CD & DVD
I’m writing a blog entry about this for a reason. Having worked in the industry for a while, and hopefully our website reflects this, I think there a lot of misconceptions about what CD & DVD Production Services are, especially in the National Capital Region that is Ottawa. Every communications company or media broker seems to be offering this service to clients, and if you type CD & DVD into Google, you’ll come across a bevy of companies who do CD & DVD like it’s selling oranges. It seems like optical media services are everywhere.
What is the state of CD & DVD? You talk to some people, and they say that the CD-ROM or CD-R medium is fast losing it’s appeal as everything is migrating to the web. That’s such an easy answer. Well, they said the same thing about print 5 years ago. Those little round discs remain in hot demand for a variety of reasons. They sit somewhere between a printed brochure and a driver that you download off of a website. It’s a medium for the delivery of content. Various kinds of content. Applied content, entertainment content, professional content. Every notebook and personal computer has an optical media drive. The little round disc still demands a great degree of attention when it’s received by an end user, and you can’t ignore the facts when it comes to the entertainment industry…DVD is not only the most successful and popular consumer good ever, but it’s also one of the fastest evolving. You might be halfway into this post going…well of course he’s saying all of this. He sells discs. Yes I do! That’s why one of the things that I regularly consult with clients on is whether they’re aware of all of the possibilities with using the modern CD or DVD. I’m finding that people have come to discount the disc inaccurately. It’s still the most widely used medium for communications! Yeah…iTunes might have hit the Audio CD market hard…and disc sales are down in the music industry…but with the introduction of high definition video, there’s been a bit of a balancing out. The dust has just settled between HD DVD and Blu Ray. Video game titles, like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Halo are still delivered via the console on a disc. The market changes…as is normal in modern industry these days…the pace is faster…but make no mistake. CDs and DVDs are still in constant use to deliver all sorts of information to the user. The only thing is…the service providers are treating it increasingly like a dying commodity.
Well. We’re not doing that. We’ve made it our personal mission to ask questions to our clients about their consideration or lack thereof in using the CD or DVD medium. It’s also our personal mission to educate and make people aware that you don’t have to do 1000 CD-Roms anymore to get a per unit break on a run of discs when you only need 200. It’s not for everyone. I’ll be the first to suggest a web based access to content if it makes more sense when consulting with our customers, but the truth is that the applications for the modern CD or DVD are still awesome, and although not as fancy as something like a USB flash drive…which is something we also provide to our clients….it’s still a cost effective solution. We do auto-run driven splash pages and homepage links on CDs and DVDs. We do custom applications that allow the client to track the hit rate with a direct mail campaign using an optical media piece. We can create databases that are pinged when a user accesses the disc, collects voluntary information if the user wants to provide it, and does it in a dynamic and media driven way. Check out our media portfolio.
Is this a sales pitch? Well yes and no. What it really is is a call to all communications professionals to not discount the modern optical media piece. It’s also a call to all clients, both current and future to not discount it either. Content delivery has spanned and there’s a whole lot of ways to do it now, but the sign of an effective communications and marketing consultant is one that embraces all of them, and asks questions about what you’re hoping to achieve.