Media Manipulation: broadcasters now able to airbrush audio

Blogging has been hard on account of work going extremely well, but you know I'd crawl out of a crypt to put a spotlight on something that bugs me.

Keeping with the smart phone theme I've been on recently, I got a tweet from Sam of O&A Radio fame and my first thought is of all those Nazi slaves working for Bayer back in the day. What the hell does that mean, you ask?

Well it seems that Sam was at the NYC Apple Store when a CNBC reporter asked him about the release of the new iPhone 3GS. Snark alert. In the most sarcastic way possible explained he was switching over to iPhone because of all the great features that one day might work, and because he was tired of all his calls going through with his existing phone, and was looking forward to dropping between five and $700 on it.

How someone can take this and make one snipped soundbyte support their slant that 3GS is the new tickle me Elmo is beyond me. Really, really makes you think about how the media works, and who pays the bills.

Here's the link to the recording.

Customer DisService: iPhones and BlackBerry's and Palm Pre's, oh my...

Until they start charging for keystrokes, people will use the internet to hand companies their asses back to them on a platter when they treat them like crap. I did a Twitter search for "AT&T" after hearing about consumer complaints, and after going through an endless list of complaints except for one dude talking about that he got a discount from AT&T, but it took forever for him to be able to use it, which is a kind of back-handed compliment I suppose.

I do not have a smart phone, but I need one and the question has been, iPhone vs. BlackBerry. I've come to no conclusion, but this certainly doesn't help Apple's case. "People were saying the Palm Pre would be the iPhone killer. ... nope, turns out that AT&T will be the iPhone killer", according to @brickworkz.

Long story short, with the iPhone 3.0 coming out, existing customers have to doll out $200-300 to upgrade. There are lots of technical complaints about tethering and MMS that I'll let others complain about at length. My complaint is the short-fall in customer care. Like most giants, they're good at attracting new clients, but not good at maintaining those relationships long term. How many times have one of your service providers offered some fantastic upgrade, offer or benefit to new customers that they won't extend to you, the loyal long-term loyalist? They apologize, explain their position, but all you really hear is sit down, shut up, and keep rowing, slave.

This is more to talk about customer depreciation than the merits of different phones or their service providers. My other least favourite depreciation tactic is the Reverse Sales Call. You call up to ask a question and they withhold the help you need until you sit through a sales pitch to upgrade or upsell my services. Perhaps when I have a problem to solve, and I've just run the gauntlet of "press one for this, press two for that", this is not the best time to be asking for more money. I'm just ranting at this point.

I've come to no conclusion on iPhone vs. BlackBerry, but first I'll have to see what flaming hoops my current provider will want me to hop through to terminate my current service. And if anyone wants me to test out a Palm Pre, I'm wide open.

Lost in Translation: Who does what in my what now?

I've written before about this kind of thing before. When I first saw this, I was told it was a South African Gaviscon ad written by someone who's first language wasn't english. Unless the entire agency was populated by people who's first language wasn't english, and unless the tagline is South African slang for "did their duty to the best of their ability" or something, or unless the whole sentence is a series of unfortunate typos, then I just don't know what to say. I think this was done on purpose, and is either the best or worst copywriting ever, depending on your point of view.

A million years ago, at my first job, we did a sales ad for a bedding company, and the headline caught some flack. Once people explained their objection, we were appauled. By wad, we of course meant money, plain and simple.

Marketing as Dating: let's hook up and exchange money for services rendered

lot of people I talk to are in dark places right now. They see excess office furniture and the people who used it carted out on dollies and they panic. Belt tightening can be inevitable. Even the parades of former co-workers dead-man-walking out the front door seems understandable to a degree.

Hands down the most common concern I hear from people contemplating the jump to freelance work or even just sideline freelance work is how to make contacts. Networking is creepy and makes stalkers of us all. Yesterday I heard an analogy that changed the way I think about networking for business contacts. It was a dating analogy, which blew my mind. Dating is all about prettying yourself up and making as many impressions if you can till someone gives you the time of day. It's so obvious.

