CRE8TIVE

Ghetto Budget Advertising Article

2008-06-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Entrepreneurs who are experts at what they do are often not experts on advertising. They may make mistakes that can adversely affect their business. Here are 10 advertising mistakes for small businesses to avoid:

Hiring the wrong consultants. Be sure that you don't pay an advertising consultant or agency on a commission basis. Commission agreements mean that the more you spend the more they make. That may lead to ill-advised recommendations. If you need to hire a consultant, be sure to check references. Find someone who is already working with a friend or colleague.
Using space advertising that is too small. Don't waste money buying space ads too small to tell your story. Buy adequate space and save money by running it less often.
One exception is: if you have a product with a strong visual, then you can get along with smaller space.
Not having a website. I don't care who you are or what you're selling, if you don't have a website you don't appear to be legitimate. Today, a website is an invaluable source of information, like a yellow pages listing with benefits. As a potential customer, if I can't go online at my leisure and check out your business, what you sell, your location your phone number, then I'm not going to buy from you.
Not capturing customer data. If you aren't compiling your customer's contact information and setting it up for e-mail and direct mail, you are throwing away a huge opportunity for low-cost or no-cost sales. No matter how small you are, you should be communicating regularly with your customers through email.
Wrong kinds of communication with your customers. Are you emailing your customers regularly but not including a money-saving offer? If you are, then you may be wasting their time and yours.
Not keeping track of the lifetime value of your customers. Getting customers is expensive. You don't know what you can afford to pay for a customer if you don't know how much revenue you can expect each customer to generate over their lifetime with you. This number, called the "LTV" (lifetime value) should be recalculated over time.
Not branding every message from your company. Branding means selecting a logo, color scheme, type font, tag line, overall look and other features that remain the same no matter what communication goes out from your company. Whether it's a TV commercial, newspaper ad, email communication or just a letter - every communication must uphold the image of your brand.
Lack of respect for creative talent. Copywriters get discouraged with clients who listen to their well-thought out, targeted, tightly written copy only to say, "Yes, that's good, but my cousin Bernie says we should say..." Find a top-notch copywriter you trust and stick with his or her copy. Don't tell them how to write; they don't tell you how to run your company.
Incorrect forecasting. Under buying or overbuying can kill a business. How do you know how much product will sell? If you use direct marketing, you should be able to read your results and project sales with reasonable accuracy. In fact you might be able to use direct marketing results to help forecast retail sales. For example, if the small black attaché case was a big hit in your catalog, perhaps it belongs in a highly visible spot on your sales floor? While results are not always easily translated from catalogs to retail, often they are. At least it will be an educated guess, made through proven responses and sales.
"I don't need advertising. I rely on word-of-mouth." Word-of-mouth is great, but you can't control word-of-mouth. Advertising is the best way to get the word out the way you want it, when you want it, about your company, products and services. Even if you can't afford a big budget, some advertising is better than none. Ignoring advertising may make your climb to success uphill all the way.
Jean C. Joachim is the author of "151 Quick Ideas for Advertising on a Shoestring," published in February by Career Press. The book is written for the small business community.

The Fabric of Truth in Brand Promises

2008-05-20T08:28:00.001-07:00

Demystifying Ways Employees Deliver on Brand Promises

By Maril MacDonald

While companies can easily measure marketing dollars spent on brand-building initiatives, understanding how the brand drives customers’ purchasing decisions has often proven to be more elusive. How do companies use “brand magic” to form long-lasting relationships with customers? Demystifying branding begins with a few simple tenets:

You’re selling a relationship with your brand, not just a product or service. The brand is your promise for performance and your customers’ expectations for delivery.
Brand differentiation comes through the total customer experience. Delivery happens at every point of customer contact.
The business strategy must set the course and make the brand a part of your company’s cultural and operational DNA. Your employees must have the systems, processes, information and incentives to deliver the promise at every point of contact.
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Working under these principles, the brand can change organization-wide behavior in a way that improves performance and drives strategy.

Start with the Customer

At the heart of a successful brand strategy is a clear understanding of the customers you serve and what’s important to them. Employees need direction on what the customer expects and the actions they must take to deliver on those expectations. To gain this understanding, employees must identify the interactions from the customer’s point of view to determine whether or not the company is living up to its customer “promise.”

These interactions, these “defining moments,” are the critical activities, the things a company must get right. They are not limited to product performance and quality. Rather, they span the entire customer experience from order to delivery to application.

By understanding exactly what factors determine a satisfied customer and then delivering them, a company can provide employees not only with a common focus, but also with definite direction as to how they can positively impact the customer experience in their everyday jobs. In this context, every employee shares the same job description—to serve customers and deliver what’s important to them.

