 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. 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.  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!  Great photo by Grok. We recently had a client assignment that went something like this (don’t worry; we’ll tell you how you can profit from this story in just a moment):
We’d helped them write a huge long-form article for their website, touting their experience with a given industry, in a given U.S. state. Thing is, this client of ours—a B2B consultancy—also had similar experience with other industries. And—you guessed it—in other states, too. On the surface, this is a very simple assignment. You want to broaden your reach, and your SEO rankings, for more than one industry, in more than one state. Sound familiar? Read on. Thinking outside the algorithm Granted, the original article was an SEO play. In other words, it went after very specific long-tail keywords that our client knew were attainable, in terms of search domination. They’d called us in to do the writing. The original article—as you’ll recall, for one industry, in one state—was quite specific and detailed. But now there were two challenges, in terms of making “spin-off” articles: 1. Talking about the other industries. 2. Talking about the other states. Oh. And there was a third challenge, which was arguably bigger than the first two: 3. Convincing Google that none of the spin-off articles were, in fact, spin-off articles. So Challenges 1 and 2 were fairly straightforward. To wit:
(Did we do this 49 times? No. We didn’t. Our client had us rank all 50 U.S. states by population, and we went after the biggest 25. Smart, and cost-effective.) So now, armed with these different buckets of data, it came time to write all of the spin-off articles. Sure, we could’ve commanded Word to do a search-and-replace, on the original article, to plug in “Industry B” for “Industry A,” and even “State No. 2” for “State No. 1.” And even though the resulting article would be totally fine in the eyes of an Industry B prospect living in State No. 2, Google would not be amused. So it was time to get more creative. We had to re-order ideas and arguments, move paragraphs, re-title headlines and subheads, and change the phrasing within most sentences… to the point where the spin-off article was materially different from the original, yet still sold, potently, to the proper audience, toiling in the proper industry, while living in the targeted state. To AI or not to AI We know what you’ve been thinking all this time: Why not hand off a basic assignment like this to ChatGPT? Isn’t that, after all, what it excels at? Yes and no. As we’ve discovered, ChatGPT can really help non-writers look better. For actual writers, the opposite is true. And that was the case here. We actually let ChatGPT take the first stab at this assignment. And its results worked in letter, but not in spirit. There were just too many flubs, none of which would be acceptable to this demanding client of ours. Could we fix those flubs ourselves? Absolutely. And we, at first, tried. But we quickly realized that it was actually less work to follow the process we’d described above than to babysit ChatGPT for this. Fast-forward a few weeks, and all the articles were written and illustrated (with the graphic team taking an analogous approach to ours) and posted online. The client was happy, and most important, the effort paid off in the SEO results. So it was a lot of effort, but certainly worth it. Need help with a tricky assignment like this? While we do a lot of big-picture marketing and creative strategy, we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and get into the weeds. Contact us and let’s talk.  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.  Great photo by Designecologist. We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging.
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! Website in the spotlight We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. Starting wide As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages! Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons:
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. Answer: No. Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours.  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.  Great photo by ThisIsEngineering Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building.
We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? Audience first If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. Working backward So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. How did they differ from us? Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. Outline, outline, outline Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this:
Close, close, close Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time.  Great photo by Alan Retratos. Landing new business is exciting. It means new assignments, and a new source of revenue. What’s not to get excited about?