Be a good listener

The dating scene seems a little quiet out there, doesn't it? Before the economopocalypse, everyone was shouting from every direction and a dollar spent on advertising was worth a dollar. It's no breaking news that many companies have shrunk or collapsed their marketing budgets lately, or as I now look at it, every other guy at the party voluntarily contracted larengitus. It's an unusal opportunity to shove that better looking guy off his feet and steal market share while your competition sits mute and forgotten. I'd say a dollar is just plain worth more when it doesn't have to work as hard.

You can't be afraid to be a hustler

I'm not proud of this next part, but it's only because the looks bad when using the dating analogy. If your client base shrinks by the numbers due to their own internal budgeting, you don't kick them to the curb; you cheat on them. Same analogy about marketing dollars, now is a great time to mad hustle for more clients. And not just regular clients. Consider married clients too. Some clients might get turned on by the aggressive swagger of an upstart leveraging against their AOR's more conservative, respectful stance.

Grow the relationship organically

All that furniture and deadwood wasn't bringing in clients; self-promotion and sales efforts do. A plant won't grow if the leaves all shrink. It needs to grow new leaves. The leaves in this horticultral analogy are one-off projects to help keep client money flowing. Now is the time to propose brave new areas of branding and promoting businesses, now that social media has removed some of the financial hurdles of traditional media. Presenting creative strategies and aligning partners on a project basis, like bringing a squirrel out of a bush with a peanut is what will grow those leaves.

Try, try again

When you're trying to woo someone and they turn you down flat, you don't crawl back in your car and leave, you step up and try someone else. I always tell the story clubbing with an old friend; it was late and everyone wanted to go but before he'd leave he ran out and hit on about fourteen women, struck out fourteen times, and we were off. He believed in the numbers game, and so should you.

On the surface of it, everything I've said follows the rules of common sense, but I believe people need to hear it some times. Getting noticed is the first step to getting laid. I mean, paid.

Product Placement: just what the doctor ordered

I'm not going to pretend that I don't park myself in front of 90210 every week to nourish my soul. It is after all, the funniest sitcom on TV these days. It also deserves an award for pioneering acheivement in Product Placement. In the olde days, an actor might place a product by saying, "sorry hon, no time for dinner. The captain's going to have my ass so I'll stop by McDonalds on the way to the precinct" and boom, some money changes hands and the audience associates the character with their feelings about McDonalds, and vice versa. Today it feels like producers assume you won't notice the Big Mac unless the actor is basically posing with it and talking about it like it's another character. Let's explore some bad examples of product placement.

Innapropriate usage of a product


Really? Dr. Pepper for breakfast? Product placement without context will always catch the eye because something doesn't fit. Take this shot; would it have been crossing a line to have the cast enjoying delicious bubbly Dr. Pepper with a Western Omelette? Cheers to the producers for putting their foot down and puting a more tastefully positioned gigantic logo beside that slightly larger crying cabbage deal weeping off the table to make this scene more realistic.

Intense usage of product

I've been less excited about bandages after accidents than these two (Dixon and Annie) were while road tripping through the Arizona desert. I couldn't decide if the cooler in the back was small, or if it only looked small because of the stylized log jam of delicious, refreshing Dr. Pepper. Either way, the director gave us whole seconds of screen time to think about it as Annie decided between regular delicious and diet.

Ridiculous non-satirical over-statement of product usage

This is the use that most taxes suspension of disbelief. In comedy I think they call it a cap or a tag when you add to the punchline of a joke with a follow-up line to milk or continue the punchline. In this example, Dixon craftfully chides his step-sister at a rest stop when he explains that maybe they wouldn't need to stop so often if she didn't drink so much Dr. Pepper. Oh snap, right? Wrong. Annie replies: "We're on a road trip! Drinking Dr. Pepper is practically a requirement". This smacks of an SNL skit, but it's not. Satire free. See my earlier note about money changing hands.

