again, if you're doing it yourself, you'll know it, but you'll have to make a budget just for yourself so you understand what we'll be spending your money on. It helps to have a producer who has experience, of course, an animator or a director to make sure that you're making the right steps in the right direction. So, the next stage really has to do with finishing the film. In animation we call it rendering or digital ink and paint. It's applying the color to the finished animation. Once we have drawn all the animation in pencil or created roughs of it in 3D, we then need to also create color models and such, and then in doing so you will understand what the look of the finished piece will be, even though it will only be a handful of frames, you'll understand what the look of the piece will be when it's final. It's complicated, not really does it, but we all have our strengths and there's questions about whether doing it yourself makes a lot of sense or not. So then you also would consider overlays to enhance the understanding of your message or voiceover. You would then finally, and I heard one of the previous speakers address this, sound is probably one of your most critical issues. It will help convey your message. The quality has to be good. If you have spoken talent on location, you really have to understand what they're saying, which means a professional recordist needs to record them so that you're getting a synchronous sound that also is understandable. You'll take that, your sound effects, music, any additional voiceover and then you'll kind of blend it all together to make sure everything is heard and that's called a mix. And your producer will walk you through the mix. Again, that is really something that's very hard to avoid at any level. So anticipate, regardless of how down and dirty you might choose to do your animation, that the mix is going to be an important aspect, very, very important. So, you know, there are a lot of resources for, you know, doing your self filmmaking and if you go to YouTube, I mean, there's literally millions of searches that you can find where people are offering tutorials. And if you just type YouTube filmmaking tutorials or YouTube animation tutorials, you know, top 10 or something like that, you'll probably come up with some very, very successful results. If you have interns or students who recently graduated in your office, they'll probably be able to navigate that kind of stuff very, very quickly and help you understand where you should be spending your time. Focus in terms of learning about doing yourself kind of filmmaking. It's entirely possible. There's really no magic to it. It's experience and that saves people a lot of money and a lot of frustration, but it can be quite gratifying to make a message of your own. But if you do hire people or a company, just make sure that the company is reputable, you need to do some due diligence to make sure that they have a reputation and that they are doing really good work that can really give you confidence in the work that they're doing. So, locally, you can hire people and, you know, local professionals and you can do a search on, you know, South African production companies, South African animation studios. There's a very small list that I've provided you, just some names that I pulled offline that appeared to have some reputable quality. In the world of animation, a lot of studios do service work and subsequently they may not create the original intellectual property, their own scripts and such. So it's important to ask if they have actually written and directed the work completely and because they may show you work they've done for a TV show for a major company. But if they've actually done that, they may have only been part of the service production chain and not actually overseeing the whole creative aspect of it. So you really want to see original creative work done by people. It really will become quite evident as to, you know, whether it's appropriate or not for your needs. You know, and, you know, one important possibility is to look up local students. There are a number of film schools and animation schools in South Africa that you can reach out to. They, at this time of the year, a lot of those schools are doing end of the year screenings. You can go and take a look at their new work. But I think it's really important to think globally because, you know, of course, everybody wants a gold winner, you know, but there are so many talent people around the world. And just like we're communicating today and you'll have a chance to ask some questions, there are some super talented people that really will be very interested in the subject of the product that you're selling. And the message that you want to communicate and that there are ways of reaching out to those people. So I've, you know, I know it's reaching high but, you know, there is an Academy Awards every year here in America and there is a shortlist. So there are generally five nominees but there are 10 shortlisted films. That means five filmmakers who made it to the finalists but didn't make the nomination didn't really get in front of the public eye. So reaching out to those kinds of people might merit helping you find short filmmakers, documentary filmmakers and animated filmmakers. Again, you can reach out to them and ask them for their email addresses. I've given you some titles to search online for Academy shortlist short films, Academy Awards documentary short film, short subject lists, different wording will get you a completely different result. And something very interesting would be also to pursue the Student Academy Award finalists. There are quite a number of them and you can again find under Student Academy Awards finalists, you'll be able to find that online and you can work your way backwards