Well not one to miss an opportunity I have talked the guys at The Bluebeards Revenge into using my friend Gunnar for their latest advertisement.

Find out all about it at ‘The Bluebeards Revenge’

The partnership with The Bluebeards Revenge will help us create an online buzz around our World Record and ultimately to sell our 1/2 hour documentary programme to a broadcaster or two!

So, here is your chance to see legendary Norwegian Traveler Gunnar Garfors ‘Travel Hard Shave Easy’:

Yes, that’s right, we have filmed a documentary on 5 continents in just 1 day.  That is to say we filmed the record being set on 5 continents in 1 day – but then took another 8 days coming back filming inserts and interviews to make a 1/2 hour programme…

24 hours after the record was completed a preview was online to start generating an online buzz -and this is it, using music written by us as usual!

Want to know more? Type ’5 continents in 1 day’ into google and read any one of the hundreds of news stories and magazine articles that have been written on the record.

Are you finding music licensing, complex, restrictive and costly – then read on for how to avoid all the issues!

You know what sort of music you want on your production but;

• how do you get it?
• how much does it cost?
• how do you prevent other people using the same music for their branding
• how do you avoid ending up in court for copyright infringement?

Well, the quick, cost effective and legally sound way is to get Adelia Television to write, record and license the music for you.

Our showreel music was written in house and thanks to the wonders of autotune, arguably, even the singing passes the quality test!

If you need more convincing, I will briefly explain more about the expensive / complicated / legally daunting minefield that is music licensing.

MUSIC LICENSING

Most music that you will want to use will require you to buy multiple, costly music licenses. These include PRS, MCPS, MPA, PPL and VPL.

The last one in the list is not a joke – there is genuinely a licensing organisation called VPL. Each organisation covers different areas of licensing which can roughly be summarised:

• PRS Performing Rights Society – covers public performance whether on radio, TV, online or in public places
• MCPS Mechanical Copyright Protection Society – covers mechanical duplication onto physical formats i.e. CD, cassette, vinyl
• MPA Music Publishers Association – copyright to publish notation; split between the musical work (sheet music / tab etc.) and the literary work (lyrics)
• PPL Phonographic Performance Limited – to use recorded music
• VPL Video Performance Limited – to use music videos

Do you need to worry about this? Well yes, if you are using copyrighted work without paying for it you are stealing and leaving yourself and your organisation open to prosecution.

PRODUCTION MUSIC

There are two possible solutions that mean you don’t need to get involved with the licensing companies above.

Production Music: For around £50 you can buy production music online that is licensed to you/your organisation – but this has drawbacks:

• To maximise profit, the music can be licensed to anyone – do you want your brand damaged by someone else’s use of the same music that conflicts with your brand values?
• The license is restrictive about where and how you can use the music – i.e. you cannot make physical copies (DVD etc.) or play it publicly without additional payment
• You have to find music that fits with your brand – this can mean hours of trawling through music catalogues trying to find the right piece

BESPOKE MUSIC OWNED BY YOUR BRAND – PROVIDED BY ADELIA TELEVISION

We can write, record and license a bespoke piece of music just for you. The license will mean that you own the music; lock, stock and barrel! You can use it anywhere in the world, on any medium, copy it as much as you like and no one else can use it without your written permission.

Adelia Television surrenders all ownership of the copyright work to you for a one off fee (check out our fees page for details)

The only condition? That we are also providing your video production services – that’s it – use us for video production and your music licensing concerns can be over.

You can tell us what type of music you would like and we will write and record it to broadcast quality to fit your video production. While it may not make this weeks Top 40 it will be a professionally produced piece of music tailored to your brand.

We wrote the music for this shaving cream advertisement – it needed something manly that drove the video production along…

The high quality ads. are designed for television use but are initially being trialed online. They form part of a series of viral videos produced by Adelia Television for the shaving brand ‘The Bluebeards Revenge’.

