 Great photo by Grok. Wow. It’s a tradition (almost) as big as Thanksgiving here at Copel Communications. In which we devote our mid-November blog post to that which we’re thankful for. And in which, of course, we ask you what you’re thankful for! In other words, feel free to chime in, in the comments!
The title of this article is a tad misleading. Last year, we wrote about what we’re thankful for. “What” implies things. You can already see where this is going. That’s why you read these. Just to stay two jumps ahead of us! Not what, but who Sure, there’s plenty of “what” that we’re thankful for this year. Our technology and systems keep chugging along, relatively unimpaired. The economy, doom-and-gloom headlines notwithstanding, has been pretty good to us. Heck, at the more primal/Maslowian (??) level, we’re happy every time we flick a switch and the lights come on. Or open a spigot and get water. Don’t take anything for granted. But enough of the stuff. Let’s talk people. If you’ve read any of these articles of ours, you know we’re sticklers for anonymizing details when appropriate. This article is no exception. That said, if you’re reading this, and you’re called out in our little honor roll below, we’re confident that you’ll know who you are. Boy are we lucky to be surrounded by great people who help us do our job and make us look insanely better than we actually are. Here, we’re talking about other creatives. We’re talking about vendors. We’re talking about members of internal client teams we work with. We’re talking about SEO nerds and knob-turners. Some examples:
Not to leave out… We’re happy to sing about these unsung heroes. They’re vital members of the Copel Communications pantheon, which includes some really great clients who make it all possible, and the love of a family that makes it all worth it. What, and who, are you thankful for this year? Post your reply in the comments, or feel free to contact us.
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 Great photo by Grok. If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them.
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. Division of labor When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. And that may well be true, in that instance. But that is not what we’re talking about here. Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. After that, however, it gets fuzzier. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period. It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!” And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit.  Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months.
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. List, then draw The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline. And that’s how we proceeded. It went something like this: Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as:
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as:
And so on. Chart your course Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline. It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. It takes all of about two minutes. We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today.  Awesome photo by Grok. We don’t claim to be a publishing expert. That said, we have ghost-copy-edited several books, for different clients of ours, over the years. We’ve done everything from boutique self-publishing to working with one of the big-name New York publishing houses.
But the lessons we learned recently—and will share in this article—really underscore how much, and how fast, the world of book publishing has changed, in just the past few short years. Big boys can be bullies Boy were we ever disappointed, not terribly long ago, when we helped a client of ours shepherd their book through the process/wringer of a major you-know-their-name publishing house. We—mistakenly—thought that our client would get the white-glove treatment from this storied icon. Were we ever wrong. Their business model had followed—or perhaps preceded—the seismic shifts that have upended the music industry. Rather than the publishers having all the power, it’s effectively the influencers who have all the power. So if you’re, say, an indie rock band and you’ve got a zillion followers on TikTok, you hold all the cards. Why fork over your hard-earned money to some record label? Ditto for publishing. You can self-publish, pretty easily, these days (more on that in a minute), and if you can drive lots of followers and sales, then what value does a publisher—regardless of how big or how storied—have to add? This is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword. In the case of our client, they’d written a brilliant manuscript, but weren’t exactly Kardashians in terms of their social-media influence. And that was all, apparently, that the big-name publisher cared about. They peppered us with questions, such as:
And one other, which we were shocked to hear:
Ouch. You’d think that as publishers, their job would be to, well… publish. But no. They’re looking for coat-tails to ride. They want to “barnacle” themselves onto a trend, rather than expend the effort and capital to start one, regardless of how trend-worthy that manuscript might be. How disheartening. But the story does get better. The Magazine Magnate Before we get to the silver-lining chapter, we have one more churn-your-stomach tale to tell. We worked with another client, recently, and helped them to complete their book manuscript. Shortly thereafter, our client was approached by another huge-name publisher, known primarily in the magazine world, but who were now leveraging their brand name to create a publishing service to authors like our client. Hmmm. Intriguing. Well, it was, until we dived into their sales pitch. They would publish the book. And they would push out a press