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The upside of human centered design

I recently attended a workshop on human centered design lead by Jason Gaikowski, Global Lead of Brand and Business Design for VMLY&R. I went in thinking I was already practicing "human centered design" by putting the customers' needs at the center of all my creative decisions. But it turns out, human centered design is so much more than that.

The goal of human centered design is connecting the brand experience to the customer experience. It goes far beyond advertising and marketing.  It begins with a willingness to define the "problem" or challenge differently in order to generate alternatives.

The reason we often fail to define the problem differently is because of the way our internal organizations are structured. According to Conway's Law, an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967, that “organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.—M. Conway.” The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a software module to function, multiple authors must communicate frequently with each other. Therefore, the software interface structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organization(s) that produced it, across which communication is more difficult.

So changing the way we think requires changing the way we work together. We must become both makers and consultants so that we can turn abstract ideas into concrete results.

One of my favorite takeaways from the workshop is the acknowledgement that making is thinking. It’s one of the most underutilized ways to solve problems. Design is a non-linear process. We go from messy to linear. So it’s fitting that when we roll up your sleeves and get our hands dirty, we activate our brains. From sketching, writing, interviewing people, whiteboarding, or role-playing...”making” can take on many forms.

Jason walked us through the four phases of going from thinking about what’s possible to making something concrete and provable. These four phases are intended to integrate the needs of people, possibilities of tech, and the requirements for business success.

Phase 1: Investigate. This is where we ask questions, we seek to know, we let our minds wonder, and we develop as much empathy for the humans at the center of the riddle we need to solve. In this phase, it’s helpful to lead with an intention instead of an objective because it encourages solving the right problem.

Reframing around an intention instead of an objective allows us to ask “how might we____?”. The question we ask must be deep enough to be worthy of exploration, and open and inspiring to possibilities. This is also a good time to address the “sacred cows”, otherwise known as the assumptions or deeply held beliefs that tether us to old ways of thinking. Here, we must surround ourselves with a diverse team to uproot the sacred cows or hidden, self-limiting beliefs, taking time to ask questions like, “What if the opposite were possible? What if we’re wrong?”.

Phase 2: Synthesize. In this phase, we hone our POV on what matters to people. A great POV is about making choices, then refining to make those choices more relevant to more people.

Phase 3: Explore. Here is where we test our hypothesize, prototype, and iterate to get things right.

Phase 4: Deliver. Now we articulate concrete results, always looking to reframe the central question to see if it still applies or if it needs to evolve.

One day is not nearly enough to make me an expert on human centered design, but it is the jump start I needed to rethink how I approach challenges. In the words of Albert Einstein, “We won't solve new problems using the same thinking we used when we created them.”  

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Live Q&A: the overlooked secret to more productive pitches

Both clients and agencies are well aware of just how labor-intensive the pitch process can be.

Clients spend hours articulating their needs in an RFP and then sifting through responses. Agencies pour their hearts and souls into learning a new business in record speed and then developing presentations that will stand out from the competition.

Typically, in their race to review the work of multiple agencies, clients pack a lot of one hour meetings into the span of a few days. In that one hour, the agency must get the technology working in the room, manage introductions, and present our end-to-end thinking. We spend every valuable minute trying to explain the hours that went into our POV. Then suddenly, time’s up and we must pack up in a hurry so the next agency can take its place.  I suspect both sides are left with that unfilled sense that happens after a one-way conversation—questions left on the table, the need to probe on comments made, conclusions that get assumed instead of explained… This can be tragic for both sides who have each already invested so much time and energy to even get to that table.

Last week, a thoughtful client team did something basic but oddly not widely adopted during a pitch: they made time for live Q&A during the meeting. And in that thirty minute window, the real truths came out.

The clients got to see how the agency thinks on its feet. Does the same person answer every question, or do we work as a team? How do we handle negative feedback? Are we able to workshop in real time?

The agency got to see first-hand that yes, bringing in a big idea is important, but ultimately there is someone in the room who has some very immediate, tactical needs that must get served. We saw first-hand that if clients can’t see how our big idea can translate down to the email they have to send out, poof, just like that your big idea won’t make the cut. A huge aha to the agency people that we must go high-low with the work we show.

