DV Info Net - Corporate Video Shot with EX-3

Arbel, you've made a very sophisticated programme with lots of visual delights. I assume your brief was to make an international programme that could be easily converted to different languages.

May I comment, I hope not too harshly, and possibly constructively, on some other aspects?

Overall I felt it was a programme which conveyed the same message any company working in that sector at that level would have been happy to have represent them. In other words it gave the senior management a nice warm feeling but didn't present any sound or conclusive USPs. It might have been made for the company which made the tooling as much as for the company that uses it.

I wonder if the Marketing Manager or Sales Director wouldn't have preferred a programme which, alongside all the wonderful imagery you've produced, also showed real customers, really satisfied, examples of excellence produced by the company, some reference to cost and value, ie we all want Rolls Royce quality but few of us get in at Ford prices etc etc..

I recall making a series of programmes 18 years ago for Marconi, a leading UK computer firm concerning their System X telephone exchanges. At the urging of senior management we had lots of pretty imagery of surface mount solder baths and computer controlled bard assembly, but the really effective programmes in my view were one we made for the Marketing Department and one which showed the manufacture - still by hand of the wiring looms. Row upon row of ladies in a grubby factory in Northern Ireland threading thin wire around nails hammered into a wooden board, almost 19th Century in its simplicity.

The Marketing programme was called the Hot Slide. It addressed the situation where a System X exchange replaced an old mechanical (Strowger) exchange housed in a small rural building with no space for the new exchange to be installed alongside the old one. Basically the company assembled and built the new exchange on a wheeled frame and installed it in a standard sea container.

In its container it was placed alongside the old building and engineers wired the new exchange in parallel with the old one. Early one Sunday morning the new exchange went live and the engineers uninstalled the old exchange, removing without haste the old equipment whilst the subscribers used the new exchange in its container.

Once the old building was empty, a suitable whole was knocked out at one end and the new exchange, still working, was wheeled into the newly empty space - hence the term, Hot Slide. The brickies rebuilt the wall and the sea container was returned to the leasing company. Because it showed many benefits of the new exchange and how the company's ingenuity and skill had extended to the installation of the exchange not merely the clever design it was a really compelling programme.

Of course, all this would have been nothing had the company not convinced itself it needed more than pretty pictures; had it not the programme would still be an idea.