Making Magic Happen: Brand Delivery

How many times have you talked with a customer service representative, looking for a solution to a problem only to find that the employee does not have the necessary information or the decision-making authority to resolve the issue? Wanting to help, the employee often becomes frustrated and starts explaining the situation in terms of the company as an outsider, that elusive “they” who makes both the employee and customer helpless. In these instances, the employee, in effect, divorces himself from the company and the brand.

What causes this? Often, companies pour millions of dollars into external campaigns that create a customer expectation, while focusing few resources on the internal components necessary to deliver on it. However, it is precisely the delivery via employees that has the most profound effect on the customer relationship. People, as simple as it is, deliver brands—not advertising.

In order for the brand to “come to life” at every point of customer contact, the brand promise must be the adhesive that holds together the overall company mosaic—its vision, mission, values, growth strategy and guiding behaviors—not just another, separate thing you ask the marketing department to do. Effective internal branding starts at the top with the company’s business strategy and leadership’s direction. In essence, brand strategy must reflect business strategy, and vice versa. It’s critical that they are both mutually supportive and two integrated parts of the same directive.

Organizations that want to create the right brand experience should make the brand promise the primary driver for decisions, utilizing six key levers of effective brand delivery: people, processes, structure, information, decision-making and incentives.

The competencies, experience and attitudes of an organization’s people affect the customer’s “defining moments” with the company. Leadership must select and train employees appropriately, always mindful of the customer when making recruiting and hiring decisions.

Organizational processes can make or break a customer’s experience. The infrastructure must enable optimal efficiency, productivity and customer service. Equally important is the prioritization and escalation of work or customer issues. Processes should promote collaboration across the company to break down barriers to communication and effective brand delivery.

How an organization assigns roles and responsibilities can create a structure that encourages involvement from employees in making customer-driven decisions. Leadership must clearly define reporting relationships and performance expectations, as well as make the necessary resources available.

The information available to employees must be accurate, relative, timely and actionable. Sharing knowledge across the organization will help employees be more effective in their roles. Leaders should consider educating employees on the company’s complete package of products and services, market trends and intelligence, the competitive landscape and customer satisfaction criteria.

Those employees closest to the customer must have the decision-making authority to consistently demonstrate the brand in action. To enable front-line decision-making, leadership must articulate a clear corporate vision and strategy, and the specific role of employees in realizing the full potential of that vision.

Company incentives—whether they are pay-for-performance, bonus, verbal recognition, or longer-term goals such as career progression and enhancement—must drive the specific behaviors necessary to deliver the brand experience.

Focusing on the six levers of effective brand delivery will help ensure that employees 1) understand what must be done to realize the brand promise and 2) can take action to deliver it.

While these levers create the infrastructure necessary to deliver the brand, they must be pulled in a way that inspires the brand to “come to life” in everyday experience.

The Magic of an Emotional Connection: Engaging the Organization

It is critical to understand that brands are emotional. While essentially inanimate products or services, the best brands are embodied in the hearts and minds of both customers and employees. Therefore, leadership’s direction must appeal to the emotional needs of employees—what makes people want to change their behavior and take action. With that in mind, the brand can be an ideal platform for such motivation, as brands often define the emotional connection between customer, product, company and employee.

Through effective messaging and delivery channels, communication plays a key role in inspiring employees’ hearts and minds to engage in and take action on delivering the total brand experience.

Messaging

Messaging, the first facet of this role, must provide direction, clarity, simplicity, consistency, integration and emotion. All messages should be integrated into a single story that can be told by everyone, from leadership in the executive suite to front-line management. A common story will provide clear, consistent direction to employees so they understand in no uncertain terms what they need to do and when they need to do it. Simply put, on one day you cannot pursue the vision, and the next the brand, and on the third day the strategy. Success in branding requires everyone to charge down one path.

Moreover, messages should be constructed and delivered to motivate employees to take the right actions with a sense of commitment and urgency. That motivation usually revolves around the “why” behind the strategic direction and how it ties into the things that inspire employees’ commitment to the company and the customer.

Messaging can and should do more than tell a powerful story—it should drive alignment and action that will actually create the story, rather than just telling it. Employees need to see management acting and talking about the brand (and overarching strategies) from a common platform. If words and actions don’t match, employees become confused and disheartened, and it becomes difficult for leadership to drive the desired behaviors. To work toward a common understanding, it is important to present concrete, clear messages to which managers must respond.

Through that interaction, one can identify differing points of view in the management team and therefore can work to achieve language and content that represents those viewpoints (while simultaneously moving the perspectives of the various leaders closer together). If views are diametrically opposed, or if personality issues preclude alignment, it is important to raise those issues and recommend and help implement a path to achieve a common brand vision.

Effective Channels

Messaging is only as effective as its delivery through effective channels. A company’s branding effort cannot reside in the executive suite alone. You must enlist support at the local level to implement the brand and to change employee behaviors to deliver its promise. Finding the early adopters in your organization, the employees who will enthusiastically champion the brand, is another way to tap into employees’ emotions on a peer-to-peer level. The effort requires effective navigation of your organization, which is often a complex, full-time job, spanning multiple levels and many silos simultaneously. It is important to find leaders who will support the brand at every level and put them to work driving new behaviors among fence sitters and blockers.

