Seems like there's a whole class of agencies that works only for political campaigns. By and large, their work is subpar--way below the national standard for branding, design, and all-around understanding of the current marketplace. Obama's campaign is a notable exception; these guys and gals were the first ones in recent memory to get it right (vs. the old-school folks on McCain's campaign who understand little about how the grassroots operates these days, or current graphic design standards). Whether this translates into success or not remains to be seen; I just find it interesting that for all the money spent on this stuff, the end-product comes out looking like--well, crap.

Obama's campaign looked NICE. His logo is nice. His design standards are good. Perhaps this is a targeting issue--after all, Wal-mart looks horrible, but that's part of its appeal. Maybe I just don't understand The Target Audience.

Still, a few things puzzle me about the political marketing vs. the advertising campaigns I've lived with and worked on for my entire adult life:

1) Why no print ads? Are they being smart or stupid with this? You rarely see a concerted print campaign (and I'm not talking direct mail) from the politicos. Why? Have they tapped into some secret governmental knowledge base that tells them print doesn't work? Are the rest of us wasting our money? I really want to know. It wouldn't suprise me if they had some data to back up their decisions on this; it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't.

2) Outdoor: Why is all the outdoor hogged with local campaigns and not national? Or is it because I'm not in a swing state so I don't see the outdoor? They seem, in other words, to concentrate everything onto TV, which seems expensive, blunt, and stupid (I guess not unlike government itself).

3) Why has it taken so long to embrace online, and why has Obama been the only one to pull it off? You hear these pundits on the radio and TV and they're like, "WOW! Obama is going to TXT people! Amazing!" I mean, is it because these consultants and pundits are so behind the times that they really think this is breakthrough marketing? I have no other explanation for this, actually.

4) PR: How can their PR be so bad? I mean, I get it, it's hard to run a high-profile campaign with a lot at stake and still expect to control your media image, but come on. This Sarah Palin thing, they couldn't have handled that a little better? Who WAS the PR firm that advised them on that anyway? Most agencies would be fired for that kind of mishandling. Or is it that the campaign itself does their own PR and advertising? Because if so, perhaps my old rule still holds: "Don't take it in-house." The worst thing a client can do is take it in-house. There's no perspective, there's no education in the latest greatest research--it's just a bad idea. Maybe that's the problem.

It's my personal belief that in the case of the political campaigns, more than half their media budget is wasted, and they know exactly which half it is. They just can't bring themselves to do things the way that corporations--with corporate accountability and P/L responsibility--have established as their best practices. Even corporations get it wrong a lot, but nowhere near the level that campaigns do. It's disheartening. I picture a whole bunch of hoary, provincial Beltway types running lush, ineffective agencies, with budgets soaring to the moon, and yet they're unable to control the brand well. I'm sure they'd argue this point assiduously, but the bottom line is that the old ways of doing things are not the same way to do things now. And the way they used to do things wasn't that great anyway. You know Zogby polls no one--NO ONE--on cell phones? Amazing.

Labels: mccain, Obama, Old Media Deathwatch, politics

This week's story in the Baltimore City Paper does a great job of detailing the demise of a once-venerable local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, but it doesn't have the depth or the space to go into why daily newspapers are in such trouble. While locally, Sun employees blame management (old management, new management), it seems clear to those of us on the Old Media Deathwatch that the problems are far deeper and more complex than just news cannibalization, The Interwebs, and poor decisions at the top. The fundamental problem, it seems to us, is one of complete and fundamental misunderstanding.

This is a misunderstanding not of business, or of reporting and journalism, or of formats and delivery, but a misunderstanding, at base, of why people read newspapers (or anything else) in the first place. For a media that depends on advertising, it seems newspapers have engaged in very little research about what people actually want; instead, they go off on their own tangents (like the Sun's pathetic attempt to reach "the kids" with the horrifying "b" free daily).

