Well, in fact, it does matter. Simply put, graphic file formats vary greatly from one to the next. They all have different color depth, compression and transparency – all suited to particular types of images and media. Since the subject is very deep and technical, we’ll just stick to the basics.

Scenarios

Let’s identify a few situations you might run into.

Logos – Every presentation has a logo, right? Logos are line art graphics with a handful of colors (think Nike, FedEx, Home Depot). GIF/PNG will give you clean crisp lines with solid colors and is the format of choice. You want to stay away from JPG for logos, as it will make the edges and colors look poor. Designed for photos, JPG compression creates ugly artifacts against clean lines.

Expert Tip: If you’re going to put logos in an Office document, use a PDF vector logo. It’s universal and you can size it to any dimensions without compromise (provided it’s a vector PDF).  A graphic professional can create this with software like Illustrator. Once you have this, you’ll never have to get another version!

Photos – A picture is worth a thousand words, but it only looks good if it’s a JPG. JPG uses millions of colors instead of hundreds, making it well-suited to display photographs. JPG will use compression to lower the file size, which is not typically noticeable unless pushed to extremes.

Charts & Graphs – If you are having a designer create a chart or graph, then this falls into the category of line art graphics. Like logos, you’ll want to use a GIF or PNG to get a clean rendering. The readability of the text and lines is the most important thing to keep in mind. Here again, if you can get a vector PDF export of the chart, you’ll have the ultimate in quality and flexibility.

Text – Sometimes you have styled titles or visually treated text that is a graphic. You guessed it; you should use GIF/PNG. For optimum readability you want clean lines with no edge distortion.

Transparency – If you want to cut out the white background of an image, you need to use transparency. For our discussion, the files that can support transparency are GIF, PNG and even PDF.  But they will have to be exported specifically for this and often professionally tweaked to provide the best end presentation.

Sizing

Now that you have a file format selected, you will also need to think about dimensions. How big is it? (Pixels wide by pixels tall.)

All of these graphics should be created or exported at the size you wish to use them – the last thing you want to do is stretch it. Microsoft makes it all too easy to size a graphic up or down, but resist the urge. Sizing a graphic up or down makes it look blurry and can distort the shape. If you are unsure about an image already placed, Office allows you to investigate its properties and make sure it is set to 100%.

Samples

Still not convinced? Sound like techno-babble? Take a look at a few samples to see what we’re talking about.

Conclusion

In the world of graphic file formats, this is only the beginning. In addition to many more professional formats, there are variants that offer more options than discussed here. But hopefully this will get you started in the right direction.

We sure think so. Just as long as you take into account the business realities of corporate communications. Here are 4 reasons why it’s time to go mobile:

1) It’s everywhere.

According to mobithinking.com, nearly 1 billion people around the world have mobile broadband connections. Additionally, a recent report by Gartner Research suggests that by 2013, 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.

Because people are on the move and technology is moving with them, reaching them wherever they are becomes increasingly important.

2) It does everything.

With a smartphone or tablet application you can put your videos, printed materials and pictures into one easy-to-use interface. And because mobile devices allow for more dynamic content, users have a more engaging experience, increasing the likelihood your message will be received. The ability to integrate slideshows, videos, animations and sound creates a level of interactivity that your printed handout simply can’t match.

3) It’s quick and easy.

On the Web, everything is instant. Content changes as information changes, and updates happen in seconds. There’s no quicker way to push up-to-date information to your employees and customers than through a mobile communications platform – and with today’s content management systems, access to that information couldn’t be any easier.

4) It’s trackable and measurable.

You’re familiar with the old adage “knowledge is power,” so why not put it to work? By knowing when and what consumers are clicking, reading, watching and sharing, you have the power to get your message across more effectively. The analytics of mobile communications provide vital information about your customers and clients, and can help you determine what’s working and what isn’t.

For mobile corporate communications, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Look for upcoming posts on mobile websites; mobile applications; and Mobile Press, a service that transforms your corporate communications into highly engaging tablet editions that come alive with slideshows, animations, full-screen video, interactive graphs and embedded Web content.

On September 22, the White House unveiled We the People on WhiteHouse.gov via a blog post with the intention of giving everyday Americans the opportunity “to create and sign petitions on a range of issues affecting our nation.” This announcement was bolstered with an informative video to raise general awareness while demonstrating the necessary steps for participation.