release for it. And they would feature it on their website. Now, in stark contrast to the old-school publisher we’d mentioned in the previous story—who, to their credit, paid our client an advance (i.e., money) against future sales for the manuscript—this magazine-magnate wanted to charge this other client of ours for the privilege of having their big name on the spine of the book… along with the aforementioned press release and website page. So now the money is flowing in the opposite direction. But okay. We’ll bite. How much did Magazine Magnate want for this service of theirs? Well, they offered different tiers. The cheapest one was $67,000.00. The priciest one topped out at $122,000.00. Can you say “Vanity offer targeted at ‘authors’ whose wallets are as inflated as their egos?” We politely declined. Goliath, meet David As we’d teased above, there is a silver lining to our client’s story—and for your book-publishing aspirations, too, especially if you don’t feel like self-educating on the arcana of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service which, while valuable, requires a ton of heavy lifting on your part. Turns out there’s a whole category of vendors out there known as book aggregators, and they do pretty much everything, for a sliver of the price we’d mentioned above. Example: For our client who declined the Magazine Magnate, they went with an aggregator who created a print-on-demand book and e-book version thereof, and distributed it to storefronts such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and tons of others. And the whole budget was under $3k. So there’s no “advance” against sales; you’re betting with your own money. But if you can, say, sell more than $3k worth of books, you’re already in the black, and royalty checks will just keep on coming. So you can see why the old-school publishers are now very old school. Their business model has been shaken to the foundations. What value do they add, beside a logo on the spine? We’ll leave it to you to answer that question. Need help with a book project? We’ve worked on enough of them by now to have experience to offer that, we’d wager, you’d deem valuable. Contact us to learn more.  Great photo by Grok. We recently saw what we’re about to describe, and it left us aghast.
Learn from the little tale we’re about to spin! What you’re reading—this article, these very words—is a blog entry. Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been posting articles like this, every two weeks, for more than ten years, now. Thank you. We knew you’d be impressed. But what is this horror-inducing tale? you’re surely asking. And what does that have to do with the title of this article? Okay. Maybe you’re not asking. We already knew you were smart. And likely figured it out already. But stay with us. So. We post blogs on a regular cadence. Twice a month. At the top of the month, each month, our blogs are more focused on our consultants audience. At mid-month—like this article—they’re more broadly geared toward our creatives audience. And yes, they certainly overlap. You don’t need to be running an ad agency to get a good takeaway, from this article, for your business. As we’d said. Every two weeks. Like clockwork. Now you don’t need to do them every two weeks. That’s our cadence. But man oh man. It is a cadence. Here’s the story: We were recently connected with a gentleman who was running his own creative agency; it specialized in web design. We’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and had booked a Zoom call. Prior to the Zoom call, we did our due diligence. That is, we checked out this web designer’s website. And this is where we had our holy !@#$ moment. Just like our site—and almost everyone else’s—this designer’s website had a “Blog” section. (It could also be called “Recent Posts.” Same thing.) So we decided to check it out. And when we got there—we are not making this up—we saw—promise, we are not making this up: One blog. One. Just one. One. And—to make matters worse—it was date-stamped. From about two years ago. Oh-my-goodness. Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect searching for a web designer. You Google. You find this designer’s site. And you check it out, just as we did. And, out of curiosity, you decide to catch up on their latest thought leadership and/or musings. And you see one sole blog, time-stamped from two years ago. Quick: What’s your reaction? You got it: Are they still in business??? Our reaction precisely. Whoever you are, reading this article, do not repeat this suicidal mistake. Do not project to the world—and to your prospects, for goodness’ sake—that you, once, two years ago, had an idea, just one, and then went completely brain dead but somehow managed to keep paying your URL hosting fees. It is worse, far worse, than not having any blogs at all. Clearly! Now extrapolate from this story, this extreme example. Could you solve this by having two blogs? One from two years ago, and another from merely one year ago? Of course not. See where this is going? If you’re going to post, then post. And keep at it. But what if you’re not a content machine? That’s entirely possible. Then do this: Create at least, say, a half-dozen entries. And make sure they’re not date-stamped when you post them. Needless to say, make sure that the topics of these articles are evergreen, too; you don’t want to, say, comment on that morning’s big headline from the news. Of course, if you’re a web designer, you may want to show off that you’re good at building, and updating, websites. Starting with your own. Need help with a challenge like this? Or any other? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. This is a perennial—and paradoxical—challenge. If you don’t update your brand after too long a period of time, it will look and feel stale.
