Always Start with the Basics

This past week, I was in San Francisco at the largest conference in the world. Dreamforce had 170,000 registrants and the campus took up several downtown blocks. 

The scale of this week long event was difficult to take in. It was even difficult to choose from the 1,600 different sessions. 

I went there to learn about marketing automation. And the thing that I heard over and over again was "marketing automation isn't automatic." 

That sounded familiar to me. And it hit me that beginning motion designers often have a similar misconception about plugins, templates and scripts. I know I certainly did. 

There is great temptation to believe that all you need is that cool plugin to make your work great the same way we were tempted to believe that purchasing Salesforce and Pardot would make our marketing automatically work better. 

These kinds of tools really only work when you understand what's going on behind the scenes – when you really grasp the basics and the why. 

When you are first getting into anything new, you'll find greater success by investing the time to understand the basics, the history, and the tools. Only then can you start automating things.