 Great photo by Juliano Couto. We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress.
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. Grab the lowest-hanging fruit Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. But what if that were already done for you? Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. Update what you bring Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? Don’t reinvent the wheel Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?” It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. For the love of QR codes How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in.
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 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. RFPs—that is, Requests for Proposals—come in all shapes and sizes. Broadly, there are the ubiquitous ones that populate the world of government services contracting. There are plenty of private-sector RFPs out there, too.
In this article, we’re going to address the tipping point that must inform all of your RFP pursuits: the notorious “go/no-go decision.” We’re looking out for your best interests here, trust us. All-American competition A little background first. Why would a company (or the government) issue an RFP? The bigger question could be: Why wouldn’t they? Think about it. If you’re an entity that needs to spend money on services (or products, but we’ll focus on the former here), it’s entirely safe to assume that 1) you want the best possible services at 2) the lowest possible price. And what’s fairer, what’s more American, than level-playing-field competition? So. You issue an RFP. And you let all these suitors compete against each other. You get exactly what you’d wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. Or is it? The race to the bottom Let’s get real jaded, real quick. How well does the government do things, compared to private industry? By and large, not nearly as well. There’s no profit motivation. There’s no “Government 2” that they’re competing against. There’s a baked-in complacency and a literal ability to print more money if they need it. This shows in their work. Think of all the shoddy government services you’ve had to suffer through—IRS, DMV, U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, you name it. Think of how many times you’ve said, “If only Amazon were running this!” And the crazy thing is, tons of these shoddy government services are actually provided by private-sector contractors! Why? Because they came in with the lowest bid. We’re over-simplifying here—there are other ways that the government procures things, and even in the private sector, there are SLAs or “service-level agreements” which stipulate a minimum required level of performance—but, as we’d intimated, nice and jaded, RFPs often represent a race to the bottom. Cheapest possible—and just passable. Now pivot this scenario to your business. Would you want to willingly join in, in this death spiral? To RFP or not to RFP The upside, for you, of competing on an RFP, is that it’s typically a pretty big contract. And it’s all or nothing. You either win it, or you don’t. And either way, you’re putting in a ton of work. Hmmm. This gets to the very core of the go/no-go decision. We were told, years ago, about an NFL coach who had a plaque in his office. It read: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, Coming in second is un-American.” Yowch. Painful. Brutal. But refreshingly similar to your RFP go/no-go decision. It boils down to this: Only respond if you can, and will, crush it. Partial measures are a total waste of time; expend that energy on other biz-dev. Assess your capabilities and those of your likeliest competitors. Can you crush the competition? If you can almost crush them, what would it take to push you over the top? Here’s a little anecdote for you. We were recently invited to compete on an RFP for a slate of marketing services. We could see, right away, that it wasn’t a great fit. We knew we could crush a certain part of what this company was requesting, but there were other parts that weren’t our specialty. We were just about to pass on this one when--hmmm—we learned, through the grapevine, that a few other companies, which we know and have worked with before, were also invited to respond to this exact same RFP. Know where this is going? Imagine where it went? Of course. We reached out to those other entities, and said, “Let’s consolidate!” And that’s exactly what happened. Working with the others, we created a veritable Dream Team… and crushed the RFP. By the way, there are interesting and creative ways to craft the actual RFP response itself, to help you win it, which go beyond the scope of this article. We’d love to help you in this realm. Contact us and let’s talk.  Great photo by Alexander Suhorucov. We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something?
Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. This was not easy. So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?” Seeing the bigger picture Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. Chop, chop Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard. We had to lay out:
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. Yup. We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose. Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. Speed reading Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?” Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished. Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email. Now do you see the broader lesson here? People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write. Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Ketut Subiyanto. No that’s not a brand of beer. When we refer to “Draft Number 10,” we’re talking about Word docs.