because the people who got the, you know, everybody wants the newest filmmaker, what about the person who worked last year, the guy or Al from last year or the year prior or the year prior? There's a wealth of talent out there and people looking for opportunities to build show reels and make work that is impactful and hopefully very, very successful for you and it will be successful for them in helping them build their career and you may get the benefit of some very, very talented people. So, you know, these wordings that I've given you are really things you should cut and paste into online research. So, there are also, by the way, you know, marketing is going to be an incredible part of your outreach. And so, I do highly recommend social media. Again, find some millennials who will help you, if you're not already one, who will help you through the process because it can really expedite things for you. So, marketing tutorials online, if you just do Google search on social media marketing tips, top 10 searches, things like that, or top tips, you know, you'll find the broader you reach, you'll actually see a lot of options. So, that kind of is, you know, the essence of what I wanted to share right now, but I'm sure many of you will have questions, or maybe even Brandy, you'll have questions for me. Tell me, can I help you in any additional way, please. Ron, thank you so much. That was very inspiring. It's easy to see that your passion for the subject is there, and we hope that it'll translate to a lot of our viewers and get them motivated to start thinking about videos to tell their stories. So, as Ron mentioned, we're going to be going to the questions right now. So, if you do have questions, please be sure to type them in the right hand side of your screen. There's a chat roll that you can enter them and we'll be sure to ask them for you. I guess my first question for you, Ron, before we get to some of the questions from the audience is about driving people to action. Did you do anything in particular to encourage all of the Brenda's and Elaine's to start interacting with your Weight Watchers campaign or did it happen organically? That's about designing a campaign and understanding who your audience is and making sure that you're speaking to them. There aren't millions of best friends named Brenda and Elaine in America, though I was surprised that they received well over 100 responses, which is very impressive. I mean, it's unsolicited and they totally identified with it and, you know, targeting women was, you know, an important choice in terms of the marketing group that they wanted to get to subscribe to their service and their dietary plan. But everything was organic. They did not solicit. They did not ask for anybody to participate. They just jumped in and did it themselves, which is great. And they saw a great uptake in their sales. We've been very fortunate to be party to huge campaigns that have changed the way people have seen the products and the industries and past and recently. Thank you. And a follow up question to that, too, that I have is that there are a lot of different languages that obviously people speak across the country and when you are working on a video, do you find that keeping the language in mind for the target audience is important or do the images reflect universally across all different cultures? Well, in animation, that's why I want to show the clips that I did because a couple of them were without dialogue and they speak a universal message. And, you know, when we're talking about renewable energy, it's something that many different images come immediately to mind. In terms of messaging about that that don't need dialogue. I would highly recommend that if you're doing multiple languages that you consider more voiceover instead of spoken on camera dialogue. That way you can read to the voiceover in multiple languages for each territory where you're going to attract the audience, much like I was saying earlier, in terms of attracting specific audience that way you can actually feed them something that is targeted to them. People really react when it's in their native language, in their appropriate dialect and such, so that they get. When we do a Portuguese version, we of course have to do two different Portuguese versions and I'm sure in South Africa where you have many native tongues, you want to make sure that it speaks directly to the people. Great question. Great. Thanks Ron. We also have a question from one of our viewers and she was wondering when you're looking at distributing it through social media, what's the ideal length that you're looking at for a video and when you're distributing it across different platforms. Should you change the length of that video to fit accordingly. I think that, again, depending on what it is the messages that you're looking to convey, shorter is generally better. I would say on social media, after 90 seconds, you probably should be out. Informationally, if you have follow up information campaigns on your website, so that when somebody has follow up question, anticipate what those questions are and produce short videos that can support that. That can really be a very effective way of engaging people. They generally like to see human beings speaking comfortably and addressing the topic at hand. And if you pre-anticipate what people are thinking, 30 second responses or even longer would be perfectly fine. But anything that is gratuitous in terms of lots of, you know, panoramas and lots of landscape shots and, you know, beautiful photography, that's all wonderful, but you got to really cut it down. I mean, the shots can be, generally, they need to be fairly short so that your audience doesn't feel like they're waiting for the message. They want to be engaged right away, right away, right away. Like, the