The client got the chance to point out what worked and where the gaps in the presentation were. Then, the agency got the opportunity to share some behind-the-scenes anecdotes and explain those gaps—some real and some that actually were connected—in a conversational way.

I know when all of us left that room, there was a much better sense of fulfillment that always comes when people get to know each other better. The agency side left knowing what we could have done better and where to improve should we make it to the next round. And, we now see these clients as people who know how to work together—which will make us even more motivated to be better partners. As for the clients, they got behind the pitch veneer and saw the truth. The un-polished, unpracticed bits that are probably a better judge of reality. No guesswork, no assumptions.

Considering the blood, sweat and tears it took for both sides to get to the table, this thirty minutes is worth its weight in gold!

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The One Minute Moment of Silence

I’m fresh off the heels of doing a bunch of interviews with key leadership at Sprinklr, a client we are creating a documentary video for to celebrate their 10th anniversary.

Sprinklr makes software that that uses data and analytics from over 30 social media platforms and 150 million sources to help brands create better customer experiences.

My head is bursting with what I learned from them. Not only do they have an incredible story to tell, they shared some golden insights that will make me think differently about my job.

One of the most powerful things I heard was their culture of observing a one minute of silence any time a customer parts ways. For Sprinklr losing a customer is like experiencing death and they treat it with a period of mourning regardless of the circumstances. This resonates with me for several reasons.

In any service business, your survival depends on your customers. But sometimes in agency land when a client relationship gets dicey, we get our defenses up and spend more time venting about how they did us wrong then thinking about how we could have served them better.  This sour attitude ends coming through in every single interaction. If the agency starts to get defensive, the tone starts to change from helping to CYA. This shift is natural and there are millions of good reasons why it happens, but the momentum is hard to turn around once that slide starts.

If we take a page from Sprinklr’s book, we must see every client relationship as the living, breathing soul that it is. Our job is to do our very best to help that relationship thrive. Of course, even with the best of attitudes and intentions, there will sometimes be casualties. And when this happens, paying great respect to the end of relationship with a one minute moment of silence communicates several powerful things back to the culture:

Every client relationship is a sacred, living and breathing thing.            This reminds us how important it is to nurture all existing relationships that we can still impact.

The loss of client relationships never gets swept under the rugs.          This promotes transparency.

We acknowledge the loss collectively because we all played a role in it. This promotes a team attitude when it comes to accepting blame.

No matter what the circumstance were, we grieve all relationships that didn’t end well. This reinforces how important client relationships are.

Thank you Ragy Thomas, Murali Swaminathan, Yoli Chisolm, Grad Conn and many more at Sprinklr for sharing some of the thinking that helps you stay at the forefront of a highly competitive, constantly evolving technology landscape.

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The highs and lows of building the plane as you fly it

A recent “building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it” type of experience with a client got me thinking about the circumstances that working this way requires.

In agency land, building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it is code for when your client has an aggressive marketing or branding deadline, but many of the decisions or planning that should inform the work are still up in the air.

For this type of model to work, a few things must be wired correctly from the start, or the work—and the relationship—will suffer. Here are a few things I’ve gathered on my building-in-flight journeys:

Know your “must haves”—and what you can live without

Yes, you want all the things, but when taking on things like rebrand without enough time, developing a website without all the content finalized, or launching a global campaign before you fully vet the concept around the world, there’s only so much winging it you can expect your agency to do with a lack of time and proper direction. This is the time to scale back to the basics. Start by indexing what assets or content you already have that can repurposed or lightly reworked. Then you can better identify your gaps—what must be crafted from scratch. Keep in mind, these net-new things will inform the older parts that you intend to repurpose. “New” needs a lot of oxygen, so put the mask on your most essential elements.  If you don’t basics properly covered, everything will end up unusable.

Choose a tight group of decisive decision-makers

When the season calls for chaos, clients need to keep their review team small and select the brave, decisive types. Agencies thrive with decisive clients because it lets us apply logic to the work that can quickly cascade. If your organization has lot of stakeholders who need to be part of the review committee, think twice about a building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it model. You will be in danger of draining your energy, agency talent, and budget too quickly.

