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Read our best-practice tips and advice

Our top posts for creatives from 2025

12/17/2025

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Female creative professional at her deskGreat photo by Grok.
​Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser? 
 
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. 
 
Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy! 

  • How to keep your business videos on the rails—and on budget.  There’s a technique, developed in Hollywood, which will actually make the production of your B2B videos go faster, easier, and cheaper. Check it out. 
 
  • What are website “pilot pages”? And why should you use them? Be efficient. Be frugal. Adopt best practice. And learn just what the heck “pilot pages” are, and why they’re an essential step in your next website or site re-brand. 
 
  • Where do you draw the line, literally, with creative direction? When should you purposely create low-quality input and/or downplay the quality of the input itself? This is a fine line to walk, both literally and figuratively—but it can yield stellar results from other creatives who work for you. 
 
  • How do you get good creative input from non-creative types? If for no other reason, click on this article to see the awesome AI-generated “nerd” we created for its illustration! LOL! Seriously, though: Great tips in this article, too. 
 
  • When will real intelligence serve you better than the artificial kind? If AI makes things easy, isn’t it better for challenges like marketing taglines? Well… no. Read a true (anonymized) client story here, and grab some useful takeaways for your business, too. 
 
  • How can you update your brand, yet keep it familiar? It’s a paradoxical challenge: Update your brand, keep it from going stale, yet keep it familiar, too. But how? Get the guidelines and guardrails you need, right here. 
 
  • One blog is worse than none. Really! Even if you’re not a marketing guru, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. Ready to cringe? Read this true story about a supposed marketing guru who did just that! Yikes! 
 
  • The biggest shifts in book publishing since Gutenberg. You want your exciting new manuscript to be picked up by one of those famous New York publishing houses… or do you? You might be quite shocked to learn about the new reality of book publishing. Get it, quickly, right here. 
 
  • We made a Gantt chart in Word! (And so can you.) Talk about counterintuitive: Here’s a way to make a Gantt chart not only in Word… but in reverse! Trust us: This will make you look like a hero to your client or boss. 
 
  • How to live with a ghost (writer). There is a very specific way to structure your relationship with the ghost writer or copy-editor you choose to develop your thought-leading book. But what is it? You might be pleasantly surprised to find out what it is. So find out here. 
 
  • What we’re thankful for, 2025 edition. It’s become an annual tradition here at Copel Communications, dating back over a decade. And we haven’t run out of things—or more importantly, people—to thank. Sit back and enjoy this one; it will inspire you to appreciate others in your life, even more. 
 
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! 

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What we’re thankful for, 2025 edition

11/18/2025

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Bountiful Thanksgiving dinner table with prominent roast turkeyGreat 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: 

  • We’ve got a great graphic artist we’ve worked with for years. She turns our crappy thumbnail sketches into masterpieces. And she’s simply a nice person to work with. 
 
  • We’ve got a designer who’s also a video editor we work with, at one of our clients. This person exhibits a degree of can-do attitude and positive professionalism that’s at once inspiring and humbling. Bonus: When the higher-ups at that same client get delayed on, say, providing us input for a project, this one person transforms into the world’s most polite yet effective squeaky wheel on our behalf. Bonus-bonus: This is also one of the nicest people we’ve ever met. 
 
  • There’s a video editor out there whom we’ve never even spoken to, but boy is he great. Why haven’t we spoken to him? It’s because he resides behind the wall of one of the major gig platforms, so we have to effectively email him our input and feedback. (See our article about how you can navigate these sticky wickets yourself.) The talent from this person is blinding. Even better: He’s got great taste. We can describe stuff in broad strokes, and he translates it into just the right music cut, just the right amount of white space in a title, just the right kind of transition or effect. We hope, someday, to talk to this special person! 
 
  • There’s a voice-over artist we’ve been using for years who is flat-out awesome. Here’s proof: Every time we get one of his reads (via an intermediary; it’s complicated), we always respond, not with “Oh, here are the flubs to fix,” but rather, “Wow is this guy ever great.” Double bonus: Both his turnaround times and his pricing are amazing. 
 
  • We’ve got a web designer who is so smart and professional, that they make us raise our game when it comes to providing input and/or working with a mutual client. And the deliverables—the websites—are just gorgeous.
 
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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How can you update your brand, yet keep it familiar?

