Dear Mr Hernandez
Thank you for your recent letter, which I received promptly by email soon after your new position was announced. In fact for some reason I got three copies, so I’m glad it wasn’t an actual letter, as that would have made me immediately suspicious as to the idea that you had a seat on the board of a paper mill.
However, I digress, but I felt it only respectful to respond to your taking the time to write to each Avid customer personally, with an early observation.
Whilst the content of the letter was well thought out and considered, forgive me of course it was, it had been past at least one copywriter, a PR professional and a lawyer, however what it did not seem to have passed the test on was cultural sensitivity.
I may be someone who runs my own business, an entrepreneur, but at heart I’m a liberal creative - an artist. We make up a large contingent of your customer base, yes we use technology, but as a means to an end and that is making beautiful things with our art.
Therefore, however well meaning and considered the contents of your letter may have been, you may as well have written to many of us in Martian - it would have made as much sense.
So may I respectfully suggest that you use some of your extensive experience from ‘complex vertical markets’ to reposition the communications of Avid, so they better reflect the language of people who add value to your brand and not just the people who try and make money from your brand. It’s as simple as using a mailing database that is sorted into groups, Mailchimp is very good and for the size of your database you could get it for a few hundred dollars a month. Mailchimp is easy to use and has lots of pictures of a funny monkey - but perhaps that kind of stuff only appeals to artists like me.
So observation number one, creative people are not stupid - but the majority of us are simply not interested in the language of the stock market, so please try and keep that kind of stuff to a minimum, it only reinforces the view of Avid being a corporate machine.
My letter is written with complete sincerity, this is not an early opportunity to try and knock you, in fact it’s complete the opposite, if you like you can call it my free PR advice. Some would suggest yesterday was ‘same sh*t different suit’ and simply nothing more than rearranging the chairs around the boardroom table. At Pro Tools Expert we’ve worked hard to gather a loyal community around Pro Tools and add a lot of value to your brand - so please prove the cynics wrong, be courageous, put your customers first and your shareholders will be rewarded later on down the road.
We look forward to talking to you about how Pro Tools users make the world a better place through their creativity - what we need from you is the best possible platform to do that AND at a fair price.
Which reminds me, Sean and his team (a great team, may I add) have worked miracles in the last few months and started to get Avid out of what have been a pretty bad set of PR disasters, one of which was the Pro Tools 10 pricing fiasco - please use all your powers to ensure all that their hard work is not derailed when pricing Pro Tools 11.
On behalf of our community our very best wishes - we look forward to a continuing meaningful dialogue with you.
Russ Hughes