Marketing!
Jun. 23rd, 2006 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
murakoziY'know, one of the fun, or at least amusing, aspects of the industry for which I work is also the most frustrating: selling ideas/products/the company to various parts of the military or gov.
Nowadays, any presentation pretty much involves PowerPoint and a lot of handouts and such. The real big players such as Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, etc. have the money to go much further and produce little movie presentations. No matter what kind of presentation it is, though, there are certain themes that are guaranteed to be present. Doesn't matter if a company trying to get a contract to make death rays or just better socks; if it's being presented to gov or mil, it's gonna have certain things in it. First off, it's gotta have American flags and plenty of 'em. Toss 'em in the background, or waving over some military guys, or just a big old closup of one with Super Defense Socks! above it. Another thing that's virtually a requirement is 'loved ones.' Just think how the new Mark 29x cuticle scissors will help keep all those families and children (who like to stand in front of American flags!) safer from evil terrorist threats! Lately, campaigns have to have North Korea in them too. You'll see it pop up in maps in the background, or simulations and such. Now you don't actually name the country, but you do include it, often surrounded by ships or tanks or orbital death ray satellites.
As I said, if you're a really big company, you make a video presentation. When doing this, you have to include lots of animations that look like they're from an early/mid 90's video game. Throw in some music and you show the potential customer something like this one pitching the DDG1000 for which a contract was awarded last year:
http://www.defensetech.org/images/ddx_promo.avi
Yeah, it looks like something Paul Verhoven would put into one of his movies, but that's exactly the sort of thing government and military types eat right up. They love that kind of stuff.
The reason I started rambling about this (aside from a serious lack of sleep lately) is that the latest thing they want to try to put on that ship is a battery of railguns. Someone read a bit of scifi somewhere and decided that putting railguns on a ship and raining down eleventy billion tons of random garbage per second would be really cool. Naturally, the materials produced to try to get funding going for that includes images of a DDG1000 parked off the coast of North Korea showing how the range of such a battery would let one ship rain refrigerators and old car parts down on the entire country from one spot.
There's no real point to this post. I'm just tired, rambling, and tossing in some insight into the industry I'm in.
Nowadays, any presentation pretty much involves PowerPoint and a lot of handouts and such. The real big players such as Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, etc. have the money to go much further and produce little movie presentations. No matter what kind of presentation it is, though, there are certain themes that are guaranteed to be present. Doesn't matter if a company trying to get a contract to make death rays or just better socks; if it's being presented to gov or mil, it's gonna have certain things in it. First off, it's gotta have American flags and plenty of 'em. Toss 'em in the background, or waving over some military guys, or just a big old closup of one with Super Defense Socks! above it. Another thing that's virtually a requirement is 'loved ones.' Just think how the new Mark 29x cuticle scissors will help keep all those families and children (who like to stand in front of American flags!) safer from evil terrorist threats! Lately, campaigns have to have North Korea in them too. You'll see it pop up in maps in the background, or simulations and such. Now you don't actually name the country, but you do include it, often surrounded by ships or tanks or orbital death ray satellites.
As I said, if you're a really big company, you make a video presentation. When doing this, you have to include lots of animations that look like they're from an early/mid 90's video game. Throw in some music and you show the potential customer something like this one pitching the DDG1000 for which a contract was awarded last year:
http://www.defensetech.org/images/ddx_promo.avi
Yeah, it looks like something Paul Verhoven would put into one of his movies, but that's exactly the sort of thing government and military types eat right up. They love that kind of stuff.
The reason I started rambling about this (aside from a serious lack of sleep lately) is that the latest thing they want to try to put on that ship is a battery of railguns. Someone read a bit of scifi somewhere and decided that putting railguns on a ship and raining down eleventy billion tons of random garbage per second would be really cool. Naturally, the materials produced to try to get funding going for that includes images of a DDG1000 parked off the coast of North Korea showing how the range of such a battery would let one ship rain refrigerators and old car parts down on the entire country from one spot.
There's no real point to this post. I'm just tired, rambling, and tossing in some insight into the industry I'm in.