So far the shaving cream’s YouTube channel has attracted over 150,000 views for a relatively modest outlay. It is through their use of a variety of types of video that they have achieved such a good online presence.

They recently signed a distribution deal worth £1million and their creative use of online video branding was cited as a deal clincher!

The London Wasps were keen to get on board with the brand, signing them up for a year long partnership that sees the team become the manliest rugby team for 2012!

Adelia Television provides quality video production, working with the brand to reinforce and disseminate key values.

For ‘The Bluebeards Revenge’ the brand is defined as manly with the following outline for a series of ‘Train Hard, Shave Easy’ advertisements:

• Tough, manly, blood, sweat and tears needed to succeed at a sport.
• Element of sexiness – saucy not overtly.
• Humour – an element of self-deprecating, table turning humour.
• No voice over or dialogue.

If you want to know how we went about filming this ad. check out the production stills below, kindly provided by Elizabeth Wainwright.

So, how did they do it? What is it that has given this video over 50 million views in just four days?

Well, it is partly building on prior YouTube success. Before the release of Kony 2012 they already had over two million views of their 276 videos. As each video is linked they reinforce eachother throwing them straight into the number one spot on the search engines. Their channel has over two hundred thousand subscribers – who will also retweet, repost, and generally embed the video all over the web.

So they had the infrastructure – but what really made this video fly was the emotive call to action. The whole point is to make itself famous to make Joseph Kony famous – therefore you watch it and then share it. I put it straight on my Facebook page – something I rarely do with anything other than my own work!

So, what is the lesson for us here at Adelia Television? Well mainly that slick production can cut it as a viral video – most truly viral videos trending now are professional productions not like the shaky cam kittens and Fails of the last few years. Also that you can now put a half-hour programme and broadband speeds and computer technology is such that people will watch it. Just four years ago the online manager of a major rolling news channel told me that online viewers have an attention span of 50 seconds so all virals should be shorter!

So a few lessons learnt but despite the films failings (of which there are many) I am left with the feeling that I wish I had made that!

For all the people that love to criticise the film I will copy here a very short summary of my views as posted to Facebook:

‘One step at a time and I for one am pleased that finally a world wide movement will bring all the issues to the top of every politicians agenda, without economic or defensive justification, but purely based on outrage at the continuing infringement of human rights… We have all seen the stories of child soldiers and the LRA on the news but this is the first time every individual has the ability to add their voice to the journalists prose. It may be a one dimensional movement, but it WILL make a difference, all thanks to a very well put together half-hour video that will be endlessly critiqued but unlikely to be bettered…’

Beautiful weather and top cars – my highlight was the Metro 6R4…

Hope you like the music – it’s another Adelia Television production – see if you recognise where the inspiration for it came from…

Well, we were watching music television the other night and ‘Flat Beat’ by Mr Oizo came on. Chloe thought this was magic and started dancing to it. I grabbed my little stills camera and recorded the moment for prosperity. However, I’d missed the start but still had four minutes of video that seemed too long to watch (unless you are her father!). Therefore I edited the whole thing down to just over a minute over the original soundtrack. So the question is; have we stolen the music and therefore infringed copyright? Before we go any further here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Music copyright is potentially a legal minefield – especially as there are circumstances in which you can use other peoples work. It’s called ‘fair use’ and is designed to ensure that copyright law does not stifle free speech and incidental use of copyright work.

So, have I stolen the music? Well, the UK copyright service do a very good and thankfully very short fact sheet which explains the in’s and out’s of copyright. Read through this and it does appear that I have infringed copyright…

But what about fair use? These are three possible defences:

• the music was incidental
• the music was used or the purposes of news reporting
• the music was used in parody

Well, the music was incidental to the film – it was Chloe’s performance that was being depicted – but then surely part of the enjoyment of the performance is down to the music (unless you can’t stand the music!). In fact, it could easily be argued that the music made up a large percentage of the video and was a major part of the production.

