 If you find yourself nostalgic for the pre-digital world of creative, you’ve got a screw loose
You don’t have to be terribly old to have witnessed a technological revolution in the creative side of marketing and advertising. We go back farther than most; as we’d noted in an earlier blog post, we actually started our work at a printing press… which was manufactured in 1896. Forget the late 19th century. The late 20th century witnessed an upheaval in creative tech, and with one small exception—which we’ll get to shortly—most of what’s left behind should well remain there. Paste-up We started in the newspaper biz, and then went to an ad agency after that, but still wearing the same hat: Paste-Up Artist. What the heck is that? Before desktop publishing (the revolution by which you can lay out artwork on a computer screen), the layout was quite literally “laid out”… on paper. And then it would be photographed in order to make printing plates. The “photography” was of the high-contrast sort, so it could forgive a multitude of errors on the paper below, and was conspicuously blind to certain colors—light blue, in particular. So it would go like this: You’d have a sketch (a layout) of what, say, a print ad should look like. The copy would get written and typeset, emerging as little pieces of paper with the type on them, via yet another photographic/chemical process, whereby the individual letters were projected through a kind of stencil onto light-sensitive paper and then developed. Photos were done in much the same way, although they were “screened,” that is, placed under a glass grid that would divide the resulting image into various-sized “halftone dots” which, from a distance, appear to be smooth shades of gray. Halftone printing is still used today, but the old-school “stat cameras” have long been retired. Anyway, all of these elements would need to be assembled, on paper, to match the look of the original layout sketch. Hence “paste-up.” The individual elements would literally be cut out, either with scissors or a razor knife, and then “pasted” to the heavier paper which would hold them. Actual paste wasn’t used. Hot wax was. One of our first tasks in advertising was “refilling the waxer,” which equated to loading little blocks of sticky paraffin into an electric device that would heat them to liquid. (Here’s a great photo of one in action.) When you inserted a piece of artwork into the gadget, a motorized roller would pass the underside of the art across the surface of melted wax, rendering it sticky. Thus you could “paste” it to your art board; you could also re-position it easily, if needed, with your fingers. And you’d need to, a lot. You can safely assume, today, that your lines of type will be straight and parallel. Not then! You needed a T-square to check alignment. And you kept a special “non-repro pencil,” which drew in that magic shade of light blue, to mark out areas you wanted to keep track of, but not to show up in the finished product. By the way, we had a trick for centering elements such as headlines. We’d draw a vertical guideline (in non-photo blue) down the center of the art board. And then, rather than measure that headline and divide by two, we’d simply fold the thing in half and make a mark where the fold was. We’d line up the fold line with the penciled center line, saving us at least the labor of doing math. You have no idea how gratifying it was, not long thereafter, to simply type Command-Shift-C. Boy did it ever suck Needless to say, all of this was a laborious and thankless process. The resulting piece was also terribly fragile: Bend it or drop it, and parts could move or fall off. There was no electronic transmission. If you wanted an ad to appear in a newspaper in another state, you had to FedEx the artwork there. And working with hot waxers, caustic developer chemicals, and X-acto blades added delightful hazards of their own. If you haven’t noticed by now, we don’t miss those days. What, then, endures? What technology from those pre-digital days, is as good as ever, and arguably better than the computerized tech which supposedly replaced it? Which old-school device did we use then, that we still use now, and you can, and should, if you don’t already? The ageless wonder For us, it’s the pencil. Nothing is so fast and immediate. Sure, there are tablets and styli, but even the best struggle to imitate the tactile feedback of friction as graphite transfers to paper and the point changes shape as it goes; worse, even the fastest computer chips still evince a perceptibly annoying lag. It interferes. It gums up the gears of creativity. There’s still room for the pencil in your work today. There sure is in ours; just the other day, we sketched a quick layout for a client with a speed and immediacy that are impossible with computer tech. And since the resulting image looks rough and hand-drawn, there’s no accidentally mistaking it for a finished layout—a common problem when “roughing a layout” via computer. Of course, we popped that sketch into a scanner, and emailed the scan to our client, hundreds of miles away. And at their end, their designer may well import the scan into his software, and place it on a bottom layer that he can toggle on or off at will as he builds tighter elements above it—a wonderful tech-enabled convenience. The point is this: Technology for technology’s sake is worthless. It’s only good if it’s an enabler. If it saves you time and effort, and offers up new creative opportunities. When someone invents something that out-pencils the pencil, we’ll take it without the drag of nostalgia. But that day hasn’t come just yet. Need help with your next creative assignment? Give us a shout. We’d love to put our experience, and our high/low-tech approach, to work for you.
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 People still read. Amazing, isn’t it? You’d think—by, say, watching the TV news or listening to the radio—that no one does it anymore. But that’s not true. You read your email. You’re reading this.
Not only that, people respond to what they read… if it’s truly compelling and motivating. Your job, then, as a business, is to do just that: Compel, and motivate. In this article, we’re going to take a look at increasing your odds of getting qualified leads and driving in new business by a method as old as the postal system (and as current as email). These methods still work. The trick is optimizing all the variables. Paper or ether? You might think that paper--i.e., postal—mail is dead, dead, dead. Who on earth opens letters anymore? Don’t you simply toss all your junk mail into the recycling bin, unopened? As tempting as it is to say, “Next topic,” we must say that we have some clients who engage us for good old-fashioned mailings, and—brace yourself—they work. These clients have gotten some astonishingly good responses (often by email, interestingly enough), leading to well-qualified leads and, yes, wholly new client engagements. We’re flattered to have helped in the process. But how? This comes back to “all the variables” we’d mentioned above. Here’s how they stack up for postal mailings (we’ll get to email in a minute):
Every one of these is hugely important. You need to maximize every one. Think of them not as variables, but rather links in a chain. One weak link, and the whole chain breaks. Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail:
Emailers First things first: Pay heed to the CAN-SPAM Act. Don’t get yourself in trouble. Bulk email services such as Constant Contact and MailChimp have good online guides for helping you navigate these shoals. That said, many of the best practices for paper apply to email: Your offer and your CTA must be impeccably strong. Your content must be clear and arguably even shorter than what you use on paper. Think of a tiny mobile phone screen. Who wants to scroll through tons of stuff, when they’re already wary of being sold to? As per “contents,” you can’t include, say, a book. But you can include, say, a link to an e-book. An interactive discovery questionnaire. And a big fat “Schedule your free demo now” (or whatever) button, which is de rigeur. Some other nice things about email: It’s effectively free (no paper, no printing, no postage), and it’s, unlike postal mail, instant. So you can time your mailing to an exact day part (think of, say, 8 a.m., when your prospect is transitioning from coffee to work). You can also send follow-ups—judiciously!—with ease. Remember: You want your missives to arrive as “valuable information that could help,” not “another piece of @#$#$$ spam to be trashed.” Need help? We work on projects like these for our clients all the time. The very fact that they keep coming back to us for more is a tacit confirmation of the results they get; done right, this stuff delivers impressive R.O.I. And now for our call to action: Learn how we can help you craft that next business-building mailing for you, whether paper or email. Contact us for a free, friendly consultation. |