first shot needs to be engaging. They need to immediately go, oh, what's that? Oh, that's cool. Or, you know, they're speaking right to me. And that'll help you become a lot more successful. So yeah, I think you need to consider doing both short and subsequent videos to help convey your messages. Great. That's very helpful. And I know that you addressed a little bit of this during your presentation, but I know personally, thinking about all the ideas of things that I would want to get the message out about. I have so many ideas in my head right now and I don't necessarily know how I would take a big idea and then apply it to something that could be short like that to get it to social media. And I know that you said a lot of your clients will come into the office already seeing videos that they've watched so that they have an idea of what direction they want their message to take. But do you have any suggestions for people who have all these ideas in their head and they need to narrow it down to something that will fit succinctly within a video to reach different audiences? Well, I think inherently budget is going to be a very big part of that discussion. And I think that whoever comes up with an idea will need to think about, well, how much money am I going to spend to create something? It might actually even be kind of a good idea to come up with that first. It really helps to get the inside of a professional, someone who understands what it takes to make a video. But, you know, depending on what kind of caliber of work you're looking to do can be quite expensive. If you're going to do it yourself, it can be very inexpensive. But still, it's handy to try to employ the skills of artists, filmmakers like cinematographers, great designers to come up with ideas. I think, you know, it's really about telling a story. So I think the more you can spend time with your idea before you go out to someone else to kind of come up with a bullet point list of things that you want to communicate. First, identify those one by one by one, then prioritize those and then start knocking off the things that, well, you know, maybe this is redundant or repetitive, maybe it's just not necessary entirely. What are the essential things? For lack of a better term, we often refer to those as our sacred cows. When we're talking to clients, we want to know what we're not supposed to kill. We don't want to offend them by killing off the most important thing that they have to say. We want to make sure that we pay very, very close attention. So think about one or two or three points that you want. What is the action that you want? That will really help you narrow down your idea. And then just think about the simplicity of being able to go out and film it. Imagine you were going to go out and film it yourself. How complicated would it be to actually capture that? I think that these are important ways to start before you engage somebody professionally to help you. But a producer of Node or a director who might be between gigs that you like, whose work you've seen that you admire, you might reach out to them and say, hey, I've got this project. I really love for you to be involved. Would you give me some commentary or notes on this to help me refine it in hopes that I can get a producer with you as the director? And directors often will give you really valuable insight. Great. Thanks, Ron. We actually have a question from another one of our viewers and it's a more relevant topic that's going on right now. It's gotten a lot of attention in the news. And she's wondering if you have any comment regarding the infamous Pepsi advertisement with Keppel Jenner that definitely seemed to evoke the wrong emotion amongst certain people. And as a follow up, how do you ensure that emotion that you're trying to evoke will resonate with the audience that you're aiming to reach? So how do you weigh those two different types of aspects? I don't know how many of you folks are multi-national corporations, but Pepsi is a very large company who can spend a remarkable amount of money, oh, the light just went out in my opposite, who can spend a remarkable amount of money producing their commercials. That kind of commercial is very expensive and the choice to have celebrity figures can work for you or it can be a detriment. So I think you're not going to fall into that trap of offending your audience. I think it is important to be sensitive to your audience to make sure that you're listening to what they... What it is you want to communicate and use more kind of generic concepts and not stick to anything that's topical, not use celebrities who could be topical as well, unless of course there's a reason for it. And if you are going to do that, you know, pursue something, I think in this sector you're not really going to be faced with that kind of complication. But, you know, there's a lot of ways of selling the subject of renewable energy. You know, there are people who will be enticed to renewable energy because of the environmental benefits. The idea that they are playing a part in keeping our world clean and safe and beautiful by not, you know, making a bigger footprint than necessary. And then there are people who just want to be off the grid. People who just want to know, well, you know, if the electricity goes out, I still have my light bulbs working. I may not be able to use my telephone or my television because, you know, all the electricity is out, but at least they'll have the comfort of knowing that some of their creature comforts will be functioning. And those are two completely different groups of people. And you probably know your audience is better than I do by a long shot. And I would be very interested to hear more about that offline if you're interested. But definitely, I think you're not going to fall