This article does the best job I've seen so far of outlining Old Media's inability to grasp the realities of a world in which the old adage "information wants to be free" has actually come to pass. Like record execs, who believe they're actually selling shiny disks in plastic boxes, the newspapers have long believed they're selling papers, magazines, web sites, or--to be charitable--"reportage". But since the dawn of the paper, what people read for is information--sure, it's better when it's well-researched and written, but essentially people just want to know what the heck is going on in the world around them, regardless of how it's packaged.

There is content; there are consumers of content; and there are advertisers who want to reach the consumers of content. It is that simple, and all the bells and whistles matter very little. The newspapers could have survived this by merging their old and new media empires, making no distinction between "web content" and "paper content", and focusing more and more on local news--leaving the AP to worry about the big stuff (which is essentially what's happened anyway, except that now local news is dead too, except for the TV stations, blogs, and community networks on the Web). The problem is, they never figured this out because they never asked. For all the paradigm-shifting rhetoric they spewed over the years, they couldn't see the forest for the trees, and their tragic death (and the news hole it leaves behind in a town like Baltimore) are the tragic result.

Labels: Baltimore, Old Media Deathwatch

I came across this study while doing some research for a branding project that we're working on and I haven't been able to stop laughing since! It turns out that the intrepid researchers in Ohio State's Department of Optometry have just discovered scientific proof that people who wear glasses are seen as smarter by people who don't wear glasses. Wow! Amazing! Who wouldda' thunk? Just consider this:

On average, two thirds of the participating children said they thought that kids wearing glasses looked smarter than kids not wearing glasses. And 57 percent of the participants said they thought kids with glasses appeared to be more honest. Both kids with and without glasses thought other kids wearing glasses looked smarter.

Good news for we four-eyed nerds, I guess! Unfortunately the study did not report results about how likely kids with glasses were to be beaten up by bullies or targeted for wedgies. Hopefully there will be a follow-up study in the future.

As promised, here are the 10 tips that we hope will help anyone looking for a new job not to look like a moron:

1. Read the job posting. Read it again. This isn't that hard. Just read the damn job posting and follow the requests you read there. Cover letter? Resume? Portfolio? If it says that you need those you do. No excuses. Showing that you at least read the job posting shows that you're minimally interested in the job.
2. Know where you're applying. This is another easy one. Find out about the company you're applying to. Are they primarily interested in CPG (consumer packaged goods) advertising? Do they work with non-profits? Do they believe that running around naked while juggling live chickens makes them more creative? Chances are if you spend more than 5 minutes with their web site, you'll find out. Make sure that your contact and your coverletter with them show that you know what you're getting into.
3. Acknowledge the contact person listed in the ad. Putting "Dear ," in your cover letter is a one-way ticket to the trashcan. I know it doesn't seem like much but acknowledging the person who actually posted the ad shows that 1) you care about what you're applying for; 2) you know how to show a modicum of respect; and 3) you aren't just sending out form letters to every job posing you see. It might just be another listing to you but to us it matters a lot AND we have to spend the time looking at what you send. If you don't care about us, why should we care about you?
4. Spellcheck! Come on...how hard is it to pay attention to the dotted red lines under the words that you wrote? In this day and age there's really no excuse for misspelled words. Allowing spelling typos to come through in your resume or cover letter shows that you really just don't give a poo (and that you can't handle the bare essentials of technology). Come on. Just use spellcheck. It ain't that hard.
5. Don't use MS Word "resume" templates. We know what they look like. You're not being "creative" by using the pre-designed templates that come with Word. You're being a sheep and we don't want sheep. If you don't have the design chops to put a little bit of your skill behind the most important document you're sending us, why should we believe that you'd do any different for clients?
6. Write a cover letter that shows that you know the bare facts about the job and the company where you're applying. First of all, "form" cover letters look like form cover letters. We know that you're just filling in the blanks. Give us a little credit, huh? And if you decide to write a custom cover letter, at least mention that you've seen our work or know what we do. You could be the greatest designer or IA in the world, but if you don't show that you can learn the bare essentials about us, you suck. Period.
7. If you're sending an email, use a subject line that makes sense. We've gotten cover letters/resumes from people who used "potato" as their subject line. Huh? What tha...? We get a lot of email. If you use a stupid subject line because you think you'll get noticed, we'll probably think it’s spam. It doesn't make you look creative. It makes you look like a dork.
8. Don't have a stupid free email account screen name. This is a biggie. While it might be cool as an undergrad, having an email address like hottiemcsnottie324@gmail.com isn't exactly going to make us think that you're someone who'd be mature enough to handle the work we're going to give you. Grow up. Use your name (or something close to it). Cute only goes so far. And it ends with when you try to get a job.
9. Don't beg, wheedle, or stalk people. Please. We don't want to be your Facebook friend (unless we hire you). We don't like pleading phone calls. We don't want emails that beg us for an interview. If you've been told "no thank you" then accept it and move on. Anything else smacks of desperation and if you're desperate we have to wonder why. It probably ain't good.
10. Don't lie. We'll find you out. Do you think we don't call references? Do you think we don't check out your URLs? Do you think that we're not going to try to get to the bottom of your statement that you "lead the team that redesigned Amazon.com?" One way or another the truth will out. If you lie in your cover letter or resume, we will discover the truth at some point. And then where will you be? Besides, either you've done the work or you haven't. If you haven't then you're probably not qualified. We'll know.