This wasn’t a piece of journalistic work – although it could be argued that it was a depiction of something that spontaneously happened and as such represented a real event. The story of that event was purely edited for time in the video as per any television news package. This was not a set up, and for myself, my family and (some) of my friends, this was an important story to tell!

It could be argued that the video is a work of parody. The original use of the music was to advertise Levi jeans. They used a hand puppet called Flat Eric, who danced in a repetitive motion just as Chloe did…

Finally, it is an excerpt of the copyrighted work not the whole. If you can establish that you are only using a minor part of a work it may be decided that it is not an infringement of the whole. However, there is no percentage or agreed amount that you can use and it would therefore be down to the court to decide whether an important part of the original work had been used without permission. In this case, since ‘Flat Beat’ is one bar of music repeated for five minutes with little variation, you would have to use much less than a bar to not be using a major percentage of the original work! Clearly that is not the case with Chloe’s film…

Really, whether or not copyright has been infringed, is not as important as whether the copyright holder feels aggrieved enough to take you into the civil courts. Despite, what would appear to be an infringement of copyright, when taken on balance, is it serious enough to warrant the time and expense of taking an individual to court who its unlikely will not be afford to pay enough damages to make the whole exercise worthwhile? Sometimes it can be to make an important point – in Chloe’s case I don’t think it is worth anyone’s time, effort and money in this particular context.

Don’t for a minute think I don’t take copyright seriously. If someone stole Adelia Television’s work and held it up to be their own I would be miffed! However, if they used it in a positive way and credited us I would be very happy! Recently, I wanted to contact a creative agency to see if they had any video work. On checking for their contact details on their website I found they had posted one of my videos on their twitter feed which appeared on the homepage. However, it was credited to Adelia Television with a link back to our website and could only be seen as a positive inference! Did I take them to court? Nope – I was ecstatic!

However, if you are a greasy, money grabbing, PRS executive getting excited about extorting a large sum of money from Adelia Television – please be aware that we either buy licensed production music or write all our own music for our clients and we would rather take Chloe’s video off YouTube than pay exorbitant sums of money in licensing…

Issues over copyright tend not to arise with the original creator of the work. It is the licensing agencies that have got over zealous in their collection of money since physical sales of music went into terminal decline. Ridiculous stories are rife – my hairdresser was told he had to pay several hundred pounds a year to have the radio on – he was told he was conducting a public performance of the copyright work on the radio station! He has so far ignored the threatening letters and phone calls – I’ve advised him that PRS are not so foolish to take him to court as if he wins they would have set a precedent that would harm an important income stream. However, I am extremely concerned by the threatening nature of these phone calls and I know of large, public organisations that have spent tens of thousands of public money on ridiculous and tenuous licenses in similar contexts.

I think people should stand up to this type of bullying – so I hereby nail my colours to the mast – and wait to see if anyone wants to take me to court over my video, of my daughter…

So how do you make a project management and collaboration suite interesting?

Well if you are Okifilms you post an almost impossible stunt on YouTube and wait for people to investigate further.

The ad. has no reference to the product at all – the connection is only made if you follow the Megawoosh link.

However, the viral has been so successful that it has crossed into the real world with news programmes reporting on it and many features on Television and in print media. The American programme Mythbusters even decided to put the stunt to the test to see if it is really possible – with mixed results:

How many YouTube viral ads. have had a mainstream television programme that’s watched by millions spend a whole hour effectively advertising it?

So, make your video appear real – or at least ambiguous you can create a buzz and not only will you put your product in front of an online audience but you will also overflow into the real world.

Adelia Television’s first foray into viral video achieved just that with the newspapers reporting the back story of a lion attack:

Of course you can get even more mileage out of your video by featuring it on you website, in your blog and promoting it on your twitter feed. You can talk about it in online forums and send press releases to your journalistic contacts.

