A Good Cause

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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Admittedly, I have fallen prey to the marketing promises of obtaining an Adonis-like body in 90 days or less. For years I told myself that I would lose those “few extra pounds” (40 to be exact) that perfected my muffin-top shape but somehow was never committed to the cause.

I soon realized that every cause needs a little inspiration and motivation behind it. Once I told my family, friends, and co-workers about my weight loss goal I suddenly had a team of militant-tattle tails watching my every nibble; ultimately, it was the additional push I needed to sustain the momentum. Surprisingly, those around me felt inspired to follow suit and suddenly I had formed my own little cause-related band of salad-eaters.

You see, a good cause can set any plan into motion. In fact, more recently major brands have been augmenting their traditional marketing approaches with cause marketing as they see the tangible benefit of connecting their product to goodwill. Recent reports (onPhilanthropy and IEG, Inc.) show that cause marketing sponsorships by US businesses is on the rise with $1.11 billion spent in ‘05 and a projected $1.57 billion in ‘09.

Take for example Yoplaitʼs “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign to help fight breast cancer, or Product Red where companies like Apple, Motorola, and The Gap promote “Red” products with part of the proceeds going towards the global fight of AIDS, TB, and malaria. Sure, these charitable campaigns encourage sales and brand adoption, but they ultimately enable individuals to become more involved with a greater cause; overall, a brilliant win/win strategy.

Disneyʼs latest “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day” promotion is asking individuals to give a day of service with the added incentive of receiving a free pass at one of the Disney parks. Imagine what this campaign will do for communities across the country if they hit their goal of 1 million service days.

Some may say these companies are self-serving and are only trying to improve their brand persona by tying in with a cause. I say, give them the benefit of the doubt and follow suit. Whatʼs the worst that can happen? A new park gets cleaned up? A child in Africa is saved? Breast cancer research receives additional funding? Bottom line, people are more likely to change a particular behavior, or adopt one brand over another, if it is for the greater good of society.

The integration of cause marketing can make a great campaign suddenly unbelievable by sparking consumer action and societal involvement. Admittedly, I never really liked to shop at The Gap but knowing that buying a pair of Khakis can fight AIDS on a global scale…I will take two pair please.

Insatiable for Social Media

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Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Everyone’s yammering about social media these days. It would be hard to name a client who’s brought a project to our door over the past year who had not asked that we integrate some sort of social media component with said project. One of our recent favorites was an RFP for an extremely large government initiative that insisted this blandly institutional program be outfitted with all the trendy social media accessories to make it capture the public’s imagination and spread like wildfire. We came up with some fun ideas, but all the same, we couldn’t really imagine the desired result actually happening. Why? Because, inherently, the message at the heart of it all just did not feel like it was worth getting excited about. In our opinion, no one was going to Facebook or tweet about this bad boy. From a social media perspective, we saw this as a very earnest effort to polish a marketing turd.

The fact is, like traditional marketing and advertising efforts, some social media campaigns work, and some don’t. And even if a campaign generates the desired buzz, where does that buzz direct you, and ultimately, does it effectively serve the bottom line? I recently read an article that made some interesting comparisons between various social media initiatives.

For example:

Have you ever had the opportunity to “elf yourself”? If you recognize that phrase, you’ve probably played with the engaging little online holiday application that allows you to personalize a troupe of dancing elves with photos of yourself and/or family and friends. Most likely you, and about 150 million others, emailed your brilliant creation to your circle of friends, and received a few of theirs in return. Lots of fun, and a social media phenomenon. The company that sponsored and paid for the application saw some impressive results for their investment: it has been the most-visited holiday greeting site two years in a row and netted 200 million visitors in 2007 alone.

Now here’s the question: do you know the name of that sponsor company? Chances are, you don’t. Sorry, Office Max. Despite all the activity engendered by the application, Office Max saw it’s sales drop 7.5 percent during last year’s holiday season and has posted losses over several quarters.