Yet when you update it, you risk diluting it and squandering all of the brand impressions you’ve worked so hard to build. So what do you do? Is there a happy medium, a bright shining line to follow? In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, some do’s and don’ts, and a little experience of ours based on a recent client assignment. Let’s start with that last part, first. Re-Branding 101 For this client assignment (and remember, we’re always fuzzing the details to add anonymity), our client wanted to create a new “2.0” version of one of their signature branded products, which had been well established, and received, in the marketplace over the past five years. So why the update? Good question. You don’t just do these things for light or transient reasons. In the case of our client, they had made significant revisions to the product itself, to the point where it warranted a new release and brand update. So the rationale was there. That’s good. (If it’s not, push back. Simply updating for the sake of updating is a mark of, well, fashion, and that’s a whole different planet from what we’re discussing here.) A good question to ask at this time: Has the audience changed? The brand, really, is for them to consume. In our client’s case, the answer was, “Not too much.” Which let us turn, rather organically, to the mandatories which would remain. In this situation, we were locked in to the client’s color palette. They had a certain bold approach that served them well and reflected their brand identity. And they had a few little visual elements that needed to carry over, in the whole branding picture. All in all, this is a very good, solid re-branding assignment. So what did we do? Well, we listed out what needed to stay (the aforementioned mandatories) and what should get updated. We got the client’s blessing on this two-column list. Then we made some quick thumbnails—nothing too detailed, mind you—of how this new branding might be visualized. We then turned these over to the talented graphic artist we were working with on this account, and let her do her thing. Narrowing the field Our designer wowed us with lots of great options. As we had hoped, she took the ideas from the thumbnails, and then really ran with them. In lots of creative directions. They were just enough to get her going in the proper direction, while letting her creativity shine. We’re happy to report that our client had a hard time choosing. The classic “embarrassment of riches” situation. That’s as good as you can hope for. Eventually, our client chose their favorite. This then went through several rounds of tweaking revisions. And the end result was strong. The client was happy. And so were we. There was a story, a number of years ago, about the then-latest Pepsi re-brand. It was, in short, a disaster. The design firm issued something like a 40-page white paper explaining why the new logo was supposedly so great. (Not to mention expensive!) Fast-forward to today, and that re-brand is history. The newer logo is better. It respects its heritage. And it’s instantly grasp-able. Those are the do’s. The don’ts? Man, if you need to write a white paper to try and justify your brilliance to your client, start over. Need help with a re-branding initiative? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Awesome photo by Grok—an instance where AI, and good prompts, rock. This is a true story. As usual, we’ll blur the details for privacy, but you’ll get the important take-aways for your business.
