On Digital Strategy, Powerpoint

I work at an agency that loves its "decks," which is a really dumb way of saying Power Point. I find deck writing very frustrating - mostly because the people you'll inevitably present the deck to have no desire to sit through 20 to 50 slides of what you're already telling them anyway.



Sure, strategy is really important, and I'm of the opinion you shouldn't even bother creating concept creative without it, but there is a point where you just need to tell a client what the hell you're going to do for them.

I learned this first hand during a recent presentation to a group of people that I would classify as "light-tech" clients. I believe you can classify people in the modern business environment into three tech categories:

*Non-Tech Adopters
*Telecom Adopters
*All Tech Adopters


I, unfortunately, was presenting a very long, strategically sound deck for an "all tech" audience that was very clearly a group of Telecom adopters. How do I know? They were all furiously typing away on their Blackberries, as I presented on some very cool Web 2.0 applications we planned to use to build their brand. Not to mention, when I asked how many of them knew what a "blog" was, only two of the 10 in the room raised their hand.

So, we ditched the deck after five slides and proceeded to wing it on the strategy. In the long run, it went very well. Maybe I need to ditch the deck more often.

On corporate transparancy

Recently, I've been reading about a lot of havoc and drama that has been created over a video that Draftfcb shared that eventually made its' way over to George Parker (love him or hate him, he's totally transparent and isn't afraid to share his opinion)over at AdScam.

It got me to thinking about an article I read a while back on how more corporations need to be more transparent. Bottom line, I believe corporations need to not only be transparent, but they need to be brutally honest. The audiences we're pushing this marketing and PR content to (it all comes back to content doesn't it? ) has a pretty good nose for bullshit.

So when I read the threads and responses from leadership weaving a web of lies and twisting the facts, it's more than a little troublesome. Being in the ad and marketing business, I understand the need to spin a message, but I also see that when someone already has the information, it only makes things infinitely worse when you get called out by your own employees for trying to cover it.

Maybe it's time for more companies to start being a bit more transparent.

Case in point for Draft... if they'd just leave this video issue alone, or take the lump from George's critique of it - the discomfort would eventually pass. Whether the blog was supposed to have the video or not, it was clearly a PR produced video intended for broad distribution eventually anyway. ... It's out there, some people aren't going to like it. Deal with it.

Who loves working on automotive accounts...

Things keep getting worse for the general and keep getting worse for the big D.

Scary time to work on an American automotive account.

On Broadcast Advertising

I won't pretend to be an expert in Broadcast Advertising. I've never worked with the medium, and to be honest, TV is really starting to bore me. Therefore, I don't get into commercials in the same way I used to get into them. But as someone who works primarily on automotive accounts, I do tend to pay some attention to the auto industry ads. I'm also a big, big fan of vintage auto ads, like this little gem below.



What I love about vintage ads is that they always seem to pack in music in a very fun way. I look at the commercials they're producing today and they just don't have the same kitsch value. Auto advertising is really an art, because it doesn't do anything anymore. If you look at the research that's out there, a lot of consumers don't even pay attention to broadcast car commercials anymore. What primarily influences their choices are Internet sites and word of mouth from friends. Sure styling plays into it, and there is a lot of weight based on name recognition etc. But to be perfectly honest, I'm VERY glad I don't have to market cars using broadcast.

Check out Jalopnik's votes for the Top 10 Best Car Commercials of the 1960s. They're great.

On Automotive Spy Photos

Recently, I had my year anniversary at Campbell-Ewald. And for the last year, the majority of my work has been on the Chevrolet account.

Now, many people either see the Chevy account as the kiss of death, or see it as the way to make your career. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. On the plus side you get to work on an automotive account, which for a car geek like me is absolute heaven. And, on the negative side, you get to work on an automotive account, which is stressful, difficult and puts you under constant scrutiny. I enjoy the stress of working on Chevy. I believe it forced me to be a decent marketer as fast as humanly possible. And it strengthened my journalistic, research and web skills ten fold.

I now scour RSS feeds more often than I did when I was an investigative reporter, and am constantly tapping industry sources for other info. I now go directly to the consumer to figure out my audience and think we're producing stronger stories and advertising as a result.