Oh. Which begs the question: Why embrace that? Just by its moniker, “Number 10,” it’s daunting and annoying. Who in their right mind would ever enjoy, let alone embrace, the tenth draft of anything? Wouldn’t you be automatically burned out? Let’s answer that “in their right mind” question first. This is business, not art If you’re a painter or a poet, up in your garret, you can dream and wile away the hours, finessing your grand opus—“a hundred visions and revisions,” in the words of T.S. Eliot—and you’ve only yourself (and perhaps your muse) to answer to. But we’re not talking about art here, despite our decades of experience (not to mention lots of awards) in creative services. We’re talking about business. Money. Deadlines. ROI. Where, then, does a Draft Number 10 even come from? Quick oh-now-you’ll-get-it answer: A client who’s a perfectionist. Aha. Now everything should make sense for you. We have a client—we’ve actually had lots of clients like this—who’s a perfectionist. Who will revise and revise and revise a draft until it’s almost perfect… and then decide that it’s anything but, and then trash it, and start over, and then revise and revise and revise again, taking us along for the ride. As a creative resource, you could fight this. But you know that that would get you in trouble, and perhaps fired. You could just go with the flow: “Oh, this is the way they like to work. I’ll just… endure it, without complaining.” It’s possible that you could coast along like this indefinitely. But neither of the above approaches benefits anybody. Thus our advice to you in these situations: Embrace it. Heck, enjoy it. See it for the invaluable paid education that it is: Our fastidious client in this story—like most of the clients we’re lucky to work with, whether they’re fastidious or not—is quite brilliant. We would pay to learn their thought processes. To try and osmose just a tiny bit of that genius. Why do they toss Draft 5 and do a wholesale rework for Draft 6? Incidentally, the method behind the madness reveals—if you pay attention—that overall, these drafts get better as they go. It’s not a simple straight slope, were you to graph it. But the trend would be positive. Put it this way: Wouldn’t you love to see Einstein’s notes en route to e = mc2? We get paid for our services. It’s incumbent on us to remain profitable. So we don’t lose money on assignments like this—while, at the same time, we don’t take advantage of our clients’ generosity. And while we get paid in dollars, often the greater reward is the knowledge. The insight. And, frankly, the ability to help other clients like this in similar situations. As we’d said, we’re not along simply for the ride. We dive right in, on every single draft, seeing what’s changed and doing our best to make it better throughout. That’s why our clients entrust us on this journey. Need help with a client, or project, that feels unending? Contact us. We’d be happy—truly happy—to help.  Photo by Amador Loureiro This sentence is in English. You understand it perfectly. And you take all of that for granted.
Stuff like this goes out the window when your client’s first language isn’t English. It certainly makes things harder for you. And for them. In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, based on our experience, for making life easier for you and your clients whose English isn't as good as yours. Bash the bias Here at Copel Communications, we’re native/first-language English speakers. We’ve had additional schooling in English. We speak, think, and dream in English. It all comes very natural. (Or would that be “naturally”?) (LOL!) The “bias” we’d mentioned above is kind of a knee-jerk reaction that you might have when you first encounter someone whose English isn’t very good. They’ll struggle with common phrases and idioms; we have one client who, when they give us input, will typically say, “Let me know how you think.” It’s cute. It’s kind of funny. And it invites a brutal bias. Because, face it, who else talks like this? Little kids. Little kids who are also struggling to learn English for the first time. So their brains aren’t entirely formed, they’re not as smart or experienced as we adults. And that’s the bias that rears its ugly head when you first hear, “Let me know how you think.” That particular client of ours is Korean (we have lots of Korean clients; more on that in a minute). Know how much Korean we speak? Try “zero.” So on the one hand, this puts us in an advantageous position for non-English-native clients who need to communicate to their prospects in flawless English; they can count on us. On the other hand, however, it obscures the fact that their English is better than our Korean, any day of the week. That’s the conundrum: Someone who sounds less intelligent than you is actually more intelligent than you, because they’re not only getting across difficult concepts, but they’re doing it in a second language. Holy mackerel! It’s humbling. So always bear that in mind in situations like this. Even when all those cute phrases keep popping up. Ways to work better with non-English-speaking clients We have clients with lots of different first languages. As we’d mentioned above, we have lots of Korean clients. But we have others whose first language is German. Japanese. Spanish. Mind you, we don’t speak any of those languages. But we have successful ongoing relationships with these clients, sometimes for decades. (This gets back to the Korean clients of ours. Once we establish a relationship at one client company, they all know us there. Then, invariably, someone from that company joins another company, and essentially brings us along. This gets so convoluted that we recently got a project for a major Korean enterprise based in Seoul, from their in-house agency in London. They told us they got our name from So-And-So at Such-And-Such Company. Thing is, we’d never even heard of So-And-So or Such-And-Such!) So how do you do it? Here are some pointers:
Get help We can offer you all of this advice because, as we’ve mentioned, we’ve toiled in these trenches for years and years, and we actually enjoy the assignments. There’s a huge degree of faith at work here: If we, say, employ wordplay or distinctly American cultural references in our work, our clients simply have to trust us to get the right message across. But they find out, soon enough, whether our deliverables score or not: they’ll get firsthand customer response. Which only helps to bolster the faith, and cement the relationship. Need help crafting messaging for a client whose English isn’t perfect? Contact us. We’d be happy to discuss your needs with you.  Okay, that’s a confusing title, isn’t it? “How to promote promotion.” What on earth are we talking about? And how will this, to be blunt, help you make more money?