Bonus tip: If you're a freelancer or small businessperson who sees a job posting and thinks to themselves "Huh! They could probably use what I do! I'll send them some information about my company" don't.

One of the most important lessons about business I ever learned happened one morning in my friend Dan's kitchen when I was 17. We were hanging around on a Saturday morning, doing what high school kids do, when his dad came in and plunked down a pile of about 40 envelopes on the kitchen island.

"Want to help me hire my new secretary?" he asked with a wry grin.

Dan's dad was a very successful business consultant who had applied his degree in counseling with his MBA to carve out a niche consulting with family businesses. It was a brilliant idea because he could tackle both the family dynamics part of the problem and the business issues the family was facing. He had written a book about his work and because he was the only published author I knew at the time, I thought he was a really cool guy.

"Sure!" I said, feeling proud to be asked to help in this important task.

"OK! Here's what you do:"

"If the envelope has a hand-written address, throw it out."
"If the envelope has any errors on it, throw it out."
"If the envelope's OK, open it up. If there's no cover letter, throw it out."
"Next, check the resume. If there are any typos or it's sloppy, throw it out."

Sounded easy enough. Soon I had reduced the pile of envelopes from a hefty forty to a more manageable pile of about four neatly-printed cover letter/resume combos. I handed them over to my friend's dad.

"Thanks!" he said, "I'll take it from here."

I remember just sitting there and chuckling to myself in disbelief. I'd reduced the applicant pool down to the top 10 percent without even having looked at a single piece of job experience or checked a single qualification! Me, a 17 year-old high school student! I was blown away and I never forgot the lesson.

Look: if you're applying for a job you'd better have an understanding of what that job's about and how you're going to demonstrate from the very first contact how you're qualified for that job. My friend's dad was hiring a secretary and basic secretarial skills such as neatness, good spelling, and knowing proper form were the absolute basic requirements of the job. Those qualities were supposed to be a given. All the other stuff -- job qualifications, prior experience, computer experience, education -- mattered only after the applicants showed they could do the basics of the job by appropriately creating and packaging their resumes.

I never forgot this, but it seems to me that based on the "applications" I've seen recently while we've been trying to hire for two senior positions, it's a lesson that a lot of other people never learned.

It's not really all the important what the positions are (let's just say they're both creative management jobs that pay very well) , but both of them had a few simple stipulations:

1. Include a portfolio;
2. Include a cover letter that demonstrates you understand our company;
3. Pay some modicum of attention to the prerequisites for the job;
4. Being detail oriented is a must.

That's it. The basics. You'd think it'd be easy.

You'd be wrong.

