There's No Business Like Ad Business

A couple of wise guys in the ad industry (there are so many of them, aren’t there?) have created a series of Internet memes poking fun at various ad agency types.

There’s the Junior Copywriter, the Junior Art Director, and of course, the high and mighty Creative Director:

If you can’t get enough of the tongue-in-cheek satire, there’s also Douchey Account Guy, a Tumblr documenting inane bits of account guy speak such as, “We need to make this as clear, and as nebulous, as possible.”

Whether you're in advertising or another industry, the ability to laugh at yourself proves that you still have a grip on reality and your own ego.

We're all Mad Men after all.

http://www.quickmeme.com/Junior-Copywriter/popular/1/?upcoming

http://www.quickmeme.com/Junior-Art-Director/?upcoming http://www.quickmeme.com/Creative-Director/?upcoming http://doucheyaccountguy.tumblr.com/

Cheese or Font, That is the Question

Here at Bandwidth Marketing, we pride ourselves on our esoteric knowledge of many things.  For instance, discerning the difference between the name of a type face and the name of a cheese.

When we stumbled across a site that let us put our expertise to the test, it was like Christmas all over again.

Cheese or Font is a quick little time-waster that presents you with a series of words and asks you to classify each as a type of cheese or type face/font. Sounds easy, but it gets tricky and addictive.

With every incorrect answer, you feel the frustrating need to prove you are an educated, sophisticated person who can smell a stilton or kern a cambrian!

Cheese or Font is proof that a small, clever idea, simply executed, can be highly effective. The site now has 500 followers on Twitter and almost 1.5 million plays, so try it out for yourself.

Now why do we suddenly have a hankering for crackers and MS Word?

http://cheeseorfont.com/

Stories Told Through Ira Glass

If you do anything creative, you know the battle between a flash of instant brilliance, and working, working, working to get to that inspiring idea.

In the clip above, Ira Glass, host of This American Life on NPR, talks about how practice makes perfect even when it comes to creative work (click for video).  Cue Gladwell’s Outlier’s pitch.

Just because you have taste and vision doesn’t mean the work you put out matches your ambition. You need to do a large volume of work before you hit upon something really compelling, and your output catches up to your good taste.  

In fact, the good taste that many creators have often stifles the ‘artist as a young man’, because one realizes that the early output...isn’t all that great.

That said, there are constructs to follow to possibly get to that successful spot more readily.

In an additional segment, Mr. Glass shares his experience of what makes a good story. Although he focuses on broadcasting, his nuggets of truth are applicable whether creating or presenting or...socializing.

As he says, a story is essentially a sequence of events told in a compelling way that carries the audience towards a destination, coupled with a moment of reflection on why the story matters.

The trick?  Figuring out the strong interplay between the two and editing down to content that isn’t crap.

Storytelling is powerful in any situation, creative or not, because our brains are wired to process in terms of narratives. With a lot of work, editing, and luck, you can create better communication in the form of a good story.

Maybe a pair of Ira Glass’s thick glasses would help as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA&feature=relmfu
http://vimeo.com/24715531

The Best Advice You'll Ever Hear

Having problems with your business? Why not call up Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker to talk it over. Think your significant other is hiding something? Just get ex-FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro’s take on the matter. 

A start-up website called Expert Insight is making it easier for us common-folk to get advice from the best of the best. Customers can browse the list of experts from various fields and their hourly rates, select a time slot from their schedule, pay online, and video chat their way to enlightenment.

Most of the rates are pretty steep, but paying $400 an hour for Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron is still far more democratic than having to be accepted into Harvard and paying the $50,000 tuition. 

Although Expert Insight is still in its beta phase, it is an interesting attempt to improve our inefficient and unequal access to expertise. It’s another example of how the Internet has blown the top off of information access, especially privileged information (we’re looking at you, WikiLeaks). 

If you think you’re qualified or know someone who is, Expert Insight is accepting world-class applicants. Otherwise, you can work on your swing with an ESPN coach or talk strategy with a poker pro. 

You can even hire former call girl turned best-selling author Tracy Quan. She charges $750 an hour, just to chat. 

http://www.slate.com/id/2296822

https://expertinsight.com

Smile for the Data, Sweetie!

Marketers are used to mining data as a resource.  But effective presentation of data is increasingly less about numbers and spreadsheets, and more about turning the quant into a quality visual.

Not that Powerpoint isn’t visual, mind you.