While the White House has pledged to respond to any petition that receives 25,000 signatures in the first 30 days (up from the initial threshold of only 5,000 signatures), the value of such a petition is certainly debatable. Does this outlet offer a real opportunity for change, or merely fragment activists from more concentrated, publicly visible activities such as door-to-door campaigns and statehouse rallies? What is certain is that technology will continue to change the landscape of governance at a rapid pace.

The idea of allowing democracy to be played out via the Internet is not a new idea; interestingly, the U.K.launched a strikingly similar online petition initiative in August. And just prior to that, social media is widely credited as a key factor leading to the Arab Spring. In fact, most technology historians trace the birth of the Internet back to a network developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars, so it comes as no surprise that this technology would come back to re-shape the political landscape that brought it to life.

Might this be the birth of a new form of democracy? Could we be voting from our personal computers in the near future? And further on down the road as the technological barriers are overcome, might we be voting more often on increasingly more mundane issues currently left to our elected representatives, replacing our representative democracy with direct democracy?

Perhaps, but certainly not anytime soon. President Obama’s own “Twitter Town Hall” and YouTube Q&A were drowned out with fringe concerns the President opted to ignore. While it may seem the whole world is online, major segments of our population — especially the elderly – have been slow to embrace this technology and therefore the online community is still a subset of our national population as a whole. And, perhaps, we may just be too fragmented with too many incompatible ideals for such a system to work. These fragmented voices from all sides of the political spectrum tend to cancel each other out, as Alexander Fraser Tytler famously wrote many years ago, “the will of the many is in truth a mere chimera, and ultimately resolves into the will of one.”

So where does that leave us? If recent polls are any indication, Americans are feeling historically disenchanted with our elected officials. Although digital governance has failed in recent experiments, it may have an impact on our lives yet. Digital governance is very much in its infancy, and the passage of time will surely sort out the problems just as many companies have managed to turn a profit online despite the dot com bust a decade ago. The way to get there is to take advantage of the mini-democracies all around us by experimenting on a smaller scale: homeowners’ associations, PTAs, and wherever else we congregate to shape our communities.

Use these opportunities to boldly experiment in ways we’re not yet comfortable doing on a national level. Ask for greater accessibility to voting through online means, share information online that people can use when deciding their vote, and use social media to stay informed of the good ideas emerging from other communities. Good ideas will emerge, good ideas will rise to the top, and together we can forge a better tomorrow by focusing on our local communities. That is democracy in action in the digital age.

The TV Loudness War is nearly over. Advertisers, striving to be heard, were bombarding audiences with more heavily compressed [and seemingly louder] TV spots – while more viewers retaliated with the “mute” button or lobbed complaints to the FCC. Last year, Washington legislated a cease-fire.

The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation [CALM] Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama on December 15th last year, requires satellite networks, cable operators and broadcast stations to ensure that commercials are aired at a volume no louder than the programs that surround them. The bill’s sponsor, California Rep. Anna Eshoo, said the CALM Act was among the most popular pieces of legislation she’d introduced during her 18 years in Congress. The FCC was to begin enforcing the law one year after it was enacted, and we are just now beginning to see [hear, actually] the effects of this bill. 

aurally denser and more noticeable, couldn’t be reliably measured by those earlier standards.  And the transition to digital television and more HD programming only magnified the problem. 

Broadcast and cable networks are now measuring the loudness of television spots over time and are starting to reject nonconforming content back to the spot distributors, agencies and production companies.

Two things can happen if you’re an advertiser and your content is rejected – neither of them good: 

(1) Since spots typically get to the broadcasters just in time to air, any delay can put the whole media buy at risk.

(2) If you don’t have the latest metering equipment to ensure the spot’s audio is FCC-legal, one option is to just guess at lowering the overall audio level. But then you run the risk of not lowering it enough over time and having to re-do again – or being too cautious and dropping the level so low that it is too quiet compared to the surrounding program material.

If you are producing and finishing HD commercials on your own and don’t have the capabilities to analyze your final spot for FCC-legal loudness, feel free to contact our Operations Department at 614.777.9933. We will be happy to analyze and verify your audio track so that you can distribute your spots with confidence, knowing that it won’t be rejected by the networks.