6/17/2025

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1950s woman in kitchen holding box of detergentGreat 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! 

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Where do you draw the line, literally, with creative direction?

3/18/2025

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Woman holding a pencil sketch of a book cover layout, entitled 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. 

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What are website “pilot pages”? And why should you use them?

2/18/2025

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Montage of multiple photos on a desktop computer and phone in a web-designer settingGreat 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:

  • Deeper dive customer discovery. Through a series of structured strategy sessions, we really dived into the new prospects they were targeting. What are their pain points? What are they doing now? What are their best alternative options, besides out client? What might “trigger” them to make a switch? Who are the secondary targets we needn’t address directly, but wouldn’t mind attracting? Who are the “tire kickers” we want to avoid engaging with? (We have a great article on that topic, by the way.) 
 
  • Narrative creative concepts. Once we had nailed down the customer persona (sometimes called the “avatar” or ICP for Ideal Customer Profile), we worked up a number of written descriptions of what the new website would look and feel like. These “narrative creative concepts” are very time- and cost-efficient. They describe the theme, tone, and feel of a proposed new site’s treatment, talking about the imagery, copy, amount of white space, navigation, and so on. And we provided several to choose from, each with a slightly different creative approach. The client then picked their favorite. 
 
  • Website wireframe. We then wrote this up, outline-style, and reviewed it with the client—moving, re-prioritizing, and adding and cutting as needed, until we had a nice tight version. (Want to learn more about how we do this—and you can, too? We’ve got a nice article you can check out.) 
 
  • Pilot pages. No, we’re not gonna describe them here in this little bullet. These warrant their own subhead. 
 
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages!
 
Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons: 

  • One: It’s essential to steer them in the right direction for what they will undertake. Not “kinda/sorta the right direction.” And that’s because of Reason Two: 
 
  • Two: That’s a lot of people, working hard. It ain’t cheap. We’re frugal with our customers’ marketing spend here at Copel Communications. 
 
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. 

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How to bring your website wireframe to life

6/18/2024

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Open notebook showing website design sketch with pen on top.Great photo by picjumbo.com
We recently worked on a project, for an ad agency, in which they gave us a 22-page PDF wireframe of a new, in-progress website for a client of theirs. Sometimes we create website wireframes for our clients; other times, like this, we’re tasked with helping to populate others' wireframes. 
 
While we could simply tell you about what we did for this client, we want to broaden this article to make it more useful for you. A website—your website—is a big deal. It’s your face to the internet world. You want to get it right. 
 
Question everything
 
When we create wireframes for our own clients, we create them as easy-to-follow Word docs, written in outline form. We have a nice article on how you can easily make one of those, too; be sure to check it out here.
 
When we create wireframes for our clients, we always take a customer-back approach: Who is the website trying to reach? What are their needs? What do we want them to do, i.e., what is the call-to-action? More often than not, for our clients who happen to be consultants, the call-to-action or CTA is “book a demo.” 
 
So all of this will be well thought-out. You need to think this out, in detail, before you craft your wireframe. 
 
We can’t assume that everyone is so diligent. 
 
Fortunately, our ad-agency client, in this story, was. That said, we still had questions. Poring through the 22 pages of boxes and arrows and dashed lines, we wanted to know what their client was trying to accomplish, who their audiences were, the tone they wanted to convey, and what the CTA was for each audience. 
 
Nicely, they’d created what we’d call a “three-door” website. Their client serves three different audiences, and so there was a clickable tile (“door”) for each, right on the home page. 
 
As it turns out, these three audiences were largely different, but still had some traits—and needs—in common. This helped us to develop a unified tone for the overall business, while still addressing the needs of each target audience. 
 
Now think of your website and its audiences: Of course they’re different. But how are they similar? What might they have in common? Asking these kinds of questions can help you elevate the entire site and make it more effective. 
 
The brain dump
 
Our ad-agency client didn’t want the typical “fill in the spaces” type of web-writing project from us. Rather, they wanted us to brainstorm lots of ideas for each high-level section of the site, so they could pick, choose, and mix-and-match at their will. 
 
This was, for us, fun. It was a headline and body-copy free-thought zone, and we came up with tons of stuff for them… which we then selectively edited down, so that they’d actually get 100-percent usable stuff to choose from. 
 