We got resumes without portfolios. We got resumes without cover letters. We got resumes from people who obviously didn't have the slightest idea what we did. We got resumes from people who lacked the basic experience we were looking for. We got emails with psychedelically-creative (and incomprehensible). We got resumes rife with typos and cover letters that were basically form letters. We even got one angry email from a guy who swore that he'd spoken to "Janet" and "Janet" had assured him that he met the criteria. We don't employ anyone named Janet.

On one hand it made it easy to quickly cull out the bad applicants. On the other hand it made me sad. Why? Because some of the ones that made it into the trash can may have actually been nice people. They may have actually had incredible portfolios. But we'll never know because they blew it by not being able to do a few simple things.

I'd hate for this to happen to anyone else. The frustrating thing is that the basic stuff anyone needs to do to at least get considered for a job aren't all that hard. Heck, the things that'll get you in the door are easy enough that even a retarded monkey could handle them. We ain't talkin' brain surgery here. All we're talking about is demonstrating that you can handle the basics of any job in business and that you've shown your potential employer a little respect by understanding what they're looking for and not wasting their time. Simple stuff, but stuff that so many people seem to be incapable of handling.

That's the lesson I've learned. Tomorrow I'll share my Top 15 Tips To Getting A Creative Job That Even A Cognitively Challenged Monkey Could Follow.

I have noticed lately that Captchas, those ubiquitous letter-images designed to fool computers (but supposedly readable by humans) have been getting absolutely incomprehensible. Take this one from Google. It took me a full five minutes to make sure I got the letters correctly; and this one isn't the worst I've seen lately. Yahoo! delivered a captcha to me that I couldn't get after 3 tries. I realize it's possible I'm just going blind (and yeah, yeah, I should be wearing my glasses, Sean) but the captchas these days do seem to be longer, more compressed, and way harder to read. Am I the only one who's noticed?

Please feel free to mock me, if it really is just me. I can take it.

Amazon is slowly but surely taking over my life. If you look at the pie chart on my online banking, you'll see that the percentage of my income going to Amazon has increased exponentially. What they're doing--with Kindle, MP3 downloads, and TiVo, is absolutely brilliant.

1) My husband bought me a Kindle for my birthday. If you're a reader, particularly a multiple-books-at-one-time reader, particularly the kind of reader who has run out of shelf space, this gadget is for you. You really have to see it to understand why--interact with the super-cool screen and buttons and read on it--and see how badass the Whispernet download system is. (You can get a book anywhere, anytime you have a cellphone signal). So now I download books constantly--no waiting!--and though they're cheaper than the paper versions, they still cost a few bucks. Basically, I have no need to go to Barnes and Noble or Ukazoo anymore--none. Amazon owns this part of my life. (One caveat: the kindle list of books is not extensive, so until they get more content, I probably will still, occaisionally, find myself at the bookstore. But authors, agents and publishers ignore this platform at their peril.)

2) Tivo now offers Amazon Unbox--the ability to download, for a couple of dollars, all the shows you didn't or couldn't record. A full season of MadMen, say, or every episode of the Office I'd never seen. My email box is now full of Amazon confirms from these tiny purchases, including...

3) Portable MP3 downloads. ITunes needs to watch out on this one. I can play my Amazon MP3s ANYWHERE. Anytime. It makes them much, much more appealing than the ITunes store.

There hasn't been a lot of marketing around any of this--I guess amazon is relying on word-of-mouth (and here I am, playing into their strategy). But I suspect that once these three items catch on, Amazon's profits are going to go way, way up. After all, $5 here, $2 there, and 99 cents over here just doesn't seem like too much to spend... until you see that roughly 1/8 of your income is going into Jeff Bezos's pocket.

Even if you are on the far end of regularity when it comes to reading news on the internet, you probably end up visiting the sites of the large news corporations every so often. Recently, the design of the BBC homepage (Link to BBC.co.uk) has been revamped. With this fresh and flauntingly 'web 2.0' update BBC also chose to increase the overall width of their entire site to utilize the current web standards for user resolution.