All up-in-your-grill usage

I may have over-stated my adoration for 90210. The first time I saw the new series, Naomi was trying to fit in with the rest of the Heathers at West Beverly High and won them over by teaching them how easy it is to program the new T-Mobile Sidekick. This had squat to do with the plot and the intense close-ups were really distracting. Maybe they could have CGI'ed in a few sparkles or played awesome dance music in the background to enhance the effect. That would have been less obvious than running a crawl of product features along the bottom of the screen. In this scene, Annie advances the plot by changing the station (read: cuing the next track from the official soundtrack) while holding (read: hand modelling) her Dr. Pepper. I'll point out they wasted a strategic partnership with Sirius/XM here.

Not-so-generic brand placement

No wonder these people love their Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper evidentally owns every inch of ad space in Beverley Hills. There is no where you can go without a giant logo being shoe-horned into view. I wanted to say seemlesslly, but the term doesn't apply. In traditional sitcoms, actors take pauses to allow for audience reaction so scripted dialogue is not missed by laughter. Attention 90210 producers: your brand placements are so focal and distracting that by the time we finish laughing and/or complaining, we're all like "that's nice, now why is Justin so mad at Silver?".

I'm going to start watching just to make a product placement drinking game out of it (see a logo, take a drink of delicious Dr. Pepper). When they innevitably pull out the old teen-alcoholism chestnut, they could seemessly work Dr. Pepper into the plot by partnering with Barcardi to invent a drink called a "Bacardi & Pepper". Annie: "I'm all worried about Shasta. All she drinks anymore is Bacardi & Pepper". Shasta: "I do it because of the delicious taste, and my daddy issues".

The producers need to get off the fence and either change their product placement strategy to be less obvious, or commit whole-hog and go for that gold medal.

That's a great ad, now feel our wrath!

When I first saw Bob Burnquist and Ty Evans's "Feel the Bubbles" video, I wanted to blog about it immediately. Aero's last TV campaign featured the two potted office plants (read: employees) talking about letting bubbles melt on your tongue in a way guys wouldn't understand. JWT in the UK decided enough was enough and created something beautiful and fun to reposition the brand. Here's the commerical.

and the very interesting "making of" video

It's always easier to apologize later than to ask for permission first, which probably led to the backlash. The creators admit they "borrowed" the idea for riding through balloons from a previous skate video, but skaters haven't been very forgiving. Snickers ripped off a skater video ealier and a boycott ensued. This backlash reminds me of this recent animated type spot by Motrin.

You may have heard a woman innocently talking about the pain of wearing a snuggli, but to a lot of mothers, they heard a condescending "you're a stupid and insecure fashion victim for wanting to carry your baby" and it was all downhill from there.

Whether you're stealing your inspiration, or just being neglectful of people's feelings, people will always find a way to complain about your work. The rule of thumb used to be for everyone one person who boycotts your product, there are a hundred who wouldn't complain out loud, but would sabotage your brand to friends, and a thousand behind them who wouldn't complain at all. They'd just quietly stop using your brand.

I did work for a bedding company that enjoyed provactive headlines and the backlash they inspired. "The Boss is on Prozac Sale" headline was written thinking the only people who could complain were on Prozac so they wouldn't be interested in complaining. The complaints came from the parents of children on Prozac. My personal feeling is you can't please everyone all the time, so you have to do what feels right and handle any flack with dignity later.

The protest signage was created by Stephanie Syjuco.

Strategic Partnerships: lightning in a bottle, or an insanely obvious misuse of trust and money

Webster's defines Strategy as "a careful plan or method; the art of devising or employing plans toward a goal". Partners are defined as "one associated with another especially in an action".

When I was a kid, friends told me there was an mirror version of the Earth on the opposite side of the sun that no one could see. Assuming this opposite Earth exists, do you think their version of the Hockey Hall of Fame saw a partnership with a Green Food detoxifyer and said "sign here, please"?

I asked a few people in the related field to comment on this photo but there was nothing they said I could reprint here. I'm reminded that the Hockey Hall of Fame is a building full of Hockey Memorabilia. It has a soul, but no colon. I have to wonder what awesome list of candidate partners did they fire through before they ened up here. Not just a green suppliment sponsorship, but an Official Green Suppliment Sponsorship.

