Tuesday, March 31, 2009

TrendFlogging: Reinveting Street Meat > Tweet Mobbing for MexiKorean Taco Goodness

Long story short: Los Angeles restauranteur and entrepreneur Roy Choi started Kogi, a mobile Korean Taco business. At first people flashed more gang signs than money at him, but what started very slow as haute-cuisine in a cube van quickly spawned a cullinary monster.

Choi's secret recipe: a small, dedicated customer base + word of mouth + twitter = mucho dineros. (ammendum: Roy Choi was also featured on reality cooking show, Top Chef, so work minor celebrity status into the formula there)

By the time Newsweek caught up with him he was catering to crowds as strong as 600 and having L.A.'s Finest policing the crowds and traffic he spawns. All this takes
is a single tweet announcing the expected arrival time of one of his trucks outside a busy L.A. bar.

Food trucks are nothing new, and taco trucks certainly aren't uncommon in L.A., but Choi has reinvented the model. By adapting social media, Kogi is essentially America's first "viral restaurant", and the real excitement comes from businessmen from as far away as Korea coming to America to study how the basic coffee truck model became an experiential phenomena, to one day unleash their own clone armies. I say let them try. The only real question is whether this will prove to be a localized fad like pop-up retail, or ground zero for a brand new business model for fast food in the future.

I'm happy to vote with my stomach.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Procrastination: How to Lose a Head in Advertising

Get this: I'm just now working on my 09 New Year's resolutions. Not really, but I am putting off an entry on elevator pitches to do an entry on procrastination. Well you know what they say:

U=EV/ID.

Let's come back to that.

Back in school my first writing partner was a procrastination-fiend who modified a
WWII gasmask into a feedbag for vaporized marijuana. We all know procrastinators are lazy people who can't nut up and knuckle through their work, so today, he's homeless, right? Wrong. He recently assumed creative control of a large west coast advertising agency. You can see where I'm going with this. Why didn't his procrastination destroy him? He figured out a simple trick I'll come to in time.

Little trivia to start. If I told you procrastinators were actually perfectionists so worried about producing less than primo work, they lose momentum, you'd tell me to go wait for a train, on the tracks. Guess what? That
's what psychologists believe. Weirder still, what would you say if I told you a scientist got paid to determine that U=EV/ID, where U (utility) = E (expectation of success) times V (the value of completion) divided by the product of I (deadline) and D (personal sensitivity to delay).

All it means is a hamster in a lab will ignore long term goals and just keep hitting the button that gives them an immediate food pellet. Admittedly, we didn't all go to school to be army snowboarders, so we're not overly stimulated by our work, but when tasks with longer timelines fall by the wayside in favour of tasks with more immediate rewards, you're setting yourself up.

Seth Godin said it's amazing that people have so much time to worry about today's emergencies but no time for tomorrow's. His point spent years talking to people about using the time you have now to prepare yourself for professional challenges in the future. No one listened. Then came the Economopocalypse.

He was talking about training and skill-building during times of unemployment. I'm talking about straight-up bullet catching. Workplaces are becoming more self-structured, letting employees complete tasks at their own pace. This is Dateline-style entrapment for procrastinators. Even the most together people I've ever worked for had time management issues, so how does Johnny Punchclock stand a chance? It doesn't take too many extended or extended deadlines to paint yourself as the next potential cost-cutting measure.

So how did my friend with this
disabling condition end up taking a diamond encrusted Escalade to Cannes? Simple time management.

He learned to visualize his tasks in more specific terms.

You have to say a job is important for you to believe it's important.

Do it right away. Now. Shock the programming of your subconscious mind and force yourself to do the opposite of your impulse.

Break up the task into smaller pieces and rifle through them. A lot of the time we worry about the scope or scale of a jog, so break it down into a series of smaller, more manageable tasks and work through them one by one.

Set a timeline. Write it down. The simplest trick in the world is to make a physical list of everything you have to do. Every time you run that pen through a completed item, it psychologically energizes you to barrel through the next. It's always worked for me.

No one will care about you as much as you do, so be careful out there.

Friday, March 27, 2009

The State of Design: Your Logo Makes Me Barf

I got a tweet that promised to cheer the spirits of any designer or art director. Mission accomplished, yourlogomakesmebarf.com.

I've always said Photoshop wasn't expensive enough. The purpose of the site is to show what happens when unskilled people design logos. "Good logos require time and involve great forethought. A good logo should be a financial investment but also something that will benefit the long term growth of a company." Just because you found a torrent for anything in the Adobe library does not make you a designer.

