Thanksgiving is a tradition. Writing an article about what to give thanks for? Well, we’ve been doing it for so long each November, that it’s also a tradition here at Copel Communications. 
 
Before we list what we’re thankful for, let’s turn the table on you. What are you thankful for this year? It can be big. It can be small. It can be professional. It can be personal. 
 
The thing is, there’s always stuff to be thankful for. You don’t need a national holiday to remind you. Just like you don’t need to book a spa day to take care of yourself. Or hug your kids to remind yourself that you love them. 
 
Chime in. Leave a comment. It might make you feel better; rest assured that it will make us feel great. 
 
The little things
 
Sometimes, it can be a tiny bit of tech that makes your day nicer. We recently upgraded our AirPods, and are thankful that we can finally adjust the @#$% volume without having to reach for a phone or ask Siri. 
 
Here’s another technical marvel: A remote-controlled training collar. Our dog has a habit of running out in the middle of the night to bark at the deer; a little beep and vibration from the training collar broke him of that habit. He might still be looking at the deer at 3 a.m., but he’s not barking at them anymore. So we’re thankful for a better night’s sleep. 
 
Clearly, we’re starting small. And non-professionally. Let’s shift gears. 
 
The bigger/business things
 
In 2024, we’re especially grateful for the power of networking. Whether it’s via in-person gatherings, Zoom meetings, LinkedIn, or forwarding a colleague’s Pitch59 card, it’s opened up new business possibilities. More importantly, it’s connected us to some really nice people. 
 
People first, business second. If you don’t like that person, you won’t like working with them. More importantly, the opposite is just as true. 
 
We’ll still reach out to, say, second-level connections on LinkedIn, and simply say “hi” to people whose profiles look interesting. It’s better than spamming them with a message-bot. Many people are understandably jaded these days, but there are still plenty of people out there who will respond with a “Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” 
 
Again: People first, business second. 
 
Saving the best for last
 
We can’t build much suspense here, because you know what’s coming. Aside from the Big Two (having good health and being lucky enough to be in the USA), we’re grateful for our friends and family. 
 
That includes the dog. He’s been a good boy. 
 
Have a thankful-for to share? Contact us or simply comment below. We’d love to hear it. 

​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. 

​Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world). 
 
Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. 
 
That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. 
 
Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. 
 
The cons
 
Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. 
 
Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. 
 
And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. 
 
So… this better be one good meeting. Right? 
 
The pros
 
After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. 
 
Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. 
 
But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. 
 
And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. 
 
But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in.
 
But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. 
 
Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. 
 
Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. 
 
But later ain’t too bad, either. 
 
Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it. 

​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! 

​You’d never tell any client that they’re your favorite. If you say that to one of them, you have to say it to all of them. 
 
But c’mon. You know that you have a favorite client. We all do. It’s human nature. 
 
It’s also a tacit business proposition: How do you “clone” that client? Wouldn’t you love more of them? (And by extension, fewer of the, um, less-favorite ones?) 
 
In this article, we’ll review what makes a “clone-able” client. And then we’ll get to the crux of the matter: Doing the actual cloning.
 
Nobody’s perfect
 
You can certainly describe an “ideal” client. And odds are, your favorite client won’t check all of the boxes. 
 
That’s fine. We live in the real world. And it’s hardly a compromise to want to clone your favorite client. 
 
But what makes them your favorite? Why are they hovering up near the “Ideal” space? 
 
It’s easy to rattle off a bunch of positive attributes of this favorite client of yours: 

• They provide good and steady revenue. 

 

• They provide interesting and challenging assignments. 

 

• They don’t quibble over pricing. 

 

• They pay their bills on time. 

 

• They’re smart/thought-leaders. 

 

• They’re good people. 

 

• They’re nice people. 

 
Wouldn’t that list resonate with you? (Have other attributes we’d missed? Add them to the comments below.) 
 
So. How do you go about cloning such a wonderful client? This is a multi-step process—or multi-pronged approach—and while you may know some of the checklist items we’re about to discuss, you probably don’t know them all. 
 
The feeding trough
 
Where is this client of yours turning, daily, for information? Are there various groups they belong to? Trade shows they attend? Websites they visit? 
 
