Borrowing from past experience in guiding website evolutions, I shared a questionnaire  for clients to fill out, which puts questions into a non-technical framework and identifies who we are talking to, and why it’s important.  In addition, answers also identify who within our organization is most closely in contact with each audience.

The form is a free download as a .docx file, available here. If you find it useful, please make a donation to the San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team, www.sdmrt.com.

The hero, Deckard, chooses a suspect’s old family snapshot photo and digitally scans the picture with a computerized ESPER machine – a photo enhancer with overlaid grids. The machine allows him to enlarge, sharpen, zoom in on different areas of the photo in order to find clues (which he does).  The technology even lets him shift point of view, and finally deliver a hard copy. The fantasy of making photos much more than static captures is brought forth in the movie, now nearly three decades old.

Though the Lytro, brainchild of Dr. Ren Ng, a Stanford Ph.D, may not do everything the ESPER machine did in that movie, this camera could be the quiet beginning to a very big leap forward in photo/imaging technology and products..

View a demo from IDF Shanghai at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EScbueZJVU

What can a marketer learn from this example?  That the majority of people get emails with images turned OFF.  To overcome this, the design of the page can be improved with some reorganization of elements. For instance, if the design kept the headline in HTML text, it would not have disappeared with the (great) visuals if a recipient’s email client has images turned off.  So even without the great food images, the message of special savings would have still come through, and there’s a better chance of our email being more effective. It’s a reality we can’t ignore and need to work with — Over half of the email clients, including Gmail, don’t display images as a default.  And with all the email that lands in the average person’s in box, marketers can’t count on the recipient recognizing the name in the ‘from’ area. In fact, many of your recipients may not even know that images are disabled.

There are other steps that can be taken to further optimize marketing email, but the first is work with the assumption that your recipient cannot view images.  If you follow this rule of thumb, whether you’re selling burgers or broadband, you can avoid sending out a big serving of ‘X’s to clients.

Below you’ll see what the email looked like without images in Gmail, and what it was intended to look like (second image).  I’ve also included how the email could be improved by using HTML text for the headlines and body copy to increase readability/response.

What the email could look like with HTML for heads and text.

We have a digital recorder, so we backed up the spot and sure enough, the visual elements of the ‘Bake On’ spot floated together and for a FRACTION of a second, less than a 10th of a secon, they formed a QR code.  I cringed.  Someone actually took time to think about using a QR code and then the final creative execution made it go by so fast that it was likely to be missed by most viewers.

Would the QR code work?  I had to know. With the commercial rewound and paused, I started the QR reader app on my phone and aimed it at the still image of the commercial on our television.  Voila!  What emerged on my phone was a well-designed, interesting mobile site specific to the ‘Bake On’ theme.  Well done with links to recipes, Shopping list, coupons and more.

So what I have to say to the Duncan Hines folks is find out who ordered the QR code to be buried and appear for such a short time in the commercial. Rake them over the coals and have them pay to re-edit this commercial.

What can we marketers learn about this?  We can think this through more carefully to see our efforts pay off more. These codes are visual elements that need time to register and be noticed. It should not be ignored, rushed, or made so small in the name of ‘creative integrity’ that it isn’t effective. Creatives need to learn to work with the code up on screen for several seconds, and be ready to have the QR code appear at least twice — or at least enough time to allow viewers to use that great app on their phones to interact further.

After 31 years in the business of being part of creative teams or leading them, and working with hundreds of clients on both the client and agency side, I find many marketers still developing creative development schedules the same way they did years ago.  There’s room to improve the approach and teach fundamentals, if we look outside our industry…

I recently found sound ideas for planning the Creative process borrowing from an industry in which the stakes are higher than our media buys, award-winning concepts, new business wins, ROI or even Brands themselves.  It is an industry where a mistake will cost far more than accolades, some profit or a job. It could cost a life.

Charles Heal is not a marketer, but a highly decorated tactical expert in the field of Law enforcement. His book for law enforcement tactical planners, Sound Doctrine, is called a tactical primer. In one section of his book, he shares a rule of thumb called the ’2/3rds Rule’ of tactical planning that is effective when used in all types of emergency situations.

Heal’s 2/3rds Rule states that although the amount of time available for planning is largely dependent on the circumstances, it is necessary to ensure enough time for subordinate units (in our business, creative teams, content producers, etc.) to plan (develop concepts) and prepare (for us, execute the creative). As the process is passed down the chain of command, two-thirds of the available planning time needs to be allocated to the subordinate units (hey Creatives, get over yourselves and get beyond the terminology here). As the process gets passed down the chain, each succeeding unit gets 2/3rds of the remaining time. I’ve seen times when creative was kicked back by the client for further development because there wasn’t enough time allocated in the first place.