This blog post could be literally eight pages long, but there isn't enough snark in the world I'm afraid, so let me leave it at this: if you doubt the description of Strategic or Partnership, you likely shouldn't be creating them. And as I've said in the past, when in doubt, consult a professional.

Advertising Slap and Tickle: Another groovy idea unintentionally backfires

With great power comes great responsibility. Uncle Ben knew it. Spider man learned it. And now the fine people at Honda are geting a taste. Honda came up with a great viral advert that put a smile on people's faces, and it was paved over before I started typing.

Every highway driver knows what happens when you hit a rumble strip. A Japanese engineer accidentally figured out how to create musical tones through the frame of a car by controlling the width, depth and distance between lines scraped in asphault. Before you knew it, drivers in three Japanese cities were enjoying pop tunes while they commute.

Honda engineers used this technique to make a stretch of road in Lancaster, California to play the William Tell Overture. Drivers loved it, but local residents? It didn't take long for local officials to point out some issues.



The ultra dynamic trumpet-heavy, fully-orchestrated finale to Gioachino Rossini's William Tell Overture loses some lusture when reproduced on aspault. You have to drive at exactly 55mph to really get the effect. Any slower and you get a dull, sickening rumble. Any faster and it becomes a whacked-out, high pitched drone. If you're not driving a Honda Civic, the spacing of your axles will alter the effect. And the Japanese originators knew enough to make their roads far from people's homes. Evidentally in the wide open California desert land, the sound carries further than anticipated.

"When you hear it late at night, it will wake you up from a sound sleep," said Brian Robin, who lives a half mile away from Avenue K. "It's awakened my wife three or four times a night".

Far be it for me to point out someone else's misfortune without pointing out my own. This piece was an invite for the very first agency I worked at. We needed an occassion, so we invented the two-and-a-half year anniversary party. The invite was simple enough; directions, two aspirin, and the suggestion that you would benefit from these the day after. The invites had to be crafted by hand and over 1,000 were mailed. Fast forward a couple of days, and the calls started. It turns out, mail does not gingerly flow on gentle breezes to their destinations like a scene from a Christmas cartoon. Real mail is beaten and rammed through sorting machines. Now picture the attached image with the dime bag, but instead of aspirin, you get white powder. The calls were endless. One was from Customs; summoning us, our lawyer and our checkbook to pay for testing, re-routing and charges related to sending controlled substances through the mail.

Somehow we had more than 1,300 people RSVP. We even had postal workers trying to crash the event. So the question is, are these campaigns really failures, or is the endless apologetic backpeddling just part of the cost of a great idea?

Conspiracy: Is there an Acrobati?

Throughout history, symbols have been imbued with archetypal energies that bond spirit and matter. These symbols are expressed in a sacred geometry. The ancients took these formulas and hid them, making us believe them to be evil so they could use them to control us. This allowed an early guild of brick layers, or Masons to build the great pyramids and ...

Uh, I mean, you ever notice how needy Adobe Acrobat is? If it was a girl, I would have broken up with it by now.

Adobe Acrobat is a piece of software that needs more memory than the original moon launch. It can take whole minutes to start up. This raises questions. What's it doing with all my RAM, and why does it want to be updated every second day, and why can't it be updated without restarting everything I own. And why is it twice as much (not really) for Europeans?

Adobe needs to be more honest about what they're doing with my computer. In school we met up with a student who'd blown his whole internship by not being honest. In his first week, they asked if he'd ever heard of Torontosauraus. Trying to sound knowledgeable and indispensible, he stepped up to the plate with a big positive grin. They wanted to name a roller coaster on Toronto's Centre Island after the monster and needed the back story on any previous claim no the name, so off he went. It took him five-and-a-half out of his six weeks to find an early 1900's newspaper clipping about two winos who saw a tire bobbing in the lake and dubbed it Torontosaurus. His lesson to us: if you don't know, don't lie, just ask.