into that kind of trap. I think it's unfortunate. We really do need to be very sensitive in today's society with using these kinds of really hot topics. Kind of things. It's, it's a tough one out there. You know, they're working, they're playing with fire in certain instances in that case, and they got burned in a bad way. Yes, that was very, that was very helpful. Thank you so much. So as we talk, there's a lot of different objectives to different videos. Some videos are to entertain, but other videos are to drive people to action. So I think that you've given us some very useful information about what you're looking when you're creating a video, you should talk with your target audience to focus groups beforehand. But are there specific things that you should definitely think about, including in a video, if you want those people to take some sort of action after watching it, whether it's a social change action or something related to something completely different, but where you want those people to watch your video and then go out and do some sort of action, whether it's big or small. What's important to include in videos? Is there a specific outline that you should follow when you're trying to set something like that up? Yeah, I understand exactly what you're saying. We are never just trying to entertain when we make a communication, you know, whether it's a short film or a commercial or, you know, any product that's going to be used more widely. It's really never about entertaining specifically and only, unless that's what the purpose of that is. It may be about brand identity. So the Levi's commercial that I shared, you know, is a beautiful, kind of somber, I remember the animator was disappointed with the music. He said, it's so sad, but it does draw an emotional chord and identifies in it a kind of individual who would want to be part of the Levi's Genes for Women's Universe. They would want to say, yeah, that's me, you know, that kind of identity. And even the opera sets are commercial. Again, it starts very, very funny. The idea of this argument between this gentleman and his stomach, both of which have gripes with one another. And the narrator comes in and kind of brings justice to the discussion. He tries to be the mediator to find a solution for the problem that they have. Of course, he's biased because he's selling his own product, right? But of course, he comes within an authoritative voice that hopefully goes beyond the source of that original, that voice. So he's bringing authority, even though he is the product itself, he is bringing authority and is able to mediate a solution between the two. Of course, it includes the use of the product, which is good. I mean, that's the objective. We can't really just help you buy our product. I mean, that's when we're getting banged over the head. And we see those kinds of commercials late at night for mattresses and for holiday sales of linens in department stores and things like that. It's about the experience, really, so much about communicating an idea and making the identifiability of it between the audience and the product, something that they want to be a part of, that they see themselves as part of. And understanding a large swath of the population then becomes the bigger challenge in that process. Because understanding them is one thing, but then how am I going to communicate a message to that group of people? And that's why I do recommend you take a look at the Acme Filmworks website because we have 50 directors working in over 24 different countries. And amongst them, we have done so many commercials of varying different kinds for both domestic and foreign ad agencies and clients. And in doing so, we always start with what the message is. What is it you want the audience to do at the end? What do we want them to do? Or how do we want them to identify with the product? The more we know about that, then we understand about color schemes and branding, those kinds of issues. We would never use red in a Pepsi commercial and we would never use blue in a Coca-Cola commercial. And let me tell you, if we forget that, we have no leg to stand on because they'll have actually supplied us with do's and don'ts about one another's products that we're not allowed to have on the set. So we're very sensitive to those issues. We want to make sure that the campaign really takes our audience into buying those products. Last year, we had a product that was sold in Japan and it sold off the shelves in a matter of hours and the client wasn't prepared for the level of production that they had to go in. And they literally did not, they had to go on the evening news and tell people to stop going to the market to try to buy the product because there was none. Unfortunately, people got fired because there was not enough product to sell. That's kind of a happy-bad scenario. We have taken that client from second position in market share and selling water to first position in selling bottled water in their country. That's Japan. So that's nice improvement for that client. But we're always looking to convey the message. And I got into such a tangent. I don't know if I've covered your entire question. No, that was very helpful. Thank you. And I have to ask, so we have some more questions coming in from the audiences, but I'm just curious. You obviously have a lot of people coming into your offices looking to create videos of different types. Are there any instances where you've had to actually talk to that organization or those people and mention that you don't think video might be the best avenue for them to take in getting their specific message out? Absolutely. I mean, print is a very important means of reaching people. And it can be quite economical these days considering that print publications are not as popular, so to