Embrace rapid, ugly iteration

When there is not enough time to marinate on ideas, concepts or content, your best approach is rapid iteration. This is where agencies and clients should be white-boarding, sharing sketches, embracing the 15-minute start or end of day call to keep the dialogue very fluid. Clients beware—when you are part of the sausage-making, you will see some ugly things that never would have crossed your desk under ideal circumstances. Great work needs breathing room so that your agency partners have time and space to self-select before you have to course-correct them. If you prefer reviewing more polished work, this building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it stuff is going to give you heart burn.

Establish a circle of trust

And most important, the building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it model thrives with a circle of trust. This happens fastest when people on respective teams have already successfully worked together, and are well-attuned to each others strengths, needs, and habits. When trust is already there, a lot of steps can be skipped because each side inherently believes the other side has its back. This is especially important a day or two before launch when engineering changes a feature, or the product name must change due to a copyright challenge and all the assets have to get rapidly updated.

Although it’s hard to incubate the right circumstances for building-the-plane-as-you-fly-it to work, it can be an exhilarating way to shake the confines of “corporate”. From its compressed timelines and chaos spring the potential for great bonding, radical collaboration, and truly spontaneous, imaginative thinking.

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Is your brand built for human relevance?

Typically when brands fail to make a human connection, it’s because they are spending too much time “talking to themselves” and not enough time listening. 

This happens when they stop paying attention to what real people think, say, and do and instead start focusing too much on demographics, market analysis, or internal dynamics.

People like you. People like me.

For your brand promise to really serve as a single source of truth, it needs to make sense in our lives irrespective of your products and brand. You must tap into the real lives we lead, our everyday challenges and opportunities. You must understand the people who are most important to us, our goals and ambitions in life, and as many emotional aspects of our real lives that you can uncover. Simply put, your single source of brand truth must reflect a human truth.

But you can’t stop there.

Next, you must ensure that your brand truth influenced by people and culture on a global scale. This comes from staying versatile, dynamic, and letting real life be your guide. Brands that remain too stubborn in their identity get wholeheartedly rejected by consumers because we expect you to understand our world and move with it step by step.

 It’s a tall order but real love and care goes a long way every time.

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What One Tough Mother can teach us about guts and advertising

Looking for an inspiring business book and biography? Read “One Tough Mother: Taking Charge in Life, Business and Apple Pies”, the story of how legendary business woman Gert Boyle and her son Tim took Columbia Sportswear from a locally known company to globally successful empire.  The catch? Gert didn’t have any internships, entry-level jobs or grad school. Nope. When her husband died unexpectedly, she went straight from 21 years of being a stay-at-home mother to running the family business with her college-aged son Tim.  Her courageous, B.S-free, and totally authentic approach to life and business are hugely inspiring.

 And as a long-time advertising agency brat, I was completely smitten by credit and respect she gave to Portland-based agency Borders Perrin Norrander for the bold work they did to differentiate Columbia Sportswear. At a time when the industry was dominated by men, Bill Borders, Wes Perrin, and Mark Norrander had the foresight to recognize that Gert’s toughness and motherly love could be a tremendous asset.  Ever-practical, Gert and Tim first ran the work by some of their most-trusted, most reliable customers to validate the approach.

They did, and “The Tough Mother” campaign took hold, helping the world see Columbia as not just another outwear company featuring pictures of gorgeous people doing the impossible, but establishing it as the company where the cranky and crochety old broad made sure that they were getting a good product at a fair price.  

Running for over two decades, the work was quirky and hugely memorable, going to great lengths to prove all Columbia products are thoroughly tested. In one commercial, Gert has her son Tim test waterproof apparel by literally going through a car wish. Or, to demonstrate how wind resistant Columbia gear is, Tim gets strapped to a car roof and drives through a snow storm. And, to prove the gear is meant for extreme cold, Tim rides with the sled dogs.

This image of frugal, extracting Gert took hold—especially because it was so true. Product, brand, and human insights all aligned—Columbia products are tested tough, the brand exists to protect people from the elements, and buyers want to feel like someone really and truly has our backs in the way a supportive mother does. Like Gert.