Now back to Acrobat.



Step through the looking glass with me here. Back in the day, the masons and the illuminati attempted an intellectual overthrow of the great Monarchs of Europe, but was supposedly destroyed by the Bavarian Government's Secular Edict in 1785. 208 years later the Shoemaker/Levy comet was destroyed on impact with Jupiter. That same year, Adobe unleashed Acrobat 1.0. Wait, a black van just pulled up outside my house. A couple of

Judgement Day: or as I call them, Weekdays

I found this image on a french "Anomolies de Back to the Future" website. In case you're wondering why Lorraine looks so pissed, they've pointed out that future-husband Biff Tannen, has left an errant copy of "Black Taboo" on his giant future-retro bartop. Thanks internet, I didn't catch that the first time.

I've referred to your museum of you before. Your blog is like a walking-tour of your personality that's open to the public. Google on the other hand is a museum of human under-achievement, and Google Image Search can be an actual guillotine. A quick google search of your name could reveal your previous arrest records or that album you made or your amateur "photo sessions" - these things happen. But what if it captured you commiting professional suicide?

To wit: hot on the heels of a KFC staff bathing in a chicken tub, I get this video of some Domino's employees making booger sandwiches. I'd show it to you, but Domino's was quick to arrest the employees, get the lawyers to yank the video off the net and slap down some damage control:

"The opportunities and freedom of the internet is wonderful. But it also comes with the risk of anyone with a camera and an internet link to cause a lot of damage, as in this case, where a couple of individuals suddenly overshadow the hard work performed by the 125,000 men and women working for Domino’s across the nation and in 60 countries around the world."

Two people hurt an entire company's brand. Now what if it's your name on the door? I've seen a lot of snide remarks recently attributed to Peter Arnell of the now infamous Arnell Group on the recent Tropicana package redux, and hot on the heels of the Pepsi redesign, I can't help but feel these comments, pooled here for your amusement, can only return to hurt his personal brand and the reputation of his company.

In a nutshell, the internet puts everyone under the same spotlight we all make fun of celebrities for ignoring. How many people have been sacked for telling Twitter and Facebook about playing hooky or how much they hate their jobs? To my credit, I've almost never been fired over porn, and a quick google search gives me a picket fence bill of health. How about you?

Professional Development: I blog, therefore I rule!

The two things I hear over and over in conversation is "should I start a blog" and "I should start a blog". I've explained before why I think professional blogging is key in this day and age, but that was weeks ago. It's time to break off a super awesome kick-ass update infostravaganza.

YOUR NAME

I know people who function just fine without getting all hung up on these "typewriter television machines" (an actual quote, and they mean "computer"), but they do it at their own peril. They have no internet identity, and by living off the grid, they are impossible to locate and go largely ignored when the gravy train rolls through with a healthy haul of work. An active life in the blogosphere and on social media is the most popular chance you have of having your message breaking through to the masses.

YOUR MESSAGE

That you are as awesome as a Guitar Shark and Darth Vader put together. No doubt.

YOUR GIG

Let's expand that last thought. Coming from an expert at establishing oneself as an expert, you should know that demonstrating your knowledge is key to building trust and earning the respect of potential future clients. I made that first part up, but in truth, what you offer and how much you share about your niche of expertise brands you. It becomes your personal brand. People argue the definition of personal brand, but my belief is that brand is reputation personified, and reputation is the promise of delivery. Big reputation, minus the ability to deliver, equals (see my next point).

YOUR HONESTY

(Read: your life span) There's a saying, fake it till you make it. To a certain degree, there's some validity to it, but if you out-and-out lie about your experience, crack open a window so the neighbours will know when to call the coroner's office.

YOUR TIME

I never took the time to enjoy periods of unemployment. Looking back I feel like the sunless kid who spent his afternoons boning up on Adobe while my friends were all outside working in the sun. Blogging takes on-going education to another level, and here's the important part: every entry is essentially an essay that the whole world will grade you on. With each new entry, it's like being in an alternative school where you choose your own curriculum day to day. They won't kick you out unless you don't study.

