Hannisdal Express Blog

Most likely if you have a business and you’ve spent any time online you’ve heard of “video marketing”. It’s nothing new.

It is an ever evolving and super affordable way for businesses to communicate with their audience. The statistics for the amount of people watching online videos are off the charts. Since most people don’t even read web pages any more (they scan), videos are becoming the most popular way to share information.

Whether it’s to demonstrate a product, give testimonials, virtual tours, or even communicate within your company, video is becoming the dominant way to do that. Because of free video sharing sites like youtube.com, you can easily share your business with the rest of the world in an affordable and simple way.

In the past, video used to be an option when it came to marketing a business. Not anymore! Now video is an essential tool to any marketing campaign that has an online customer base.

If you’re not using video to market your business you might want to ask your marketing team why that is. Oh, and if you need a quality video produced, we know someone who can help.

This is a recent TV commercial we produced about Lima Memorial Health System's "Chest Pain Accreditation".

The Lima area hospital was recently award the highest level of accreditation by the Society of Chest Pain Centers. This puts them in the top 1% of hospitals in the United States... pretty impressive!

Check out limamemorial.org for more info.

This is part of a continuing guest entry from Todd VanSlyck. Use these links to read his previous entry or learn more about Todd. (Also, be sure to check out his awesome stock footage on istockphoto.com)

OK, don’t get me started on bad graphics.  This is the area that suffers the most when it comes to awful TV.  Since you may be Stan’s future client and he may not want to hurt your feelings - I’ll be the bad cop here.  If I was going to tell something to every single person that is thinking about making a commercial, here’s what I would tell them about graphics:

You’re not writing Moby Dick.  Don’t try to cram so much junk in your commercial that nobody can read it.  You have no idea how much that decreases effectiveness.

Use fonts that make the text legible.  Serify or thin fonts might be OK as long as the text is large enough, but solid fonts are almost always a better choice.  There are tons of cool, free, legible fonts on the web, and Stan has a bunch of them.

When it comes to colors, don’t use red.  Red is bad.  I know you want everybody to see your latest sale price, but bright red is very hard to read on TV.

If you want people to know where your business is or be able to find you on the web, put that information up for more than one second at the end of the commercial

Simple is very effective!  Stan is great at simple, effective graphic design.

And just for good measure:  Don’t flash your text on and off.  That’s just tacky.

OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now.  Sorry.

As 2009 comes to a close, I’d like to take a minute and say thank to our customers.

2009 has been a very exciting year for us and that is because of you.  Thank you for trusting us to represent you and allowing us to be your “video department”.

We have some exciting news coming in 2010 so be sure to check back.  But for now, thank you and have a happy New Year.

Sincerely,

We were privileged to be around for the Help-Portrait Lima event.

You can learn more about Help Portrait here, but in a nutshell it's an international movement of photographers who are using there time, equipment, and expertise to give back to those who are less fortunate.

The Lima event took place at Our Daily Bread Soup Kitchen on December 11.  The event was organized locally by photographer Eric Meffley but there were many other individuals who brought their unique gifts to the day.  Some of these included providing makeup, helping to print the photos as soon as they were shot and passing the pictures out.  The day wasn't about names or titles or who was involved - it was simply about giving.

Around 200 portraits were shot and printed to a group of very grateful people.

We had the opportunity to be a sort of "fly on the wall" and shoot some footage on a Digital SLR Camera, the Nikon D300s.   The purpose of the video wasn't so much for professional use but rather as a way to unobtrusively document the events of the day.  Eric Meffley edited some clips and has posted them on YouTube here.