Now, when you hear the phrase, “That was easy,” or see an image of a red “Easy” button, what company do you think of? Staples probably bubbles right to the surface. Their “Easy” campaign has consistently and effectively communicated its core message – that Staples efficiently helps you solve problems. The result? From a social media standpoint, that message has become part of the social consciousness, ranking right up there with phrases like “I’m loving’ it.” and “Got milk?” They’ve sold gads of actual souvenir “Easy” buttons which reinforce the campaign in a very tangible way. And most importantly, since Staples remains solidly in the black, the economic results have been noteworthy as well.

To be effective, a social media initiative needs to have a strong connection to its brand. Elves are cute, but after all the ooo-ing and aww-ing, how do you make the connection back to office supplies? And how does Office Max in particular fit into that scenario? Fact is, it doesn’t. Office Max got a lot of fizz for their efforts, but no substance, and no resonance for their brand. Staples, by contrast, continues to get meaningful mileage out of their campaign.

As we move forward in putting more and more social media campaigns together, it would be smart to always do an “authenticity check”, and ask ourselves whether or not the initiative connects to the brand in a meaningful, memorable way. Additionally, let’s ask the even more basic question: does social media provide the right channel for this project? Will people care about the funny, flashy campaign but forget the brand behind it? Just because everyone’s yammering about social media doesn’t mean every campaign should use it.

Avoiding Design and Advertising Apathy

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Monday, August 31st, 2009

I ran across the definition “Design is art optimized to meet objectives” by Shimon Shmueli of Touch 360. I have found myself defining what I do for family, friends and even clients. For clients, it is not something they usually ask but something we volunteer in the context of explaining, selling or defending a design or design process. When asked about the difference between a designer and a fine artist, I have said we are the whores of the art world. For a fee, we create art that meets the client’s needs. Or maybe it is that we work a client’s needs until it is art? I think I like Shmueli’s definition better.

I will often hear “I know you are the designer, but could you explore or change this or that”. I have gotten to the point I anticipate this and reply along the lines of “We really don’t design for designers. Almost everyone should be able to see, evaluate and critique design – even if you can’t necessarily design yourself.”

The truth is, we are not actually designing for them. Maybe I need to be more forthright about this? We are designing for a demographic that they may or may not be in tune to. We are hired to understand and execute a solution for that audience. Both client and designer can certainly get it wrong when we don’t listen close enough, run with a false preconception, or are just lazy and offer them exactly what we think they want.

Got Milk

An example of lazy, and my latest peeve are the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” rip-off campaigns. Just across the street at a Beauty Supply shop they have this fine advertising example:

There are similar billboards littered across the Wasatch front but this landscape flyer was inspirational. I ask for one last campaign to clean this up, maybe “Got An Original Idea?”

Designers are at fault when we give the client what they want instead of what they need. They used to say in school to throw out your first idea. That first idea is the one the client (and everyone else) also thought of. For a moment you share that magical connection in a tired, cliché design or concept. Amazingly the client may also pick the idea because they thought of it also! On two recent occasions I, or designers I know have wrestled with this. We had considered removing an inferior solution that we thought might be too gimmicky. I had even jokingly said “I bet they pick that one”. I will say the solution was not horrible in either case, but I believe their audience would have appreciated something a little more sophisticated or original, even if the client did not.

Better Brainstorming

Do we act the prima-donna and pout or do we accept this silent change in objective – do we trade inspiring the audience for stroking the client? Even worse is when we are the ones who suggested the “Got Milk?” in an attempt to flush out concepts or fill a pause in the conversation. But there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, right? Possibly, but there may be better ways to brainstorm than we are practicing now or we might need to better prepare ourselves for a brainstorming session. I liked the simple process presented at Business Balls including defining the objective, setting a time limit, and monitoring the follow up process. I would add the personal brainstorming outlined in this article is valuable preparation for a group brainstorming. Laziness is where both client and agency can run into problems. A client needs to value and understand why they hired us. The agency needs refine its processes and better prepare for the creative possibilities.