My second favourite part of the site is the disclaimer page for anyone who gets the cold splash of water as they find their logo featured. If it's your company logo, they strongly advise it's time for a redesign and even have a list of endorsed professionals.

If you were the designer, blow out the pilot light on your oven and read a long book. Actually, it advises that criticism is part of design and part of design is constant learning. The truly commited have to eat criticism and learn from it. You're forever going to hone your craft and even a mentorship is not a bad idea.

I endorse the site because, A) it's the logo version of the audition episodes of American Idol, and B) see point A.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Definition: The Three Second Rule

Brand messaging is (almost) always going to have more visual appeal than promotional messaging. At least, that's been the trend, but it's my experience that there there are enough good people working in promotional advertising today who feel promos deserve attention to design and well-crafted visual story-telling that promos have come a long way. There are those clients who feel as nice as it is, this only slows the in-take of the "what's in it for me" message, but I beg to differ.

Store environments are highly visual places loaded with thousands of square feet of competing brand messages and product images. Throw signage and promo materials into the mix, unfreeze a caveman and watch his head explode. The hunter/gatherer part of the modern human brain has the ability to treat grocery store aisles like wallpaper, only really focusing on the occasional tin of soup or bag of dog food.

By my math, and this is really conservative, if you throw promo materials or display in someone's path you have three seconds or less to engage them or they're gone.

You can easily test this yourself by people watching in a store. Watch how their eyes fall on it, do a quick backwards Z from top to bottom and either engage or keep walking. They need a reason to want to keep looking; to read beyond your clever headline or value proposition, to decide to take part in your promo and somehow commit your URL to memory. That's another story.

The reasons? First: craft a value-add or promotion so strategic and irresistible to your demographic that they think it would be stupid not to take part and you've already cleared shelf space for that next award. And second, strategic design; well-crafted visual story-telling that engages the consumer.

If your program has no lead time or money to put against it, I know it can be hard to deliver the bacon, but if you can't find a way to use strategic planning and design to do this, you're letting opportunity and money slip through your fingers.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Freelancing for a Living: Catfighting on Sugar Mountain, or living in an Asian Curse

There's an Asian curse I heard about "living in interesting times". With the Economopocalypse in full-swing, stock markets are trash, unemployment is more popular than Twitter, and the trickle down effect has more and more companies lopping heads to meet corporate pressure. It's almost like an All-Leia Cat Pillow Fight. If that's not clear, just take away that these are interesting times.

That being said, business rags and the blogosphere is unanimously packed with articles about advertising in a recession. Letting your customers know you're still developing your brand instead of playing duck and cover leaves you ahead of the pack when the smoke blows over and the Horsemen ride off. This, combined with reduced internal staff, means more pie for the freelance crowd.

Working in your underwear, no commuting, choosing your hours and hand picking your clients like fruit from trees gives you so much freedom and flexibility that I can't imagine life any other way. Why do you imagine study after study shows freelancers report higher level of job satisfaction and more and more professionals are giving up their full-time roles in hopes of a more rewarding life freelancing, but it's not always life on Sugar Mountain.

Before taking the plunge, take a quick tally of your core strengths. Design? Accounting? Sales? Awesome. You've been promoted across the board. Most people don't realize that when you hit the road alone, you are a bus full of people in one body. You are truly alone. You have to wear all the hats of a traditional agency, and you better wear them well. It's a lot to juggle, and it can derail the most well-intentioned, because when something goes wrong, you're under a pretty bright spotlight. So you start by approaching clients as modest as yourself, which is great. You can make a whole career from good relationships with steady Mom & Pop shop clients, but you have your eye on bigger game. You want to grab better established clients.

Recently, the owner of a boutique promotional shop I'd been hounding took me to lunch. The client had already known my reputation as an art director and picked up the bill. It was around $50. Translation: because they knew of me, the client determined that meeting me was worth at least $50. I've had meetings where my lack of a reputation was worth nothing but a sit down in a lobby. The fact is, your name isn't some ubiquitous pop-culture catch phrase, so how do you stalk bigger game?

Scenario: you've found an in with a mid-size jacket company who at the same time is being wooed by a local design shop. What are you going to do?
Scenario: you're in the woods and a cougar shows up and starts yelling at you. My advice: hold your jacket open to make yourself appear larger. Cougars aren't big on big competition. In both scenarios, feel free to point out your differences; they are your strengths.

PRICE

I've had my fingers crossed on an opportunity with a local company who has quietly been searching for someone with agency experience but without agency overhead and rates. Less overhead. No payroll tax. No health insurance costs to pass on. If you're ever been privy to a proper agency estimate, you've probably shaken your head at the cost of doing business with a reputable marketing shop. Economic differentiation has never been more important than it is right now.

