Michael and Mike McCool
by Maggie Wolff Peterson
Some of the most advanced multimedia production in the region can be found in possibly the most unprepossessing location imaginable.
It’s in Front Royal, in a low brick building on the downtown bypass. A warren of rooms, the business was founded as National Cassette Services. Today, it’s known as National Media Services.
Up front, graphic designers conceptualize; upstairs, sonic designers lay down tracks. A single machine worth a half-million dollars is installed in the back, to convert computerized data into individualized marketing tools. Midway between, high shelves contain master tapes of work that proprietor Mike McCool completed decades ago.
These days, he’s going through those shelves, getting rid of obsolete stuff to make room for what’s new. The facility is undergoing a thorough facelift.
“There’s no free space,” McCool said.
McCool remains excited about the business he founded in 1979, after an Air Force career taught him the basics of broadcast engineering. “We created radio and TV commercials and all sorts of special productions for the Air Force,” he said.
In those days, the medium relied on magnetic tape, recorded reel-to-reel and dubbed onto cartridges. McCool bought used half-inch tape from the government and sliced it in half to size it for cassette use, and traveled between Pennsylvania and North Carolina, repairing audio equipment.
Eventually, he decided to stop. Having a leisure home in Front Royal made the town a logical place to settle. He brought a handful of clients with him. “My customers gave me their equipment and said they were tired of maintaining it,” McCool said.
At first, McCool worked from home. He began at his current location in 1982. “It was one-third the size it is now,” he said. “We kept adding on.”
Accretion has made the business diverse. From printed paper products to audio MP3 files online, National Media Services has a way to produce and reproduce items in as many or as few as a client needs.
In fact, short runs have become a niche market for the company. Unlike monster facilities that produce items in thousand-run minimums, National Media Services will make things on demand, a handful at a time. They’ll even make just one.
When the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation was devising “Quadricentennial Minutes” to pitch television broadcasters on the upcoming 400th anniversary of the historic Virginia settlement, National Media Services designed the package that contained the CD. “We made just one, and sent it to them to preview,” McCool said.
The company won the contract.
National Media Services has done short-run CDs for rock bands and spiritual groups, for motivational speakers and educational firms. One band wanted its CDs to look like old 45 RPM records, with a centered “label” and actual grooves. Michael McCool, Mike McCool’s son and the next generation in the business, figured out how to do it.
“No one could do that, and do just 100, but us,” he said.
The company uses a specialized printer to apply images to heat-sensitive film that is then affixed to blank CDs. The resulting discs are individualized with art, photos or text in full color. Another machine prints nothing but the slender, sticky labels that secure the top edges of CD jewelboxes. Other machines score and slice paper for CD covers. The company is experimenting with heat-transfer equipment to extend marketing ideas onto tee shirts.
The first question McCool asks is what a client intends to accomplish with his marketing piece. From that come the ideas that become actual products. “Sometimes we talk people out of projects,” he said.
When Precision Tune, the national automotive chain, contacted National Media Services to bid on part of a multi-faceted media kit for its 300 franchisees, McCool asked enough questions to convince the corporation that his little company could do everything necessary. “They were using nine vendors to put the project together,” he said.
The company has also ventured into cyberspace. Through proprietary Web sites, the company markets access to recorded information, the same way it markets CDs. A client, such as a motivational speaker, will hire the company to record seminars and transfer the information to a Web address.
At one time, McCool dispatched 55 employees in five crews nationwide to produce CDs onsite for clients. “We traveled at least 20 days a month,” he said.
The National Media Services team would set up at the back of a seminar room, record lectures and produce recordings for attendees to buy. Internet access changed all that.
And after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, everyone is working leaner. Less luggage means getting through airports quicker. You “can’t schlep equipment all around,” McCool said.
For a group of lawyers, the company put 15 years’ worth of instructional material on one of its 20 Web sites. “That will end up being better than when we used to do cassettes,” McCool said.
Still, there is a market for hard copies. So, in addition to web audio, the company produces discs. “Not everybody downloads,” McCool said. “You hear a lot about downloads. But it’s still a small, small percentage.”
Not all production involves travel. Two production studios allow the company to record professionally. Studio techniques enlarged the sound when a 13-person choir from Christendom College in Front Royal made a CD of spiritual music at National Media Services. “It sounded like a cathedral,” McCool said.
These days, National Media Services employs 20 people full time. McCool makes sure every employee has health insurance, enforces a no-smoking policy and at one time, created a nursery on site for employees with small children. Flextime allows workers to come in when it suits them best.
McCool said his greatest challenge is local. It’s hard to get people to believe “something good comes out of Front Royal,” McCool said.
“We’ve always had to do something different to survive,” he said. “The market around here isn’t big enough to do just one thing. We’ve had to make it, go get it, drag it back to Front Royal and do it.”
