 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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 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 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!  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!  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!
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!  Great 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.  Great 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!  Great photo by Brett Sayles Whether you’re a creative professional, have creatives under you, or simply need to hire other creatives, you face a common challenge: You want to get the most creative bang for your buck.
Or your client’s buck. Same thing, here. This is easier said than done. Creative professionals know what they’re doing; that’s how they’ve managed to carve out a career in professional services. So shouldn’t you simply trust them to do the right thing? Of course you should. But if it were that simple, there would be no need for this article. Direction... give or take Every single creative assignment begins, necessarily, with direction. That creative person needs to know what to do. Where to go. How to proceed. They can’t work in a vacuum. And this—right at the first step—is where it gets tricky. Do it right, you get great stuff, and big bang for your buck. You can guess the other half of this equation. Or maybe not. It’s not just that you won’t get great creative out of your creative person(s), but you’ll waste time, energy, and effort. You’ll get frustrated, as you receive deliverables that don’t meet your expectations. Importantly, your creative person will get frustrated, too. And that’s not good. We hate to generalize, but we’ve been in this biz forever, so here goes: Creative people are higher-strung, and thinner-skinned, than most people. We like to say that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” In other words, their fuses are shorter. They’re like professional athletes: They like to perform. But if you, as their coach, keep calling the wrong plays, they’ll not only fail, but they’ll burn out. And they’ll resent you, since they won’t respect your judgment. So the direction that you give is everything. Just as important, if not more important, than the direction you give... is the direction you don’t give. And this, by the way, was the impetus for this entire article. Setting the stage As we’d noted above, creative people like to perform. Which points up a convenient analogy, beyond, say, athletes. Know who else likes to perform? Yep. Performers. As in, actors. If you’ve never directed actors before, or even if you have, there’s a cardinal rule—or perhaps cardinal sin—when it comes to directing them, and that is: “Never give your actor a line-reading.” Huh? What’s that mean? And how does any of this translate to, say, getting a good layout or web page? A line-reading is when the director actually acts out a given line of dialogue, telling the actor, “Do it like that.” It’s an easy knee-jerk reaction for a director to make when he or she doesn’t hear the right phrasing or intonation, but doing it is the kiss of death. Why? Not only does a line-reading “talk down” to your actor (“You don’t know this as well as I do, so let me explain”), but it also “pollutes” their process by planting an impossible-to-ignore version in their head from the get-go which makes them utterly miserable. It short-circuits their own, internal creative process. They will hate-hate-hate you for it. Same thing goes for creative people who work for you. Never tell them: “Use this font” or “Add a six-point black border.” It’s tantamount to giving them a line reading. So what do you do? Do the opposite. Talk around what you want. Describe it aspirationally. “Here’s what we’re looking to accomplish, in broad strokes.” Stay out of the weeds. And challenge them: “Think you can figure out a creative way to solve this?” Thin-skinned though they may be, creative pros like to show off, in their own way, and tossing down the gauntlet, appropriately, plays to their sense of pride and entices them to rise to the challenge, to outdo themselves. To show off. All of this is hard to do, but boy is it ever worth the effort. You’ll get better results, and improve your working relationship with the talent at the same time. Need help with interpreting, and giving, the appropriate creative direction? Contact us. We surmount these kinds of challenges, for our clients, all the time.  This is one of those provocative subjects that, theoretically, we could argue in a single sentence. But it requires some setup and context, and deserves a fleshed-out explanation.
But first: What on earth are we talking about? What’s the intent of the headline of this article? Why would you, as a creative professional (or someone who hires one) ever consciously go against your own creative instincts? Why would you ever make a creative choice that you don’t like? Talk about counterintuitive. The germ of this article came from a recent situation with a client of ours. We had worked with them for months to do painstaking customer discovery. It’s one of our specialties—it’s pretty much our religion—here at Copel Communications. Through lots of structured conversations, we had worked with this client to narrow down their targeted audience to just two big buckets. Then we worked with them to understand each of those audience’s day-in-the-life concerns and needs and comfort zones. Always, always “work backward” from the customer. If you know what the customer is going through, and what they need, then it becomes straightforward (albeit not easy) to start with that, and then “back into” the best possible messaging. Indeed, you can also “back into” the best possible products and services, too, but that goes a little beyond our wheelhouse. So. For this client, we’d helped them uncover some really interesting things about their target customers, for both buckets. While they were certainly distinct in terms of what they each needed and wanted most, which strongly suggested serving them via a bifurcated website (we have a very helpful article on this exact topic), they did have a fair amount in common, too. For the purposes of this article, let’s say that these target audiences each wanted a Lexus-like look and feel, yet with the suggestion of more Toyota-like pricing to purposely undercut the upscale look and feel. Pretty neat, huh? Unpleasant surprise So you can imagine our surprise when, one day, this client sent us a brochure they’d created on their own. It featured lots of big, cartoony graphics and bold/daring layout: for example, on each page, the single biggest element on that page was the