SALARY

So you earn more per hour but work less hours. You have a fight an army of competition, and this results in rate wars, client-mandated concessions and delayed payments, but the ray of light comes tax time. Get a good accountant. I could do a whole article on the tax benefits.

QUALITY

A woman told me that she liked working with freelancers because they were eager to please consistently, while agencies were great at ramping her up but it always felt hollow after a month or so. Call it the seven week itch. Their strength was not in maintaining a relationship. If its your name on the door, you bet you want it shined every morning.

CARE

I read somewhere that the main problem with Type A new business gurus is that although they're quick and slick about wooing new clients into the fold, but they generally stink at maintaining long term relationships. It lacks the adrenaline they require to thrive. I've been at more than one agency where a client left because they felt the ball had been dropped on customer care.

BRAINS

More often than not, clients don't know what they want, or worse, only know it when they see it. This can be mitigated with simple education and guidance. If they're just looking for you to fill an order, so be it. If they're looking for strategic thinking and marketing perspective, always remember that's what they're paying for and that's what they deserve to hear. Walk them through the process step by step. It shows your competence and builds their trust. Only too often do agencies take the easy route of keeping the client happy without treating them like they're part of the process. it's a disservice you should avoid.

CONTACT

It's 9:30 at night and a client is calling you. If you're full-time at Saatchi, you're going to have to hide two hours of complaining against a billable docket somewhere. A freelancer's home is their business. Your personal and professional life blend so thoroughly that a call from a client is no weirder than a call from a relative. An agency will never be able to meet that kind of service.

DEADLINES

The client has revisions, it's going to press or presentation or powerpoint first thing in the morning, and that's only six hours away? Theoretically, a freelancer can ride in on his white horse and make revisions with a happy "there" and a "sweet dreams to you". Only the primaries at an agency could care about this kind of a scenario. Adobe Miller and Alexis Wipeboard in creative and account service aren't going to ruin their night out for you, and that's if it's a week night. Lord help you if it's a weekend. I want to do a line of mugs that read TGIAMA (thank god it's almost monday again) and use them to hammer this point home to clients.

AVAILABILITY

An agency will also never be able to match the speed of your accountability. By having your fingers in every avenue of a client's business, you are a one-stop shop for an immediate answer at 11:30 on a Sunday night. This is a big advantage, and clients love it.

How do you go about landing these clients? That's another discussion, but for now I just want you to know your strengths, know your weaknesses, find your niche, grab that fruit.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Death of Newsprint: Birth of an Idiocracy?

People love the dry rub of ink on blackened fingers. They love wrestling with the turgid crease of a tabloid format, flipping pages in tight spaces like subway trains and coffee tables. People love the flyers than rain out and the special edition sections and the search for the nomadic crossword section. And until you can walk into a midwestern coffee house to find a luncheon crowd of families and truckers hunched over their phones, scrolling the headlines on a two inch screen, I'm not ready to eulogize the printed word just yet.

I'm an optimist at heart. I'm also reminded that when the camera was invented, people decried the death of painting, cheerily claiming the artform to be obsolete and forgettable.

Newspapers are feeling the Economopocalypse like many industries. Some have actually shut down, and others threaten to follow suit. Some people mourn. Some people work to reinvent the business model. Some people cheer for the woodlands. Others see another nail in the coffin of accountable journalism.

Traditional journalism is definitely in trouble. A small but increasing number of news agencies have implemented some form of citizen journalism into their ranks, as a force for good. The democratization of the news. A grassroots level of consumer-level involvement. There's an obvious argument about fact-checking and accountability that's been debated since the day Wikipedia threw out their welcome mat and can wait for another day. I want to talk about stupification.

Princeton did a study that showed how the loss of a local newspaper has an "immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement". The fear is that in the same way TV makes us stupid, the internet is going to make us stupid and lazy; and when it comes to internet news coverage, users favour more sensationalistic national headlines and viral entertainment over local issues. The internet is the perfect venue for indepth coverage, but people are more likely to stay for the salient points and click to the next headline rather than reading "cover to cover".

Dark economic times don't make people stupider, but they're coniciding with a point in history where some percentage of the masses drank the kool-aid and bought into flashy adult edutainment rather than boring and proper civic discourse. Evidence of this exists in the number of editorial departments that left community news to focus on the more lucrative tabloid format, increasing stimulation and decreasing decimination (of actual news).

We'll have to wait and see what happens. All I know is
: heads are rolling, and one of my local papers had two typos on the cover a few days ago.
My hope is that people will enjoy dumbed down journalism or tabloid entertainment for what it is, but recognize that citizen journalism and the internet are tools for increased education and enlightenment and choose a nice balance in their lives. Namaste, readers.

