How to remain apolitical while working as a hired gun It’s that time of year again. Granted, this is a smaller election cycle than, say, the four-year presidential one, but it’s still time when lots of races start to gear up. What’s this have to do with a posting about “creative services” from Copel Communications? Glad you asked. As a creative, you might find yourself tasked, from time to time, to work on something political. It may be something pretty tame. Or it may be highly provocative. It might align with your own beliefs. Or it may fly in their face. So what do you do? Setting the ground rules First off, you need to have your own boundaries. You need a bright shining line which you refuse to cross, professionally. And you need to get the fastest possible understanding of the potential project in order to make that go/no-go decision, ASAP. You don’t want to waste that client’s time, hemming and hawing. And you don’t want to waste your own time, either. Sometimes (albeit rarely), this will be easy. You might be handed an assignment that’s so polarizing, or so, well, offensive that not only does it run counter to your own ethos, but even if you were to try and take it on, you’d do lousy work. You couldn’t possibly approach it dispassionately. Notice we said “rarely”? Because, as a rule, these will be tougher calls. We worked on a project recently for an agency that represented a big business concern. Oooh: “big business.” The Evil Empire, right? We’re not against big business, but we needed to bring in another resource who might’ve been. They were cagey about joining the project. But guess what? The aim of this big business group, in part, was to help low-income people. (From a political standpoint, this was a matter of lobbying for direct vs. indirect assistance for these people. In other words, do you help them with lower prices [what the business wanted], or a government subsidy funded by taxes [what the opponents wanted]? Either side could claim the high ground; both were, ostensibly, “looking out for the little guy.”) Seen in this (hugely parenthetical!) light, our partners were happy to come on board. Incidentally, this was a “high-ground” campaign we were working on. That is, “Look at all the benefits! Wouldn’t this be great?” It wasn’t a smear campaign of the opposition. We’d likely have passed on that one. Hitting it out of the park Not long ago, we were handed an interesting creative assignment for one of the country’s leading new-economy companies, courtesy of their agency. (Can you see how we’re bending over backward to anonymize this??) They wanted a certain legislative initiative passed, and were actually targeting the policymakers themselves. This might sound like a “lobbying” campaign, but this client has such deep pockets that they were going all-out in all media: television, radio, outdoor, social, transit, you name it. We can see the logic of the media spend: If the creative were done right, it would also induce a good warm-and-fuzzy feeling among the very constituents who voted for those policymakers. Get it? We’ve said this a zillion times in these articles, and we’ll say it again: Know Thy Customer. In this case, the “customer” was the policymaker. We needed to know what was on their plate. What kept them up at night. What their biggest concerns were. Only then did we consider what the big business was proposing; otherwise, our appeals would have been tone-deaf. We developed a number of overall multimedia creative concepts, which really took an emotional approach to the seemingly sterile legislation. It was all about how it impacted underserved people (detect a common thread here among these political players?) who would benefit, if the policymakers went the way the business preferred. Our reasoning was akin to “Why did you want to get into politics in the first place?” Or, to use a phrase that politicians prefer to use, “Why did you want to get into public service in the first place?” See the difference? A parting shot Politics, and political campaigns, are potential landmines for any business. The above examples are about actual election-cycle campaigns. Here at Copel Communications, we’re officially apolitical. You have no idea where we stand, left or right, red or blue. That’s intentional. We advise the same for all our non-election-cycle clients, too. Put it this way: The instant you get political in any of your messaging, you effectively alienate half of your audience! Some companies, such as Nike (and, to a lesser extent, Apple), are willing, indeed proud, to stick their necks out thus. But they’re the exceptions. For everyone else, it’s good politics to remain apolitical. Need help with that next campaign, whatever it may be? Contact us. We’d be delighted to put our experience to work for you.
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It happens all the time: You book a meeting with a hot new prospect, and they want to learn all about your company. Time for the PowerPoint deck. Only yours sucks. Sound familiar? There is so much riding on the quality of that deck. We can’t stress it enough. And so, in this article, we’re going to give you some surefire pointers and tips to craft that killer presentation deck which ostensibly “tells the prospect about your company,” but which really “helps you close the sale.” This is not a website We recently worked on a deck like this for one of our clients; they had a first draft which they shared with us. It felt like a website. Which is understandable: they’d copied-and-pasted lots of pages from their existing website into PowerPoint to make the deck. That might seem like a good idea, but it’s a mistake. A well-designed website acts like… a website. That is, it offers the visitor various options they can choose from (pages, links, buttons), so they can learn about your company and its offerings at their own pace and in their own style. If you take all those various pages and drop them into PowerPoint, you’ll have a mess. While you can certainly “nudge” a website visitor along via things like sub-pages and even bifurcated home pages (we wrote an entire article on this topic), you can’t control the narrative anywhere nearly as tightly as you can in a slide deck. That’s not a limitation. That’s an advantage. Their story and yours A PowerPoint deck has Slide 1, and then Slide 2, and so on. You control what the viewer sees, and when. It’s totally granular. With that in mind, think of what you want to get across. The usual knee-jerk reactions are: “Tell them what we offer! And why it’s better!” Ennhhh. Flip the conversation. Make this about them. Make it about their pain-points, their day-in-the-life problems, the issues they need solved yesterday. This doesn’t take very long—or many slides. It can be a series of provocative “can-you-relate” questions. You can see where this is going. You’re building up the problem, specifically so that your company appears (in “Act Two”) as the solution. And since you have slide-by-slide control of the narrative, you can (totally unlike a website) build suspense. Imagine a single slide which reads: “How can you do that?” Let that sit on screen for a while. Let ‘em chew on it. You can click to the next slide when you’re good and ready. Then you can get into the stuff about your own company. It’s Act Two. This is certainly a case of less-is-more. Select—curate—the vital few wow-facts about your company that you can present in just a couple of slides. “Name-drop” big-name clients you’ve served. (Show logos!) Tout the biggest numbers. Perhaps you have one great sound-bite-style quote to show, either from a client or the press. Use it. The point is to establish as much credibility as possible, as quickly as possible. And then—again, keeping it short—wrap it with the “Q&A” slide. This is where you’ll stop clicking through PowerPoint, and get to the real business of answering the prospect’s questions, and closing the sale. Go modular Here’s a great thing about PowerPoint. It’s not a one-off oil painting. It’s a basic computer file that’s saved on your hard drive (or in the cloud, whatever). Thing is, as with any computer file, you can easily “Save as…” to create an alternate version. Some guidance: Create the biggest version of your deck first. Because it’s always easier to cut than to add. Indeed, you might not ever even use that full-blown version. Not a problem. It’s like a repository for all your best stuff—a “master file.” As new opportunities/sales calls arise, simply “Save as…” and cull the parts you don’t need. Examples: “Mission and vision” slides are snoozers for prospective clients, but they’re valuable for potential new hires. Specific “client success stories” might work better for some prospects than others, depending upon the alignment of the situation. And some might be eliminated altogether if, say, that prospect can only give you a half hour, and you want to save as much time for the Q&A as possible. Get help We know about this stuff because we work on these types of assignments all the time. Need help with that crucial company-intro sales deck? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help you out. |
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