Answer as many of these as you can for your favorite client, and then “feed from the same trough.” Example: Look up which LinkedIn groups your client belongs to. Then join them. You’ll see the same conversations they’re seeing; you’ll see which posts they like, which articles they read, and which influencers they follow. 
 
When you actively join in and comment on a forum like this, LinkedIn rewards you by making your comments visible to more people. In fact, if you can get a vigorous conversation going, LinkedIn will really tell the world about you. We could call this “The Kardashian Effect.” 
 
So as your street cred grows, you’ll get exposed to more people like your favorite client. You can then connect with them, comment on stuff they’re posting… and then, politely, ask for a quick chat or Zoom, just to say hello. If you really do this, as a person, and not like some LinkedIn bot that automatically spits out five pages of “personal” messages as soon as you click “Connect” (hate that, don’t you?), you increase your odds of making a real connection. 
 
Shake the trees
 
Ask yourself: How did this client find you in the first place? Think through every step of that process—because it contained numerous steps—and then replicate it. Was it a certain person who had referred you? Then reach out to that person. Was it at, say, a certain event? Be sure to attend the next one. 
 
On paper, this is a very simple exercise in reverse-engineering. In the real world, few people take the time, or make the effort, to do it. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of doppelganger favorite clients out there, just waiting for you to discover them. 
 
Lubricate the revolving door
 
We have a wonderful client that, well, has a high churn rate when it comes to their employees. And what do we do? We stay in touch with those employees when they move on. ​LinkedIn is great for this. 
 
We can’t tell you how many of them have gone on to become new clients of ours, as they’ve brought us along to their new gigs. And they invariably become very good clients, since our original client did such a nice job of vetting these people for us in the first place! 
 
These are just a few tips. There are others. For example, we’ve not even touched upon the entire (huge) topic of marketing outreach to this ultra-targeted audience… and that’s really our specialty here at Copel Communications. 
 
Want to learn more? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you. 

​Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing. 
 
How can you say organized without reading? 
 
Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? 
 
Why it’s hard
 
There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. 
 
So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps.
 
Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. 
 
What don’t you read?
 
There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) 
 
Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) 
 
There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. 
 
Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding.
 
Naaah. That ain’t it. 
 
There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. 
 
That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. 
 
Which leaves one more choice. 
 
The universal language
 
The Big Element here is color.
 
It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. 
 
We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. 
 
When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. 
 
Brilliant. 
 
Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. 
 
And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. 
 
Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. 
 
Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. 
 
Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. 
 
And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.)
 
Read without reading
 
Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. 
 
But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. 
 
Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. 
 
Mac-specific tricks
 
Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.) 

• Icon labels. Apple now calls them “Tags,” but they’re basically little colored dots you can assign to any item in the Finder. The great thing is that you can instantly sort items by tag. We’ll often use this when searching through tons of stock photos for an assignment. If something is really good, it’s “red” hot. If it’s almost as good, it’s orange. If it’s pretty good, it’s yellow. Below that, we don’t assign colors. But after searching through scores of stock photos, it’s great to sort the downloaded samples by assigned color tag, so all the best ones float up to the top, properly ranked in groups. 

 

• Desktop backgrounds. Here’s a simple way to stay organized, on-the-fly, during the work day. Include a photo, for each client, within their client folder, and name it “Desktop Background for Client A.” Pick a photo that’s relevant to what they do; sometimes you can simply use their logo. Then assign that photo as the Desktop Background on the Mac, and use one for each desktop, client-by-client. Then when you zoom out in Exposé mode (do they still call it that?), you’ll be able to quickly see which desktop belongs to which client, without the need to recognize any of the open windows on that desktop, nor without having to memorize the “Desktop 1” or “Desktop 2” name which the Mac arbitrarily assigns to it. 

 
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them!

​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. 

​It’s that time of year again: the end of the year. That’s when we provide our 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. Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of cool tips and tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy! 

• How do you write for a celebrity? Most of our assignments—and likely yours—address rather arcane B2B concerns. This one didn’t. Get some cool tips for writing for celebs in this fun article, based on our assignment working for an international celebrity. 

 

• When does “no production value” become “better production value”? Talk about a counterintuitive topic: This is a case of “way less is actually much more.” Intrigued? Want to see how you can do a ton on a non-budget? Read on! 