Sometimes this involves very informal interaction—around the water cooler, in the plant and R&D center, behind the scenes. Other times it involves the creation of special internal teams designed to harness and apply the skills and persuasive powers of leaders up and down the organization. Consider beginning your search with such groups as marketing, sales and customer service, as they will have a keen interest in brand evolution, as well as a vested interest in aligning (or blocking) support for the brand.

To win their support, it is necessary to have mechanisms in place to conduct a healthy dialogue around the brand, its rationale and opportunities. Communication departments are uniquely positioned to be leaders, brand champions. They can be effective in distributing information throughout the organization, targeting both formal and informal leadership.

With the right message and effective channels to drive it, a company will be positioned to execute a powerful internal branding campaign that will win the hearts and minds of its employees. If you give them a reason to care along with the right resources, structure and systems, employees will not only meet customer expectations but also exceed them. That’s when the real magic happens.

Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.

2008-04-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.

By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: April 6, 2008

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
— Albert Einstein

I’M of two minds. As a matter of fact, so are you. And until recently, corporate America wasn’t doing much to take advantage of one of them. But now that we’re hip-deep in what has been called both the “Creative Economy” and the “Conceptual Age,” no one can afford to ignore the artist within: the right hemisphere of the brain.

Although popularized in the 1980s by the artist Betty Edwards in her book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” the right-brain-left-brain dichotomy originated with the research of the American biologist Roger W. Sperry in the 1960s. Through studying “split brain” animals and human patients, whose brain hemispheres had been disconnected (in humans, this was done to prevent severe epileptic seizures), he found that each side of the brain plays its own role in cognition. The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.

The two function cheek-by-jowl, constantly sending signals back and forth through a bundle of 200 million to 300 million nerve fibers to help balance learning, analysis and communication throughout the brain.

But now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere — the part that sees the individual trees in a forest — the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.

“These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human,” notes Mr. Pink, who synthesized his ideas about the new role of right-brain thinking in his 2005 book “A Whole New Mind.” “It’s just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high-concept, high-touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.”

Why bother? Because much of the left-brain-centric work that the Information Age workers of America once did — computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls — is now done more cheaply in Asia or more efficiently by computers. If it can be outsourced or automated, it probably has been.

Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, “is the new M.B.A.”

He’s not the only one saying it. When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said.

“I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”

When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

So it makes sense that business executives are turning to the original pop culture icon of right-brain thinking, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” for guidance into their right minds. Ms. Edwards retired in 1998, but her son, Brian Bomeisler, teaches scores of corporate and public workshops each year.

The list of companies Mr. Bomeisler has worked with is a Who’s Who of the Fortune 500. “That corny phrase ‘thinking outside the box,’ that’s what I do for corporations,” he says. “In teaching them how to draw, I’m teaching them an entirely new way to see. They unbox their minds and absorb what’s really there, with all of the complexity and beauty. One of the common phrases that students use afterward is that the world appears to be so much richer."

During a two-day workshop with Halliburton Energy Services, Mr. Bomeisler watched as a team’s drawings slowly revealed an obvious solution to a longstanding problem. Team members realized from drawing that they had been enjoying their special status as a task force and had become so fascinated with the problem before them that they were in no hurry to solve it. This was resolved after management set a strict deadline and promised the group equally intriguing problems in the future.

Published: April 6, 2008
(Page 2 of 2)

That ability to help others see from an artist’s perspective was the reason Ms. Edwards decided to write her book, she said in an e-mail message. “My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.”

That alternate way of thinking has traditionally been marginalized in corporate America, as it has been in the rest of our culture. Dr. Sperry, who had a doctorate in zoology, noted the prejudice in 1973 when he remarked: “Our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”

Mr. Pink hopes his latest book, “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need,” will help set things right. Promoted as “the first business comic book,” the paperback is drawn as if it were a Japanese manga novel. In the story, the office cubicle dweller Johnny Bunko is taught the true rules of the career game — including “There is no plan” and “Make excellent mistakes” — by a superhero fairy godmother who appears when he breaks open a pair of chopsticks.

THE primary moral to the story, Mr. Pink says, is this: There’s power in making career choices for fundamental reasons, such as doing something you love, instead of instrumental reasons, like hoping a job will be a steppingstone to something else.

It’s a message Dr. Sperry seemed to understand when he accepted the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1981. “The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain,” he said, “is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you.”

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Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

What a Difference a Day Makes

2008-04-02T07:11:00.001-07:00

While our industry is scrambling to reorganize around tech trends, platforms and formats, the audience is organizing itself around content
April 2, 2008
-By Kirk Souder

It all happened in a day.