The campaign was awesome—and so is the fact that Gert spent nearly an entire chapter of the book giving much of the credit to the company’s dramatic rise in sales to the campaign. She willingly admits that it “was the best decision we ever made”.  To see a Chairman of a global empire acknowledge the role their brand agency plays in their success demonstrates the kind of respect Columbia has for their agency partners. No wonder the work has been so good.

Gert ends the book asking for readers to create a “Gert-ism” to share. Think of this as a headline for the now retired “Tough Mother” campaign. I can’t resist the invitation, so this one’s for you Ma Boyle:

Step away from your screens and go play outside!

And she’ll make sure you don’t have any excuses!

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Death by Nice

Recently, Debbi Vandeven, Global Chief Creative Officer of VML, shared a great article by Mark Wnek about a topic that  creative people are secretly plagued by: death by nice.

Wnek got me thinking about why “nice” is such a creative killer. Nice is a devious, two-headed beast that seduces its victims with soothing kindness and then renders them useless.  Yet putting the kibosh on nice work can be tricky because it masquerades as good, solid work. Nice work is easy to approve because its familiar and comfortable. You must work very closely to discover that it has no edges to create tension, it has no soul to make an emotional connection.

Nice flairs when timelines get tight, when a project doesn’t have a strong center of gravity, when we want to be liked by a client, or when we make things our clients think they want instead of things they need.

Nice happens when we feel bad about asking someone to redo something for the third time, or when we don’t want to deal with the pushback that comes after giving feedback.

There are all sorts of valid excuses and rationalizations behind nice work. And none of them take back the ugly truth: time and money were wasted making unremarkable, invisible work.

Be hard on the work and good to the people

Any creative worth their salt got into this business to use their creativity to solve problems. We must remember when giving feedback that if we’re not able to give and receive critical feedback, we’re not making each other better.  And what could be “meaner” than preventing greatness in our teams and our work?

Allowing work to stop short of great, settling in at “nice” is another form of short term gratification. But giving tough feedback—when delivered from a place of caring—is the nicest thing you can do to help people on their career paths, not to mention showing your clients you care about their work. They might not agree. They might not approve the “better” ideas. But at least you’ll know you’re keeping your standards high, vigilantly fighting for the best work. Because if you don’t, who will?

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Know Your Narrative

Storytelling. It's become such an over-used term I almost hate to use it. As advertisers, we've reminded our clients a thousand times that their brands need a compelling and consistent narrative.

But as advertising professionals trying to influence our teams, our company’s, and our industry, we need one too.

Some might call it an elevator pitch, but at any given moment you should be able to tell your boss what value you're adding to the company. But doing that requires recognizing what is really happening and then reconciling it with what you really want to happen.

What is really happening is the work. Maybe you're a copywriter writing your first e-book about cloud security. Maybe you're a designer working on a brand identity. Or maybe you're a creative director trying to land the next campaign for a gaming client.

But what you really want to happen is the next big thing in your career. And this is where understanding your personal narrative, your story, or your elevator pitch--whatever you want to call it--can help reconcile what you're doing with what you want to be doing. For the aforementioned writer, it's not just writing an e-book, it's about recognizing the powerful role content can play in helping shorten the lengthy B2B buying cycles.

For the designer, it's not just about creating another brand identity. It's about understanding how the kit of parts you created is iconic enough to help a company stand out, but simple enough to provide an easy onboard to a unified, global presence.

And for the creative director, it's recognizing how your campaign can help the agency establish itself as a force in an entirely new category.

The key here is to constantly stop and ask yourself how to connect the dots on the small, day-to-day tasks to the big things you ideally want to be doing. There is always greatness in these day-to-day things if you are approaching them with vision and understand how they are laddering up to the next thing.

When you take the time to think through how the value of what you are providing today can power what's next, your boss will take note too.

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Disagree and commit: the new growth mindset

I recently read a game-changing philosophy from Jeff Bezos about the power of making decisive decisions. He encourages his teams to make faster decisions by going with 70% of the information they need. If the logic in that 70% is convincing enough--regardless of whether he agrees with the direction--he'll get on board with it and commit to making it happen. He calls it "disagree and commit".

I call it playbook material for advertising agencies. We live in a world with racing deadlines, imperfect information, and an enormous amount of subjectivity surrounding what ideas to put in front of our clients.