One of the most powerful ways of using this type of video is in your business to business interactions. Professionally produced videos can seriously improve your credibility with your suppliers, distributors and business partners.

Point of sale screens and trade fairs also give you a chance to showcase your videos and put forward your products and services in a professional, accurate and compelling way.

You do not have to get millions of views on YouTube to get value from your viral video – in fact many of those views will not be users of your product and are likely to be outside of your geographic reach.

The intention of posting this type of video content on YouTube is create a buzz – something you can turn tangible in the real world.

YouTube viral videos have a much broader life than a few seconds in front of a teenager looking for smut and injury! YouTube gives you a free, worldwide, universally acceptable distribution method that is geared to short videos.

It is a tremendous opportunity to use the well established benefits of video, via a convenient and endlessly linkable distribution channel…

For us here at Adelia Television, YouTube has ended the frustration of producing corporate video. In the past, great video used to languish on a dusty shelf on VHS or DVD – occasionally it would be dragged out and new staff would have to sit and watch it usually in a classroom environment.

Now, video sits online, and you decide who you want to send it to – and they can watch it when and how they want:

• On their office computer while going through their emails
• On their home computer while doing background research
• On their mobile phone on the train
• On their laptop between meetings

There is now no need to make an appointment to view, your audience can click and view when they feel like it and that flexibility means your video will be watched by hundreds, thousands or even millions of people instead of gathering dust on a shelf at Head Office…

Adrian Butterworth from Adelia Television, teaches the Video Journalism unit…

The curriculum is provided and accredited by the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists). This means that if you pass the course you will have the universally accepted NCTJ qualification.

We thought that we would put together a short promo to give you a flavour of what it is all about – as usual all production elements (video and music) have been produced by Adelia Television:

If you are interested in video training with us you have the following options:

• Use our free tutorials
• Book a Skype tutorial via the contact form at the bottom of the page
• Book ‘one on one’ or group days with Adelia Television
• Have a look at the Up To Speed Journalism website and the comprehensive NCTJ accredited courses they provide

Good luck with your video production work, I hope that we can help you!

This time they have signed a major distribution deal that will get them onto Britain’s High Streets…

Of course, as one of our clients we can bask in their reflected glory, safe in the knowledge that their 100,000 YouTube hits over the last few months is the result of a viral video campaign produced by Adelia Television.

Despite only moving into viral video production earlier this year, Adelia Television has accrued a total of well over quarter of a million hits for our clients.

So this is yet more proof that YouTube is the new place to advertise. After all, it is a free distribution network with millions of worldwide viewers! Such an advertising medium could only be dreamed of a few years ago.

Take a look at the Bluebeards Blog to get a flavour of their approach.

They are extremely brand focussed and know how to target not only their customers but to use social marketing and viral video to target their business partners too.

Each video that we have produced for the brand has had maximum value extracted from it – ensuring that the product and the company have always looked and acted like a major player in their market.

The Bluebeards Revenge boys have used a mix of viral video to get their brand noticed:

“The company was quoted over £50,000 for this extensive series of videos – still considered cheap in the broadcast world.  However, Adelia Television produced top quality content at real world prices – less than 10% of our other quotes.”

Nick Gibbens, Marketing Director The Bluebeards Revenge Shaving Cream

“Adelia Television is the only company we use for our video production – they excel at fulfilling client requirements in the ever changing online video market.  Production standards are excellent, even allowing clients to use viral video content in national television campaigns.”

Mark Southern, Managing Director Polygon PR

Don’t feel left behind by the social marketing revolution, instead use it for:

• Marketing
• Business to business
• Internal communications
• Product tutorials
• Getting your brand noticed!

Ok then, just how much will it cost?

• A fully produced broadcast quality video viral starts from £999
• Even better, we currently have an introductory special offer;
• Book your first job through the website today* and we will produce your first video for half price – from just £498 for a top class viral video!
• Just use the contact box at the bottom right of this screen…