In the end, we delivered a 34-page document, consisting primarily of headlines, subheads, and intro body-copy teasers. Fast-forward to the conclusion of this site’s gestation, and we were happy to see lots of our stuff employed in the finished product. 
 
So the takeaway is that there’s more than one way to do this. Our ad-agency client gave us a super-structured document, but then told us to freewheel when we got it. Conversely, we’ve worked on other website projects where there are actual slugs of approved copy baked right into the wireframe itself, and we’ll be given very strict input to create very strict output. We can work either way. 
 
Have a website challenge on your plate? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! 

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How to direct creatives you’re not allowed to talk to

2/20/2024

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Stressed woman whose mouth is gagged shut.Great photo by Cottonbro Studio.
​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! 

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Our top articles for creatives from 2023

12/18/2023

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Thoughtful woman writing in notebook with quill pen.Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio.
​It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. 
 
This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy! 

  • Deep geek for creative. That client wants you to jam up a pretty headline of yours with tons of SEO verbiage… and they’re right? Grab some good lessons learned, while you satisfy your clients and your creative instincts. It’s all here. 
 
  • How to fall (back) in love with creative work. We all burn out at times. This article, posted on Valentine’s Day, gives you plenty of ways to re-kindle that spark. So you can get back to work again… and love doing it. Again. 
 
  • Why should you avoid creative choices that you like? Provocative! Counterintuitive! And yet, client-pleasing and business-building, too. We won’t give you any spoilers here. Just click, read, learn, and enjoy. 
 
  • How to get better creative out of your creative people. This one went viral, with thousands of impressions, reads, likes, and comments on social media. Must’ve touched a nerve! Regardless, it’s chock full of helpful pointers. Check it out. 
 
  • How to create an (easy) wireframe for your website. Why do some agencies insist on making these simple exercises so needlessly complicated? If you can’t guess the jaded answer already, you’ll find it here. Along with plenty of tips and tricks for knocking out a fast, effective blueprint for your next website. 
 
  • How to get better voiceovers from your V.O. artist. How do you “direct without directing”? What does that even mean? And how will it help you to produce better content? Learn that, and more, in this truly helpful article.
 
  • Why our clients hate “production” blogs. First off, what is a “production blog”? Why do our clients hate them? Would yours? Blogging is still a reliable business-driver, so be sure you do it right. Regardless of your experience level, get the pointers you need here. 
 
  • How do you (or should you) sell to people when they’re down? This is a sensitive subject. And the article is based on a recent experience with a client of ours. You might be surprised how universal this topic it is—and how many applications it has to your day-to-day workload. Check it out. 
 
  • How to stay organized without reading. Talk about a go-to article for creatives! You may have figured out some of the tricks we mention here, but certainly not all of them. This is a great quick-read article that you’ll profit from for years. Enjoy! 
 
  • Taking Sides: Word vs. Google Docs (and others). Now that all of the big platforms have rolled out real-time collaborative working capabilities, how do you take advantage of them? Bigger question: Or should you?? We're not afraid to step on lots of toes. This one is written for you, not for some behemoth software vendor. 
 
  • What we’re thankful for this year. From creature comforts to cutting-edge tech, there’s a lot to be thankful for, as called out in this Thanksgiving-themed article. Can you guess which one we’d saved for last? 
 
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! 
 
Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know!  

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How to create commanding space for your brand

8/1/2023

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PictureGreat photo by Karolina Grabowska
​You’ll like this story. It’s useful. 
 
Recently we were working with a client to help them strategize the new branding for their business. Granted, we need to purposely “fuzz-ify” the details here, so for the purposes of this story, let’s make two broad points: 
 
1) The new branding was for a B2B service-based business. (Feel familiar to you?) 
 
2) The name was something like “Rocket-Speed Consulting.” That’s totally made up, and not the name, but again, it will help us tell this story to you. 
 
This client had already created some “1.0” branding which they shared with us. As you can likely imagine from what we’d just described, the logo featured a picture of a rocket ship. And every single offering from this company was named something like “Flight Speed Service,” or “Supersonic Payload Power,” or “Blast-Off Engagement.” 
 
What’s wrong with that, you might ask? 
 
To mix metaphors (one of our dubious skills here at Copel Communications), this got our Spidey Sense tingling to the point where we had a Vietnam flashback. 
 