For Creative Development, our window is the time between client project start and hand-off to production vendor/network/media channel. And though this rule of thumb was developed outside our industry, past experience tells me that in many past assignments, a 2/3rds use of timing tends to show up again and again in well-developed projects.

If you read this far and think marketers have very little in common with a SWAT Team or Emergency Responders, then look at concepts that all these industries deal with:  Identifiying the nature of the problem; crisis (market changes) and conflict (competition); Command (direction); Tactical Principles (best practices), an End State (resulting ROI), and gathering intel.  Our industries all deal with fluid, evolving situations that don’t have the luxury of unlimited amounts of time or the ability to get a second chance.

It’s easy to get caught up in our industry’s own self-speak.  Looking outside our business is a great way to look at our situations differently, and shed new light on old problems, like planning out time for creative development. Even if someone is coming up with their first project schedule or deciding what creative team to assign a new project, applying foundational concepts that work beats just guessing at dates in an Excel document, doesn’t it?

Think about it a bit.  If someone is using a smart phone, and uses a QR reader APP, and an ad’s QR code has caught her attention in some print, billboard or TV ad, she is looking to further the engagement.  She expects more than just being led to a static web page that regurgitates what she’s just seen. Here she has this phone with very cool connectivity to the web, videos, music, and can call to order that must have item that you are marketing, and all that’s stopping her is poorly thought-out use of the engagement medium.

Just this week, I saw an add for high-end designer sunglasses with a QR code that simply went to the eyeglass manufacturers website, which was NOT designed to be mobile-friendly (Duh!). Instead of the QR code linking to a really cool video (yes, they exist, buried elsewhere on the website) that romanced the brand further to loosen the purse strings of someone into buying, this marketer was banking on the simple act of landing on the link to spur on some action. But they’ve left the audience without more to bite on.  No sizzle, no steak.

I also saw another online QR effort on Facebook that was equally guilty of being a tease that went nowhere.  It was for a specialty clothing Brand, and their QR code was embedded in their status update, with the caption “Anyone know what a QR code is? If so, here’s a little prize.”  Where did it take a fb fan?  To a photo/wallpaper. A nice one, no offer, just a picture, so calling it a prize was an overstatement.  If they really wanted to use the QR code effectively, why not sell with it, or link to something that would engage further. like many of this Brands online videos that are action-packed and have more viral value?

There are site on the Web that talk about best practices for QR codes, but most focus on the technology instead of marketing best practices.  As marketers, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Veteran marketers must avoid technology over-love of this Killer App (gag!).  The QR code can be a very powerful tool.  But don’t count on a great tool to overcome weak thinking of the process. Repeat the mantra: “Technology is not a channel or solution, and I must remember the basics of good one-to-one marketing fundamentals still apply.”

Some good examples of engagement using QR codes:  101 uses for QR codes

A place to generate your own QR code:  Kaywa QR Code

Scan the QR code below. I’ll share my newest whitepaper: Three important things to know about using QR codes for marketing.

viewable using Scanlife

A former client of mine used to say, “show me crappy marketing work, and nine times out of ten, I’ll show you a crappy brief.”  If she asked her marketing agency to show her the brief during a creative presentation to her, that was a sure sign of trouble, because it meant that the objectives weren’t clear to her from the creative.  Once she looked at the brief, agency folks would usually be be raked over the coals.  The head AE would take a hit for the poor input, and the CD for not kicking back the brief and wasting time and energy of the creative team! No excuse of ‘the creatives didn’t follow the brief because…’ would be accepted either, since the AE and CD were jointly responsible for confirming the direction was followed, and the competency of the creative team fit the project.

Many agency account executives argue there’s not enough time to write briefs, or think they can work around the lack of a brief and still get a good end product for their marketing efforts. That lack of effort will reflect in money, either through bad results or creative cost overruns.  In contrast, I still get good, short briefs from a client who consistently wins DMA ECHOs and beats control efforts while working with different creative teams.  Their teams include very talented writers and art directors, but the common thread in their consistent high performance is their attention to input.

