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. 

​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! 

​You may know—if you don’t, here it comes—that we’ve been writing these blogs, twice a month, for more than ten years, here at Copel Communications. 
 
How do we always have something new to talk about? 
 
More important for you and your business: How can you always have something new to talk about? 
 
And when we say “talk about,” we’re, well, talking about things like blog entries. Videos. Social posts. Stuff that keeps you out there, in the eyes of your target audience, as a thought leader. 
 
Interesting note: This becomes all the more challenging in the age of generative AI. How can you possibly stand out amid the overwhelming tsunami of auto-generated material? 
 
Fast forward
 
We recently gave a presentation on this exact topic. We won’t dive into the details here, but AI—tools like ChatGPT—are amazing at effectively ingesting and then memorizing (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) the entire internet. Just as easily, they can spit out (first half of previous metaphor) content at will, using said input. 
 
But they have one massive limitation that you don’t. It’s why their “intelligence” is artificial, and yours is quite real. 
 
We’ll circle back to their weakness—and your strength—in just a second. But first, let’s just talk about the mundane challenge of populating your marketing editorial calendar. 
 
You do have a marketing editorial calendar, don’t you? 
 
Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Lots of companies lack them. But it’s never too late to start. 
 
Think of it this way: Why break into a flop sweat every time you need to push out new material on a pre-determined cadence? If that’s an hour of stress, say, twice a month, why not eliminate it?
 
The solution is easy: Dedicate one big chunk of time, typically around year-end, to simply jot down a list of every month of the year, and then brainstorm the topic you’ll develop content for, for each month. It’s hard, but it’s a one-shot effort, and you’ll end up with a year’s worth of topics. 
 
Yes, it’s hard. But there’s a neat trick to it, as the headline of this article has not-so-subtly implied. 
 
Back to that ChatGPT weakness. 
 
Hindsight is overrated
 
ChatGPT seems brilliant because it can memorize the entire internet. That’s some feat. But here’s a feat you accomplish every day, which it can’t do: 
 
You look forward.
 
The internet is a repository of stuff from the past.
 
If you can spot trends among your clients, guess what? You’re already smarter than ChatGPT.
 
This dovetails with our populate-the-calendar challenge rather nicely. 
 
While you may be doing this at year-end (or right now, no one cares), you’ll be using information that ChatGPT has zero access to: Your thoughts, and your files. 
 
So here—finally!—is the trick we’d teased at the outset: 
 
Looking for topics for marketing material for your business? Look no further than your recent invoices.
 
Yep. You read right. Your invoices are magic fodder for this assignment. 
 
Look at any given one. It shows how you earned your keep, and how you delivered unique value, for any given client. And therein lies a story. Think back on what you’d billed for. There was, invariably, a challenge to solve. And you solved it. (And your client was happy to pay you for that expertise.) 
 
That’s a story. It’s a cool story. It’s a story that showcases your uniqueness and thought leadership. It’s also a story that ChatGPT couldn’t write in a million years. 
 
Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach. We build our editorial blog-post calendar, and stick to it. And we routinely open up our own billing files for cool stories that we can anonymize and share with you for handy tips and lessons learned. 
 
Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

​We’ve worked in marketing long enough to know our bounds. Note the careful phrasing of the name of this article: “Goofy gadgets to help you be more productive.” We never said “guaranteed to make you more productive.” 
 
That said, let’s dive into the challenge, and how it affects you in your daily work life, and, of course, all the neat stuff. 
 
Why is this needed?
 
That’s a great question. Let’s consider the answer before we move on. 
 
Put it this way: You wouldn’t need any of the stuff we’re about to describe—and we wouldn’t need to write this article about it—if you, and we, were all naturally super productive and creative, all day long, without any dips in our performance, energy, or creativity levels. 
 
Of course we aren’t. We’re human. 
 
(Now there is an entire sub-topic of this discussion, which we’ve pet-named the “Best Energy Theory,” revolving around the intentional pairing of your daily peak energy periods to the daily tasks which are hardest to perform, and vice versa, but that goes beyond the scope of this article. Reach out to us if you’d like us to write an article devoted solely to that topic.) 
 
So. There are little gadgets, toys, food, furniture, you name it, which can help you get through the day, and have more/better work to show for it, too. Here, we’ll rattle through some oddball (and not-so-oddball) items from our daily inventory here at Copel Communications. 
 
Some of these may overlap stuff that you already use. Some, we hope, will be new and useful to you. 
 
