​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: 

• We live in a 3-D world. 

 

• Printed pieces are 3-D. 

 

• Paper has two sides. 

 
(Following this so far? It’s not hard.) 

• If you fold a piece of paper in two, it effectively has four sides. Four pages. 

 

• This is the basis for the carved-in-stone rule, since the days of Gutenberg, that the page-count for any printed piece must be a multiple of four. 

 
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...

• If you’re not going to mail it, why print it?  

 
And then, it’s not a big leap to: 

• If you’re not going to print it, why be a slave to the multiple-of-four rule?

 
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. 

Some cool, counterintuitive findings
 
We have a client, here at Copel Communications, that tasks us with writing a lot of short marketing videos for them. They get posted on YouTube.
 
We also do lots of other stuff for this client: blogs, ads, case studies, and so on. 
 
One day, not long ago, they asked us to write a blog about a video we’d already written.
 
At first, this seemed to be a head-scratcher. Video is, by its nature, the densest and most elegant way of communicating; it’s common to pack, say, five minutes worth of info into a three-minute video, simply because you have the layering of images, titles, and voiceover. 
 
So why would you want to write a blog about that video? Isn’t that redundant? 
 
A smarter way of looking at things
 
At first, we thought—we assumed—that this must be, solely, for SEO purposes. That is, helping the search-bots to find the videos. Thus, the audience must be “search bots,” and not “real humans,” right? 
 
Wrong. 
 
This client, by the way, is very smart. They’d analyzed the behavior of their site and YouTube visitors, and determined that intermingling a blog with a video would provide a synergistic effect. Were they right? 
 
The blog, in case you haven’t guessed, wasn’t very hard to write; after all, we still had the original script we’d penned to create the video in the first place. It wasn’t a copy-and-paste job, because 1) video scripting is written differently than blog copy, and 2) a real human reader would feel cheated to read the exact same thing that they’d get from the video. Indeed, it was somewhat liberating for us: These videos have a tight time-cap on them; in the blog, we were a little freer to play, and could add details and embellishments that we couldn't put into the original script. 
 
So once posted, it looked like this: There would be a headline to the blog article, followed by a paragraph or two, and then copy that would say, “We made a whole video on this topic; here it is.” Below that, there would be a big tile, imported from YouTube, for watching the video. Below that, the article would continue, broken up with interesting graphics—some of which were borrowed from the original video elements. 
 
But did it pay off?
 
Once this posted, the client went back to their analytics. And boy did their hunch pay off. Turns out that not everyone wants to read the entire blog. They might just want to consume a paragraph or two, and then watch the video. Or they might just view a part of the video, pause it, and then skim the rest of the article and its illustrations. 
 
The point is that this hybrid approach paid off handsomely, providing a veritable smorgasbord to the client’s site visitors. 
 
Icing on the cake: It fed those search-bots, too. 
 
Hybrid power
 
This is not the end of the story. To this day, this client tasks us with the one-two punch of video-plus-blog all the time, and the results keep on pouring in. 
 
But it goes beyond that. Think about it: A hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds, and you needn’t restrict it to just blogs and videos. We’ll do social and retargeting ads for the same campaign. We’ll do email campaigns that tie to a new landing page for a given offer or audience. 
 
The lesson here: Never assume your audience is consuming solely one medium. They’re not. And if you’re serving them only one, you’re missing out. 
 
Have a creative or marketing challenge that’s keeping you up at night? Contact us. We’d love to help.