WWW: Discovering fire 

While the Internet dates back to 1969, its early years were the exclusive domain of code-literate research scientists. But a little over two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a software consultant at the CERN nuclear research labs in Geneva, Switzerland, submitted a proposal to secure funds for an open computer network to share particle physics research in a more “humane” form that didn’t require heavy-duty computer coding. His paper would later serve as the blueprint for the World Wide Web with innovations including HTTP, URLs and HTML. Once he had the funding, Berners-Lee built those three foundational chunks of software code — plus the server and browser software to host it and read it – by Christmas, 1990.  While the invention of the Web rivals the discovery of fire, it took awhile to catch on.

Tim Berners-Lee created the vision for the World Wide Web and invented the software protocols that serve as its foundation.

A slow bootup

But it would take years for this obscure research tool to gain momentum. For mainstream computer users, the World Wide Web wouldn’t become a global phenomenon until the mid-1990s once Mosaic, Netscape and AOL popularized the software and helped put browsers on every desktop.

Businesses start to ‘get it’

In 1995, most of us at Mills James were still asking, “what’s a website?” But later that year, we launched our first homepage, which initially was a modest presence in a “business mall” site with other companies.  In early 1996, we premiered our first full website with its own domain, the Mills James Drive-In. In the mid-90’s, many businesses followed a similar trajectory and rushed to the Web with “brochureware” sites as we all began to sense the immense communications potential of this fledgling online medium.

Launched in early 1996, The Mills James Drive-In was our first website with its own domain.

Later in 1996, Mills James jumped into the deep end, launching an entire “New Media” department as part of a major building expansion, staffed to build corporate websites, e-learning content, kiosks and interactive media.  The rest is 15 years of digital history.

Mobilizing resources

Today it’s a different rush, as organizations scramble to stay ahead of the online tsunami — mobilizing websites with content optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices; launching video portals, webcasts and webinars to satisfy video-hungry online appetites; and integrating websites with social networks and their growing online communities. Our Video & Interactive group is staffed with knowledgeable consultants who can help you navigate this rapidly-changing digital terrain. It’s tough to imagine how different today’s world would be if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t created the elements that brought the World Wide Web to life. Who knows, maybe we’d be faxing this blog to you.

Today, organizations are scrambling to mobilize their sites – optimizing design and content for smartphones and mobile applications.

For organizations of all sizes, timely internal communication can be a powerful tool to engage staff and improve performance. For large multi-national corporations, it’s a fundamental strategic issue as an increasingly sophisticated workforce expects transparency and honest dialogue in return for buy-in to the business direction. To help negotiate this complex terrain, more companies rely on Mills James for expertise in employee communications media.

“Employees need a clear line of sight between their everyday work and the mission and goals of the companies they work for,” said Ken Mills, President of Mills James. “We support our clients with proven media communications tools to ensure employees are getting the information they need to help guide their day-to-day decisions and improve business results.”

Internal communication strategies are changing as dramatically as the technologies, said Mills. The old model was all about disseminating information by cascading information down the management chain – but key messages could be diluted as employees at each level interpreted it in their own way. Today, the communication is about aligning employee behavior with business goals, which takes a more direct approach – straight-lining media messages to managers and employees using intranet content, videos, e-learning, webinars, podcasts, management summits and “straight talk” meetings for large employee groups.

“Organizations are paying much more attention to internal communications,” Mills said, “because it plays such a pivotal role in how people work, their motivation and their commitment. That’s why more companies value an experienced partner in employee communication media.”

If your event will need significant staging and production support – lighting, sound, projection, scenic and rigging – are you choosing a venue that supports that without adding hidden costs? Everything else being equal, here are several factors that could be tie-breakers when choosing among potential meeting facilities.

Space – Room seating charts and floorplans provided by facilities usually quote optimum room capacities – assuming no space is needed for projection, staging, scenic or AV. A more realistic room capacity can be determined by your staging provider once all the technical systems are plotted into the detailed floorplan drawings.

Setup time – When scheduling the facility, are the rooms available with sufficient lead-time to allow for load-in, setup and rehearsals? Is there enough time to tear-out? Many facilities tend to book room rentals so closely that load-in and tear-out get crunched, or require supplemental crew to “beat the clock.”

Rigging points – Most larger events need to be “flown” – with lighting trusses, speaker clusters, drape lines and other scenic elements suspended from the ceiling on “rigging points,” pre-engineered suspension hooks that tie directly to the building’s steel supports. Some facilities aren’t equipped with rigging points; others do but charge for their use; others require their own in-house riggers to do the work for a fee.

