The Blaze Blog

The Amazing Everyday

As you may know from my previous posts, I love going to the cinema.  I love the films, I love the big screen I love the surround sound. Heck, I even love the trailers and the adverts!

Cinema advertising feels like the older cooler sister to television advertising, they’re shinier, they’re louder, they’re longer, they look stuffed full of budget and have massive production teams behind them.

I’m also sucker for ‘inspirational’ talks, books, blogs and articles so when the ‘The Amazing Everyday’ advert came on in the cinema last Saturday I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

The premise of the advert is that every day need not be so everyday.  Then, to the sound of a quirky track, we are taken through an any-old-day where ordinary people are doing something routine, but in an extraordinary way.

A man cooks a fried breakfast, but it looks like a skull and cross bones.

A very dirty car has a detailed picture etched into the dust.

There’s a jogger skipping backwards through a lush green park.

There are office workers making waterfalls out of coloured post it notes.

There’s a man dancing whilst doing his ironing.

As you watch the advert, you’re shown the little amazing things that happen every day, everywhere.  You’re shown that even the most ordinary of lives can be colourful, quirky and fun… you just have to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to really be in the moment to enjoy the full potential of the day.

It’s a simple message but a huge life lesson, and one that’s been made before by some great thinkers of our time (Ghandi, Tolstoy and the Dalai Lama to name three).

As you can see, I held high hopes for this advert.  It’s completely captured me, I’ve been swept along by the music, the visuals and the message.  I have surrendered completely and am the captive audience that big budget and huge production team have worked so hard for.   I tell myself that tomorrow I, too, will go forwards and stop assuming every day will really be everyday.  My life will be better, more colourful just for having seen this advert.

Until the advertising equivalent of a large bucket of cold water is thrown over me… the product.  A mobile phone, a Nokia mobile phone at that!

I feel cheated, I feel violated – I gave myself fully to that advert and took it to heart.  Only for the product to turn around and slap me in the face.

At no point are we told how possessing a Nokia mobile phone will help us live in the now and discover those extraordinary moments.  At no point are any of the people we see experiencing their fabulous, colourful, quirky lives actually using a mobile phone.  They are enjoying the moment for what it is, losing themselves in it fully and truly experiencing life.  They are not glued to a phone checking Twitter, Facebook or texting friends.  So where is the relevance?

This is a classic example of a fantastic advert completely and utterly ruined by its product.   The advert lacked any relevance whatsoever to the product it was advertising. I loved the advert, but hated feeling cheated by the product.  I was left feeling cheated and disappointed – the messaging had built me up, only to crash me down in the last 10 seconds.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying mobile phones are a ‘bad’ product or that they don’t deserve great adverts.  I just wanted to share how disappointing it is when a great advert is produced only for it to lose its credibility once the product appears.

If you’ve seen any amazing adverts lately that are let down by poor relation to the products they’re promoting, I’d love to hear about them.

If you liked this post you may also be interested to read Things that make you go grrrrr! Gender Stereotypes in advertising or Musings on multitasking – at what point does multitasking become overloading?

I often think that being a marketer can make one think and behave a little strangely.  It can make you collect advertising emails that most would delete instantly, it can make you obsessed about how to make people you’ve never met before click on a certain part of your website and it can even mean hours spent putting leaflets into carrier bags creating tall slithery mountains behind which all sense of time disappears.

My personal foible is a fear of brown boxes, I’ve even dedicated a whole blog post to this!

It’s not the boxes as such that put the fear of God into me, it’s the opening of them.  This is when previously overlooked grammatical and spelling mistakes pounce!  You may have made sure your brochure was proofed twenty times, but somehow when you have 20 boxes of brochures sitting in reception those evil typos leap out at you like a jack-in-the-box.

Your heart sinks, you feel sick and all of a sudden you have an overwhelming urge to open a tea-shop by the coast!! (Or is that just me?)

As I’ve become a more (ahem!) mature marketer, I’ve picked up a few tips along the way and now seems to be the perfect time to share them with you:

1. Don’t read on screen, it’s been proven that people proof more effectively from hard copies
2. Don’t rely on spellcheck, it’s useful but not fool proof
3. Check all phone numbers, websites and emails.  Call all the phone numbers, visit all the websites and Google email address/peoples names to ensure that they’re correct
4. Don’t squeeze proofing in between other jobs, it’s so important that your marketing communications are correct it’s not worth saving 20 minutes by doing it quicker
5. Proof somewhere quiet – away from phones, television and chatting colleagues, you know you’ll be able to think more clearly
6. It sounds obvious, but always check titles and headlines, these are often overlooked as people focus mainly on the body copy
7. Ask a colleague to proof it also as it’s particularly difficult to proof copy you’ve written yourself
8. Check page numbers and that they correspond to the contents page, if there have been a lot of changes during the design stage is very likely that content will have moved
9. Keep an eye out for anything that refers to pictures or diagrams ‘left/right/below/above/overleaf’ and make sure that’s where they are
10. Check all lists deliver the number of points they promise

Once you’ve followed the above steps, you should be in possession of marketing communication materials with perfect content!  But if you’re anything like me, after following this list, you’ll want to do it all once more just to make sure!
If you have any other top tips for proofing marketing materials, I’d love to hear them, please feel free to share.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also enjoy reading; Brown box phobia, the marketer’s curse – top tips for signing off print or What are the most important things to check before setting your website live?