‘Data visualization,’ the process of distilling reams of statistics into something aesthetically pleasing and functional, is quickly becoming a buzzword.

Tech companies have been doing this for years. Google Maps and Google Earth, for example, are just enormous amounts of data packaged into a useful and consumer-friendly service. 

Now marketers are catching on. Intel created the Museum of Me website which pulls Facebook photos, videos, and other archived bits to create a gorgeous, if self-absorbed, virtual exhibition. 

For marketers themselves, data visualization tools help synthesize paralyzing amounts of consumer information.  Forward-thinking agencies like R/GA are hiring computer scientists to find new ways to distill and display data. 

Easier analysis means faster insight and decision-making -- and even though number crunchers abound, it’s visuals that stay with most people.  Think back to your ‘how to give a presentation’ lessons -- gesture, smile, and be a presence.  That’s what’s remembered more than the content.

Data visualization creates a demand for those who are able to think mathematically as well as artistically. By using both sides of the brain, we can graph recipes that double as art work and discover new music and apps through interactive maps.

In this highly visual, digitized age, a picture’s worth a thousand words...and a million data points.

http://adage.com/article/digital/powerpoint-data-lure-consumers/227997
http://www.intel.com/museumofme/r/index.htm
http://www.abisolberg.com/#1217452/Sum-of-the-Parts
http://discovr.info
http://mwtech.com/rw/photos/GoogleEarth/

Counterintuitive Counterfeits

The counterfeit industry has long been the shady brother of legitimate, high-end manufacturers. Conventional knowledge says fakes steal sales from genuine brands, but could they actually be good for business?

A preliminary study of counterfeit sales in China (the birthplace of all these fine products) suggests that rip-offs may serve some good after all. 

In the 1990s, China suffered a bout of well-publicized cases of food-poisoning and gas tank explosions. As policing efforts were diverted from counterfeiters towards the drug, food, and gas industries, knock-offs proliferated. Instead of losing business, however, high-end labels saw rising sales in the following years.

There might be several reasons for this:

• Fakes serve as free advertising by signaling brand popularity. All publicity is good publicity, right?
• Owning a fake could eventually lead to purchasing the real thing. MIT marketing professor Renee Gosline calls counterfeits “gate-way” products that allow the owner to form an emotional attachment to the brand.
• A guilty conscience helps propel counterfeit owners to buy the genuine article.

As more brands and corporations go global, the best solution against counterfeits and copycats  is differentiation through quality. For high-end labels, luxury materials that are harder to replicate fetch higher prices anyway.

Imitation may be flattering, but it’s so much better when it’s also profitable.

http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/

http://in-this-economy.com/2009/03/04/fashion-flash-new-black/rich-louis-vuitton-car/

The Times They Are A-Changin'

A documentary about journalism might not seem like edge-of-your-seat material -- you’re thinking white guys on computers, right?  But Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times, is gripping -- a spirited defense of traditional print media in its most dire hour.  

Page One follows the goings-on of the newsroom, casting media reporter and colorful personality, David Carr, as the main protagonist defending journalism against bloggers and new media types.

Carr is actually far from a luddite. He calls himself a ‘digital adopter’ while at the same time recognizing that derivative news sources such as blogs and the Huffington Post can’t exist without and can’t replace rigorous, original reporting.

Page One makes clear that journalism as a public resource is what’s at stake -- but it’s also a classic tale of an older entity struggling to adjust to new markets and resources.

TV Guide transformed into an online fan resource; AOL is trying to sell ads instead of dial-up portals.  Can the Times, and the traditional news industry in general, make the leap where the FREEconomics have changed the field?  And if they don’t, will the blogs and aggregators in essence kill off the host organism that feeds them?

David Carr believes the Gray Lady can keep shining, beyond just using new hair dye.

He calls newspapers “branded information put together by people you trust.” The brand, if valuable enough, can live on even if the physical product, delivery method, and business model change.

The Times put up a pay wall in March, the first step in what might be a future largely supported by readers instead of ads or subscriptions.  If the Times is going to be asking for dollars, Page One is  a pretty persuasive infomercial.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/watch_trailer_for_journalism_documentary_page_one_inside_the_new_york_times/

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2011/01/28/david-carr-page-one-and-the-future-of-the-new-york-times.aspx

http://www.thenewsgallery.com/2011/06/page-one-ny-times-documentary-opens-for.html