Gary Bettman is head of production for The Miller Group as well as the Chief Operating Officer. Prior to joining The Miller Group, Gary worked for many years as a feature film producer on many award-winning, independent features. He delineates the agency's strategy for creating engagement and innovative work.
Can you give us a brief overview of your structure and some of the clients you work with?
We are a full-service agency with an on-staff Producer (Head of Production), as most of our clients – like Goodwill Southern California, The Salvation Army, and event tech company, PSAV, require video and/or audio production, in addition to post production as part of their campaigns. Being headquartered in Los Angeles gives us access to wide range of top production talent, both in front of and behind the camera.
How does your production team utilize social listening tools to understand audience sentiment, gather feedback, and adapt their strategies for improved engagement?
We always ensure every campaign includes some means of capturing performance metrics, whether that comes in the form of clickstream data, or social likes or shares. But, beyond using our own work to guide engagement improvements we also monitor all platforms to gather sentiment analysis, create word clouds, or spot target consumer trends. Tik Tok, You Tube, and other platforms to weigh technique, timing, and technology.
What innovative approaches does your production team take in using new tech or AR/VR experiences to create unique and memorable interactions with your audience or clients?
Video is at the heart of all VR and AR and we have found or created ways of embedding video in direct mail pieces, email campaigns, and social media posts. For a client trying to help the sales team get meetings with hard-to-reach senior management, we created a video card [V-card] with a specially-produced video message. For another client we created a calculator that their clients and prospects can use to compute hotel meeting bandwidth requirements.
How does the localization of content for different regions and cultural contexts factor into your media strategy, and what lessons can be learned from successful cross-cultural campaigns?
We have a research and planning group on staff to ensure we capture granular geographic, demographic and psychographic information because across all segments customization and personalization are key. B2B and B2C consumers are accustomed to personalized messaging and are quick to abandon anything that smacks of an impersonal generalized message. We do a lot of work with member organizations and non-profits, and when it comes to fundraising, or membership drives, the message has to be both localized and customized. The same is true for cultural segments. In our experience, “national” or “regional” messaging and media starts from the bottom up: market by market, not top down.