From the archives

I was looking at updating my portfolio site recently, and flipped through the archives. One of my favorites is one that's a few years old—a campaign for Intel, in conjunction with Dell. It consisted of an email, print ad, a set of banner ads and a landing page. The offer was a free backpack for the back-to-school season.

What's so great about this particular ad? It's simple. (I mean, the concept is simple, the design is simple, the copy is simple, the call-to-action is simple. Thus, the answer is simple, too.)

Three cheers for not over-thinking things.

A Life Musing

It's been a year since I last posted, and it had been quite some time since the previous post as well. Life tends to get busy, especially with a kid and all that other life stuff. It's like the children's book The Mitten. Your life gets full, and just when you think it can't get fuller,something else wedges its way in.

It is the thick of summer and the rain is dumping, I tell you, d-u-m-p-i-n-g. From my 20th story window I can see two cruise ships docked at Elliott Bay. I do wonder what all the out-of-towners think? "Oh, it rains in Seattle." Yes, it does, but not like this. I actually saw lightning on my drive this morning. I have not seen lightning in years. It's a special occasion. I'm actually happy about the rain! I love it, especially when it's a break from summer heat and sunshine.

If you're looking for a marketing musing, then I direct you to a local establishment, which was picked by AdWeek for the Ad of the Day - Museum of Glass.

Happy weekend!

Something I've been doing

So... I've been busy at work with a simultaneous product-launch-website-launch-corporate-rebrand-oh-yeah-and-let's-reorg-while-we're-at-it event. Hence radio silence for the past couple of months. Energy all focused on those things.

Within that, I did write a few case studies. Here's one.

The Genius of Boldness

The ad world is abuzz with the Wieden + Kennedy ad for Chrysler during last night's Super Bowl. I am struck by how bold a move that was.

A. Lot of time to fill. On the one hand, long form copy is easier to write than short form. You can take a little time to get to your point, and you can meander around any nuances you want to make. But that's completely different when it comes to television. I picture being the creative director whose lap receives this plum assignment. First thought: "HUGE opportunity. Hooray for me." Second thought: "Oh, fuck."
B. Not cheap. "Less than $9 million" for 2 full minutes. Which means more than $8 million. That's a lot of room to fail. Not to mention production costs.
C. The flip side of "lots of room to fail" of course is "lots of room to succeed." Which I suspect they have done.
D. "Imported from Detroit." Just brilliant.

Hats off!

Take a Breath… Heck, Take Seven and a Half

The life of a freelancer is like a teenager learning to drive: full throttle, screeching halt, full throttle, screeching halt… Ad infinitum. When it’s slow, you’re dying for some throttle, and when you’re at full throttle, of course you’d give anything for a break.

I’ve been pleasantly full throttle for two months now, which makes me very optimistic about the economy. But also is currently leaving me depleted. Which is why I had to remind myself to take a breath.





If you're like me when you’re swamped with new projects, it's very easy to procrastinate on that much-needed battery recharge. "Well, only another week and then this project will be done. I'll take a break then." But the day before you deliver the project, something new comes up, or there's a last-minute addition that means you have another week's worth of work. And no break. What to do?

Take a breath.

And I've learned that one breath is not enough. I can’t tell you the number of times when I've said, “I need to take a moment.” And I take exactly that: one moment. And then immediately get wrapped up around whatever was on my mind in the first place.

I utterly missed the point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas?

So take seven and a half of those giant gulps of air. Seven and a half is the designated number because it's not a neat, round 10 or five: you will get a little bit out of your head just by keeping track of the count. And keep doing it until your mind has wandered on to something delightfully meaningless and irrelevant to your immediate work. (If you are afraid you're going to forget something important, you should be keeping notes written down somewhere other than that tightly wound brain of yours).

Lastly, it never can hurt to ask for time. I got an email from a designer three days ago inviting me into a project she’s working on. "The copy's not right, and I’ve gone back and forth with the client several times. We could really use your help. He wants to launch on Friday." I emailed the client and said I couldn't get to it for a week, fully expecting he'd go find someone else. Instead, he said no problem.

And I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Tribe

Seth Godin, speaking at IAB Mixx, made some interesting comments about "cutting through the noise" to reach consumers.

Give up. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

It's hard to contradict the venerable Mr. Godin, and I'm not going to try. It's very interesting, though, to suggest that we've all been "branded to death." Going further, if consumers are going to choose a product not merely based on the message, but in order to belong to a tribe--how are they going to identify with that tribe? Social media? I'd like to think that the best product will win--at least the first consumers will be analytical about the product, before the followers come.

On a related-but-not note, I was speaking with a colleague who is 21 years old and was among the first Facebook users, and she was predicting the demise of Facebook: "I find I don't use it as much anymore. We're all getting too open. It's too much information."

If we don't have Facebook, how will we find our tribe? Fundamentally, the drive to belong is primal, and s/he who figures that out holds the key to the future, whether it's Facebook or something else.

Best B2B Voices: Part 3

A few days ago I mentioned I’d found 2 great B2B voices. Last week I talked about IBM (which still surprises me how well written their site is—though I should clarify that’s not because it’s sooo head-and-shoulders above the rest, but rather I still hold onto an apparently inaccurate IBM stereotype).

The other voice is TribalDDB.

In the agencies where I’ve worked (which is to say, not big ones), their agency website was always an afterthought since between billable hours and non-billable hours, billable is going to win every time. Apparently that’s not true for biggies. (Huh. Putting as much effort in your own site as you would a client’s. Smart. Maybe that’s why they got big.)

At any rate, what’s working in their voice? TribalDDB makes what they do sound exciting. They don’t overwhelm with too much information. And they speak in metaphor that distills the potentially dry service offering into something easily understood as beneficial. For example, describing SEO/SEM the headline is “Hey needle, time to burn the haystack.” SEO/SEM is spectacularly boring except to people who really understand its power. And guess what? That headline describes its power.

Why aren’t more B2B voices like that? Is the problem that TribalDDB doesn’t want to spend as much time getting to know it’s clients’ benefits the way it does its own? I sincerely doubt that. More likely clients won’t hand the reins over. They’re scared to be too different. And maybe it’s right to be afraid of being different. But standing out is also how you beat the competition.