Design Contests: A chance to eat a big bowl of crow and make history


So North America has it's $ sign, Great Britain has it £, there's the Euro €, the Japanese Yen ¥, and the Reserve Bank of India has ... nothing?

Generally they're called
Rs or INRs, but these are considerd abbreviations, not symbols. And hot on the heels of a rant against "design competitions" comes a design competition so unique and significant that it surpasses everything I said about this horrible disease that reduces the design community to a horde of old-timey prospectors panning for loose change. The government of India has announced a chance to design the rupee symbol.

The sketch pad practically jumps into your hand, and you'd also want to sketch up a synopsis for the jury that explains "the historical and cultural ethos" of your design. The winner, as chosen by a seven-member jury of experts drawn from various art institutes, the government and the Reserve Bank of India, takes a $5,000 prize and historical bragging rights. A short list of five final entries walk away with $500, but put those pencils down.

Sadly, the contest is only open to residents of India.

From a design point of view, the chance to design something so historically significant doesn't come along very often. How many people do you know with an internationally recognized symbol on their resume?
And potential PR if the contest were global aside, look at it this way: when the Euro was introduced back in 1999, the price tag to update computers topped $50 billion. Each entry has a required $10 (500 rupee) fee. Each participant can enter twice, so by my math, as long as half the population of East Asia enters twice, they have a pretty good head start on those new keyboards.

News travels fast, and in the time it took me to type this, a German fontblog has already taken design submissions from the ineligible.

Don't lose hope though. I've heard Russia is looking for a currency symbol for the Rouble too. More to come...

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Blog vs. Portolio: admire my work, and enjoy the enlarged genitals

Building a personal brand and using a machine to humanize you? A blog, as well as your portfolio? My portfolio is the greatest thing in the world. It showcases my experience, increases genital size and cures diabetes, but that doesn't automatically entitle me to a flood of return traffic and new business.

A portfolio is stagnant, lazy, and unadored. A blog, on the other hand, can be
interesting, personalized, and compelling. It's the perfect tool to fill the interest gap, and the hoped-for side effect is peripheral interest in your work after admiring your carefully crafted thoughts, then comes love, then comes marriage.

It's a silent interview

Human psychology 101: it's harder to hate people you know than random strangers. You want the world at large to love you, and you want that love to translate into increased business. But unless you're the Caligula of cold calling, you're not going to be meeting people and you're not going to be making great contacts. Your blog is a museum of you, and it's open twenty-four hours. Show off your abilities by sharing your knowledge. Show your value by having the maturity to put it all out there for the world to enjoy.

you're waiting for people to reach you, and a blog is the perfect place for you to create a museum of you, to share your knowledge and show your abilities. In short, it's the pre-interview you.

Getting to know you

As an Art Director and Graphic Designer, I could drive a car through an Adobe seminar and I'd still have 99.99998% of the competition able-bodied and hacking at that same pie (they're out there, while I'm in prison). A potential client has a lot of choice when it comes to making a hire, and without the benefit of a living conversation to add substance to your name, you're a ghost. A simple portfolio can't tell them what you might have in common; there's no chance to be impressed by your opinions and mindsets, to enjoy your wacky experiences or to relate to you on a more personal level. All of this can translate into the trust and confidence that might see you with a new business card.

I know, it's a big ass crowd

The theory bouncing around is that as more people recognize your name through social networking (blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, linkedin, etc) the more leads and referrals to follow. Don't automatically hang your hat on this nail. It's a big web out there. There's a better idea...

Give away your cow's milk

Create your blog, and focus your writing on what you know best, then squeeze. Honesty reads, and the need to feel like every other blog out there is not the most satisfying past-time. Write what you know, as long as it's unique and credible. It may seem counter-intuitive to spill your guts to the world and share valuable revelations and experiential tips for free, but if you believe in karma or wiki-spiritualism, you'll end up benefiting long-term from relationship building, networking with your peers, and increased business.

Friday, March 13, 2009

A professional gibberish-sounding post about professional gibberish

As note in my last post, Pepsi paid over a million dollars to redesign it's logo. Whether the leak of this work-in-progress document was intentional is debatable, but take a flip through and with just a few pages in, you're ankle deep in "breathtaking" Marketing Speak. To wit:

"The Pepsi ethos has evolved over time. The vocabulary of truth and simplicity is a reoccurring phonomena in the brand's history. It communicates the brand in a timeless manner and with an expression of clarity ... Breathtaking is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design."