Let’s imagine that you’re sitting at your desk, eagerly awaiting the design of your new brochure to ping into your inbox.  You had a conversation with your design agency last week and they’re excited about getting the designs over to you.  They’ve been working very hard and say that they’ve come up with something that you’re going to really like.

When the email arrives, your heart jumps and you open the email with bated breath.  The pdf opens slowly and your excitement makes you frustrated with your PC that seems to have become inexplicably slow.  Come on flaming computer!

Then, your wait is over, and you get the first glimpse of the new brochure.  Your excitement turns heavy and you feel a little confused, is this artwork really meant for you? It has your company logo on it, so it must be yours, but it’s not at all what you expected.

Simply, you don’t like this brochure, you don’t want this brochure and now you have to call the agency and let them know.

As an account manager at an agency, I’ve been on the receiving end of this conversation and as a marketing manager in a previous life, I’ve also been the instigator.  It doesn’t have to be an awkward conversation, so don’t fear it.

But how did it get to this point?

The most common cause of receiving artwork you don’t love is that an insufficient brief has been issued to the agency.  There is nothing harder than trying to design a product that is inside a marketer’s head, when they won’t tell you what they really want.

Often marketers feel that they should give their creatives a completely free reign to produce something outstanding.  But with hundreds of possible directions they could go in, what are the chances that they’ll pick the one direction you hope they will unless clear direction is given?

What do I do now?

Pick up the phone and call them.  As a design agency, our livelihood is creating design that you like.  If you walk away with something you aren’t completely happy with, we won’t be completely happy either!
But we make one request before you make this call, have a think about why don’t you like it.  Is it too text heavy?  Have we misunderstand your brand? Are the wrong elements emphasised? Did you have something completely different in mind?  Did you want something more playful? More serious?

These are all helpful, constructive criticisms and will point us in the right direction for the next version.  Please don’t feel awkward about asking us to change anything or even to start over again, our job really is to produce functional design that works for your company, not to use your marketing communications as awards fodder.

Have a look over the artwork, maybe sleep on it and think about what it is that you dislike.  Then pick up the phone and we’ll take it from there.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also enjoy reading Brown box phobia, the marketer’s curse – top tips for signing off print or Happy accidents. Can making the odd mistake be beneficial?

Is it a logo or a brand?

To many, logo and brand can mean the same thing.  Often clients come to us asking for a brand and all they really require is a logo.  Sometimes we’re asked to create a logo when really a brand is needed.

In reality, these two tools are rather different beasts, they have different attributes and each serve a different purpose.

So what is the difference between the two?

Let’s start with the simplest of the two.  The logo.  A logo can be seen as a stamp of authentication upon a product or service.  Think of it as the face of your company, it is how people will come to recognise your organisation.

Imagine picking up a box of cereal, you don’t recognise the packet design, but can see a big red Kellogg’s logo on the front.  The font, the colour and layout all tell you immediately who has made that cereal and you know that it will be of a certain standard.

OK, now to the more complex part, branding. Let’s choose another brand – Apple.  Just upon hearing that brand name you’ll have had an instant reaction.  Does it excite you because their products have changed the way you live? Does it encourage you to save a little harder because you really want an iPad2?  Does it make you feel make you feel like part of a creative tribe?

Why do you feel this way about Apple and not another company, Dell for example?  Both will sell you a computer.  But when you buy from Apple, you’re not buying a computer, you’re buying a brand.  That brand comes with statements about yourself (I’m creative, I wouldn’t dream of using a PC), that brand comes with promises (‘this is the most innovative technology out there’), that brand makes you part of a group (‘oh, you don’t use Android do you?’).

So in a nutshell…

A company’s brand is what will spur you on to buy their product or service over other options, it promises you what you’re going to get and how it’s going to make you feel.

A logo helps you to recognise a product or service as belonging to a particular company and stamps it’s seal of approval upon it.

Ultimately, companies require both but I’m afraid the starting point is a whole other blog post!

We hope you enjoyed reading this post, if you did, you may also like to read The secret to cohesive branding for startup businesses or Logo or face? Who would you rather chat with?

If you’re anything like me (a worrier!), you worry about making mistakes at work.  You don’t want to get anything wrong and want to prevent accidents from happening in the future – the mere idea of it wakes you in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

But what would happen if we allowed ourselves to make the odd mistake?

Would the world come tumbling to its knees?  Would it be reported as the latest scandal in the red top press?

The answer is most likely going to be a resounding ‘no’.

In fact, we’ve seen recently how mistakes can be a positive experience for marketers.  One of our lovely clients (whose modesty I shall protect here) accidently gave us the wrong data to send her eshot to.  Did the world end, NO! Did it end up plastered across The Sun, NO!

So what did happen?  The people who weren’t supposed to get the eshot responded very well, they presented a high open, and good click through rate.   This unexpected response was so good our client was decided this group of people should get their own dedicated eshot.  When sent, that eshot then pulled in real, tangible business enquiries!

The mistake made by the client, although painful at first, proved to be a positive and profitable experience for their company!

So perhaps we shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes afterall.  Who knows, there could be a real gem hiding behind one of them!

If you enjoyed reading this post you may also enjoy reading How do you find inspiration? or  Musings on multitasking – at what point does multitasking become overloading?