If your event may require ceiling rigging, have those conversations with your venue for an up-front discussion about capabilities and fees.

Power charges – If your event will require supplemental lighting equipment, you also will need additional electrical service to power it. Many facilities levy substantial power charges for this service. Others may require a “tie in” to the house power mains, using their staff electricians. And other venues may not have been wired to provide the type of power needed for supplemental lighting, which may make diesel generators necessary. Make sure you discuss your power needs with the facility’s operations staff.

Possible distractions – There’s nothing like conducting your own site survey to reveal any distractions that could make your potential venue less than ideal. Does a too-thin airwall separate your space from an adjacent event that could spill annoying sound into your meeting? Is the air handling system too loud? Is the room too close to a noisy kitchen or a loud bar?

On the other hand, if your own event is going to be a high-energy show with loud music and cheering attendees, let the facility now so they can create a buffer zone between you and any other groups. You won’t want to ask your guests to tone it down because another group is complaining about loud sound levels.

Logistics – Are the loading docks located nearby, or will their distance complicate the load-in? Are personnel lifts available, and if so, is there a rental charge? Is the space a union facility and are there staffing requirements that would affect your event? Does the facility have an exclusive agreement with in-house AV providers? (Some facilities apply a “corkage fee” as a surcharge to discourage use of outside AV services.)

Sight lines – Is there anything about the room layout that will obstruct the views of participants? Will low ceilings or low-hanging chandeliers get in the way of projection systems and screens? Will columns or alcoves block views or make supplementary projection screens necessary?

When choosing a venue for your meeting or event, the best advice we can give is involve us early. Over the decades, our crews have worked the top convention centers, conference halls and hotel ballrooms in leading destination cities across the country and beyond.

Most likely, we already have room drawings on file for the facilities you’re considering, and can weigh-in on the ease (and cost factors) of using one facility over another. In the end, we want you and your guests to have the best possible experience with the venue you select.

On the surface it seems simple enough – when clients review the first-round budgets for their projects and see a line item for professional talent, it’s easy to conclude, “I’ll just use our employees for the on-camera work and save the money.”
Sometimes that’s a good choice; sometimes it isn’t.

When to use employees as talentWhen budget is a driving factor – The clearly obvious reason to use employees is that it may save significant out-of-pocket costs – assuming you’re using amateurs on camera in ways that won’t lengthen the shoot or complicate editing later.

When you need to put a face on your brand – A brand isn’t a logo or a trademark; it’s who your company is. And using company associates – in their real-life roles – brings natural credibility and authenticity that can be more difficult to create with professional talent. Documentary-style, real-people testimonials from employees who are living out your brand on the job can be one of the most powerful forms of video storytelling.

When employees have specialized skills – Employees know the drill – whether it’s laser equipment calibration or performing blood tests in a medical lab. When your on-camera talent need to look like they know what they’re doing, and the task requires a practiced skill, then using real employees may save time and money, and deliver a more credible look.

When to use actors as talent

When there’s scripted dialogue – When the on-camera delivery is heavily scripted with prepared lines [common examples are HR role-playing scenarios or serving as an on-camera principal host], then professional talent is the clear choice. Here, using employees is a false economy. Blown lines and excessive re-takes can run up costs by lengthening the shoot and requiring extensive [unbudgeted] editing – and even then, the result may be a sub-par performance that mars the video. Professionals bring a confident on-camera presence, the ability to take direction, and experience to help with continuity issues. [Let’s see, which hand was I using to hold the pliers?] 

When the shoot schedule is tight – Some videos need to be shot during limited or odd hours – between shifts in a busy hospital; when a restaurant is closed; when a production line is changing over. Whenever there’s a limited production window, professional talent can help keep the shoot on track by delivering consistent takes – quickly – especially in high-pressure situations.

When you need a long shelf life – Using employees on camera carries certain risks – if those people later leave your organization, are involved in a disciplinary action, or in other situations where their continued presence in the video is awkward. Using professional talent minimizes re-shoots or edits that may be necessary down the road due to personnel issues.

Employees or actors? Thereare situations where employees have the edge for credible on-camera delivery on a budget. Other times, an investment in professional talent may the best financial choice in the long run – for reasons that go beyond just the initial shoot costs. With careful preproduction planning and solid direction during the shoot, good talent – amateur or professional – will deliver great results.