Blogging didn't pull me off a ledge, but it did give me purpose when times were tough. It made be smarter, faster, stronger. And if you click the adlinks on the side of the page, it'll make me slightly richer.

[UPDATE: the author wants to thank the entire internet for apparently showing up for the launch party of his previous post about Marketing an unmarketable property like a Fight Club. Let's just say that the writing was no joke. And no, although I'm flattered, it was not a promotional gimmick by Doubleday or Chuck Palahniuk]

Business Cards: a Valuable Clue to solving the Mystery of your (professional) Death

So I'm going through a crate of business cards with an event guru, when she stops and shows me the worst business card she's ever seen. I'm a strong believer that learning is a life long process and you can learn as much from your mentors as your tormentors, so let me preface by saying I'm not being mean. I'm just going to vivisect this hot mess for the benefit of others.

What makes this card great

Out of 1,500 plus cards, this had the most conversational appeal.

What makes this card not-so great

You can already see the big issue. If he were an artiste you might chalk it up to use of ironic design and embrace its brilliant lack of flair, but we have to weigh the odds that this guy will more likely become patient zero for a new site called yourbusinesscardmakesmebarf.com.

Nothing about this card expresses the mildest glimpse into what his business is. It's got a name, and a phone number, and a hotmail address. The end. No job title, no indicative graphics, no URL. Designers use a hierarchy to create emphasis of your information. Your name, company, contact info, some kind of visual identifier, logo or wordmark associated with your business. If you're in a more competitive field of business as an example, having a very clear title of what you do is a fantastic idea too. Otherwise, consider throwing on a recyclable logo.

Photos on business cards is more of a niche characteristic, like people in real estate value who place a premium on making themselves appear friendly, approachable and visually memorable. In this case, we have a photo of John Doe relaxing by a fence on a planet that may have more gravity than earth, like one of Jupiter's moons. Perhaps he wanted to appear friendlier, and just had his smile stretched out rather than splurging on a second photo.

Fonts and colours. Don't question the effectiveness of a clean business card. Believe. If your card is awash in colour, you will stand out, but your card will be less useable. Same goes for type faces. The less the better. In this case, he two colours for fonts. Good boy, but he's using three fonts on a card with three lines. Consistency increases digestibility.

When it comes to printing on unusual stock (wood, plastic, metal) or creating crazy sizes to make your card unique, remember that if it's too awkward to fit in someone's wallet or rolodex, it's not too awkward to fit in someone's garbage. This guy really jumped the shark and committed the triple sin of lamination. First, your card is now too wide to fit in a standard wallet card sleeve. Second, and really this should be first: lamination is cheesy. And third, although this card will outlive us all, standing against the elements for thousands of years so future historians can ignore him too. And why will they know so little about him? You can't write on lamination. A lot of people like to make personal notes on your business card; quick memos about your specialties or how they know you. It's a nice idea to leave white space or a mostly blank backside for this purpose.

If you're looking for cool inspiration, here's a Flickr set that will treat you right. And when in doubt, consult a designer. Show them what you have and get a second opinion.


via videosift.com

R.I.P Trust: don't touch the body, it's diseased

Shady, street-level marketers spent so much time corroding our ability to trust with their scams and their deceipt and their lies that they accidentally overdosed us and left us for dead. Plus they gave us hepatitus. Makes you pretty angry, huh.

Did you know the guy who pioneered TV thought he built something that would allow cultures around the world to learn about each other, and this would lead to an age of reason and understanding. The renaissance emancipator turned into a shameless marketing tool and he lived the rest of his days cloaked in guilt at "the monster [he'd] created".

Sounds like some other invention I've heard of. Oh right, it was "every other communication device ever invented." I'm not alone in saying that this disease has infected my phone and email. As a result, in my private life, I'm not terribly easy to get a hold of. Actually, it's quite easy, but I might answer my phone with foreign gibberish to weed out telemarketers. I am officially voice mail phobic. I'll check it, but typing in all those numbers to access to system then waiting to scan one-by-one and debating the motives of each caller - you could say it's not the favourite part of my day.