But what I haven't figured out yet is to cater to the spy crowd. How do I leverage the Jalopniks and the AutoBlogs of the world? I know I get excited about spy photos... how do I capture that sort of enthusiasm for Chevy vehicles. That would be the theoretical golden ticket.

The audience is a powerful one... and they can be harnessed, but the big question is, how do I get around the legal ramifications of showing pre-production vehicles masked off without upsetting the balance.

Some cool wallpaper

I don't often post about good design nearly enough anymore. However, today, I was cruising through Smashing Magazine and was taken by this post on using desktop images to serve up calendars. It got me to thinking about how some members of an advertising group are preparing to have people skin calendar software to portray their message. Wouldn't a desktop wallpaper be just as useful?



I tend to think if someone is interested enough in your calendar, and you want to use it on a desktop application, why wouldn't you just make it a wallpaper instead of something that needs to integrate with the software.

Thoughts?

On the new Modernista! site

A few days ago, someone referred me to the new Modernista! Web site. For those of you who aren't familiar, Modernista! is an agency with offices in Michigan and elsewhere. The new site is bold, very bold actually.

It totally embraces Web 2.0 by utilizing Wikipedia as the background. They've created layers to have their Wikipedia entry and all of the links to portfolio work go to other Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and YouTube. They've also embraced 2.0 link labeling and allowed for even their flaws to become a part of their site.

It's nice to see an agency putting their money where there mouth is.

On Sleep Deprivation and Marketing

I've said it many times before, and I'm saying it again. I'm exhausted. Sleep struggles seem to have decided to rear their ugly heads in my world again and to be honest, it's really messing me up. My wife to be (we're inside three months people, scary!) kept shouting at me last night for snoring. Every time I was just asleep, I apparently was snoring and kept her awake. I finally forced myself to be awake until she fell asleep, then couldn't get back to the state I had been in that caused my snoring in the first place. It wasn't a good situation.



I got up, played a little God of War and then began frantically wireframing a Web site for my friend Melanie. I've been designing something for her for a long time, but hadn't put any of the final touches on anything for a while now. I need to pass those initial plans along to her.

So all this lack of sleep has begged me to ask the question - Why can't I seem to want to use or purchase any sleep aids? Part of the problem, admittedly, is that I refuse to consult a physician on my little sleep problem. So, why then, am I hesitant to take over the counter solutions?

It got me to wondering how marketers could better position OTC sleep aids.

So, I started clicking, especially on LexisNexus (Thanks GR Press!) and found out that apparently, more Americans aren't actually insomniacs - marketers are just really great at their jobs.

The 60 percent increase in the use of sleeping pills between 2000 and 2005 is due to marketing rather than an increase in insomnia. This trend became particularly noticeable when a luminous green moth floated onto U.S. television screens in April 2005 and quickly became a well-known emblem of Lunesta, the prescription sleeping tablet.

For every 10 percent increase in advertising for a given type of medicine, prescription sales for the category rise 1 percent, according to a 2003 study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif. In 2002, every extra dollar drug companies spent on ads pushed up revenue by $4.20, the research found.

I just can't tie advertising/sales figures to OTC. I'm looking into it though. I know why I don't want prescription drugs - as it requires a trip to the doctor and I think the ads are BS. I just want to find some hard data for the OTC.

On Hulu

News Corp. and NBC Universal launched on Hulu today.

The goal of Hulu is to attract marketers by offering a richer experience than Google's answer to the online video craze (maybe you've heard of it?) YouTube.

Supposedly a lot of marketers are very interested in the program. Marketers already working with Hulu for beta testing -- which allowed users from media executives to journalists try out the site -- included Cisco Systems, Intel Corp., Unilever, General Motors, Nissan and Toyota.

It will be interesting to see how many other companies jump on the streaming media bandwagon. Limited commercial interruptions within streaming media can be quite obtrusive. Personally, I go online to avoid advertising. I go out of my way to block it (thanks AdBlock Plus!) and want my shows uninterrupted. That's why I was incredibly upset to hear that NBC and others were abandoning the iTunes route.