Too often big presentations and pitches fall victim to the endless squabbles that eat away at what little time we have to craft a truly integrated end-to-end story. And the thing is, none of us know all the answers in that shrinking window of time before the deadline. Not even the client, or they wouldn't need our services.  In due time, the data will be there to show us the way. But in that presentation or pitch moment, what clients feel--right or wrong--is the conviction from a team who is united in approach. A team with some members who likely had to disagree and commit in order to help a vision survive.

A culture of disagree and commit saves time, with less going towards analysis paralysis and more energy applied building and making.

It also breaks down the ego echo chamber that plagues creative fields, encouraging the kind of growth mindset that reminds us that unexpected greatness can be tapped through conviction.

And to say nothing of the teamwork that gets established when others know you're willing to get on board and find solutions even if it wasn't your idea.

Try it. Let someone show you a compelling argument that goes against your intuition and then agree to take a gamble with them. It might just pay off.

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Want great creative? Bring a flag pole.

Hey clients, want to save money and focus your creative team to do their best work? It’s the easiest, hardest thing to do in world: know what you are trying to stand for, aka your “flag pole”. Essentially, it’s the key thought you want your advertising or content to communicate.  

It starts with a Launch Pad 

How do you get to that key thought? David Griffith, Director of Strategy at POP, uses something he calls a “Launch Pad” to tease out “Territories”. Here’s how it works. First, a strategist uses the Launch Pad to explore the four critical areas that will help the brand get an unbiased look at who they really are—not who they think they are:  

Category Dynamics—The forces defining the future of the category/business

Assets and Attributes—From culture to branding to history to product differentiators, these are the things a company already has in place that we can build on.

Consumer Insights—Perceptions and insights that will help us connect our audience to our brand

Brand Potential—These are ownable, credible and extendible traits we want to elevate

Next stop: Territories 

Using cues from the launch pad, a key thought starts to take shape.  The key thought is meant to elevate the brand to its highest possible, most aspirational place. To help explore the possibilities of what that key thought can be, the strategist will carve out 3-5 territories the brand in question could own. For example, Nike owns empowerment. BMW owns the ultimate driving machine. Virgin Airlines owns customer service.  Now, the creative team comes in to explore the key thought through the lens of each of the chosen territories. We write manifestos, we make mood boards, we craft tag lines to help show the client how each territory could help their brand and communications come to life.

No frakenmorphing! 

This is the tricky part. Most clients will want to munge all the territories together and pick their favorite parts from each one. While tempting, this is how you water down a positioning before it ever comes to life. Resist the urge. This is your chance to stand for something. This is how you create integrated, cohesive marketing. Discipline yourself to pick one key thought and the territory you want to own around it. 

Keeping your clients on board pays off 

Once the key thought and territory are selected, the strategy team will use this as the lens from which to either write or modify the messaging framework. Now, the creative team has a carefully curated place from which they can start concepting. The right territory should give the creative team a large enough sandbox to play in, but with the kind of borders that speed up the ideation process. And since the client team has been along for the ride, chances are good they will be much more willing to approve work that pushes boundaries since they were part of the process that helped set them. 

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Why The Players Tribune is Hitting a Home Run

What can Derek Jeter and a bunch of athletes tell us about creating great content?

I recently discovered, A LOT.

When looking for examples of exceptional editorial content across copy, design, and UI—The Players Tribune is hitting home runs. Here are five things they are doing so well.

1. Authentic, personal writing. The articles are incredibly human. The range of athletes they have detailing personal on and off field moments is fantastic. The writing is clean, simple, and told from a first person point of view. They each manage to exude the sort of honest authenticity that makes me feel like I got invited to some sort of one-on-one interview.

2. Large, stunning images. Each story has its own stunning hero imagery that pulls me in, giving me a front row seat to the action.

3. Simple, elegant design. Ample white space and clean, black and white graphics give full bleed photos the center court. The page elements work as a team, making the content easy to absorb.

4. Sticky navigation. Thanks to sticky navigation, ThePlayersTribune.com makes it dead simple for me to navigate the site, link to more content, share an article, save an article to read later, or hit the like button--from wherever I am.

