A purchasing expert recently challenged me on our prices for editing - asking me to reduce the cost of our £500 per day edit suites beyond the normal 4-day week offer. We came to an arrangement, of course, because of the amount of time this particular client spends at Oakslade Studios.

But the conversation made me question whether we were really offering value for money, rather than simply comparing ourselves with other providers as being somewhere between ‘low-cost’ and ‘expensive’?

Whether or not a marketing campaign (in our specific case a piece of video) was worthwhile value for money depends entirely on results. These don’t have to be simply “increased profit” - but unless you’re embarking on marketing just to make yourself feel glamorous, whether or not the cost was worth it depends on what the darn thing does to change and improve your business.

Investing in and spending money on marketing relates to the whole ethos of a business. Would you sit down and ask your managing director to breakdown where they spend their salary and work out where they could cut costs? You’d judge them on their performance of course. How well they hit their objectives, how they communicated goals and delivered strategy throughout the business.

The challenge for us, and for marketers in general, is in setting the objectives in the first place, measuring them, and relating them to business issues that everyone has a stake in. In some cases this has to be something as concrete as increased profit!

One thing we learned early on was not to force our clients to go to any more trouble than necessary to view the work we’d done for them.

Picture the scene: the deadline for the first draft is upon us, and the client is impatiently awaiting a screening; they’ve got their own boss to show it to and time is short.

What’s going to work best?

1. Trying to email a 50MB video file which is most likely going to crash the client’s inbox?
2. Saving the file on our FTP server and spending the next hour explaining in painstaking detail exactly what an FTP client is and exactly how to use it? (only to find the client’s corporate IT policies won’t allow installation of new software)
3. Sticking the video on YouTube where the client can easily view it - but so too can everyone else, including their competitors?

or:

1. Giving the client immediate access to a secure online website where they can view and download our edits, whether on PC or Mac

You can probably guess which option our clients are extremely enthusiastic about!

Our new service, called WatchYourEdit.com, is a brilliant way for our clients to save days of time whilst DVDs are posted back and forth. And it works straight away even on the most dusty old office PCs.

Clients can even watch back an edit and leave comments or scribble notes directly onto the video - our editors then receive a list of annotations complete with exact timecodes, so they can dig straight in and make the changes in no time.

WatchYourEdit.com has been a wonderful example of a new piece of technology making a genuine, beneficial difference to both our clients and our editors’ lives, and we love it very much