I was looking forward with anticipation to the above named event laid on by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Would they reveal any secret revelations about the online world… perhaps some tactics for how to market within social networks? At least there might be a speculative debate among experts.

A debate did take place - but virtually everyone there seemed more interested in trying to protect the CIM from becoming obsolete rather than discussing what the future of marketing actually was. Indeed the session revolved almost entirely around a research project which the CIM has commissioned about the definition of marketing. When I asked whether they’d asked any consumers what THEY thought marketing was I was literally laughed at: ‘that’d be like opening Pandora’s box!’ someone said.

This baffled me. Even the speaker’s own presentation slide (amusingly entitled ‘Changes in marketing since 1976′) had ‘Conversation with customers’ among its bullet points.

I think the most valuable marketing work we do with film plays into the notion that people respond to ‘human conversation’ much more than ‘commercial announcement’ (read Seth Godin). Ok, so it’s hard to have a conversation with a screen - but the rise of shared video in online social networks indicates that video is more often than not the conversation-starter.

Companies that want to be part of a conversation with their customers need to have something interesting to say - but they also need to be prepared to listen to the response. The speaker last night concluded that he was pleased that their polemical discussion had sparked a debate. I’m not quite so sure the Chief Executive thought the same - his passing comment to me was (and I swear, verbatim) “Remember lad, I’m the one who’s over sixty and has the words ‘Chief Executive’ in my title”!

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