tech support? a question for the moderator or tormek

[Rob]

when I first graduated I worked in TV advertising for 3 years.  There was a phenomenon we all knew about at the time called "the chairman's wife syndrome".

This was when a very expensive commercial break would be bought by an advertising agency on a Sunday afternoon or sometimes a Saturday night.  The slot would have been bought at top of the rate card because the client company's chairman's wife was throwing a dinner party at the time it was to be broadcast.  Her plan would be to sit all her posh guests round the Tele and watch the scheduled advert to show off her husband to her friends.  Naturally, he wouldn't have the courage to talk his wife out of this and so the client company would pay many tens of thousands of pounds over the odds to secure 30 seconds in the centre break of the Bond film (or whatever the programme was) all to satisfy the ego of the chairman's wife.

There is a concept in advertising called "frequency" and this refers as the name suggests to the amount of time the advert is repeated and therefore the probability of it being seen by the target audience.  If an advert is not seen very much it massively reduces its impact and results.  In order to hit the frequency targets to make advertising effective in the Televisual medium a company has to spend really quite ludicrous amounts of money.  Procter & Gamble and Unilever for example spend many hundreds of millions on the soap, washing powder etc brands.  Whats the point I hear you ask?

The point is that smaller companies cannot hope to gain the frequency targets needed to actually have any influence on their target audience at all because they don't have the marketing budgets to drive the numbers.  So, given all that is well known in the fmcg marketing universe, I am always left wondering what the real motive is behind these kinds of corporate footage (much like the chairmans wife anecdote).  It is of course entirely possible that many small (ish) companies just don't understand the way advertising works and were "sold" by a slick marketing pitch.

The one possible exception in the modern world that I could be persuaded to consider is digital media.  A prospect visiting Tormek's website could conceivably locate that video and be comforted by the attention to quality.  But didn't you say its buried somewhere difficult to find?

Again, I have to say, in my view a completely pointless piece of narcissistic mumbo jumbo. (Somewhat negatively I will admit :-)

[Ken S]

Agreed.  We need to stay focused with getting better training.  I'm the oddball guy in the class who always preferred the theory to the hands on part.  I also like the history of products and the business.  That's not what matters here.  Let's get moving on some improved more in depth you tubes.

Ken

ps For those on the forum who don't know, Rob and I have become friends.  We have never met in person, and don't always think alike, but have developed a mutual friendly respect for each other, even though we don't speak the same language.......

[Rob]

Cotton pickin' varmint daggnabbit!

:-)