Peter M Howard ::

On Being Marketed Down To

11May2006 [myth]

Went to a couple sessions of Adobe's Fully Loaded tour on Tuesday, the first on Video and the second on Web. Now I wasn't expecting too much - it was a free event and basically just a marketing thing, but I was surprised by how bad the marketing message was, and how badly targeted it was.

I expected the Video session to be a matter of Adobe saying: This is why you should use our tools, to assist you to do what you want to do. Instead, the message was: Look at all the things our tools can do. Old school one-way marketing at its worst. And because it was simply a matter of showing off their tools, the session was run by a guy with only a basic knowledge of the programs and very little knowledge of video production. Making things stranger, they were showing off Pro features -- the bundle in question costs a few thousand dollars. Then the language he was using was all about "clients", seemingly targeted at people who simply wanted to get the job done (ie, rather than at creatives, first surprise). And then the actual content was targeted at the lowest common denominator: to home users and hobbyists who, one would think, would be in the market for Premiere Elements and similar home-editing systems costing only a few hundred dollars. So a little confusing.

What doesn't make sense is that, even though many of the people in the room were just home users, the fact that they were there means they are interested in serious products. So why wasn't the message at least targeted at people with artistic aspirations.

In any case, I've been put off Premiere with the discovery that it doesn't run on Mac, and as I'm still leaving my options open I certainly don't want to lock in to Windows. Annoying though, because it integrates so well with After Effects, which is a de facto standard (and does run on Mac)

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