Get set to be liberated, creatively If you’re a creative pro, then our mention, in the headline, of a “seven-page PDF,” must make you cringe at some deep, subliminal level. A seven-page PDF? What? Are you crazy? Allow us to tell you a little story. You’ll like this one. Is it Escher, or is it advertising? We recently wrote a big case study for a client, and their gifted internal graphics team was laying it out. But there was a problem: There wasn’t enough copy for an eight-page piece. And so the designer left a big hole in it: “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE.” Before we turn to how we went about filling it, let’s back up here a tad. We’ve been tossing a lot of assumptions your way so far, and now we’d like to expose them:
(Following this so far? It’s not hard.)
You know this. You toil in it daily. A printed piece is four pages. Or eight pages. Or 12 pages. Or maybe 16, 24, or 32 pages. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. And it’s a rule that's inviolable. We’re not living in some Escher distorted-reality world. You can’t remove, or add, a side to a piece of paper. Crisis equals massive opportunity We confess that, when that designer tossed us the “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE” page, we knee-jerk reacted to fill it. A piece has to be eight pages, right? So we, and the client, worked hard to come up with new material to put there. But there was a problem. Try as we may, nothing worked. It all felt forced. It broke up the flow. It diluted the call-to-action or CTA. It took us a while to realize that we were victims of our own orthodoxy. And more importantly, a seismic global event had handed us the opportunity of a lifetime. We’re talking Covid-19, people. Everyone—especially the intended target audience of this piece—was working remotely from home. So why mail it? We didn’t have all those addresses. And so it logically follows...
And then, it’s not a big leap to:
Voilà. A seven-page PDF. It tells the story. It wastes no space. It got killer results. More boxes to think outside of You don’t need a pandemic to be creative. (Boy, is that a bizarre sentence!) But you get our point. We had a client that wanted to make a costly printed piece with easel-back wings, die-cut, on it. But we realized that most of the recipients... have kids. So why not make it into a “free” PDF, with cut-and-fold lines that would be fun to assemble, while building a bond between parent and child—and reinforcing our client’s branding the whole time? It’s that kind of thinking you need to embrace. By the way, our other client now does seven-page PDFs all the time. Along with five-pagers, three-pagers, you name it. Boy is it liberating! Everyone benefits except the printer and the post office. Have a creative challenge that requires outside-the-box thinking? Contact us today. We’d love to help.
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