First, I woke up to find about six messages in my in-box pointing me to YouTube's posting of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's presentation at this year's TED Conference. (Taylor is a neuroanatomist at Harvard.)

Next, I typed out notes from a meeting I had with the director of a branded-entertainment division of a major agency network. In the notes I relayed how 80 percent of their content initiatives were oriented around brand CSR projects (in order for the content to have any relevance and engagement to the audience). In many cases, a CSR project actually had to be first developed by the brand just so relevant content could be filmed around it.

Later, I stopped in my local Venice, Calif., coffeehouse and noticed that three laptops were simultaneously playing the same piece from Google Video: "Professor Randy Pausch's Last Lecture." (Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has advanced cancer, and his lecture was modeled after a series of "final" talks given by academics about subjects that matter to them.)

At the end of the day I accessed Oprah and self-help author Eckhardt Tolle's first Webinar. In the process, I came across some audience metrics and discovered that it had been the largest Web gathering in history. About 500,000 virtually attended the live event and, since then, it's had close to 2 million views.

As the light faded that evening I found myself asking, "What's happening here?"

It appears that while our industry is scrambling to reorganize its structures around technological trends, platforms and formats, the audience is organizing itself around content. And, it would appear, a particular kind of content.

The book, Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism (the latest in a series that predicted trends such as the information economy and the global village), forecasts that this type of content, call it "conscious content," will be a major trend over the next decade. If "conscious content" feels a little too New Agey, we might call it "content that touches the hearts of the audience." If that still sounds touchy-feely, let's call it "content that makes people want to be more like Randy Pausch than Paris Hilton."

This begs a question: How long will it be before a major agency network's infatuation with techno-centric categories begins to wane, and it returns to the deeper, more lasting and way more profitable relationship with the audience? The human family is where our bread gets buttered. How long before we organize our structures around their content consumption as opposed to whatever type of box they happen to be watching it on? How long before a progressive agency network or, more likely, a progressive entertainment brand, hangs a shingle on an experimental division with the title, "Conscious Content?"

If audience momentum isn't enough to make the industry move in its direction, then it can resort to a buzzword it already uses: "ecology." The most important ecology on the planet today isn't that of the polar ice caps and the rainforests. It's the ecology of human consciousness. We have reached the point where as this ecology goes, so go all ecologies we touch: environmental, cultural, corporate, familial, etc. We have the honor of being the industry that creates the main input of this seminal ecology: media content.

How unconscious will we remain, or how conscious will we become, of that honor? And will we create this content by choice or, as is the pattern, because it's mandated by our audiences and brands? It was hard not to notice that the sponsor of the Oprah and Tolle Webinar was not some crunchy New Age brand, but one of the most conservative Middle America brands in existence: Chevrolet.

It's exciting to consider that someday soon we may open this magazine and see the announcement of a "Conscious Content" division started within an agency network.

It can happen in a day.

And when that day comes, hope springs eternal it'll need a creative director.

Kirk Souder is a partner at Granite Pass in Los Angeles. He can be reached at kirk@granitepass.com.

How to present your work by Sally Hogshead

2008-03-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

How to present your work
October 19th, 2007 Posted by: Sally Hogshead
Or: The difference between a great career and “I coulda been a contendah”
Sitting in LA morning traffic, I felt like an antelope being digested by a python. The painfully slow constriction finally deposited me at my client’s doorstep approximately ten seconds before the start of the new business presentation. It was still early in my career, but we’d worked for weeks on the work, so I felt confident about the outcome. At least I felt confident until I reached into the back seat for the portfolio

Wait. The portfolio case. …Where’s the frikkin’ portfolio case?!! As the ice water flushed through my blood, I realized exactly where the portfolio case was: on the kitchen counter. Um, yeah.

Lesson #1: Don’t forget the stuff you’re there to present. (Okay, let’s move on now, shall we?)

Most of us spend a lot of time on the material in the presentation, and very little on the presentation itself. But dumping your notes into PowerPoint slides is akin to serving Bobby Flay cuisine on dirty paper plates.

For anyone working in an idea-based business (such as you and me), coming up with ideas doesn’t mean squat if you can’t sell them. We sell ideas in presentations — whether those presentations take place in a boardroom or a co-worker’s cubicle — which means that presentations form the very building blocks of our careers.

In today’s marketing environment of chaos and insecurity, you have to fortify your ideas to face the most hairy decision-making moments. Below, a few tips for turning between great hypothetical ideas and great produced ideas.

Think of the client’s concerns before they do.
Ahead of the meeting, be brutally honest with yourself and your team in pinpointing the weak spots in your ideas. That way, you can address those if the client brings them up. Consider all aspects of your client needs, concerns, insecurities, politics, and biases that you’ll have to overcome in order to earn their genuine consideration. The point isn’t to defensively fight for your work, but rather, to avoid being caught flat-footed by a tough question.