A higher power
 
Ages ago, there was a car company called Saturn. You might not remember it. It was actually owned and launched by General Motors, with much fanfare. It was a really innovative brand, and car, and gained a loyal following for quite some time. For example, they introduced the concept of no-haggle pricing. Their car doors weren’t stamped sheet metal, but rather plastic: One of their TV commercials showed a supermarket shopping cart smacking into the side of a parked Saturn, only to bounce off, with the dented door of the car magically popping back into shape without so much as a scratch.
 
They had a pretty logo, too. It was a square, with a minimalist illustration of the planet Saturn, with its signature rings, cropped within the square. Red and white. With the name “Saturn” underneath. Very nicely executed. 
 
So what’s this have to do with Spiderman? And Vietnam? 
 
Our Spidey Sense tingled, because there was something about all this “Rocket-Speed” 1.0 branding that didn’t feel quite right. And we experienced a Vietnam flashback, because this reminded of us one day, back in the day, when we toiled at an ad agency in New York. 
 
Inner vs. outer space
 
That ad agency did a lot of “automotive retail advertising,” which is code for “screaming car dealership ads.” One day, we were working on a print ad for a Saturn dealership (see? it’s coming full-circle), and consulted the manufacturer’s ad planner to help us. 
 
Uh-oh. Jargon alert. What’s an “ad planner”? 
 
Back in the day, these would be printed books. Full of artwork and logos you could use in dealership ads, along with copious guidelines detailing what you could and couldn’t do in those ads. 
 
Today, these don’t exist as printed books, any more than Saturn exists as a car company. 
 
But branding guidelines live on. They’re important. They’re huge. 
 
Anyway, there was one page in this Saturn ad planner which showed what you could and couldn’t do in any ads. And it said, quite plainly: 
 
“No stars or planets.”
 
Huh? 
 
Now, a typical guideline for ads like these will dictate that you use their logo, as a measuring stick, and be required to allow a certain number of logo-widths around it, as white space, to elevate it, to prevent clutter. To protect the brand. That’s common. And it was the case for Saturn, too.
 
But no stars? No planets? 
 
Just as Saturn didn’t want to muddy up their branding with visual elements impinging upon the logo’s “breathing space” on a page (or screen), they also didn’t want to muddy up the powerful feelings that are implicit in the name “Saturn” by calling attention to it as a planet in the solar system.
 
Think about that. That’s brilliant. 
 
“Saturn” means something to you. It’s cool. It’s beautiful. It’s hinted at in the logo. 
 
But not one of their ads mentions planets or stars. It’s forbidden. It would cheapen the brand. 
 
Can you think of another brand that does this today? 
 
Hint: Their logo also looks like a familiar object. Yet they make no reference to that type of object in any of their advertising. 
 
You guessed it. Apple. 
 
Their logo looks like an apple. Replete with a bite taken out of it. (Legend has it that the “bite” was added because without it, the original looked too much like a cherry.) But you’ll never see any mention of “fruit” or “juice” or “trees” in any of their advertising. Same reason. 
 
(The closest they came to that was naming the Macintosh, back in 1984, which is an intentional misspelling of the McIntosh variety of apple. But as you know, it’s only ever called a “Mac” these days.) 
 
Helping our client
 
Fresh from our Vietnam flashback (which should give you a hint of what those New York days were like), we were able to tell this story, and make this suggestion, to our client: 
 
Keep the “Rocket Ship” name. 
 
But nix every other “rocket” reference in the sub-branding. Protect the brand. Elevate it. Don’t cheapen it. 
 
This client of ours is very smart. They got it immediately. And they implemented it, too. Today, their branding is very clean, smart, and dare we say, Apple-like. 
 
Need help with a branding challenge for your business? This story, and lesson, are just one small sliver of the type of support we offer. Contact us today to learn more. We’d love to hear from you. 

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Steal from yourself to build your brand

5/1/2023

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PictureGreat photo by Polina Tankilevitch
​Let’s dive right into this. It’s based on a disheartening episode we recently experienced with a client. 
 
Here’s the story: We’d been working, for months, with this client, to develop their new brand persona, by taking a meticulous customer-back approach to their business. 
 
And by “customer-back,” we mean, “starting with the customer—who they are, what they need—and then working back into all of the messaging and, indeed, offerings.” 
 