And of course this is a two-way street. We would love to hear about the stuff you use, that’s novel to us. Reach out or simply post a comment so everyone gets edified equally. 
 
Paging Dr. Maslow
 
Let’s start with the bottom of the Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. If you’re in the knowledge-work biz, you’re sitting at a desk for the bulk of your day. 
 
Don’t go hungry. In the movie business, this is what’s known as “craft service”: a setup of all kinds of goodies (think of a mini convenience store) with sweet and salty snacks, bottled water, you name it. 
 
Pick fun stuff. Keep it in arm’s reach. Think of it as a “caloric heads-up display”: You can keep working, keep reading, keep typing, etc., without so much as taking your eyes off the screen, and not get distracted by hunger. 
 
Or thirst. And of course, yes, there’s caffeine. As in, duh. You didn’t turn to this article to learn about that.
 
Crank up the comfort
 
Where are you sitting, right now? We don’t mean “in your office.” We mean, “what kind of chair?” Again, you want to be comfortable. You want to want to sit in that awesome chair—and only get to do so if you’ll be getting work done while sitting in it. 
 
Some easy tricks: You can (we did) dress up an old leather office chair with a plush sheepskin cover, like the airline pilots use. So it’s never too cold in winter nor too hot in summer. And you can (we did) add a plug-in seat heater, too, for those chilly mornings. Again, you want to love sitting there, so you can be totally relaxed and focused on the work at hand. Put another way: We once heard an expert on airline seating say (and we love this quote): “Comfort is the absence of discomfort.” Brilliant, no? 
 
Dial down the stress
 
Stress, at work, is unavoidable. But you can fight back. We’ve got a whole slew of spring-loaded and sponge-rubber finger squeezers. Stress balls. A neck/shoulder heater. Numerous massaging gadgets, including a lumbar massager and even a pneumatic/electronic eye massager. (As you might’ve guessed, you can’t work while wearing that eye massager; it blocks your vision. But sometimes a ten-minute session helps to regain your focus.) 
 
Reduce the distractions
 
As we sit here typing this, our office window is behind us. Would be nice to peek outside and see how the weather is looking, right? That’s why we added a remote-sensing weather station to our desk. We can see the outside temperature and humidity trends at a glance, and return to our real work, having scratched that itch. 
 
Similarly, we just have some neat artwork in our office to look at and be inspired by: Posters, drawings, cards, miniature sculptures, models. They provide just the right amount of eye candy to keep us sated. 
 
Don’t work in a bare office. Dress it to your liking. Make it a happy space. You’ll be more productive. 
 
Allow for goofiness
 
We participate in more than our share of Zoom calls these days. And sometimes these are flat-out brainstorming sessions, which actually require a degree of hair-let-down goofiness not just from us, but from the other participants on the calls. To that end, we’re fans of all the baked-in video effects that now come with the Mac operating system that let us, on occasion, toss confetti or light fireworks during a meeting. 
 
Heck, we even have a little rubber hand puppet of a great white shark which we keep handy. We can’t tell you how many times he’s bombed into Zoom meetings, often as “our attorney,” to add his opinion. 
 
Have the meetings gone better? More productively? You bet they have. 
 
What are your favorite tricks and tips? Contact us. We’d love to learn them. 

​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: 

• Quick personal background. Knowing we were unique, among this crowd, to have worked in creative services, we were able to do some cool “show and tell” with pencil sketches, layouts, and stories. 

 

• Add credibility. You can—and should—do this, too. Don’t be obnoxious, and don’t belabor it, but don’t miss this opportunity. For example, we’ve served as a judge of the Clio Awards. Even from the beginning, our earliest clients included big names such as Warner Bros. and Taco Bell. 

 

• Who we serve. This, you shouldn’t be shocked, was custom-tailored to the audience and their clientele, too. The point here isn’t to be academic. It’s to build business. 

 

• Teaser on how we work. We have a unique—and, frankly, cool—methodology here at Copel Communications. So we quickly walked through this, as if each audience member were a new client of ours. We went slow. Wanted each cool point to sink in. Get them excited about the process and its possibilities for them.

 

• A referral “in.” Since we were fishing for referrals here, we prepared a list of “Questions you can ask your clients,” the answers to which would likely steer them our way. 

 

• Q&A. Given our six-minute total, we allotted about 2.5 minutes to this—with the obvious invitation for subsequent one-on-one’s with whomever wanted/needed more time. 

 
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. 

​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! 

​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: 

• RPA is like a macro for your computer, which spans multiple applications. It can point and click and copy and paste and type and all that. 