In this post-literate 21^st century era, attention spans are microscopically small and shrinking – a trend that’s having a profound impact on how you communicate your message. Any message.

When Amazon introduced the Kindle eBook reader, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wasn’t impressed, as he was widely quoted in The New York Times:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”                        – Steve Jobs

A nation of skimmers – For years, hundreds of scholarly studies have documented a dumbing down of American literacy; yet nothing’s as definitive as the CEO of the planet’s most successful computer/electronics company saying it’s so.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing from literacy experts who are certain American society is going someplace bad in a handbasket. But is it a literacy issue, or an attention issue? While that’s a topic for robust debate, one thing is certain – we’ve rapidly morphed from a nation of readers to a nation of skimmers. For communicators, this changes everything.

The Internet is re-wiring us – New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Carr, in THE SHALLOWS: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, presents compelling evidence that our brains’ neurology actually changes in response to our experiences. While the printed book tends to focus our attention in deeper thought, the Internet promotes a scattered, distracted sampling of randomized bits of information. Now, as the Internet remakes us in its own image by rerouting our neural pathways, we’re becoming ever more fluent at scanning and skimming [perhaps at the expense of our capacity to concentrate, analyze and reflect.]

The attention budget – Here’s our own theory: are attention spans shorter, or are they just becoming narrower? Today’s information-intensive reality means that each of us faces a bewildering matrix of choices over where to focus our attention. It’s as though each of us starts the day with an ‘attention budget.’ We only have a finite amount of concentration to spend on the entire mass of information that comes at us each day, and we have to make conscious choices around where we spend our attention. So when I’m forced to ration my awareness, you can be sure I’ll spend it on material that’s relevant to me, makes my life easier, improves my situation or puts a smile on my face.

A profound new reality – For producers of all kinds of information – journalists, advertisers, marketers and educators – this is a profound new reality thundering over us. It’s a new age and we need to be thinking more about how our audiences want to ingest our informational products – rather than expecting them to swallow our material in the formats we’ve grown comfortable producing.

For anyone with a message, that means:

• Get to the point – Know the difference between ‘need to know’ and ‘nice to know’ and ruthlessly edit your message for concise coherence
• Make it relevant – Quickly hook onto your audience’s motivational velcro with reasons to care about your message
• Break it up – Chapterize or serialize content into absorbable chunks; write and design it to be scanned as well as read
• Tell it as story – Stories improve engagement and make it easier for your audience to connect at a more credible and emotional level
• Make it an experience – Keyword: ‘multisensory’; open up the visual channel; add motion graphics, audio and video; make it an interactive event and engage your audience at several levels to improve cognition and message retention

It’s an information jungle out there. With content flows increasing, scanning is becoming an ever-more-important survival skill. And since there’s only so much attention to go around, why not put a little extra thought into ways to help your message make the cut into my consciousness?

With the explosion of video-enabled smartphones and the growth of online video on the web, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t watched at least one clip in the last month. According to market researcher ComScore, 83.5% of all U.S. Internet users watched an online video in January 2011, totaling over 171 million individuals.

As video becomes a preferred form of online content, companies are investing more heavily in video-based marketing, advertising, PR and training. But hosting and measuring that video content requires more sophisticated tools than internal servers and traditional web “page view” analytics can provide. The very nature of video defies traditional web traffic evaluation, and standard web metrics simply aren’t relevant to understanding the popularity, viewability and social sharing of video content on the web. 

Hosting: It matters where your video lives

Fortunately, there are better hosting and analytics solutions, and Mills James has several approaches to help optimize video content for adaptive streaming – whether for public websites or content intended for targeted viewership, like internal training and corporate communications. This ensures successful video viewing across multiple devices, operating systems, file types, screen sizes, and bandwidths – which also enables better analysis. And the content can still be secured, embedded on Intranets and in password protected web pages.

Improving your best content with engagement analytics

Mills James also offers geographic reporting so you can see down to the city where views are taking place. This geographic overlay, coupled with monitoring search terms used and domain names that drive traffic to your videos, can provide rich insights.

Right tools for the right medium

In today’s online video landscape, video content is served and played in so many different formats that it takes a much bigger toolbox to get an accurate measure of online audience behavior. With more robust video hosting and enhanced metrics, every event that a viewer does while watching a video online can be captured and analyzed precisely for more comprehensive insight. Shouldn’t your online video content be delivering a maximum return on your investment?