I'll blog a lot more on this topic as I surf Hulu and get my bearings. I can't believe I wasn't asked to be a beta tester!

On Street Art in Marketing

Thanks to a recent work meeting, I've had to pay a bit more attention to tattooing and street art.

So needless to say, I was thrilled when I came across this fantastic little feature on PingMag.

It's an interview with Excusado Printsystem, a Columbian art collective geared at making art inventions in Bogata. It got me thinking about the recent craze on using street art in advertising. Pepsi Co.'s recent launch of the Green Label Art, for its Mountain Dew drink.

What I love about that campaign is what you never see in the ads, the partnership with the artists. These artists, who might never reach the audience that Mountain Dew can provide are getting a chance to have their work seen (whether you think the artist is "selling out" or not is irrelevant to me - artists and designers have to eat too!).

There seems to be a resurgence in allowing outsiders to have a crack at logos, designs and campaigns, and I like the spirit behind it. But it needs to be done very, very carefully. There's a cred that goes with graffiti and tattooing. And if you're going to allow people who claim they're "artists" a shot at shaping your brand, you'd better be damn sure they're legit and they're not going to blow it.

Today's appreciators of "urban" and "street" (whatever you want to call it) culture have a finely tuned bull shit detector.

Mountain Dew has always been branded pretty well in my opinion. They latched onto the X-Games before the X-Games were cool and use their sponsorship bucks very well. Nice to see they worked with some legit artists here as well.

At any rate, check out all of the above. Any thoughts on use of "Street Art" in a campaign?

On staying relevant in a "Free" economy

This week's Advertising Age features an interesting interview with Chris Anderson, who is probably best known for his work with Wired, but is also known for his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

I was particularly drawn to some of Anderson's classifications of different kinds of free. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

When you think about it, there really are three kinds of free. There's the free we've known forever, which is the King Gillette razor-and-blade model, which is a form of cross-subsidy. A spin-off of that model is the media model, where the product is free because it's subsidized by the advertiser. That's called a three-party market -- the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer who gets everything for free.

The second kind of free is this weird kind of the free that's never existed before, simply because cost goes to nothing. Moore's Law said processing would get cheaper every year, but there are corollaries for bandwidth and storage. As the price gets closer and closer to zero, you can eventually just treat it as free.

Hotmail started with a tiny amount of storage for free and then you had to pay for the rest. By 2000 to 2002, you were getting more. Then Gmail said, "We're going to give away one gigabyte for free," and revolutionized the market. Yahoo said, "We'll give them infinite storage. We'll use that to reinforce people's connection with Yahoo and make the money somewhere else, maybe banner ads on Yahoo News, maybe just the information you get from people's user behavior that allows you to charge more for ads."

The third model of free is the gift economy. This is what used to be called freaky, Berkeley, hippy-commune stuff and now is the basis for Wikipedia, the blogosphere, Craigslist. There is a real economy out there that is motivated by nonmonentary consideration such as reputation, attention, expression -- all the social incentives that are turning out to be incredibly effective in getting people to do things for free. Before we didn't have a platform on which they could work.

Interestingly enough, Wired is also free to the first 10,000 on an e-mail list and is dedicated to how the future is "free" as well.

The Long Tail is something that's consistently brought up in presentations to our digital clients at work. One of our EVPs of Planning recently blogged about how he believes Barak Obama to be the first successful "Long Tail Candidate," by hitting on a massive niche area of campaign donors. This targeting has allowed Obama to continue to flourish while other candidates war chests have become a bit tapped out.

All interesting discussions really, and it presents a big challenge for marketers and traditional ad people alike. How can we really gain traction when more and more people want things for free? In my opinion, a lot of it comes back to content. People are willing to pay for something if they believe it to be a quality product. Just look at Radiohead and the success it had with allowing its fans to purchase "In Rainbows" digitally for any price they chose. It was an interesting exercise, and while it wasn't the first band to try it, Radiohead was by far the most successful.

Radiohead's success doesn't necessarily come from the fact they make good records (I believe a lot of their stuff between "OK Computer" and "In Rainbows" was absolute crap). The band is successful as well because they have people waiving their flag and attesting to their quality despite critical bashing from time to time.