Trust us. We’ve got the answers. This one comes from a recent story with a client of ours. It’s a “teachable moment.” So we thought we’d share it with you. Spilled ink That client of ours had had a turn of good luck. A big company—one of the nation’s largest banks—chose to feature them in an article they published. Sounds great, right? Of course it is. This bank is a household name. Their brand is worth billions. They have a powerful media presence. So just to have them say anything about our client, let alone feature them in an article, is pretty great. Why, then, are we writing about this? What’s “teachable”? Our client, understandably, wanted everyone on earth to know that Huge Bank wrote an article about them. Sure, Huge Bank did publish this article (online). But would it reach our client’s niche audience? Our client wanted to push out a press release, telling their clients and prospects about the Huge Bank article. This still seems really straightforward, doesn’t it? Well here’s where it starts to go off the rails. Our client brought in a writer to pen the release, and gave him the Huge Bank article as input. That might seem logical, but it was a mistake. Because here’s what happened: That writer scoured the Big Bank article, pulled what he thought were the most important points, and drafted a press release around them. And that release, well, sucked. Teachable moment. Mind you, we’re not blaming the writer here. He simply followed his directions, which were insufficient. And here’s why: The article from Huge Bank was all about how our client leaned on Huge Bank for a business line of credit, and how Huge Bank was able to meet their needs. Totally straightforward. Sure, it made mention of what our client does and who they serve, but the big focus—no surprise—was on Huge Bank. It was about how Huge Bank has all kinds of creative lending solutions. And how Huge Bank works extra hard to help its clients. It was a puff piece—no surprise—about Huge Bank. So guess what this press-release writer’s release read like? You guessed it: It read like a promotion for Huge Bank, and not our client. Ooops. We needed to swoop in and rewrite the release from scratch. That’s because there was a time crunch; ordinarily, we’d simply re-direct the original writer. Our new release—which the client loved and immediately approved for publication—was all about our client. In a word, Duh. It talked all about how great our client is, and the kinds of problems they solve for their clients, and that nowadays, they’re so well-known and respected, that they’ve even been featured in a new article by... wait for it... Huge Bank. How much, then, of Huge Bank’s article informed our press release? Hardly any of it. We just wanted to promote the fact that Huge Bank was talking us up. Indeed, our press release was worth more than Huge Bank’s article. Naturally, we included a link to Huge Bank’s article in the release itself, but we couldn’t have cared less if the readers actually clicked it. Tracking it down As we noted above, our client was delighted—indeed, pleasantly surprised—by the quality of the new press release we drafted on such short notice. But this gets to the bigger question, the one you’ve likely been wondering about all this time: Why did this mistake happen in the first place? Why, indeed, is this teachable? Why were we forced to “swoop in” (our own words) to fix this? Why was the original release subpar? (As we mentioned above, we don’t blame the original writer.) Most importantly, how can this be fixed—and avoided—in the future? Oh, you’re smart. You figured out most of this already. By which we mean, “Our client mis-directed the writer.” Which is absolutely true. What we didn’t tell you, however, was that our client had reached out to this writer without telling us, and only informed us after the original press release was written, i.e., a quick “Hey, could you review this before it gets published?” Had we known, from the get-go, that our client was only going to give that writer the Huge Bank article as input, we would have instantly intervened and given him proper direction. That didn’t happen, and so this situation quickly became a fire which required dousing. The go-forward solution? We had to gently admonish our client: “Don’t do that again.” We can certainly appreciate their enthusiasm and excitement at getting some “ink” from Huge Bank, but if we hadn’t intervened, and if they had actually published that original release, it would’ve been a Huge Mistake. Need help “promoting the promotion,” or any other marketing-related challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.  You’ve been handed a creative assignment to execute. Quick: How much input do you need?