speak. But you can also reach many of those same print publications online. Their audience is online and they're highly targeted. So if we were talking about renewable energy and we're talking about people in their mid to late 20s into their, say, 35 or 45 people who are affluent and they're probably reading certain kinds of publications. They're attracted to certain kinds of magazines, whether they're paper or online, that deal with homes, home ownership, luxury lifestyle, and putting an ad on one of those can be far more effective. What you're looking to do is probably two things in a print ad and that might be to convey a message and hopefully to get a click through back to your website so that they can begin to get their questions answered and hopefully enlighten them. Because they may not know the questions to ask and you want to make sure that you're anticipating what they should know. Not a lot of boring stuff up front, really kind of segmenting your audience to make sure that you're understanding who they are so that you can appeal to them on those levels. So definitely print can be an enormously successful thing. Frankly, we've lost campaigns to re-envisioning by the client where they decided that they decided to just put a piece of paper in the newspaper and have that disseminated across the region. And that can be a very effective way. The social media is a very important method of reaching people and we've been doing a lot of social media outreach with a non-profit that I run and we do advertising literally advertising for $1 a day on Facebook and have found regionally that to be very, very successful. And what we've learned is that we literally reduce the criteria to a very narrow group so that when they are actually, we can do keywords and so we use keywords that are very specific so that we don't use up that whole $7 a week budget that we spend for a particular region on people who aren't really targeted for our particular product. So it's our message. So that's something very important to keep in mind social media. So videos and even print may not be a part of it. It's about messaging and that's what I do every single day with multiple clients. And it's interesting. It's invigorating. We are proud to have been a successful part of working with a number of different campaigns, both locally and globally. Thanks Ron. We have a question from a viewer. It's actually related to social media. So let's say no marketing was done for a campaign before the video was actually produced. Are there any other methods other than social media to market the video or campaign after the fact? So if you don't have something creative heading into it and you don't want to use social media, I know that you said print in other ways are great to advertise the campaign. But then a video is created and what are other ways to get the video out to your target audiences? Would you suggest TV commercials? I'm sure those are a little bit more costly to try to get on the air. You know, media buys are a lot more surprising price-wise than you might imagine. Even popular TV shows. Again, if you reduce the hours in which they can be viewed to non-prime hours, but if they can be proven to you that you're going to reach your target audience by media buys, I promise you, the people who are responsible for selling media at time on either television and online, you know, TV shows that are very, very popular may have a repeat, for instance, opportunities for you to hit a particular audience if you're trying to hit that group. It is a wise idea to start with, I mean, if you already have a video and you don't have a marketing strategy, you probably want to figure out what your budget is going to be and what your expectations are. Understanding your expectations and making sure they're realistic for what it is you're going to spend or the amount of effort that you're going to put into it is very, very important because there is a direct correlation. Some ways of working far smarter and less harder and spending less money, yes, there are ways of doing that, but understanding what your budget is so that you're not just kind of randomly shooting out there, different messages, you really want to kind of be on target. So I would say the most important thing is your website is making sure that it's attractive, visually appealing, that it doesn't barrage people with too many visuals, but that it captures a tone, and a place that they want to be and that they find easy and communicate and carries the message that they want to read and become acquainted with the subject. You know, television is always an option for advertising, but again, you really need to know what your strategy is in terms of how many different markets, how long you're going to do it, what you want to spend, what kind of reaction you're hoping for. That's the one thing about television, which is great. You can see an immediate reaction. Whereas social media, you can spend a lot of effort to attract an audience and get them aware of you, but magazine appearance and publications and on television can be instantaneous. It is instantaneous. You should expect that when you run an ad on TV, you're going to know within the first 48 to 72 hours whether it's a success or a failure based on how many responses you get. And that's about messaging and making sure they know how to reach you, and you know, you got to make sure they have your phone number on long enough or your email address, your website so that they can find your website, choose a domain that's easy to understand and easily read and easy to remember. How's that for making it simple? So those are my suggestions. Great. Thanks Ron. So we're actually nearing the end. We have about five minutes left, but there are two questions that I want to make sure that we get to from our colleagues in