5. No gates, no drama. Of course they want my email address. But The Players Tribune doesn’t gate their content, giving me an ultimatum to ante up or get lost. Instead they let me explore the site in peace. After I read a few articles I got an interstitial page that politely asked if I wanted to get “the voice of the game” in my inbox. I don’t. Not right now anyway. So I “x’d” it out and it let me go back to reading. The next time I arrived at the site I had the same experience, with The Players Tribune responding like a waiter or waitress who knows when to clear the plates and when to let their table talk!

High fives to the team at ThePlayersTribune.com, the jocks know a thing or two about creating an elegant content destination!

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The truth about advertising

One of the best parts of my job is working on all sorts of different products for wildly different audiences. Last weeks challenge was creating a new conversation about the way we talk about adult diapers.

We had two weeks to identify real audience truths, not the things that khaki-wearing marketers assume to be true of adults who find themselves needing diapers for one reason or another.  The only way to truly uncover these truths is to talk to the people living it and translate their real feelings. Then, we encapsulated that raw emotion into an anthem video. And from this emotional anthem video we articulated the kinds of content that could support the truths we uncovered.

In hindsight, this ask really straddled two important but very different worlds: advertising and content. Until now, the work I have been doing has fallen neatly into one bucket or the other, making it clear which hat to be wearing when.

The journey started neatly in the advertising campaign, trying to identify an audience insight that is strong and universally true enough to build and extensive, authentic platform. In advertising-land, we would have gone on to make banners, a landing page, and a pre roll video out of this platform and call it a day. But in content-ville, we used the insight to drive a whole series of video and expert articles. Creating content gives the “big idea” more facets so it can take shape in all sorts of incredibly useful and interesting ways. Or, as Joe McCambley (SVP of Content at POP) would say, “Content creates a context for brands to have meaningful conversations with their customers."

So I confess, were I asked to put my own money on what pieces would perform the best, I would bypass the beautiful, insightful advertising and select the stories, facts, and insights from the content.

It was a huge moment for a gal who cut her teeth in advertising. On the bright side, the tricks of the trade we use to create breakthrough advertising are still useful ways of unearthing ideas that first really come to life through content. Like most people trying to juggle life, I am often too busy for advertising. I don’t have time to click on banners and watch pre roll. But I break for podcasts about start ups, MOTH videos, food blogs, gifs, memes, and dog photos.

The advertising world has evolved and it craves substance.

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Double Happiness

There I was checking my Yahoo mail when lo and behold, not one but two banner ads from a campaign I worked on months ago showed up in the right rail. Oh the joy of seeing my team’s little pretties in the light of day! I paused to take in the glory; creative that somehow made it through the client gauntlet, the ad spec obstacle course, and finally into the real world. The images are strong, the copy crisp, and the CTAs pointed: this is my art. And while the final creative result may end up slightly bruised from acts of data or the opinion mill, there is a hero’s journey behind each piece of work that made it to the real world that makes me proud.

Of course, the odds (at best) are .17% that anyone will click on either of these two ads. But I’ll take the fact that two ads my team made simultaneously showed up in my browser as a random act of advertising kindness.

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Radical Empathy

(This is the face of “radical empathy”, aka Joe McCambley)

I have recently begun working with Joe McCambley, POP’s new Senior Vice President of Content. Joe, an advertising veteran, swears he made the first banner ad for AT&T back in 1994. He was a pioneer in the digital revolution and now he’s doing the same for content marketing.

In just a few short weeks Joe has got me taking a closer look at the stark differences between advertising and content marketing. For one thing, he continues to diplomatically point out that many of the things I call “content” are actually just advertising. His logic is shockingly simple:  Advertising is designed to sell, and content is designed to help. Joe goes on to note that “Content that tries to sell usually doesn't. And content that tries to help usually sells.”

Joe’s recipe for creating honest, authentic content is based around one core ingredient that he calls “radical empathy”. Radical empathy involves an unvarnished understanding of your audience. You gotta respect what keeps them up at night, recognize what they love most in the world, understand what motivates them to act, know what makes them laugh, also what makes the hairs on their arms stand up straight.

Radical empathy requires that you walk a mile in your audiences’ shoes so that you can appreciate what help they need and how your brand can really, truly be of service.  And here’s a radical thought for most brands: radical empathy is about respecting your audience so much that you are willing to put their needs ahead of your marketing goals.