Their previous site was merely 770 pixels wide, which designers, developers, and probably most people involved in the web in some way or another would agree sounds dated. It's the typewriter of website widths, and crouched in left corner of browser window, anyone without a laptop (and an old one, at that) viewing the old BBC site would see a huge, empty and most importantly, unused space.

What impressed me most about this size increase and it's implementation is the execution of all the pages in their News section. Although the design and layout of the content is almost exactly the same, it has been molded to fit their new grid, sandwiched between their updated header/footer. A seamless update without a full out redesign. (So seamless, actually, that it took months for a homepage-skipper such as myself to notice.)

To drive home the thought and process behind their changes and implementation of this update, there is an available PDF outlining their decisions (Link to Visual Language 1.0 [PDF]). Top-to-bottom it's well written and thorough with a lot of great images showcasing the new grid and it's implementation. I'm impressed with how well the previous content was accounted for, both in planning and execution.

The legnth of the document, the language, the examples, and the justifications for decision are all spot on and clear. It's hard to not blindly trust everything in the document, and even be enticed to skim it rather than dig in and inspect it just out of faith. Anyone involved in our industry should certainly be taking notes.

As the amount of information continues to grow on the internet, it is becoming harder and harder to find stuff.

As you know, necessity is the mother of all innovation. I recently ran into searchme.com (thanks to Kim F. for the heads-up). Basically, searchme.com is a visual search engine. That’s right, a visual search engine.

This is how it works: you type in your search phrase and press enter. What happens next is a hybrid between the iTunes music slider and ask.com’s website preview option. And then some. Here are some of the neat features that I noticed right away:

• No pagination – search results are loaded right on the page using AJAX, and they keep loading as you keep scrolling
• Highlight keywords – each search result image highlights the keywords matching your search criteria
• Traditional results – this tool also allows you to toggle between full screen visual search results and traditional text-based search results

You have to play with it to really understand how it works. I highly encourage you to test it out and think about how web design can change if this catches on… how can this change search engine optimization?

Remeber, the eye and the mind can process images a lot faster than it can process text. People also gravitate towards “credible” websites. Credibility is instantaneously established when a user looks at the page’s design. All these factors stack on the side of searchme.com. Let’s keep an eye on these guys and see where this goes.

Labels: Design, search engine optimization, search engines, usability

Just when you thought the whole “open a storefront in Second Life!” B.S. might have cured us of our overestimation of Dumb Internet Marketing Trends, along comes Marketing Using Twitter.

That’s right… your friends at the BBJ have spotted the hottest new trend in PR: Twittering to, for, and about your clients. Now, never having been a client myself, I can’t say this for sure, but I hope that I would not be reading my PR firm’s Twitter feed in my spare time. Call me a curmudgeon, but reading about how some flack is going to be painting her bathroom ceiling this weekend is just not all that interesting to me.

Says one, “[d]elving into the personal gives clients a little bit more into Kel as a human being as opposed to Kel just the CEO of a marketing and communications agency." I dunno, if I were his client, I might think Kel should spend a little more time coming up with strategic insights for his clients and a little less time letting us get to know him.

Maybe that’s really what bugs about Twitter in general: it’s so aggressively one-way and navel-gazing. It’s like, “Look at me! I am so interesting! I don’t want to hear about your day, read about mine! In minute, excruciating detail!” It makes personal blogging look positively epic in scope. Social networking is precisely that: networking, a dialogue. But Twitter’s just a content-free stream of consciousness from people who just aren’t that interesting to begin with. Why should we care?

Luckily for all of us in the business, clients are not yet asking about this—and probably never will, since AdAge called it one of the most “asinine” trends of all time. Too bad the BizJournals didn’t get the memo.*

*I have nothing against the BizJournals folks and in fact, in the spirit of full disclosure, must say that I have written for them in the past. I suspect they may have had a news hole, because this article in the BBJ was actually a rehash of one done in the Boston Business Journal about a month ago.