Be able to articulate every element of your recommendations.
Don’t send your ideas out alone and defenseless into the meeting. Be able to clearly explain every element of your work, why you did things the way you did, and the reasoning for it. Odds are that you didn’t develop your recommendations by randomly shooting darts at a spreadsheet; make sure the client knows that too.

Have “Plan B” ready if your work isn’t approved.
Decide what elements of the work you’re willing to compromise, and what you’re not, so that you can pick your battles.

Help your audience support your ideas.
Give your client all the tools he or she needs to then turn around and sell the ideas internally, even when you’re not present. Whether or not you have a “leave-behind,” make sure they can articulate and defend in your absence.

Remember that no presentation is more important than the relationship.
When you’re passionate about what you’re working on, that passion can be a fantastic selling tool because it shows you believe in the work. However, there is no single idea that’s good enough to trash the overall relationship over it. The reality is that there are more good ideas at your disposal these days than there are clients.

If the presentation starts sucking wind, don’t wait to find out what’s going wrong.
Instead of nervously pushing forward to make it out alive, try to rustle the pink elephant out of the bushes. Acknowledge the situation with a little diplomatic honesty: “I could be wrong, but by those veins throbbing in your temples, I’m sensing that this isn’t working for you.” Only once they express their concerns can you then redirect attention to solving them.

Finally, check the kitchen counter before you walk out the door

Slaughter the Sacred Cows

2008-03-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in your agency, sacred cows lurk in the hallways. They’re wandering through the HR department, or chewing cud in CEO suite. You might even have one curled up in your own office.

Sacred cows are the unquestioned rules, dogmatic systems, and ways of working that seem off-limits to change.

The problem is, sacred cows block potential. If you blindly accept a pattern, or worse, feel forbidden to challenge it, then you can’t improve it. You become stuck. And stuck is the antithesis of everything we stand for.

Only by testing the legitimacy of a sacred cow can you create the best solutions. Here’s an example. In our industry, the following statement is accepted fact:

Advertising agencies are creative.

We share a vested interested in maintaining this reality. We don’t even think to question it.

Yet this statement is only partially true. Yes, we are the most innovative group around– when it comes to our clients. However when it comes to our own companies, we’re remarkably unimaginative. Rarely do we stop, look around, and reinvent the way we work.

The reality is, certain agency practices are ineffective, obsolete, or even unfair. Yet they remain standard policy.

I say, we should turn our exquisite insight upon our own agencies, identify the sacred cows, and usher them out the door.

I say, we accept too much, and question too little.We buy full-fare plane tickets without hesitation, then eliminate microwave popcorn due to budgetary constraints.

We centralize agency ownership into a few holding companies, then wonder why the work feels homogenized.

We ask clients to approve ideas that make their palms sweat, but rarely have the nerve to present just one campaign.

We leave weeks to research a strategy, and three days to create the campaign.

We always have time for revisions, but never enough time to get it right the first time.

We water down ideas to avoid conflict, then end up with ideas that lack passion.

We compromise too much on our work, and compromise too little on the sick day policy.

We spend so much time putting out fires that we’ve become better firemen, and lesser architects.

We search for fresh options by scrolling down the Fonts menu.

We request “real people” from Central Casting.

We create TV spots for a living, then fast-forward through them on Tivo.

We recommend an honest “veritae” style of photography to clients whose ads might not necessarily tell the whole truth.

In new business, we try to seem bigger, unless we’re a big agency, in which case we try to seem smaller and more boutique-y.

We kill ourselves to build revenue, then miss the good ol’ days when it was all about the work.

Our job is to develop unique identities for brands, yet we ourselves have virtually indistinguishable mission statements.

We’re communication experts, yet often communicate quite poorly among each other.

Our work requires inspiration, but leaves little time to find it.

We entice new hires with a big jump in pay, but reward loyalty with a minimum annual raise.

Creatives who win awards on glamorous clients get a raise, but creatives who take one for the home team by producing mediocre work on difficult assignments end up with a lower market value.

We hire individualists who are just conformist enough to be presentable to the client.

We promote some of the most talented creatives into positions where they no longer create work.

We pour our hearts into nurturing young talent, but if we do our job well, they’ll leave the nest for another agency.

We squeeze people out of the business by age 50, then lose our way without mentors.

We have miles of spreadsheets analyzing precisely what people want, but often don’t realize how to make employees happier.

We treat color printers more carefully than employees. Computer viruses are an emergency, but diseased morale is status quo.

We spend $10,000 on recruiting an employee for whom we can’t afford a $1 birthday card.

We forget to tell clients, “Yes it’s now technologically possible to assemble and email a concept in less than an hour, but the human brain’s timeline for brilliant ideas hasn’t changed.”

Do you recognize any of these sacred cows roaming around your office?

