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Traditional Broadcast Excellence

vs. the modern cellphone

Taking a 50 Year Old Property

into the Social Age

Petersen’s Hunting Magazine was started in the 50’s by Pete Petersen, a Los Angeles publishing giant who’s media strategy went like this:

“For the kind of magazine I publish,” Petersen once declared, “the newsstand is king.”  Petersen Publishing’s cradle-to-grave approach to identifying and addressing a bevy of special interest topics compensated for any readership loyalty lost by regarding the newsstand as “king.” “If we see one of our magazines becoming too general,” the company’s long-time president remarked, “we start a new magazine rather than add pages and dilute the magazine for our hard-core readers. We want to make a guy a lifetime reader of Petersen publications, not just a reader of one of our magazines.”

I’m guessing Pete would have been jazzed by social media – but the current company was struggling to ad tasks and job titles at a speed to keep up.  So an intrepid field director steps up…

Content Re-purposing

for the Instagram audience

The aerial clip of gimsbok running across the African steppe was shot by me with a DJI Inspire on an exploratory side trip and might not have been used in the broadcast edit for the show.  Turning the content into a 15 second clip purposed for Instagram brought our branding to live on a previously only stills Instagram account.  With such high impact eye grabbing footage, it’s a shame not to have it grabbing new customers!

The show airs every Sunday, and so effective teasers in social media Friday and Saturday remind our loyal 2.5 million audience that their favorite content will be fresh Sunday night.

A traditional TV

doesn’t have a chat box sitting below it

The above clip was put together by me as a web only online conversation starter to engage the social media needs of the brand’s Facebook followers.  Normally focused on the half hour broadcast production, specialized content that teased using the chat space in comments below the video was a new development.  Using clips that would normally be left on the cutting room floor can develop the character of the show hosts outside the story line of the full episodes.  These strategic opportunities I identified and took advantage of as as field director to feed the social media monster.  (A second version of the clip edited by me on my Vimeo page linked here)

One of the primary advantages of using a solo producer is the ‘head space’ advantage that your content creator will have.  As I pushed the record button on each of these clips, I have the first advantage at putting together effective clips in the same day they’re shot.  In this edit you see the travel elements (landing by float plane), living out of a tent, rough arctic environment, and insight into the personality of the show host as a whole scene inside the 90second window we felt was the attention span for a Facebook audience of causal browsers.

Meeting current media needs
while shooting next season’s episodes

One of the challenges for blending social media engagement from within the timeline of traditional media production is shooting content for timely social media engagement while filming next year’s broadcast schedule.  Traditionally the episode’s content shot this year will be aimed at broadcast for time relevance next year in the traditional media cycle, but with amateur competition using cell phones and uploading immediately it’s a new media landscape!   In the above clip we’re able to reach out to fans for engagement who are probably out doing some of the same things we are in the same time-frame since I edited the clip together from daily downloads and a quick edit after dark.  The cell phone up-loader won’t be editing clips, using time-lapse photography, and presenting professional audio so we still have the advantage of production quality to set our brand apart.

My close engagement with the producer of the show (talent in the clip as well) allowed me to concept and execute this clip to the web.  The editor for broadcast puts together the episode with the 30min timeline in mind and probably won’t think twice about the short clip shot mentioning the date because it doesn’t move his story line forward and the verb tense doesn’t fit with our standard live action vs. retelling give and take.  Because I was also with the brand manager for CZ-USA (who is the sponsor of this episode) I was able to get immediate edit approval as well as pass the clip over to them for engagement in their social media streams furthering the partnership between the brands.