Creative briefs that work well seem to be derivative of the classic David Ogilvy brief. BUT, they work as long as the brief writer can honestly stick to answering the questions clearly on the form, instead of cutting and pasting volumes of unedited client blather and self-speak that is neither positioned, edited or made relevant. The other extreme is people providing too little input for the scale of the project (the lazy “This is big. I’m too rushed to write it down now-let me send you the client’s PowerPoint-we can do this in a call” approach) anticipates that some important focus will be recalled later by the creatives. Don’t count on it.

Every day, there are marketing articles, news items and blogs in which pundits (usually young enough to be my kids) offer theories as to why ‘impression fatigue’ is happening to marketing campaigns these days. Hooey. It’s easy to blame too many impressions, disintermediation of media, and viral marketing for this. Those are all just excuses for sissies. There are still plenty of campaigns, large and small, that do just fine because they have good solid roots. And I’d bet most of the winners responsible for creating them started with a pretty good brief. Those who didn’t likely had to beat the input out of someone up the input food chain.

Few marketers, even some veterans, will admit the dirty secret –  writing a good creative brief scares the hell out them.  Guess what?  It should if you want it translate to great creative work.  Every brief should be worthy of attention and respect by author and recipient, and no good creative can be led by a bad brief.  Those who are willing to face this fact should get trained on this skill and thinking process, and agency higher-ups who want to increase job security can do well to acknowledge that better briefs help their bottom line by reducing waste during creative development.  Agencies who demand that this is done end up making more money for themselves.   They become tougher, stronger, better marketers, and leave the sissies far behind.

This morning, I checked twitter and found that instead of a sprinkling of postings from my varied connections, the entire body of recent posts seemed like they were from this person.  She had posted so many tweets linked to white papers and other information that I had to scroll down pst over 30 posts in order to find someone else’s tweet. On average,  posts were added every 3 minutes for 4 hours.  And every one of the posts linked to white papers offered by one site.

At this point, I’d had enough. It was clear this person was either a shill for a Website or someone that was over-caffeinated and desperate to position themselves as a forward-thinking professional.  Pity, because her machine-gun posts were filled with ideas that she simply vomited up on twitter.  It was ironic (and funny) because some of the tweets were on subjects like “Understanding The Value of a Social Media Impression”, and “White Paper – How to Attract Members and Grow Your Social Media Community”.

So, since I’ve ‘unfollowed’ this person and reported them as a spammer on Twitter, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a good idea to see not just what, but how often, someone posts on their social media.  If you can’t cross-reference their profiles on other social media, ditch them.  Maybe this person doesn’t realize their being a spammer, but they are.  So Perhaps one day, Twitter will have a tool to limit how many tweets you get in a day from a single user, but limiting communication isn’t really their mission.  Until then, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, had a couple laughs at my own expense, and now have a great little marketing horror story to include at my next speaking engagement.  Thank you, Wanda.

Now, after the morphine wore off and I made up some of the lost sleep, I have to plan my counter-attack with large amounts of water, possible ultrasound treatment to break down the stone, and a change of diet which I was going to do anyway.  And then we’ll see what the pea-sized crystal that’s working its way through me ends up doing.

I’m not happy about having to take seven days of Cipro, since it contributes to tendonitis, but so be it.  At least I am allowed to continue exercise.  The pain has subsided, so I suppose the stone is staying put for now.  And if not, the pain killers I’ve been prescribed are close by.

1. There will always be people faster than me, and people slower than me.
2. Relaxing your shoulders DOES really help.
3. …So does picking up your knees higher when you start to get tired.
4. Good socks are important, or blisters will show up in the most unexpected spots.
5. There’s a good number of spectators at long-distance events whose racy inspirational messages will never make it past US TV censors.  I never saw any of THAT kind of stuff on Olympic coverage!
6. Somewhere around mile 10, I zone out, and zone back in at  about 12.5.
7. Cold beer tastes wonderful after that kind of run.  Not just good, but WONDERFUL.
8. The rush of completing a half marathon isn’t instant.  It can take a day to really sink in. About the same time the Advil wears off.
9. Plastic Trash bags really do keep you warm before a race.
10. Yes, everyone chafes during a long race.
11. No matter what music you play on your MP3 player, at some point during the race, it will get drowned out by a bad live band. So run more quickly past them.
12. People around these events are happy. Despite the pain and maybe boredom, I was not within earshot of one single argument all morning. That’s impressive, with over 20,000 people in attendance.
13. When I crossed the finish line, it didn’t matter what my time was, what place I came in, or who was waiting for me.  I felt like a winner. One of many that day.

13.1.  Now I know I can do a half-marathon…and will do a few in the future, god-willing.

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