Stand back, and take a big picture look at the way you do business. Challenge each practice to see whether it’s a smart way of doing business, or a sacred cow. Poke it. Test it. Make it uncomfortable. Make it prove itself.

If a practice still seems right after being challenged, then great. Keep going.If you find a cow, get right to the core of the problem. Usually it’s benign neglect, but sometimes it’s complacency, or myopic accounting, or ego, or something equally awkward to bring up.

At that point, start talking about it.

Over dinner.

While eating a bloody rare steak.

It’s Time to Upgrade to You 2.0

2008-03-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

March 16th, 2008 Posted by: Sally Hogshead
Think You Don’t Work in Digital Media? Guess What: You Do. Here’s Your Guide to Translating Your Skills From Traditional to Digital

In the next year or two, you’ll be interviewing for a new job. So will I. So will your coworkers. So will your boss, your client and your competitors. Digital media is changing advertising so quickly, so radically, that we’ll all have new jobs in a couple of years, and our careers will depend upon our ability to use digital media to our advantage. It’s not just the creative department or media; it will drive how every person in the company creates and operates, from human resources to accounting. Today, digital is not a department — it’s a competitive advantage.

Bad things happen when people don’t upgrade their skills. About 15 years ago, when computers entered the creative department, most art directors quickly adopted them. But some resisted, especially “senior” ones (read: those over 40), who continued to rely on the studio. Their argument — quite noble in theory, actually — was that they should be hired for their brains, not their wrists. Unfortunately, nobility doesn’t live long in agencies. Within a few years, most had been replaced by younger (and cheaper) wrists/thinkers who’d never dream of art directing from the back seat.

Let’s avoid that unpleasantness, shall we? Translating your skills and experience from traditional media to digital isn’t as hard as you might think (at least, assuming you had strong ideas and strategy to begin with). Below, your guide to navigating this transition.

STOP RESISTING IT

It’s happening. Or should I say, it happened. No longer is digital a “department” within an agency — it’s an essential competitive advantage for everyone in the company. Time to get on with it.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, YEAH, BUT YOU STILL NEED A MESSAGE

It’s not enough to slap up content and expect it to get hits. For every Dove “Evolution” there’s a burial ground of failures.

EXPERIMENT MORE

Digital marketing is written in code, not stone. Constantly try new things, tweak formulas and take more risks.

GET READY FOR OBSOLESCENCE

Even as you launch a digital project, the clock is ticking on its countdown toward clichédom. Things change so quickly in digital space that 2008’s breakthrough will be 2009’s yawn.

QUIT BITCHING ABOUT FASTER TURNAROUND TIMES

Immediacy is a key advantage for clients. Make it your advantage, too.

STOCKPILE NEW SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Collect as much digital understanding as possible. Boost your learning curve by attending conferences (and not just for the boondoggle). The best way to turbocharge your worth in the digital marketplace is to work alongside the best, so work with digital superstars even if you don’t get paid for it. As someone once said, “Aspire to be the dumbest person in the room.”

LIMBER UP YOUR BRAIN

The most successful people in digital marketing can mentally multitask. Stay flexible. Don’t get married to any one solution.

BE CONVERSANT WITH A VARIETY OF TECHNOLOGIES

It’s always a bad sign when someone on a digital assignment isn’t familiar with Facebook, SMS, Skype and other key digital technologies. Learn about the main players and understand their implications. You don’t need to read the TiVo owner’s manual to understand the implications of DVRs.

DON’T WORK IN A COMPANY THAT DOESN’T EMBRACE DIGITAL MEDIA

Your career will take a hit in a culture of Luddites. Digital media mirrors a modern career: Constantly changing, fast-paced, occasionally frenzied and always filled with new possibilities. If your company becomes outdated, your work for it will, too.

PERFECT THE ART OF THE SELL

As if selling great work to clients wasn’t difficult enough before, now there’s the added complexity of explaining unfamiliar media. If your client isn’t fully versed in a recommended form of media, boost your odds of selling the idea by boosting his or her learning curve in advance of the presentation.

CREATE A “FIRST”

It was easier to discover new lands back in the days when guys like Christopher Columbus could accidentally bump into continents. Today, countless uncharted digital territories still await. Now’s your chance to conquer one.

DEMONSTRATE DIGITAL PROWESS THROUGHOUT ANY JOB SEARCH

Find new ways to sell yourself. Describe case studies you’ve been part of. Have a website built and become active on LinkedIn and other professional social-networking sites. Creatives should have a DVD with examples of all forms of experience, including traditional media.

GET OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE

The best way to get smart about the digital space is to constantly expand into new forms of media by actually working with them. Take on assignments outside your area of expertise. Become a generalist in thinking, with specialist application as needed.

EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE

You shouldn’t spend life tethered to a BlackBerry, but you also don’t want to become known as the slowpoke who can’t access e-mail out of the office. Don’t allow personal resistance to technology to become a pain in the ass for the people you work with. In this case, it’s not OK for the cobbler’s child to go barefoot.