Question: Is that even a valid question? You bet it is. If you think this is simply a matter of “Well, it depends on what I receive,” then think again. Creative assignments vary in scope and medium, but they all have one thing in common: Interpretation. Your job, as a creative pro, is to take what is basically un-creative yet factual input, and come up with an enticing, all-new creative spin for it. “Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle.” That kind of assignment. Still, you need to know enough about the product or solution you’re selling—and, even more importantly, the target audience you’re selling it to—before you can begin ideating. Which begs a very important question that you may not have thought about before, because these things get tossed your way all the time, and they’re on deadline, and you just do them, so why would you think about it? But the question is the topic of this article: How much input do you need? Put another way: How much is too much? How much is too little? What, in other words, is the Goldilocks-just-right optimal amount of input for you to nail that creative assignment? Think big (or small) Not-so-irrelevant digression: We’ve noticed that old people invariably pine to be younger. And kids invariably can’t wait to grow up. Which suggests that there must be one magical age that all people yearn to be. We asked a Generation Z’er. She said, without a moment’s hesitation: “Twenty-three.” As we said, a digression. But not wholly off the mark. Your optimum-input dilemma follows a similar logic. An easy way to arrive at the answer is to think in terms of wildly exaggerated extremes, and then carve your way back to the sweet-spot middle. For example: You need to create a two-sided sell sheet. The client input consists of an email that says “Make something exciting about our ABC offering! It’s better than what others offer!" Clearly, way too little. You can see where this is going. But you might not see the profitable takeaway quite so easily. True story: Not long ago, we were assigned a two-sided sell-sheet by a client. The input? They emailed us 100 pages of material. Obviously, this was way too much. Not quite so obviously, it was also an opportunity. A time for leverage When we received this 100 pages of input, we immediately told the client, “That’s too much.” They said, “No, we think it’s fine. Send us a bid for the project.” And so we bid on it, all right. Our bid included the massive amount of time it would take us to pore through all 100 pages of stuff, to cull out what we needed to create two pages. We’re not the greatest mathematicians here at Copel Communications, but even we can tell you that that’s a 50x ratio. This bid was expensive. It had to be. We can’t simply carve out that much time and effort to create what would otherwise be a small, basic assignment, without charging to cover all that extra time. When they saw the bid, the client was taken aback. “Wow,” they said, “that’s more than what we expected.” Now comes the fun part. We were able, at this point, to be generous. “How about we make you a deal?” we offered. “If you can carve the input down to an essential five pages, we’ll knock the price in half.” Get this: They thanked us for that offer. The next day, five pages arrived. And everyone was happy. The golden ratio The lesson here is that you need to speak up, and do so immediately. Don’t be shy. And certainly don’t wait until you’re on Page 32 of the input to go griping to the client that you need more time, more money, or both. But do couch it positively: “I’d like to do this for a lower price!” That will get their attention, every time. It will also condition them, going forward. Here’s another trick: (virtual) Post-It’s. That client probably doesn’t have the time to cull the individual slides from that massive PowerPoint deck, or diagrams from that report, but they can add little “stickies” to point out just the things you need to know... if you ask them to. And we ask. All the time. It’s not impolite. It’s professional. Finally, to address the ingoing question of this article: Just how much input do you need? Well, the answer will depend on the type of assignment and the type of input, but we find that about a three-to-one ratio is nice. That’s for written input. If it’s visual input, the ratio can go much higher—as high as ten-to-one—because it’s easy to look through images quickly and make snap judgments thereon. Need help with that next creative assignment? Contact us. We’d love to help. And we won’t be shy when it comes to helping you cull the input.  So many marketing topics seem straightforward, until you dive into them. This is one of those.
