CompuServe Thread

Hi Stephen – >>should I start looking for a new day job?<< A provocative, worthwhile, and interesting question. I agree that the tools become better and better, but it strikes me that most of the people who want to do production are already doing it. My view is also that the tools are, after all, just tools. Production is about art too. And good tools don't make a lousy artist into a great one. If that were true, all of those great Mac & PC drawing tools would have put artists out of business! It seems to me that desktop video, nonlinear editing, and other tools simply give us the chance top be more creative, by freeing us up from some of the grunge work and giving us more chances to experiment. The result, in my opinion, is to make the good people better. I'm interested in what others have to say about this. I'd say keep producing! Happy New Year! Bob

Stephen: My background is primarily in print publishing, and I think there are strong parallels between what happened with desktop publishing and what is happening now with desktop video. The changes that DTP brought to the printing industry have hurt some people and brought tremendous opportunities for others. Those changes have resulted in some of the shlockiest printing ever done, but they've also resulted in tremendous savings in time and cost for those willing to do things "the right way." The key for someone in printing today is to decide what business he's in. Here's what I mean. In the past, printing was a specialized industry with very high barriers to entry because of the high price of the equipment required to professionally put an image onto paper. (Sound familiar?) That meant that the only people who could get into the business — particularly on the creative side — were those who were serious about it not only as a business but a craft. Now, on the other hand, anybody with a Mac and a laser printer calls himself a designer. For that matter, you can even produce full-color brochures on a simple Mac now, then have the color photos scanned at a service bureau and then have them run the film and you FedEx it to some wholesale color printer in Hong Kong or someplace else in this country. Days later, your customer gets his color printing drop shipped to him. He never suspects you didn't do the whole thing unless you tell him. (People are so ignorant enough about the process that they somehow think I can have a color press in my office. But who's to blame them? They don't know what a color press looks like.) The bottom line is that the customer doesn't care how the work is done as long as he's happy with his final product. To him, it doesn't make any difference whether the brochure was quickly put together on a computer or whether it was designed, color seperated and stripped the old-fashioned way. Now, who's hurt and who benefits from the technology? Well, the professional printer or designer who is trying to do "bottom feeder" type business is going to starve. (By that I mean the simple business for the bottom of the market, things such as letterhead, envelopes, business cards, etc.) If the designer has been charging a few hundred bucks for designing a corporate identity package which consists of a logo, letterhead, business cards and envelopes — which used to be the only way to get such things — that person is going to be hurt by the amatuer who goes into DTP with nothing but a Mac and a laser printer, whose "training" consists of looking through a stationery order book to look for ideas. This person will do the whole thing for $25 or so. That's why the professional designer loses low-end accounts — and it's also why we see so much lousy design today. OK, that's the bad side. The good side is that if a professional is willing to adapt himself to the technology and aim his marketing at the people or industries for whom the design DOES still matter, he has the opportunity to have a much higher return on his investment than ever before. The key is to decide what business you're in: printing or creative work. You have to understand that the actual production part of what you're doing has become pretty much a commodity. That means you can't count on much (if any) profit from that portion of your work, because something becoming a commodity always drives down prices and lowers margins. (In the absence of government monkeying, of course, but that's another story.) So if you understand this, you concentrate on portions of the market that are 1) less price sensitive, and 2) more demanding of quality design. (This is a decision I faced a few years ago when I was looking at starting my own company. I knew I wanted to do something in print, and I was willing to do anything along the print spectrum that made sense. I chose to be an advertising agency specializing in print, because this means I'm basically doing the same sort of things I'd do if I were in printing, but I get a higher profit margin because I'm addressing the high-profit part of the market.) For the video industry, I see the same thing starting to happen. As simple production becomes even easier and less expensive, the people to be hurt by it are the ones providing very simple video services without a great deal of creative input. That's simply because a beginner can duplicate their services (at least in the eye of the customer) at a lower price. On the other hand, the people who do well will eventually be the people who find a way to differentiate themselves from the market by offering value-added services not being offered by the producers of "commodity-level" video. Concentrating on the creative part rather than the commodity part should lead to serious profit. There are some people in the print industry who are still fighting the battles of the past. I know a few people who still think that unless a color sep is done on a half-million dollar drum scanner and then manually stripped in, that it's not "quality work." Well, for a long time, the quality for desktop color was good enough that the customer couldn't tell. Now, it's getting good enough that _I_ can't tell the difference. The "old-timers" are still fighting battles that technology won years ago. I'm afraid that many in video are going to fight the same battles. People who have grown up with a particular definition of "broadcast quality" are going to fight the move to something that will initially not be quite as good as what they're accustomed to. The sad thing is that (if it's anything like what happened in print) the battles will be fought the hardest over things that don't matter one whit to the customer. The bottom line (in my opinion) is that DTV means tremendous opportunities for those who are willing to think logically and look at the industry from a marketing perspective rather than a production (commodity) perspective. It's also why I am beginning to move my agency toward video, because I believe there is tremendous opportunity for those who are positioned well in video. In other words, you can do well or poorly in video in the future. It's your choice, and what you decide to do today will determine how you will do. David