One Idea to Stimulate the Maine Visual Media Economy

I finally did it. After more than 2 years as the Director of Marketing for Coast of Maine Organic Products, I was able to convince our founder, Carlos Quijano, to hire a professional videographer to shoot some training videos for our high end, organic soil line.

Carlos has done a brilliant job of marketing Coast of Maine products with beautiful images of our bags and wonderful relationships with the independent garden centers that carry our products.

I’ve spent the last 2 years shooting some amateur videos and streaming them from youtube with links through our website. My point with Carlos was that in today’s world we need to make our products come alive and use the videos to deepen our relationships with the independent garden centers that we work with.

In addition to marketing “Coast of Maine” I was also able to take a small step in helping to stimulate the local Maine Visual Media Economy. I hired Brett Plymale who was the videographer for the HGTV series, "People, Places & Plants" and director, editor, videographer and jack of all trades for “A Chemical Reaction”

Like everyone in the visual media business in Maine, Brett is working hard to create work and work with others to make a days pay. Thankfully, I was able to work with Brett so that he would have a couple of days pay.

So how can I help Brett get more work and continue my mission of making Maine a better place to work in the visual media industry? Simple. As the Marketing Director for Coast of Maine I have constant contact with thousands of garden centers and hundreds of companies throughout Maine and across the United States. I am constantly talking about visual media to them and now I have some simple, professional training videos that they will be watching and I’ll be encouraging them to contact Brett and other Maine visual media producers because I believe that Maine has the talent to compete with visual media producers across the country.

This also spurned an idea.

Many of Maine’s most successful companies hired visual media talent from outside of Maine. Why? Because, the visual media industry doesn’t do a good enough job of constantly marketing itself to the companies that could ultimately hire them.

I plan on doing everything in my power to change that. Here is a small but vital start:

The Hire Local Maine Visual Media Talent Facebook page. I have started to create the page and I invite all of you to participate. I created events from different organizations in Maine and please don’t hesitate to voice your positive ideas.

I will use the page to refer companies too, that are considering producing visual media.

With some input from other talented Maine visual media producers maybe we can all market each other to produced a few extra days of work and stimulate the visual media economy.