Marketers have made diseased corpses out of trust and prematurely killed voicemail too.

There are days I want to flying dropkick my phone through a plate of glass. Friends tell me they have dozens of partially heard messages saved on their work and cellphones waiting for that one ambitious afternoon where they'll buckle down and give them the attention they deserve. I ask them what calendar year? They prefer it when people send them a text or email. Are they unique? Nope. U.S. phone carrier studies show that 30% of calls sit for at least three days before being checked.

So on the one hand, all this fear of marketers has heralded a new age of brand engagement, product interaction, experiential marketing and social media ties to get around the diseased corpses of old school marketing messages, but what about us everyday people who got an air bubble shot into our arms? What about our more day-to-day concerns? Fear not. Hope is on the way. Wireless providers are figuring out how to convert voice mail into text and email so save you from your own trust issues, and they're already starting to roll them out. If my phone hadn't been suplexed into some drywall, I'd love to have that technology today.

----

A quick tip: the one good reason to answer telemarketer calls. No, not for material for your phony phone call album. In that brief two second pause after you answer before a human comes on the line to pitch you, a computer is logging that your number has been reached and you're removed from the call-back cycle that has your phone ringing at the same time every day. As air rushes into the telemarketer for those first words, my phone is already on it's way back to the cradle. It's an effective and beautiful dance.

As an aside, if you're looking to have fun with telemarketers, try this: next time you get a call from a 000 area code, take the call. When they tell you their records show your car/truck warranty is in danger of expiring and can be renewed for as little as $600, tell them you drive a model-T ford or Mad Max's old ride, and they will still be happy to help you. It's surreal.

Lost in Translation: Forgiveness is Divine; Salvation is Free, or at least cheap

You know when you watch Asian TV and literally nothing makes sense?

See this truck? Maybe there's a Korean pop-cultural reference I'm missing here. I'm not going to attack Koya Ajoe juice. It's delicious. In fact if someone wants to ship me a case, I'll bathe in it on YouTube. The ad is well-meaning with good photography but the message is a disaster.

So how will I vent? I could easily make this about the value of translators (plural) or the three-second rule of advertising, but follow up on the happy theme of failure with a look at screwing up royal. No one wants to hear they made a mistake, but how you handle it says a lot about you.

I was always in awe of how the Japanese handle blame. Working in North America, when something goes wrong there is a flurry of finger pointing like people are dodging a shit-sprinkler (pardon the language). Throw someone, anyone under the bus, deke fault and distance yourself, get the promotion. In Japan, step one is to identify the problem, fix the situation, and only then is someone asked to put a sword in their stomach. The North American model may lack honour, it may be cowardly and shameful, but it's an honest reaction pre-programmed since school.

If you're freelance, it's just you. You're at the bottom of the trough, and if something goes wrong, guess what - the best thing to do is climb under the bus voluntarily.

WHAT TO DO: 101

To begin, repeat after me: "I'm sorry". Show some contrition to your client and get right to work on it.

Step two, show them the cause of the error wasn't a brain injury by describing a solution and get approval to proceed. Did we mention the client is the one who found the mistake? Make them feel that they're a part of the solution process to put them at ease. Now fix that problem. Stay up all night. Eat that cost. Whatever it takes. And if pushed or taken to task, let your pride take a backseat and honestly explain what went wrong, no matter how dumb.

The odds are the cooperative process of your repair job will be worth more goodwill than the damage of admitting Twitter is destroying your life and you promise to quit shortly. As long as there's an open line of communication, you're working as a partnership, and you can save yourself a lot of pain.

So do I consider this Aloe ad a mistake? I've worked with translators and they can be a shady bunch. Not every one of them is going to be the first to point out how culturally irrelevant your headline is once it turns into french or spanish. So unless "crush" translates from Korean as "delicious beverage", then at best, it's wrong for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.