 

• How to sell creative ideas… creatively.  Sure, as a creative pro, you’re all about coming up with new concepts. But how you pitch them requires its own type of creativity, if you want those ideas to reach prime-time. Learn how to win at the subtle art of head-gaming in this insightful article. 

 

• Cashing in on personification. Intellectual or emotional concepts—such as fear or desire—can be hard to convey visually. A handy tool: Personification. Sure, you know how this works, but do you know all the tricks and questions to ask yourself when you proceed? Get some great pointers, right here. 

 

• Why we love extreme examples. You’d never develop a campaign featuring murder in it… would you? But you might be surprised to learn how useful your over-the-top ideas can actually be. This article will help you not only with assignments, but dealing with recalcitrant clients. Check it out! 

 

• How do you do creative on a big budget? Seems like a nice problem to have, right? But sometimes it truly is your problem to solve. Simply throwing more money at a creative challenge won’t solve it creatively—or appropriately for the budget. Learn how to spend big—and wisely—in this cool article, based on a recent high-end creative assignment. 

 

• The joy of visual metaphors. Sometimes you can take your client along for a huge creative leap—easier than you might have thought possible—with the help of an outrageous visual metaphor. Get inspired from some real-world stories in this fun and useful article. 

 

• Abuse yourself into writing a good email campaign. Yes, we actually talk about this, in this article. Read it. It will help your next campaign bring in more leads. No pain, no gain! 

 

• Creative for political campaigns. How can you remain apolitical while working as a hired gun? Should you even accept that assignment? Learn what to do, what not to do, and how, in this straightforward article about a touchy subject. 

 

• When can you have fun with serious topics? Want to see one of the dumbest headlines we’ve ever written? It’s in this article! Seriously, though, you can have some serious fun with un-fun topics, if you know your guidelines, and how and when to cross them. Get inspired; check it out! 

 

• The pitfalls of search-and-replace. This basic computer time-saver can also create some serious headaches and embarrassments if you’re not super careful. Want proof? Learn from our missteps! Cash in on cringe-worthy lessons learned in this surprisingly helpful article. 

 
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear ‘em. 

We’re fond of saying that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” There’s a constant tension that exists in this field like nowhere else. 
 
The mere idea of selling a creative idea feels almost wrong. But it’s part of the biz. 
 
In this article, we’re going to relate a recent story in which we had to do just that. But pay heed: This is more than just “pitching the idea and seeing if the client buys it.” It was more subtle than that—and the way we succeeded here can help you, too. There’s a little bit of mental head-gaming going on here; let us explain. 
 
What’s your take on video? 
 
For this assignment, our client (a professional-services consultancy) had the opportunity to be featured in upcoming videos by a big enterprise which sort of straddled the line between “partner” and “client.” The important thing to note, for this story, was that the enterprise was going to be footing the (substantial) bill for the video production. So it was our job to basically pitch our client’s story to this enterprise, so that the enterprise would hopefully feature them in their upcoming videos. 
 
Note that this enterprise had tons of companies to choose from. Thus it was, in our view, a competition. We had to make our client the most video-worthy choice for this “Hollywood” enterprise.
 
So what do you do in a situation like this? You listen.
 
Reading between the lines
 
The head video person at this enterprise (we’re blurring some lines here to protect identities) was the one in charge of making the selection of which companies would feature in these new “shows” they were producing. We wanted to learn more. So we booked a big Zoom call, with us, our client, and a few people from the big enterprise, including that Head Video Guy. 
 
Here’s where it gets interesting. Remember what we’d said about listening? The more you pay attention, and take notes, the better armed you are to succeed in a challenge like this. Here’s what Head Video Guy told us: 
 
“We want to make videos about a great company we’re working with. We want to feature the principal people of that company. But we don’t want to simply shoot ‘a talking head in an office.’ We want to tell an interesting story, one that really works well on video and takes advantage of the medium.” 
 
Ta-dah. There it is. We’d left off with the enterprise that we’d think about some ideas, and pitch them to them in a follow-up Zoom call. 
 
Building the “un-story”
 
In our next, offline, meeting with our client, we asked the different team members about the kinds of things they like to do when they’re not at the office—and the more extreme, the better. 
 
We were pleasantly surprised. These people play as hard as they work: 

• One was a mountain climber.

 

• Another enjoyed deep-sea fishing. 

 

• Yet another was a surfer. 