page number itself. Oh boy. Why did they follow this route? The piece was certainly bold, but 1) it looked like a student project, and 2) it wholly ignored everything that had been learned during the intensive customer-discovery sessions we’d conducted, and documented, with this client. Here’s the short answer: The graphic designer they found and hired simply liked this stuff. He liked cartoons and huge page numbers. Do our client’s prospects feel the same way? Absolutely not. So this brochure would turn them off, simply by looking at it, without so much as reading a single word. Thus the headline of this article: When should you avoid creative choices that you, personally, like? Answer: Whenever they conflict with what the customer would most like to experience. As we’d said above, straightforward. But not simple. Another example Years ago, we did work for an ad agency, and the owner told us a great, and related, story, which we’ll paraphrase here: The ad agency conducted market research for one of their clients: A nationally-known maker of a certain line of consumer packaged goods. The ad agency’s job: See which colors would resonate most with targeted buyers. (You know where this is going already, don’t you?) So the ad agency commissioned original, confidential market research, in which lots of mock-up products, in lots of different colors, were presented to the target audience via methods such as surveys and focus groups. The findings were clear and unequivocal. There were certain colors that were really liked, and others that were really disliked. When the ad agency presented these findings to their client’s CEO, she disagreed. She was certain that certain colors—the ones that she liked—would do better in the marketplace. She imposed her will, and so those colors—and not the market-tested ones—went into production, and then on sale. Guess what happened? All of the colors picked by the CEO absolutely tanked in sales. The one or two, from the market research, which she had allowed to go into production, soared. We don’t know the rest of that story. We hope it became a teachable moment for that CEO. But it certainly backs up what we’ve said for years: If you’re looking to grow your business, always subsume your own desires to those of your customer. Have a customer-discovery challenge that needs cracking? Contact us. We’ll help you move forward.  We see it a lot. Younger people enter the creative-services workforce, and are invariably disappointed when they don’t get to express their full genius on every assignment. Look at their killer portfolio! Look at the awards they won in school! What gives with the real world?
In this article, we’re going to focus in on some of the (seemingly) most creative-crushing assignments, with an eye toward helping your client succeed. And our parenthetical comment above is spot-on, because if you believe there’s no room for creativity in that assignment, you’ve already painted yourself into a corner. SEO... as creative? We worked on an assignment recently, featuring a slew of social ads aimed at executives in a particular vertical; let’s say it’s “logistics.” And we were told—it was a mandatory—that we had to feature the word “logistics” in the headline. Mind you, these are social ads. As we’ve written before, they’re a lot like freeway billboards. In that there’s hardly any room for copy. You get a few words, max. And now you’re telling me that I have to use the word “logistics” in the headline? It’s enough to frustrate any creative pro. But there’s a sound method to this madness. And there is most certainly a creative solution to this challenge. First things first. If this ad, on a cluttered web page, is targeting logistics executives, it needs to cut the clutter of all the other ads that don't. Yes, you can show a picture of a long-haul tractor-trailer (and likely should), but nothing says "logistics” like, well, “logistics.” It gets worse. Or, depending on your perspective, better. We were also told—another mandatory—to get the word “exec” in there. We’re targeting logistics executives, right? Execs are a special, elite group. Again, think about it. You’ve got a genuine logistics exec, looking at some cluttered web page. He or she sees the word “Logistics” and takes notice. But there are tons of offerings in the world of logistics; it’s like manufacturing or insurance or any other huge vertical. But then you add the word “exec” to the ad, and it’s undeniably focused. This is what we might call “the SEO approach to creative.” It’s using the kinds of words that the audience would search on, to populate creative elements such as the headline. Which might read something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! Exciting, huh? Well, maybe not to you. And therein lies the rub. This is what so many of the new-to-the-workforce creatives fail to grasp. You’re not trying to score points for cleverness. You’re trying to help your client make money. Simple as that. Deeper geekery Notice the mention of “LTL” in that made-up headline above? It stands for “less-than-truckload,” which is an acronym that’s very specific to logistics. So while you would never use an obscure, and undefined, acronym in a headline to the general public, here, in this case, it slices through the clutter even more sharply. It tells that logistics exec, “We know what you’re up against.” It tells them that you speak their language, both literally and figuratively. Sounds crazy, but little ads like this work. We’ve jammed in some intense, industry-specific jargon, and whereas it would be death at, say a cocktail party, it works quite well when you need to cut through the clutter toward a very focused and time-constrained audience. So where on earth is the room for creativity here? If you’re in the tightly-constrained realm of a social ad, think of your remaining elements, besides the headline:
Not much, but it’s there. What if you did something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! ABC Enterprises Helps You Keep On Trucking [Button:] Accelerate Your Performance And what if there’s a totally outrageous, grabber image, such as a tractor-trailer... with a rocket engine and wings? The heat from the engine could even be scorching the call-to-action button. Well whaddya know. All of your college portfolio work paid off after all. The important thing—the discipline—is to know when and where to add the creative “spice” to an assignment, vs. letting the “untouched ingredient” stand on its own merit. The qualifier here, as always, is what the end-client/prospect/customer will respond to. Viewed through that lens, the decisions get much clearer. Need help with these kinds of assignments? Contact us. We’d love to answer the call. |