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About Marketing and Technical Skills:
October 14, 2002:
In a recent essay, I took the marketing industry to task for their
dishonest and outright boorish methods. At that time I also said
there is nothing inherently wrong with marketing. Recently I have
noticed a series of television advertisements that make my point
very well. These are the Aflac ads which have been airing on several
channels.
This series clearly demonstrates that commercials do not have to be obnoxious or in-your-face. They do, however, cost money. These folks are clearly willing to bear the cost to get their name in our minds in a very effective, non-offensive way. In fact, the ads are better done than most of the sports shows they are presented on.
The ads feature a goose as the main character with humans in supporting roles. Because each episode is humorous, they are effective in their presentation. Another thing they do is create new episodes at very regular intervals. Whenever a new one comes on I enable sound just to hear it. I suspect a large number of folks do the same thing. Yes, new episodes are costly, but alienating your victims must be even more costly.
One of the stupidest things among the many stupid things that advertisers do is to run the same ad over and over again forever. It is invariable the stupidest ones which are run the longest and most often. I believe this is obnoxious, annoying, and self defeating. It is why most of us use the mute button. It is why we often tape shows and fast forward through the commercials. It is why commercials have less and less effect even as they get more and more strident with each iteration. Aflac has shown that it does not have not be that way.
I would like to point up the true imaginative genius involved in making a really good commercial message. The requirements are a good idea, good writers, and, in this case, outstanding technical expertise. This one happens to be a television message, but the concepts are not limited to television. Some of the same principles apply to making a good book cover. A book cover is also an advertisement and a promise to the reader. I can talk in detail about the book cover, because I have some experience in that.
In our most recent fiction book, No-Count-Charlie, I used in a minor way some of the photography techniques which were used in this ad series. For me, it involved the manipulation of photographs to get the effect I needed. You can see the cover of the book on our website in our publications pages. Click on Our Publications and then on No-Count-Charlie.
That cover is actually a composite of three different photographs, one overlaid atop another, and then another. This is done using two software programs. One is called Photoshop from Adobe Systems. The other is a Photoshop plugin called Mask Pro from Extensis. Both of these programs are expensive professional tools for graphic artists. To use them, I have had to become something of a graphic artist myself.
As I said, I used three different photographs to create that cover. The first one, which is the base or first layer of the cover was quite simple. It is a photograph of Portage Lake in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Since it was the first layer, it required no special trickery or manipulation. The second layer was much more difficult since it had to overlay the photo of Portage Lake. It is a photograph of a small stand of pine trees in my yard.
To make it work with the lake photo I had to use Photoshop and Mask Pro to carefully remove some of the brush, limbs, and earth from the photo. In fact, I made some believable openings through the trees. I needed to make the lake visible through the trees as though the trees were standing on the shore line. In reality, there is nothing but grass on the shore where I took the lake photo.
The next trick was to place my lead character on the shore of that lake within the stand the trees. This was the most difficult part. The third photo is really a photo from behind of my very handsome son. It was staged and taken in my parlor. My son's hand, which seems to be on the tree, was really on a door frame in my parlor.
To get him out of the parlor, I used Mask Pro within Photoshop to mask out all of the photo except my son. This is very tedious work. Although they say it is possible to save the work and come back to it, I have never been successful with that. I have found that once I start the masking procedure, I must finish it in one session. This means many hours peering at the computer screen, controlling the mouse with a very steady hand. The result of this work is a cutout of my son on a completely transparent background.
Once I have this cutout, I can place it in my lake scene and fit it to the scene. This will require several tries because the size of the cutout must agree with the scene. We do not want Paul Bunion in the forest, nor do we want an elf. This means sizing and trying to get the right visual effect.
The final step in this process is to make the whole scene a shadowy baneful night scene. All of these photos were made in full light to get the good detail I needed. To turn the scene into a night scene meant manipulating the brightness and contrast on each layer separately. I also had to frost the tree branches with moonlight. I think the finished product justified my effort.
Now, to the Aflac ads. Just consider how believable that goose is in those ads. Now, we know the goose is real and that geese are not particularly bright creatures. Yet, the goose appears to have personality and even cleverness. I can only imagine how many hours they had to video tape that stupid goose to get the different looks they needed to make it believable.
In addition to making the video tapes, these technical experts
had to do essentially the same thing with motion pictures that
I did with still photos. They had to mask out the real background
and plug the cutouts of the goose into the video clips for the
ads. I hope, my brief explanation of these process will give you
a greater appreciation of the folks who do these things well.
I am in awe of them myself.
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