 

• AI adds a level of decision-making power that goes beyond basic “if/then” scenarios. 

 
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. 

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. 

​Boy is this ever a “modern problems” topic. As a former agency creative director, we’re used to, well, directing creative people. 
 
But nowadays, very often, you can’t. 
 
You can’t speak to them. You can’t see them. And yet you need to direct, and coach, and motivate them, to do their best work. 
 
What gives? 
 
The gig economy cometh
 
Back in the day, we’d walk around the bull pen and engage with our artists at their drawing boards (yikes!) and computers. We’d go to recording studios and direct voiceover talent and jingle artists. We’d direct photographers on photo shoots, videographers on video shoots, and so on. Very straightforward. 
 
Enter Upwork. And Fiverr. And their ilk. The vaunted “Gig Economy,” wherein people can work, and make money, from anywhere. 
 
We’ve weighed in on this topic before. It’s a double-edged blade, which democratizes the availability of talent purveyors to buyers, while also (often) encouraging a race-to-the-bottom mentality when it comes to pricing and (often) quality. 
 
We won’t get into that here. What we will get into is the way that these platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr, force you to work. They expressly forbid the talent on their platforms from engaging with the people who hire them… outside of the limited messaging capabilities of the platform itself. 
 
Think about that. We’ve had some tricky video assignments, for example, which we needed to dole out to qualified editors. The requirements for success were nuanced. Know the best way to communicate this to the editor? How about a phone call? Or better yet, Zoom? 
 
Nope. Not allowed by Upwork. Or Fiverr. (To the point where they’ll banish these workers from their platforms if they’re caught engaging in such egregious violations of their terms and conditions. The platforms are effectively dangling their livelihoods on a string.) 
 
So what do we do? How do we surmount these challenges? Is it possible to make lemonade from such tainted fruit? 
 
The pen is mightier than the restraint
 
There’s really only one tool at your disposal if you’re looking to get great work out of these gig-economy vendors. And that’s the written word.
 
Imagine that rousing speech and directions you’d planned (or hoped) to give that vendor in person. Write it down. Verbatim. It’s your only/best choice. 
 
Sure, you can, and should, list all the mandatories in the project (“The logo must stay on screen for at least four seconds,” etc.). But you need to put the “carrots” in there, too. We’ve ended some lengthy directions with exhortations such as, “If this one comes out great, there will be others in this series. So impress us!” You’re not some HAL-like computer spitting out commands. You’re a person, doing your best to connect to that vendor on the other side of the gig-platform wall. Be nice. Make friends. 
 
And don’t be surprised if the street isn’t exactly two-way. You may spend, say, an hour writing up an incredible input package. And you may get in return something as succinct as “ok got it thx.” 
 
Don’t be offended. Just roll with it. You don’t need, say, that graphic artist to spend an hour or two on a beautifully written reply; rather, you want them to devote their time to making beautiful graphics, following your instructions in both letter and spirit. 
 
Need help getting the best out of a hybrid team like this? Contact us. We do this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too! 

​ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? 
 
Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. 
 
Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. 
 
Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so.
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
What it is… and isn’t
 
When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? 
 
No. 
 
We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. 
 
Ignorance is what breeds fear. 
 
Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power.
 
We’ll take the latter any day of the week. 
 
ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. 
 
You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. 
 
ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. 
 
All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative?
 
Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? 
 
Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. 
 
It’s a tool.
 
We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. 
 
See? You’re laughing. 
 
Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do.  
 
So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. 
 
Some caveats
 
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. 
 
It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. 
 
And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) 
 
The good stuff
 
Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT.
 
We do this for many reasons: 

1. We’re honest. 
2. It provides pricing transparency. We never charge for querying ChatGPT. 
3. It provides us with plausible deniability: “Here’s what ChatGPT spat out; don’t be surprised if you find garbage here.” 

​So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) 
 
Some examples: 

• A client of ours was slated to attend a trade show. They wanted to come up with promotional ideas for getting contact information from people (prospective clients) who would visit their booth. Clearly, this is an exercise that’s been performed by countless others, countless times. Why reinvent the wheel? We asked ChatGPT. It spat out about 20 suggestions; our client actually used about two or three. We consider that excellent. 

 

• Another client of ours was looking for provocative discussion-starters to post on social media, centered around a certain business issue. We asked ChatGPT. Sure enough, others had thought of the same stuff before; ChatGPT was able to effectively organize it for us in a matter of seconds. 

 
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. 
 
So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. 
 
Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!