Pretoria. They have a watch group happening at the American Corner. And the first question that I want to ask is related to animation. So a lot of the times people automatically assume that animated strips or videos are more geared toward children just because of cartoons that we think of that are popular in everyday culture. But how do you use it to target a wider audience and how do you make it relevant for adults? So I know that you showed some examples in the beginning of products that are actually more geared toward adults. But is there anything that you have to keep in mind when doing the actual animation that would appeal more to the adult audience than perhaps the children audience? Well, I think it's unfortunate when people write animation for children. I think that all animation basically, except for subject material, it should be for children. I gear my animation studio to do work that is sophisticated, intelligent and geared toward adults, but should appeal to all people based on the messaging, the subject and the design. Design is a very big part of it. Kids like cartoons. There's no question about that, but a lot of people, a lot of adults like cartoons. Kids will like anime, which is a form of cartoon that originated in Japan. This is a stylistic approach. Really, there are so many different possibilities with animation. It's really about what your imagination starts with, what you're thinking about. The best thing for that is to look at websites like the Acme and Filmworks.com site where you see a wide array of different executions. Even by the same director, you'll see multiple visual executions. And you'll gravitate to something and you'll go, wow, that's very cool. But I think that it's about how you tell your story, how you communicate your message as much as it is the visual style. And if you're trying to tell it through humor, cartoons are often a very good way to do that, as evidenced by both the Weight Watchers and the Alka Seltzer commercials. Whereas the other two, the Hilton Hotels, you know, getting from A to B, it's a concept that most young people don't really think much about unless they really kind of, you know, commit themselves to it. But it's something as you get into your 20s and 30s. And older people go, wow, that's life. You know, life is what's happening in between. It's not at the destination point. So it's about clever ideas. And frankly, I've been very interested in the idea of negotiating for some of the commercials that we've done to be repurposed for clients in different production sectors. So if you saw commercials that I love, I love that particular commercial, then it's potential, there's potential given its age and might actually be resurrected in a different form for a different product sector. So that's consideration. Great. Thanks, Ron. So unfortunately we're running out of time and this is going to be our last question for this session. In the beginning, you mentioned that you will be sharing some resources that are available to people if they're trying to do it themselves or save on cost cutting measures. But just a question from one of our audience members, when editing the work, is there any good program to use as a beginner in the industry? For example, any free or inexpensive online tools or tutorials? And is that something that you can share with us that we can share with the audience afterwards? Yeah, well, you know, almost every computer and every cell phone today comes with an editing program on it. I mean, it's pretty ubiquitous now. You'll find it everywhere. And the skills of editing, I think the links that I suggest about filmmaking, if you just add editing to the query, you'll come up with lots of tips on how to edit successfully. There are principles of editing, but sometimes it's good to throw those out the window. But it is good to understand what you're doing. But I think you'll find that online, pretty much every modern computer comes with some kind of editing program. And I'll try to see if I can find a couple of editing programs that are available for download that I can add a link to so that you can have that as a resource. Great. Thank you so much. And Ron, we just want to thank you for taking the time today to speak with our audience. I know that I'm definitely inspired after listening to what you talk about and all the passion that you have for the work that you do. So I know I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of the videos that are going to come out from our audience members after watching this presentation. So thank you so much. My pleasure. I hope I get to see those videos too. And that's actually a good plug. We want to remind the audience members that if they follow hashtag Energy21SA on Twitter and Facebook, that they can stay up to date with all of the Energy21 information that we have coming out. And if you provide your email address to our website, which is america.gov slash energy21, you will receive updates and we'll also be sending out the recorded version of today's session through listless serve so that everyone will have the information that we talked about and also the resources that you have to share. And I also just want to take a quick moment to thank our colleagues in Pretoria and Cape Town for hosting viewing groups and submitting questions. We really appreciate your participation, as well as everyone else's participation who joined in today's session. So again, everyone, thank you so much for joining us. Energy21 will be taking a few weeks break from the web chats, but we look forward to seeing you in midday for some more communications discussions and make sure to follow us on social media to get information about when those sessions will be. So thank you, Ron. Thank you, everyone. We look forward to seeing you next time. My pleasure. Thank you.