I'll blog more on "The Long Tail" and freeconomy later. I'm just getting going on my initial research into this realm. What do you think of the Free Economy? I'm curious.

As a side note: thanks to all of you for the well wishes and great feedback on the redesign. You're great friends and colleagues.

xo - Eizans

Once upon a time...

On the iPod "The Storm" - The Doves

Once upon a time, there was a young man named Daniel. Daniel was a young, hopeful journalist with aspirations of one day reporting and editing for The New York Times. Daniel began his professional journalism career in Grand Rapids, MI. He wrote about lots of things, from murders, to fires to human-interest pieces. Daniel was happy in Grand Rapids. Not too long after he began his career, Daniel took a job in Monroe, MI at the Monroe Evening News.

He became a beat reporter, covering police, courts and fire. After two-years, Daniel became tired and slightly burned out.

The tired journalist then tried his hand in Detroit at Crain’s Detroit Business. It was here he grew into a programmer and code slinger, running the publication’s Web site.

Still, Daniel wondered when he would finally feel like his work would mean something to the world. He began looking outside the narrow world of newspapers and magazines.

In May of 2007, our young fulfillment seeker took a new position as a digital editor with Campbell-Ewald, the nation’s sixth largest advertising agency. Daniel believes this new opportunity will allow him more time to write, more time to be creative and hopefully help him find the fulfillment he has been yearning for.

This is Daniel’s story. This is Daniel’s newest beginning in a history of new beginnings.

On packaging.

On the iPod - "Summer Skin" - Death Cab For Cutie

It's snowing in the city. And as beautiful as I think a snow covered Detroit can be, I hate driving downtown in the stuff. The drive to work was particularly hectic today, and my only saving grace was some fun things to design at the office and some interesting posts on the news wires and on my favorite daily stops.

One of those stops led me to an interesting article on the often linked by yours truly PingMag.

The article covered packaging practices in Japan and other Asian countries. Anyone who knows me even reasonably well knows that I'm fascinated by Eastern art, philosophy, marketing and advertising practices and culture.

What I find most interesting about the marketing and advertising campaigns (and the design of packaging for that matter) in this region is the dedication to some wild color palettes. Asians seem to have affections for the brighter colors, are more accepting of cartoon mascots for everyday products and seem more adept at handling numerous stimuli attacking the rods and cones in the eyes.

I'm actually longing for a trip to Japan, if nothing else than to people watch. Sure, I'd love some real sushi, would jump at the chance to take in a Dharma talk at a real Zen temple and would be giddy at the different technology, but just taking it all in and immersing myself in a visual playground is very appealing.

I know a lot of this packaging would never make it stateside, but it's still fascinating, as someone who appreciates interesting design.

Holiday designs, reading

On the iPod: "Talk About The Passion" - R.E.M.

With the holidays upon us, we're seeing no shortage of the cookie cutter advertising, images and decorations. But believe you me, there is some interesting stuff out there if you take a little time to look for it. Over the last two years, I've taken a closer look at how holiday ads are designed - from the color schemes to the imagery used.

Editor&Publisher did a nice little piece on the Holiday advertising forecast, but I'd like to focus more on holiday print campaigns. AdCritic, has a host of interesting print campaigns (some holiday, some not) featured on their site at the moment.

A holiday design reading list

I've been doing quite a bit of holiday reading this year as well, here's two books I'd recommend in the design arena.

1. Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter & George Kalogerakis
Spy, The Funny Years
Miramax, 2006
Part nostalgia, part history lesson, all interesting, "Spy, The Funny Years," explores the famous New York magazine's history, culture and influence on a generation that grew up in the 1980s. Not only is it interesting, it's beautifully designed to boot.

2.Philip Hoare & Chris Heath, editors
Pet Shop Boys Catalogue
Thames & Hudson, 2006
Even if you aren't a fan of the Pet Shop Boys, there is a lot to take in here. It's visually stunning at 336 pages, filled with great photography, anecdotes and the musings of one of pop music's most influential songwriting duos. It would serve as a great coffee table book for any pop music fan this holiday season.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm really trying to be better. Really.