 

• A few of them enjoyed skiing. 

 
Do you see where this is going? 
 
Pitching without pitching
 
In our initial Zoom call, we picked up the signals that the Head Video Guy loved coming up with creative story ideas. In other words, he didn’t want to be spoon-fed. Read another way: He didn’t want to buy other people’s creative ideas; he wanted to come up with his own. 
 
So our job was to essentially pitch him “fodder,” and let him (easily) come up with cool creative ideas that were “his own.” All of the extreme sports listed above made this ridiculously easy. 
 
In the follow-up Zoom call, the conversation went something like this: 
 
Us: “We chatted and talked about different things, and just thought we’d tell you about what we learned about the different people at this company—specifically, what they do in their off-hours, compared to what they do at the office.” 
 
Head Video Guy (intrigued): “Go on...” 
 
Us: “For example, one of the top technical people, when she’s not solving difficult software challenges, enjoys going mountain climbing in her spare time. Can you believe that?” 
 
Head Video Guy (huge epiphany): “Wait a minute! This means that she’s always striving to reach new heights! What an incredible visual metaphor!” 
 
Us: “Amazing!” 
 
Yeah. Of course we’d thought of this. But we didn’t want to pitch it that way. The rest of the conversation, as you’ll see, was pretty predictable, but enjoyable and productive nonetheless: 
 
Us: “Our top sales rep loves deep-sea fishing.” 
 
Head Video Guy: “He likes to reel in the catch!”
 
Us: “The Director of Product Development is an avid surfer.”
 
Head Video Guy: “He’s catching the next wave!”
 
Us: “The CEO enjoys skiing.” 
 
Head Video Guy: “He’s carving out the right path for the company!”
 
And so on. 
 
The takeaway
 
As you can tell, Head Video Guy was absolutely delighted by this call, and all of the brilliant creative ideas he came up with during it; they were all great for the upcoming video series. 
 
Just as important, note what we didn’t do: We never pitched any of these visual metaphors. We didn’t need to. Indeed, if we had, they would’ve ruined the call. We let the other guy make the (relatively easy) creative leap, and enjoy the rush and the glory. And oh, our client came out ahead in this “video competition.” 
 
As we’ve said, “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” But the more you know about selling, the better you can be at selling your creative.
 
Need help with that next challenge? Contact us. We do this kind of stuff all the time. 

Hard to believe that 2020 is almost over. (Good riddance, right?) 
 
What we mean is, it’s time for our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, 1) thanks! and 2) here’s an opportunity to revisit and refresh. 

• How to show respect for—and win business from—your target audience. You’d be shocked to learn how many egregious mistakes creative people routinely make when addressing their audience. So learn. And profit. 

 

• How to handle creative criticism. Think frustration is bad for you? Think again! Learn how to embrace that anger before you put it to work for you. 

 

• Creative inspiration is for the birds. We take this one very literally—and so can you! Get actual useful creative tips, thanks to our feathered friends, and the bird nerds here at Copel Communications. 

 

• How to create an infographic in 3 easy steps. This is a challenge that will cross your desk a lot. So learn how to nail it, easily and effectively. 

 

• Which website trends will make your business the most money? All-in-one pages, animated navigation icons... which elements really mean business? Find out how to find out, in this insightful article. 

 

• How to direct (other) creative people. How do you (dare to) provide creative direction... to a creative person? More importantly, how do you 1) build the relationship, and 2) get the best work out of them? Learn here. 

 

• Overlooked sources of creative inspiration. It’s a problem that never goes away: You need to find new inspiration. Constantly. Use this article to help you. 

 

• Using color to boost business. As a creative professional, you know all there is to know about color, right? Possibly. Either way, you can enjoy—and profit from—this article. 

 

• When should you break the rules of composition? Do you really know all the tricks for populating that elusive rectangle? Hint: The counter-intuitive ones are the most fun. Discover them all here! 

 

• How much do you know about letterspacing? Can you improve readability and aesthetics at the same time? How do letterspacing rules change with different fonts? Find out how metal type, straight from the foundry, can inform your decisions. 

 

• Stuffing can be good for you... creatively. If “less is more,” when isn’t it? The answer isn’t obvious, but it’s super rewarding. Learn some fun, inspiring examples in this Thanksgiving-appropriate blog post. 

 
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.