FINALLY, KNOW WHEN TO SKIP THE DIGITAL AND GO OLD SCHOOL

When sending a thank you, skip e-mail in favor of handwritten note. When giving a presentation, don’t read PowerPoint slides verbatim; instead, tell stories. Get up off your butt and go talk to people across the office. Be a human. Not an avatar.

Video Game study

2008-03-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

This is Your Brain on Video Games
Gaming sharpens thinking, social skills, and perception.
by Steven Johnson, additional reporting by Victoria Schlesinger, Illustration by Gary Panter

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/video-games/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Image courtesy of Electronic Arts
James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin, was profoundly humbled when he first played a video game for preschool-age kids called Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. Gee’s son Sam, then 6, had been clamoring to play the game, which features a little boy who dresses up like his favorite action hero, Pajama Man, and sets off on adventures in a virtual world ruled by the dastardly villain Darkness. So Gee brought Pajama Sam home and tried it himself. “I figured I could play it and finish it so I could help Sam,” says Gee. “Instead, I had to go and ask him to help me.”
Gee had so much fun playing Pajama Sam that he subsequently decided to try his hand at an adult video game he picked at random off a store shelf—an H. G. Wells–inspired sci-fi quest called The New Adventures of the Time Machine. “I was just blown away when I brought it home at how hard it was,” he says.
Gee’s scholarly interest was also piqued. He sensed instantly that something provocative was happening in his mind as he struggled to complete the puzzles of the time machine. “I hadn’t done that kind of new learning since graduate school. You know, as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels.”
Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
The video game Tetris, among the earliest games to launch the industry, involves falling tile-like tetraminoes that a player must quickly maneuver so they fit into space at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in the brains of Tetris players using positron-emission tomography (PET) scanners. The glucose rates show how much energy the brain is consuming, and thus serve as a rough estimate of how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined the glucose levels of novice Tetris players as their brains labored to usher the falling blocks into correct locations. Then he took their levels again after a month of regular play. Even though the test subjects had improved their game performance by a factor of seven, Haier found that their glucose levels had decreased. It appeared that the escalating difficulty of the game trained the test subjects to manipulate the Tetris blocks mentally with such skill that they barely broke a cognitive sweat completing levels that would have utterly confounded them a month earlier.

Nearly a decade after Haier’s study, Gee hit upon an explanation. He found that even escapist fantasy games are embedded with one of the core principles of learning—students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too difficult and the students get frustrated. Make them too easy and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this the “regime of competence” principle. Gee’s insight was to recognize that the principle is central to video games: As players progress, puzzles become more complex, enemies swifter and more numerous, and underlying patterns more subtle. Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.
To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. More than 70 percent of video games contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk, and are popular because they challenge mental dexterity. Among the best-selling game franchises, The Sims involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and detecting patterns.
Gee contends that the way gamers explore virtual worlds mirrors the way the brain processes multiple, but interconnected, streams of information in the real world. “Basically, how we think is through running perceptual simulations in our heads that prepare us for the actions we’re going to take,” he says. “By modeling those simulations, video games externalize how the mind works.”
Even if Gee is right and video games are learning machines, one question remains: Do the skills learned in the virtual world translate into the real one?
the answer comes from a slew of recent studies, one of which began when then cognitive sciences research assistant and ardent gamer Shawn Green worked with University of Rochester cognitive sciences professor Daphne Bavelier on a project investigating visual perception in video game players. On standard tests that measure attention span and information-processing time, Green found that gamers consistently outperformed nongamers. When Green tweaked the tests to make them challenging enough so the gamers wouldn’t have perfect scores, the nongamers sometimes performed so poorly that their answers might as well have been random guesses. The researchers addressed an admitted weakness of the study—that visually intelligent people were more likely to be attracted to video games in the first place—by immersing a group of nonplayers for a week in the World War II game Medal of Honor. They found that the group’s skills on the standard visual tests improved as well.
Green did the initial research as part of his honors thesis, and after graduation, he and Bavelier continued the study. Nature published the results in May 2003. Since then the pair has also found that gamers can visually track more objects simultaneously than nongamers and that playing video games improves this ability. Their latest research on the visual precision of gamers is forthcoming in Psychological Science and the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Green says his main interest is the brain’s plasticity, but cautiously concedes there may be practical applications to playing video games. “Strong peripheral vision is useful to law enforcement, firefighters, and the military. They need those enhanced skills,” he adds.