Content Management for Sites that Matter

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Monday, July 20th, 2009

In the last five years or so, I’ve been involved in the enhancement, support, or creation of a number of CMSs. I’ve seen firsthand both the thought-process that went into the design of the CMS and the effort required to build the CMS that includes all the features proposed by the design. Some features tend to make more sense than others.

Probably the most popular feature of current CMSs is the built-in HTML editor, something that allows your basic non-tech savvy user to get WYSIWIG with their website. There are two flaws in the inclusion of a built in HTML editor, especially a WYSIWIG editor.

First, websites fall into two basic categories: those that matter, and those that don’t. If your website matters, you should not be leaving its creation and maintenance in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. And if your web dev/admin does know what she’s doing, the last thing she’s going to want is a clumsy, feature-starved HTML editor when she could just write the HTML by hand for far better results. If your website doesn’t matter, there’s no reason to bother with a CMS. Find some contractor to build your three pages and you’re good.

Second, built-in HTML editors are notoriously bad at showing you what your website will look like in the browsers that your visitors are going to actually use. There’s not much point in spending hours tweaking your pages to look right in your CMS’s editor just to discover that they only work in IE, and look like garbage in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

CMSs are often advertised as one-size-fits-all systems. This is next on my list of flawed design features. As I mentioned earlier, there are websites that matter, and those that don’t. If yours is one of those that matters, it is inevitable that you will want your website to do stuff that isn’t the same as every other website out there. No matter how many features that come with the CMS, you aren’t going to be happy with it if the CMS doesn’t support easily doing what you want. And trying to add a new feature to your one-size-fits-all CMS? Ha ha. Fat chance.

The fancier CMSs allow you do cool stuff like manage the structure of your website and upload templates. They take all this info that you give them and build you the pages for your site. That’s great and all, but it also brings us to the next flaw in CMS design. Where is your content stored?

Storing content in actual web page files, even ones that were created so fancily with smart templates and XSLT, brings with it unnecessary baggage. Most websites that matter are none too small, and that kind of content storage can result in the creation and storage of a vast number of files. All of those files will be discarded or re-created every time you make any changes to your templates (and possibly your site structure), giving you lots of time to play Solitaire while you wait for your change to be applied. It’s also no fun to move all those files around, and they are generally far too married to your web site’s design.

Content should be stored separately, preferably in a database. Pages can then be created dynamically (or “on-the-fly” for you buzzword junkies). Changes to templates don’t have any direct effect on an files other than the template, and of course the dynamically created pages don’t need to be stored or transferred. Most importantly, the content is agnostic, knowing nothing about the web site’s design. This makes your content highly portable. If you completely redo the look and feel of your website, the core content is unaffected, rather than requiring hours of painful page by page updates.

The most fundamental flaw in common CMSs is a lack of true versioning. CMSs are treated more like portals to a website, instead of a true management system. There needs to be at the minimum two basic versioning options: the ability to preview and then publish changes, rather than having them go live as soon as they’re saved, and the ability to roll back all changes to any past version of the web site. It’s easy to make mistakes when updating a web site’s content. Having a way to undo those mistakes easily can save lots of hours.

For people and businesses whose web sites matter, the best CMS is most likely to be a custom tailored CMS that will fit your needs exactly. Any CMS is going to have a similar set of basic features, and involvement in its customization will guarantee that additional features you will need are made available and has the added benefit of forcing you to review your website to determine what those needs will be. As long as your custom CMS allows you to freely edit content without having to use a clumsy built in HTML editor, includes all the features and options you need, and stores the content intelligently, you’re bound to be happy with the result.

The Three Rings of Perceived Value

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Thursday, September 13th, 2007

If you want a copy of Andrew’s slides for reference, you can download them by clicking here.Thanks for everyone’s input: I suppose a parting question would be: what are your ideas for enhanced services that mediaRAIN can provide?