Who does what now? Sure, it sounds vague, it leaves you feeling empty, it begs for clarity, but it's called Marketing Speak and if you thought regular english was hard...

It all started with the Corporate Mission Statement? You'll find them etched into nickle plates outside many offices or in the About section of many websites. A mission statement is a brief statement of the purpose for a company. If you're familiar with them, then you've probably wondered why they sound so random and intentionally vague? Well according to Wikipedia: "In management, by stating organizational goals with opaque words of unclear meaning; their positive connotations prevent questioning of intent, especially when many buzzwords are used".

Sigh. Can't we get a computer to do this? Well, a Mission Statement Generator is a simple program that contains a short list of simple nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs which are randomly belched out into print-ready statements such as:

"Our mission is to continually leverage existing catalysts for change with a high level of employee empowerment."

or...

"Our mission is to establish a reputation as the first choice to network wealth-generating enterprises and delivery inexpensive solutions to our clients."

or...

"Our mission is to seamlessly integrate profit-drive teamwork and network principle-centered benefits."

Congratulations, you have an instant MBA in Pro Gibberish. Sure, at best it's a ramshackle syntax, so overwhelmed with topical buzzwords and empowering business jargon that the end product rings generic and hollow, agreed, and the fact that a computer spewed it mocks the entire industry, but people get paid and paid really, really well to sound fluent in this kind of stuff.

So much of modern Advertising & Design is not what you make, but how you sell it. Word to the wise, learn to do it well, and you're writing your own cheque, tap dancing into the future sipping martinis made with pickled panda eyes instead of olives or onions.

Sadly, the Dilbert model no longer exists but many clones can be googled in it's stead.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Design Contests: a lot of losers and one Winner (who is also a loser)

If spec work is a cancer on the Advertising & Design industry, then "design contest" sites are full-blown AIDS.

Too harsh? Let's begin. In the beginning, there was pro bono work. Pro-bono work is work taken on for free, with no expectation of payment outside of any out-of-pocket expenses. The typical client is a non-profit, and people feel a boost of altruism livens their spirits.

Spec work, short for speculative work (short for "I'm speculative over whether I'm going to get paid for this or not) is work taken on with little more than a handshake (no contract, no deposit, no binding agreement). The danger is that the client will either reject, or in some cases steal your work, leaving you unpaid for countless hours of toil. Spec work makes the typical designer into a non-profit who's lack of blood sugar makes them feel a boost of swooning.

Lately I've been getting a few tweets (twitter messages, for the uninitiated) about "design contest" sites; "contest" being the operative word.

Here's the skinny: a client posts a brief looking for work with a typical budget of between $30 and $250. Hordes of would-be designers begin churning out work, all whittled down to the low-end of that $30 - 250 spectrum, then sit back and patiently await the client's verdict on their work. In these contests, there are a lot of losers, and one winner, who is also a loser, with $30 in his pocket.

I understand how economic downturn and whackjobs like the Arnell Group pissing through $1.2 million to rebrand Pepsi's look and feel certainly do claw at John Q. Businessowner's ability and desire to pay a premium for something as benign as a logo treatment. I get that. But spec work is at best, a potentially syphillitic blind date, and if this same business model were applied in any other industry, they would innevitably crumble flat into a Economopocalypictic landscape.

Case in point: I'm hungry. I put out the word on a "cuisine contest" site and 2,173 would-be chefs looking for work each make me a full-course dinner, and then 2,173 would-be chefs sit back and patiently await my verdict on their work.

I elect one (1) who will receive some compensation for their time and expenses, but remember, there were a few thousand entrants, so the real contenders had to lowball their rates to remain competitive. 2,172 would-be chefs now go to the next "I'm hungry" posting to design another dinner hoping one day they will get paid for their work.

I was going to use an image of scrimage at a UNICEF supply drop, which illustrates a similar kind of desperation, but the eyes of the hungry in the Sudan have more self-respect than this, so it just didn't fit. Spec work is cancer, we all agree. This trend towards "design contesting" may not be actual AIDS, but it is certainly a degenerative disease that eats the meat right off the bones, so play safe out there.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Smell my hand (I mean, look at my stuff)

As well as updating my status on LinkedIn, naturally I want to get my work in front of as many eyes (read: potential clients) as possible. Heard about Coroflot which has a pretty clean and inviting layout and planted some of my skills on them too.

http://www.coroflot.com/bradchoma

Killing Time to Kill the Pain

So this is to be a professional blog. A flog of professional attitude and decorum. Let's see how that goes. Today I began a blog about the awful life of a former co-worker without his consent. An official fan site at that. He barely knows what's going on, and I'm okay with that.