The notion that video games can develop abilities that apply to real-world situations has been expressed by many and is increasingly being put to the test. In October 2006 the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) endorsed video games as a potential means for teaching “higher-order thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.” They cited “owners mode,” a component of the video football game Madden, which lets players manage an NFL team, as teaching basic business skills. Team games, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, develop cooperation and communication skills that the FAS says are useful in business settings.
A prime example of gaming that tangibly improves professional technique comes from James Rosser, director of the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. He found that laparoscopic surgeons who played games for more than three hours a week made 37 percent fewer errors than their nongaming peers, thanks to improved hand-eye coordination and depth perception. The Harvard Business School Press published a new book in November 2006 by John Beck, who has looked at three distinct groups of white-collar professionals: hard-core gamers, occasional gamers, and nongamers. The findings contradict nearly all the preconceived ideas about the impact of games. The gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. They also showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with nongamers. “It wasn’t surprising that gamers were more competitive, or more strategic, but the social and leadership skills that they exhibit don’t fit the stereotype of a loner in the basement,” Beck says.

The U.S. military has long supported the premise that learning through games can prepare soldiers for the complex, rapid-fire decision making of combat. Since 2002, they have offered new versions of their own game, America’s Army, which lets potential recruits play at everything from boot camp to Special Forces missions. According to the gamemakers at West Point, the purpose of America’s Army is to “give the player an idea of what it’s like for real U.S. Army soldiers to train for duty.” More than 4-and-a-half million registered players have completed the game’s basic training.
In the fall of 2003 two media researchers at the University of Southern California set up a study to look at the patterns of brain activity triggered by violent video games. Peter Vorderer and René Weber booked time on an fMRI machine, loaded a popular game called Tactical Ops on an adjoining computer console, and watched one test subject after another pretend to be part of a Special Forces team trying to prevent a terrorist attack.
Before Vorderer and Weber even looked at any of the brain scans, they were surprised by the behavior of the dozen or so adults who volunteered for the test. Participating in an fMRI study involves lying for extended periods of time in an extremely confined and loud space. Even a mild claustrophobic will invariably find the experience intolerable, and most people need a break after 20 minutes. But most of the Tactical Ops players happily stayed in the machine for at least an hour, oblivious to the discomfort and noise because they were so entranced by the game.
The genesis of this reaction may lie in the neurotransmitter dopamine. A number of studies have revealed that game playing triggers dopamine release in the brain, a finding that makes sense, given the instrumental role that dopamine plays in how the brain handles both reward and exploration. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist collaborating with the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University, calls the dopamine system the brain’s “seeking” circuitry, which propels us to explore new avenues for reward in our environment. The game world is teeming with objects that deliver clearly articulated rewards: more life, access to new levels, new equipment, new spells. Most of the crucial work in game interface design revolves around keeping players notified of potential rewards available to them and how much those rewards are needed.
If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s likely those Tactical Ops players in an fMRI machine were able to tolerate the physical discomfort of the machine because the game environment so powerfully stimulated the brain’s dopamine system.
Of course, dopamine is also involved in the addictiveness of drugs. “The thing to remember about dopamine is that it’s not at all the same thing as pleasure,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who looks at dopamine in a cultural context in his book, Satisfaction. “Dopamine is not the reward; it’s what lets you go out and explore in the first place. Without dopamine, you wouldn’t be able to learn properly.”
What kind of cognitive skills should we expect to find in the Pokémon generation? Not surprisingly, Gee has got a list. “They’re going to think well about systems; they’re going to be good at exploring; they’re going to be good at reconceptualizing their goals based on their experience; they’re not going to judge people’s intelligence just by how fast and efficient they are; and they’re going to think nonlaterally. In our current world with its complex systems that are quite dangerous, those are damn good ways to think.”
Gee’s remarks remind me of an experience I had a few years earlier, introducing my 7-year-old nephew to SimCity 2000, the best-selling urban simulator that lets you create a virtual metropolis on your computer, build highways and bridges, zone areas for development, and raise or lower taxes. Based on the player’s decisions, neighborhoods thrive or decline, streets get overrun with traffic or remain wastelands, and criminals prosper or disappear. When I walked my nephew through the game, I gave him only the most cursory overview of the rules; I was mostly just giving him a tour of the city I’d built. But he was absorbing the rules nonetheless. At one point, I showed him a block of rusted, crime-ridden factories that lay abandoned and explained that I’d had difficulty getting this part of my city to come back to life. He turned to me and said, “I think you need to lower your industrial tax rates.” He said it as calmly and as confidently as if he were saying, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”
In a 20-minute tour of SimCity, my nephew had learned a fundamental principle of urban economics: Some areas zoned for specific uses can falter if the zone-specific taxes are too high. Of course, if you sat my 7-year-old nephew down in an urban studies classroom, he would be asleep in 10 seconds. But just like those Tactical Ops players happily trapped for an hour in an fMRI, something in the game world had pulled at him. He was learning in spite of himself.

iPod stuff

2008-03-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

youtube ipod extras for music play over remote speakers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR4hA0uyEmg&feature=related

Pimp'n linkage

2008-03-25T08:06:00.000-07:00

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