One of Joe’s best tricks for driving the creation of content instead of ads is to ask “How can we help people?” rather than, “What can we sell people?”.

IF marketers can retrain themselves to thinking about helping instead of selling, we just might be to rewire people’s brains to seek out brand experiences, rather than run from them.

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Pizza Hut Swag: hot or cheesy?

While I would never want to be caught dead wearing Pizza Hut branded clothing, I do find myself intrigued--and maybe even a little impressed that they went there.

Love them or hate them, a move like this shows Pizza Hut is into their brand. So I applaud them for having the chutzpah to get out of their box, show a sense of humor, build a little buzz, and if nothing else, remind their die-hard customers that they take the art of pizza very seriously.

Who cares if anyone will ever actually buy the pizza vision sunglasses or pepperoni scarf.  What matters most is that Pizza Hut has heart. If they don’t see themselves as a commodity, neither will their customers.  And that is worth a lot of dough!

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5 reasons some contractors make the call-back list

Calling all contractors. Thank you dearly for your on-demand surge of talent that helps us rally when new work or tricky deadlines require us to ramp up quickly.

For those of you hoping for consistent work or maybe to see your contract turn into full time, here’s a few ways to get yourself catapulted to the top of the agency call back list.

1.     Practice face time. Yes, it’s far more convenient to work at home, but sometimes there is just no substitute for face-to-face.  Showing up gives you critical context. It gets you hands on. It helps you hear the after-meeting morsels. It guarantees you’ll be in the side bar conversations where everything changed. No, you don’t have to park yourself permanently, but understanding when to show up shows you are invested. And, if you are looking to do more work, showing up means you can sign yourself up for heftier roles versus waiting for people to tell you what to do.

2.    Be the expert.  Knowledge is power. The smarter you get on the account you were brought in to work on, the more your over stretched agency brethren will move mountains to make sure you stay locked on a piece of work.  Make sure you get your hands on all the necessary documents, feedback, and schedules so those around you breathe a sigh of relief that they wont have to play babysitter.

3.    Become a master of protocol.  The more you understand an agency’s inter-workings—how to fill out time sheets, where to post files, how to name documents, who’s in charge of what—the more valuable you become. Why? Because the overhead of having to train another contractor can be a fierce de-motivator to outsource. Prove you are turnkey and its yet another reason we won’t want to let you go.

4.    Get personal. Once your project has been kicked off, don’t turn the creative director, PM or account person into the go-between. Find the people you need to work closely with and contact them directly. Call, email, arrange to meet in person—the more personal you make it, the better the collaboration, the better your work will be. And that is the ultimate callback.

5.    Move with a quickness. When you’re a contractor, it pays to move with quickness.  Set expectations and then make sure you deliver when you say you will.  Proving you can be counted on to deliver on time goes a long way in the agency world, where many people need to get their eyes on things before they can go out the door. Keep this chain of necessary reactions moving and your stock will rise.

Hey beloved contractors, here’s hoping these observations give you some insight into what agencies are looking for. We know trying to fit into a team and figure things out on the fly is tricky business. Thanks for rounding out our ranks and jumping in to help us deliver!

[wordupat]

Little things clients can do for BIG love

Clients, looking for some easy ways to inspire love and loyalty from your agency?

I mean the kind of respect that gets us thinking about your work on a run, in the shower, or as we drift off to sleep? Yes, good budgets and cool projects go a long way, but here some small things clients did just last week that made me want to go the extra mile:

1.     Made yourself available over Skype to bat around ideas in progress

2.     Ditched email and picked up the phone to discuss concerns

3.     Openly praised someone on our team for a job well done

4.     Provided thoughtful comments and edits right in the word doc

5.     Took the time to send examples of work you admire

6.     Told a joke at the start of the call

7.     Kept us informed of internal politics that might affect us

8.     Brainstormed your own ideas with a disclaimer that “now I realize how hard this is!”

9.     Didn’t chisel the scope or the timeline down

10.  Came to our office for a review

Many of these small but mighty acts of awesome probably take five minutes or less of your time.  But the good will you can generate is just the thing to catapult your project to the coveted “kept thinking about it in my free time” slot that yields the biggest ROI.