The germ of this story came from a client assignment we were handed recently. Our client was going to be presenting at a prestigious webinar, and wanted us to write a blog article about the event. So the question became: When should this article run? Before the event? After the event? Which would be better? The answer, incidentally, depended on the answers to a few other questions. Think ahead As always, we wanted to know who the audience would be. Again, not so simple! Because there are two audiences at play here: 1) the audience our client would be presenting to, in the webinar, and 2) the audience for the blog article. You can’t assume they’re the same. Indeed, they weren’t. By the way, we’ve been saying “blog article,” because that’s what this client asked us to write. But it could just as easily have been “press release,” “e-blast,” or “social campaign.” They’re all different flavors of the same assignment. So here are the answers we got to the who-the-audiences-are question: 1) The audience at the webinar would be professional peers within an internal-services vertical that our speaker represented, within the client’s business. 2) The audience for the blog post was to be wholly different: Prospective clients of our client’s business—and not other internal-services professionals. In other words, this was a prestige play. Our client was to be showing off their thought leadership to a distinguished audience of professional peers, and they wanted the rest of the world to know that they were thought leaders, top-to-bottom, even in internal-service functions that prospective clients wouldn’t experience firsthand. Follow? Do the two replies above help to answer the “timing” question? Not on their own. But they’re essential input for creating the blog. Who owns who? (Or what?) The next question we asked was: “Who’s hosting this webinar? Is it you? Or someone else?” Answer: “Someone else.” Aha. That’s the big one. Because if our client were hosting this upcoming webinar, the obvious follow-up question is, “Would you like to boost registrations and attendance?” The obvious answer to that would be “Of course.” And then the obvious answer to “When should this get posted?” would be “In advance. Naturally.” But that wasn’t the case here. Some other entity—in this case, an industry trade group—was hosting the webinar. They were doing all the promoting and attendance-building. That was their problem. At the same time, they had a whole slate of featured speakers to promote; our client was just one of them. So our client would get lost in the sauce of the trade group’s promotional efforts. Which is why they wanted their own self-promoting blog. Which is why they turned to us. Again: Follow? So now we had enough information to discuss with our client, and come to a mutual agreement on, the timing. They certainly could have promoted it in advance: “We will be proud to be presenting at the ABC Webinar next month!” That would show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so that’s not bad. Side note: There isn’t “the right” answer to the timing question. It’s more like “the best” answer to the timing question. You need to weigh different factors. Working with the client, we chose to promote this after-the-fact. Because it would still show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so no loss there. We’d have the benefit of final attendance info to bolster our blog (“Over 10,000 attendees from more than 15 countries!” “Keynote speakers included Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both of whom made last-second commitments!” That kind of stuff.) We could quote the rave reviews our client-speaker received. And, unlike the trade group, we had zero vested interest in boosting attendance in advance. See? “Best answer.” Not “the right” answer. Rules of thumb You might not have noticed this, but all the advertising for a big Hollywood movie always appears before the movie opens. The idea is to build as much hype and excitement as possible in order to have the biggest-possible opening weekend. Once the movie opens, the advertising virtually vanishes. You might not have noticed this before, but watch for it next time—even as theaters are shuttered and “openings” become more firmly cemented online. This is Hollywood’s approach. Is it the best approach? That’s the topic of a different blog. Is your opening-weekend box office the most important thing anymore? Highly debatable. Similarly, you’ll see hype about politicians unveiling their latest initiative... after they do it. They generally won’t tell you, in advance, “We’re working on some new thing.” Sure, you could find that info if you dig, but it’s not what they choose to hype. Their reasoning? They want massed glory and constituent approval, all at the same time. Our point here is that there are pre-existing conventions for the timing of different hype-able events, and you can learn, and draw your own conclusions, from how they are similar, or dissimilar, to your situation. Have a promotional-timing issue you’d like to discuss? Contact us. We dive into these thorny weeds with our clients all the time.  Hard to believe that 2020 is almost over. (Good riddance, right?)
What we mean is, it’s time for our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, 1) thanks! and 2) here’s an opportunity to revisit and refresh.
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.  If you’re a creative professional, you’ve constantly got to come up with all-new stuff. That’s why it’s called “creating.” But a little inspiration can go a long way: something which gets you looking, or thinking, about that challenge a little differently.