We were on a Zoom call recently with a client, brainstorming ideas for updating their tagline. The tagline was basically a message to prospects, saying, “Use this service, and you’ll be better at doing XYZ.” During the call, the client asked, “Hey, why don’t we use the word ‘turbocharge’?” “Sure. Try it.” And so: “Use this service to turbocharge your ability to XYZ.” Hmmm. Here’s the thing. This service has nothing to do with turbocharging. It’s a B2B play, not an automotive one. In the land of taglines, where you typically only have less than a dozen words to get your point across, you can’t be off one bit. And now comes the lesson of this article. Ready? At this point, our instinct was to start brainstorming other ways to update this tagline. Starting with the customers’ needs, and layering in what this company really specialized at, and how they did it. That should seem straightforward to you, especially if you’ve ever read any of our other articles here at Copel Communications. But remember: We were on a Zoom call with the client at the time. And so that client said, “Let’s ask ChatGPT.” And they brought up a screen-share, and plugged the “turbocharge” tagline into it, asking ChatGPT for other versions. (If you see where this story is going already, give yourself some extra points.) And so ChatGPT dutifully delivered. It spat out a bunch of other options, all with variations on the word “turbocharge.” Things like “energize.” “Electrify.” “Invigorate.” “Supercharge.” Et cetera, et cetera. Guess what? None of these was any better than the original version. Of course you know why. Although it wasn’t immediately apparent to our client during the call. It was a classic case of GIGO: the old software programmers’ acronym for “garbage in, garbage out.” ChatGPT assumed that “turbocharge” was a perfectly good prompt, so it ran with it. Client: “Let’s try ‘amplify.’” They did. And ChatGPT spat out more of the same. Having waited patiently during this exercise, we then asked the client specifically what we’d mentioned, in this article, just a few paragraphs ago: Why don’t we take a different tack? Why don’t we start with the target customers’ needs, and layer in what your company specializes at, and how it does it? Guess what? And, no—it’s not a case of “Ta-dah! We got something brilliant, instantly.” The “Guess what?” answer is this then took a lot of work. ChatGPT is easy. But in cases like this, it’s just a GIGO vacuum. At least our client could see that it wasn’t delivering useful output. And so we worked on answering those questions above, because we both knew the answers. At that point, it was a matter of narrowing it down to just a few bullet points and words, and assembling them into a tagline-like sequence that would have a strong cadence and impact. It went something like this: Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit. Look! “Mastery”! And the subtle art-like touch that comes with this company’s services… not to mention the grounded-in-science methodology. Plus specific business benefits that the company delivers to its clients! Honestly. Do you think that ChatGPT would have figured out any of that on its own? Of course it couldn’t. That’s not fair to ChatGPT. Now you can (in fact, we did) feed “Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit” into ChatGPT and let it try and polish that. But again, it just didn’t come through as well as good old-fashioned elbow grease. Don’t get us wrong. ChatGPT is a cool tool, and it can be quite useful. But you need to apply it appropriately, and recognize its limitations. It’s like that old adage that if you’re a hammer, you tend to perceive everything in your world as a nail. Need help with a creative challenge that AI can’t handle? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Sometimes, the success of your creative marketing hinges on some decidedly un-creative input.
Here’s a true story. We were recently tasked with scripting a video for a client of ours. Granted, we have to cloak this in anonymity, but you’ll get the gist: The client of ours is a consultancy. They had created a breakthrough technical solution for one of their clients. Our job was to script a video, showing the whole world this breakthrough solution—while also anonymizing our client’s client. Follow? On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward assignment. We had to write a script which would show prospective clients (for the consultancy) how amazing this technical solution is. But it quickly became trickier than you might think. Our point of contact at the consultancy was one of the super-sharp technical people who had actually worked on this breakthrough solution. Let’s call him Steve. Steve was our source of input. And so Steve—not terribly shockingly—told us all about this breakthrough solution. Every nut and bolt. Every feature. Every output. Every paradigm-shattering spec. And we couldn’t write the script. Know why? Think about it. Our task was to write a brief—as in, two- to three-minute—video, dramatically showcasing this breakthrough solution. Yet what had Steve, in all his ardent energy, failed to provide us? Of course: Act One. Huh? Two sides to every story (and marketing piece) A video like this—or any marketing piece like this—should follow what we call “a two-act structure.” Steve had given us all of the input for Act Two. That is, the solution. But of course! Now it’s super obvious, isn’t it? A solution solves a problem. What was the problem?? We asked Steve. And he said “Well, our client couldn’t do X.” And yes, he technically answered our question, but he didn’t exactly help us. And here we get to the gist of this article. Steve is not a creative pro. That’s not his job. He excels at plenty of other stuff, and the world is a better place because of it. But he needed a little help, a little nudging, from us, to give us the input we’d craved for Act One of this script. And so we asked him, “Could you tell us more, please? Why couldn’t your client do X? What were all the contributing factors? We want to know, as much as possible, about the sheer chaos they were confronting before your solution came along. We want the ‘Before’ to be horrendous! Inundate us with details! The messier, the better!” You could see the light dawning in Steve’s eyes. Of course! The messier, the better! Because The Great Wonderful Solution isn’t so great or wonderful unless it really clears what appear to be insurmountable hurdles. Once Steve got it, he got it. After all, who would know that client’s “before” situation better than him? He piled on with gory details, and voilà! We were able to pen a truly effective video. Clearly, you can extrapolate a lot from this little story. Marketing and advertising routinely require creativity. And just as routinely, your input sources may not be people who are naturally creative. But they can be coaxed. The information is there. You just need to tease it out. Need help with a creative challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. We recently worked on a book project, wherein we worked closely with the author (to be specific, we ghost-copy-edited the manuscript), and we were also involved, as a creative resource, when it was time to create the book’s cover. We had a great graphic artist we were working with.
