Category Archives: Think Creative

In honor of the summer vacation months, I now turn my head to how technology emulates and influences our traditions of past and future.   I was motivated to do so one day as I was anticipating my own vaunted getaway.  I found myself repeating a practice that I thought had no connection to modern interactive marketing trends – only to realize, I was wrong. Again.

What I was repeating is a long practiced road-trip tradition of mentally inventorying road-trip games.  These various kill-time endeavors reach from the annoying to useful to truly annoying to the essential. Games like – “Name that Semi” – a game where you try and call the truck maker name of a truck before others in the car.  In my day, just answering MACK Truck would net you 80% score without fail – it’s a harder game to play these days.  Or this one – “Punch bug yellow” – my children insist on playing this game 24/7 – 365 and my arm is sick of it.  (If you couldn’t tell, this is one of the “truly annoying” and painful games.  But my favorite and a favorite of every experienced road-trip-traveled parent is:  “Who can be quietest, the longest?”  This one is always executed with the wishful thought that “if only I could have started this a 1/2 hour ago.”  If these don’t strike a cord, Susan Fox’s article, Classic Road-Trip Games of Disney Family Fun has hand-ful more classics to give you the idea.

The surprising thing is – each and every one of these arcane and inane games shares a surprising common thread of connection to our modern technical lives.  They are all classic forms of the now in-vogue marketing strategy/term – Gamification.  As Wikipedia defines it:  gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the application and become engaged with it.

I see it as a marketing effort to turn either a brand interaction from boring to fun OR provide a fun experience during those times when a user is well – bored.  Which of course – is the point of road-trip games.  They are always engaged after hitting the n-teenth mile where everyone is about to keel over.

I guess this too has become the reason technology Gamified or “funware” brand experiences have become in vogue.  Apparently, all those people constantly checking-in, FarmVilling out, earning badges and becoming the mayor are just too bored with walking, crossing-the-street or say, engaging with the friend who’s house they just walked into on a visit.

And here is where the road-trip games and our new-tech versions differ.  The first – engages, and forces the assembled mass to face and conquer an entertainment challenge together – in the here, and now.  The other – pushes us away from the immediate situation, and people – and allows us to escape with a disconnected mass of “people” in the cloud.   So, this is the life we lead, with modern portable electronic entertainment devices that keep us connected, directed and spaced-out.

As a marketer and creative – I’m intrigued and entertained by the gamification strategy – I just hope they never come up with a funwared experience of “Smell the flowers.”

It’s all about lead generation these days. How to track web activity, track news releases and gather data to convert into business and billing dollars. Lists are offered that have been vetted, filtered and proofed, and still they contain bad email addresses, faux names and phone numbers. In addition, these lists can be expensive. How does one get new quality leads to build business?

Sometimes you need to go organic or grass-roots, so here are a couple of unique options to try.

The first option is go to the Sunday New York Times Style section, and look for wedding announcements. This will provide a list from the tri-state area that is typically mid level executives and above, after all who else places their announcement in the most viewed wedding page in the U.S.A. The best thing about this listing is you are guaranteed to learn exactly what they do for their companies and just how important their job is. For example you will read, “…the groom John Smith is a Product Marketing Manager for Jones & Jones Pharmaceuticals in charge of their very successful anti-depression drug. Mr. Smith controls all media purchases for the drug in addition to product packaging.” I’m sure if the something that sounds important is left out by the happy couple their parents will be sure it is added, for this is also an opportunity for their friends to learn how successful their children have become. You do have to read through a few announcements with bride and grooms that don’t have positions of interest, but when you hit one it is great. A phone call congratulating them, mentioning you saw their announcement is always a good door opener.

Option 2 is a lunch time activity, or even better one done while traveling. Restaurants and hotels are always trying to encourage people to provide them with information for future mailings etc, so they invite guests to leave a business card for a chance to win a free lunch or stay. While you are waiting to be seated in the restaurant, or in the check-out line, you can casually check out the business cards. The prize is leads from your area if at a restaurant by your office, or if you are traveling and at a hotel, leads from a wider area. Now you are able to call or email the President or VP of Marketing directly, no more being blocked by a gate keeper, you have their direct line.

Lead gen doesn’t get any better than this!

I like focus. I like crisp and orderly, thoughtful presentations distilled for quick and easy consumption. I have a very short attention span, and from interviewing executives and producing corporate videos for clients all over the world, I learned I am not alone.

Success in the world of corporate video production relies on many closely-followed tenets – glitch-free production, careful lighting, unblemished audio, crisp wardrobes, flattering make-up, finished length not to exceed three minutes, etc. While YouTube has demonstrated that if a video is clever enough, or funny enough, or richly informational or insightful, you can stray from some of these guidelines. But once in a while one comes along that ignores the rules and is still hugely successful.

Grand Rapids found itself on a list of “America’s Dying Cities” and decided to pull together and tell the world they were very much alive with an incredibly low-budget production that comes off not-schmaltzy, is moving and makes you want to hang in for the duration (10 minutes) to see what’s next. $40,000 budget, 2.7 million views — now that’s a successful marketing metric!

Wish that you could find a bunch of inspiring, cool design blogs? If you answered yes to this question, skim on.

(Not the kind that make you feel like you should be doing things differently, or like you need to take notes, or re-design everything you ever made.) I’m talking about blogs that just make you want to go out and try new things. 

I found a good article that lists 50 design blogs around the world which is worth checking out. Its got some of my old favorites, like DesignSponge, and some new ones too!

Life’s lessons apply to many unexpected areas of life. This truism was demonstrated to me recently when I attended my five-year-old daughter’s nursery school graduation.

The lesson: Remember to focus on the little things – they often times prove to make the biggest difference.
Anyone who has children knows the power of this lesson. Even those that don’t have witnessed its influence after being forced to look through a ream of pictures from a child’s first birthday! Sorry, we parent’s do that kind of thing.

But how does it apply to marketing design?
Simple – this lesson makes for a great design rule. Let’s look at the example below of palm’s new home page. A site I found very tasteful and elegant.

Palm Homepage

For our discussion – let’s look at the detail in the background. The designers have taken a stage setting image – in this example a kitchen – drawn it onstage in focus so you get the idea of a where and then they blur it out. Simple, right? So you are saying – yes, simple – so they blurred a background big deal. But think about the simple elegance and very dramatic impact it creates. The event draws the viewer’s attention to the foreground by physically telling you that the focus is there. It also creates an abstract field of color and light that act as a complimentary backdrop for the main character – the Palm pre – the product. They continued to use simple expressions of elements on stage. The navigation isn’t blocked out in heavy, weighted bars or fields that would distract from the setting. They have also continued the simple theme with tasteful minute icons of the products in a bar 2/3rds the way down the page.

The focus on this site of having things being very clean and simple have made all the difference to the user experience. This design rule is at the core of the most successful product designs as well. (A really great extension to this discussion is to compare this execution to its competition but that is a much longer discussion that is not so short or at least – simple.)