There are lots of sources of inspiration—beyond your computer screen—that you can use and exploit. Indeed, we have two good posts already written about them: one about drawing from nature (and profiting from it) and another simply entitled, “Creative Inspiration is for the Birds.” This topic—inspiration—is one that never gets old. You’ll encounter stories of its importance going back millennia; think of the phrase “creative muse” (origin of the word “museum”), and you’re invoking ancient Greece. Where we’re going with this is, this is a topic you need to perennially revisit. You’re always going to need, going to benefit from, creative inspiration. And thus it soon devolves into a supply-and-demand dilemma: Where do you go next, when that previous wellspring has run dry? Where do you dig next, when that last vein has been tapped out? Sure, there are lots of obvious choices, but in this article, we’re going to explore some of the un-obvious ones. Child’s play You’ll often hear people talk about channeling their “inner child.” But what if you channel your outer child? This is a lot more concrete than it sounds. “Inner child” is like an exercise in self-hypnosis: you want to transport yourself, mentally, back to another phase in your life and try and re-see the world through those younger, more innocent eyes. And there’s nothing wrong with that approach. It’s admirable. It’s also hard. (We, by the way, wrote a great—and popular—blog on this topic. It’s called “On Self-Hypnosis and Finding ‘The Voice’”. Check it out!) So that’s the tricky mental acrobatics involved in tapping into your inner child. Getting inspiration from your outer child is much easier. There are two ways to do this, with the second being far more pragmatic when you’re on deadline: 1. Watch a real kid. If you have kids, you already have the tools. If you don’t, you can watch other kids at play: at a playground... on basic YouTube searches... whatever. As we’d intimated above, this approach can help, but it’s not time-efficient. You may have a friend tell you a funny thing their kid said yesterday, but it took all day to get that one quote. That’s fine if you’re a parent; it’s impractical if you’re a time-pressed creative pro. Sure, you can “probe,” i.e., ask a kid (whether a toddler or a tween) how they feel about a certain topic. That will accelerate the process. But be prepared to be patient, and do your best to embrace the inevitable tangents and/or tantrums. 2. Look at kids’ things. Here’s the big conceit: Most adults completely isolate themselves from kids’ stuff. Meaning, it’s a trove of new inspiration. Better yet, you’ll find some really great stuff here! Toys. Board games. Stuffed animals. Dolls. The collection is endless. Consider board-books: If you’re unfamiliar with the term, they’re those small, thick, first-ever books for babies, printed on “pages” that are actually thick slabs of cardboard, hence the name. Sure, you can expect a page with a big letter “C” and a picture of a “Cat” on it, but the opportunities far exceed that. There are books out there, for example, which teach kids how to use snaps, Velcro, and zippers... by featuring those real items in the pages of the book itself. They’re tactile, fun, and educational—and boy are they ever inspirational, when you’re trying to come up with a new take on, say, a brochure, UX design, eBook, or interactive website. “But I don’t have kids!” you might say. (If so, that’s a mixed blessing! But we digress.) Not a problem. For all the toys, for example, you don’t need a cluttered playroom or even a visit to the store (although a visit to the store would be second-best). If you’re time- and travel-constrained, simply “shop” for toys on Amazon. Art for art’s sake You may be considered a “commercial artist,” but (as we’ve noted in another cool blog, “What’s the Difference Between ‘Creative Services’ and ‘Art’?”), you’re far more “commercial” than “artist.” To wit: You work for clients. They pay you. You’re on deadline. You need to help them make more money. It’s all quite mercenary, when you contrast it to the real starving-in-the-garret/art-for-art’s-sake artist. Visit a museum. Can’t go in person, whether due to distance, time, or lockdown? Visit online. Paintings and sculpture which were created with no commercial constraints whatsoever can help unlock your brain from threadbare consumer tropes. Pay special attention to modern art. Look at both representational and non-representational. Don’t shun abstract expressionism: you’ll find organic approaches that will jolt you out of your comfort zone. Don’t think that other creatives haven’t tried this approach; and don’t think they came away empty-handed, either. If you’re old enough, think of the repainted school bus from The Partridge Family TV show. The inspiration came not from the production studio, but from the museum. Just check out the works of Piet Mondrian. Experiment One other way to find creative inspiration is to—odd as this might sound--create in a different medium than the one you’re tasked with using. If ever a suggestion were counterintuitive, this is it. But it’s a gem. Surely you’ve heard the stories—probably urban legend—that “starchitect” Frank Gehry would simply crumble paper to inspire designs such as The Walt Disney Concert Hall. Even if it’s not true, it’s valuable. Crumbled paper... iconic edifice. So play with paper. Origami. Paper airplanes. Clay. Paper clips. Packing peanuts. Bubble wrap. Anything lying around. Here’s a famous example which might inspire you. When the designers of the iconic Lexus SC400 sport coupe were trying to envision its fluid lines, they used—wait for it--balloons filled with plaster. Yup. Smooth, streamlined, fluid, organic. They then took photos of these things and stretched the photos. That fluid look made it all the way to the assembly line, and is why that car is the most unique and beautiful vehicle Lexus ever created. Get help We understand “time-constrained.” Sometimes, you just don’t have the time. If that’s the case, don’t despair. Offload. To a trusted resource. Like us. Contact us today and let us help you with that next creative assignment. |