All of this will tie in—shortly—to the gist of this article: Directing other creatives. There’s certainly a fine line between over- and under-directing them. So how do you find that sweet spot? Quick tangent about book design. Regardless of the cute aphorism you were taught in grade school, we all judge books by their covers. In a word, Duh! That’s what they’re there for. You wouldn’t buy a technical how-to guide with a cover that teased a torrid romance, or vice versa. The cover needs to inform the would-be reader of what's inside. It’s as important to the book’s success as a poster is to a movie, or even further back in the day, what a record sleeve was to an album. (Contact us in case you don’t get either of those references.) So. Having worked with the author on this project, literally word-by-word, for months, we knew very well what the book was about. Far more than, say, our great graphic artist. Which is fine. It wasn’t her job to read the entire manuscript, and know who the target audience is, and all that. We knew that stuff. We also knew the mandatories for this project: For example, the author runs a company that figures prominently in the book; the company logo needed to be on the cover. Stuff like that. Who speaks what, visually We quickly pencil-sketched nine different thumbnails as cover ideas for the book. And here’s where it’s important to know your different players well. The author of this book is not a graphics person. So he basically understood the thumbnails, but didn’t get any of them. He needed to see his favorites fleshed out before he could pass any real judgment. So we sent these along to our graphic artist, with fairly minimal instructions. We walked her through each one, explaining its basic intentions, but carving absolutely zero elements in stone, aside from the aforementioned mandatories (company logo, company color palette, etc.). And in this process, we very purposely downplayed the quality of the thumbnails themselves. Sure, there was the very real possibility that one of them would end up being “the” one, and thus the germ of the final cover art. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to inspire our graphic artist to improve upon what we’d sent her. To, for lack of a better phrase, show off. The thumbnails weren’t so dumb as to be negligible. But they were loose enough to require input and interpretation. And that’s the fine line you want to walk when you’re directing a creative person. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Creatives are a lot like athletes. While many creatives are ostensibly introverted, they still yearn to be challenged, and to strut their stuff, to flex their creative muscles, so to speak, and to outdo themselves and what they’ve done before. The winnowing Despite what we’d hinted earlier, our thumbnails were actually clear enough for our client to pick a few favorites before we sent them along to the artist. This worked well: The client/author picked his three faves. We sent all nine to the graphic artist, with the three top choices highlighted; this way, she could see what the client had rejected, and possibly draw some inspiration from elements of the also-rans, if needed. This also had the very pragmatic effect of reducing time and budget. Having that artist work up nine different covers would be quite a bit of work. Three, on the other hand, was pretty reasonable. The good news: It was hard to choose among the three designs that the artist submitted! We had our favorite; the author had his. Guess who prevailed? Of course. The author. It’s his book, not ours. And his choice, while not our tip-top choice, was still among our favorites—and that’s counting back to the original nine. From that point, it was just a matter of iterating and refining. As we write this, the art is finalized, and the book is at the publisher. Importantly, everyone is happy. Our client has a great book cover (by which others will rightly judge that book!). Our graphic artist is justifiably proud of her creation. And we’re delighted to have helped the process along, walking that fine line between over- and under-directing our precious creative resource. Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be happy to help. |