Done right, this is a powerful process. With this client, we did it right. We were developing some killer insights that would position our client head-and-shoulders above all their competitors. 
 
This positioning, then, informed the structure and content of the new website we were creating for them. 
 
(“Disheartening”? Stay with us.) 
 
So. We did the deep-dive customer-discovery work with them. We developed the new brand persona. We developed the strategy, and then the wireframe (“outline”) for the website. All of these were approved by the client. 
 
Then, using the approved wireframe, we wrote all the pages of the website for them. These, too, were heartily approved by the client. 
 
Everything was going swimmingly. 
 
Cart? Horse? Huh?
 
Then, one day, the client surprised us by sending us a brochure to review. 
 
This was certainly a surprise: “brochure” hadn’t been discussed before. But that’s fine. We’re not parochial. We can go with the flow. If clients want to take the initiative and bolster their marketing, we’re all for it. 
 
Until we saw this brochure. 
 
Mind you, it was finished. Outlined, written, and laid out. The client told us they wanted to send it out, en masse, and wanted our quick review/sign-off before it went. 
 
Holy @#$#@$. 
 
Our first reaction was Who is this brochure for?? Yep, it was that far off of everything that had been previously, and laboriously, developed... and then approved.
 
Yikes. 
 
There was not a sentence, not an image, not a pixel in this thing that was on-brand or on-message. It told a different, and confusing story. The imagery would have been off-putting to the specific target audiences we had worked so hard to define. The structure was confusing. The layout was amateurish: like a mediocre student project. There was no call-to-action.  It was, in short, a train wreck. 
 
Tough love
 
Now, we’ve seen lots of mediocre, and downright bad, marketing materials in our time. So along that continuum, this one was hardly a shocker or a standout. 
 
But what did make it so extraordinary was the way in which it simply disregarded all of the painstaking, groundbreaking work that had preceded it. Not only would it turn off the very people it was supposed to turn on, it—most importantly—squandered all of the effort that went into the main branding and site-building. 
 
We don’t enjoy giving tough love here at Copel Communications, but we also don’t shy away from it when it’s required. Here, it was required. It was not fun to tell this client that, while we appreciated all of the effort that clearly went into this thing, it would do more harm than good, and should simply be shelved. 
 
Ouch. 
 
So now you know the “disheartening” part of this article. But what about the “Steal from yourself” headline? 
 
Play it on the cheap
 
You probably figured it out for yourself already. Between the prior branding, and especially the website and its already-written pages, this client already had everything they needed to quickly create a killer brochure, practically for free.
 
It was the same messaging. In just a slightly different format. Indeed, it’s even easier: You don’t know how a visitor is going to poke around the different pages of your website. But they’ll start reading that brochure from the front cover, and turn through it, page-by-page, in order, until they reach the end. So it’s very straightforward to populate the thing, especially when you have all of the content and images already on hand. They’re not only polished and powerful. They’re paid for.
 
And thus the “steal, steal, steal” advice we have to offer here: 
 
Steal from every great marketing piece you have, to create other great marketing pieces. 
 
Fine. We’ll be polite. We can say “leverage,” if you like. 
 
Fact is, too many clients get so caught up in their own marketing materials that they feel compelled to create something new every single time, when reality dictates the exact opposite: Never flatter yourself into thinking that some prospect has not only read, but memorized your entire website, and then will be put off, or offended, when they review your brochure which includes, effectively, the exact same content. 
 
So our client’s mistake here wasn’t uncommon. This was the trap they fell into. They just fell a lot harder than most. Their biggest mistake: Opting to “surprise us” while they worked on this thing—from ideation through completion—in the background. Boy, could we ever have nipped this in the bud—and saved them a ton of headaches, aggravation, time, and most especially money—in the process. 
 
Use web content for brochures. Leverage brochures for social ads. Use print copy for radio. Sales-sheet images for case studies. Video-script voiceover text for emails. It just goes on and on. Steal, steal, steal.
 
One other way to look at this: If you do the opposite, you diminish your brand. You’ve got all these disparate looks and messages, and no target will ever connect those dots. But when it’s all unified and coordinated—which is actually easier, and less effort—your brand appears huge, unavoidable, and inevitable. 
 
Need help with branding challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

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