We worked with a client recently on some customer-discovery work, and found, counterintuitively, that almost the exact opposite was true. That was the case for them. It may well be the case for you, too. Let’s explain. Who wants what? As part of our near-religious passion for taking a customer-back approach to everything we do here at Copel Communications, we were helping this client of ours—a niche consultancy—to develop their new website by first determining who they wanted it to reach. So far, so straightforward. Now, we need to clothe the details here in anonymity, but we can still make this story clear enough for you to understand and profit from. Historically, this client of ours had worked with various types of customers, whom we were defining as avatars—or, more colloquially, “putting into buckets.” Among those buckets were the “Go-Getters”: the really aggressive customers who offer high reward… for commensurately high risk and high maintenance. There were the “Tire Kickers.” They weren’t an obvious group, at first; it took a lot of discussion to tease them out. But once we did, we realized that we didn’t want to attract any of these energy vampires to the business. (We have an entire article on this topic, which you’ll enjoy.) The third bucket (are you sensing the Goldilocks vibe here?) was what we ended up calling the "Lovably Boring” cohort. They were exactly that: Steady, meticulous, detailed, risk-averse… yet honest, straightforward, trustworthy, and reliable. Bingo. They automatically became our client’s prime target. Weighing the cost and effort to attract, sign, and service them, vs. the revenue and profit potential vs. the other buckets, it became crystal clear… in hindsight, of course. It took a bunch of modeling and number-crunching to reach this conclusion. But once we got there, it was great. You (may) know the old adage: “Speak to the target. Let the others listen.”That was the case here. (Granted, the “Tire Kickers” were kicked right out of the room.) Catering to the un-exciting You might conclude, somewhat logically, that reaching this “boring” audience would itself be a boring assignment. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve said, taking a customer-back approach makes things not easy, but straightforward. And in the case of our “lovingly boring” target audience, it actually made it fun. Imagine: Climb into the head of that super-cautious prospect. What gets them excited? Things like safety and peace of mind. What freaks them out? Things like risky approaches and high-pressure sales. Aha. From here, it became downright enjoyable to create this safe, Eden-like online oasis for this group. Knowing their personalities, and needs, made it straightforward for us to determine what kind of language to use… what kinds of fonts, colors, background video music, amount of white space… all of it. The lesson here is to really follow that customer-back approach. That customer’s values might not align with your values. But you’re not selling to yourself. You’re selling to them. And what, after all, could be more exciting than converting a boring prospect into a paying customer? Need help with customer-discovery challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alex Knight. From bots to AI, everyone’s in a tizzy about this new technology which threatens to take over the world, eliminating vast swaths of good-paying jobs as it goes. And yes, we did use the word “tizzy.”
Here’s the thing. This is a two-way street. There’s an inherent creative challenge here that no one is talking about. And that’s making the positive case for this technology, which—spoiler alert—often saves jobs, rather than displacing them. We know. We toil in these trenches quite often. So what’s this all about? Let’s take a second to discuss these supposedly-evil technologies before we weigh in on how to portray them, positively, from a creative standpoint. Broadly, the two we’ll discuss here are robotic process automation, or RPA; and artificial intelligence, or AI. Quickly and purposely over-simplified:
Honestly: Does any of that make you shake in your shoes? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’re not any more threatened by these than we are by a word processor. They’re just tools. Powerful tools. And that’s why they’re making such a big splash nowadays. They’re new. So there’s a fear-of-the-unknown factor at work. The good news We have a client that custom-builds lots of AI-powered bots. And we help to promote them in various media. So the age-old creative challenge goes something like this: How do you “portray” a bot that you’d like to sell, knowing that it’s actually an evil job-killer? This would have you asking yourself things like: “Should we even portray it at all?” and “Do we even mention this evil technology?” Well, we’d spoiled this above, and so we’ll dive in here. This technology, this tool, is hardly evil. And in the majority of the use-cases that we’re tasked with promoting, they’re a downright godsend to the people who “work side-by-side” with them. How is that? Imagine you’re a worker. Sitting at your computer all day. Doing tons and tons of drudge work, like creating reports using data from one system, and manipulating it in another and doing all this stuff, over and over, because none of the systems talk to each other and, importantly, all this drudge work is eating up the time you’d rather be devoting to the more important and fulfilling parts of your job, such as serving clients or customers or developing new solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if you could simply flip a switch, and all of the work, in your day, that you hate-hate-hate, magically goes away? That’s what happens. You’ll never see this in the news, because it isn’t scary, and the media’s job is to try and scare you in order to keep you clicking. But workers who get bots not only love them; they actually show them off to their co-workers, who each want their own. Talk about viral. The creative challenge that solves itself All of the above discussion was not a digression. To the contrary: It was the setup for solving the initial creative challenge. The answer, as you can now see, is to address this one head-on: In other words, feel free to depict this technology as friendly, as an assistant, a life-changing development like the microwave oven or the cell phone. Thus, we routinely work on marketing materials which, yes, personify and anthropomorphize RPA bots. And they’re all portrayed as eager, friendly helpers. Incidentally, this entire tale is a great example of taking a customer-back approach to a creative challenge. Once you know what the end customer (in this case, the worker who could benefit from the addition of an AI-powered bot) needs, the way of expressing the solution, creatively, becomes not easy… but straightforward. Need help with challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you. |