Monday, April 27, 2009

Some of my best friends are horses

Those of you who know me are aware of the fact that I'm an avid equestrian. Learning how to ride horses is both a joy and a challenge because it's such a metaphor for life. Horseback riding is so counter-intuitive to everything we do on the ground so it's all about letting go. If this sounds a lot like Zen that's because it does have that quality and you never stop learning how to ride.

The lessons I've learned from riding my horse are often ones that I apply to my life outside of the stables. The other day in preparation for the first competition of the season I got very frustrated about what I perceived to be my lack of progress. My instructor, Tara Bowles, then asked me if I want to get high scores in the horse show or if I want to ride. I thought that was such a great question and statement at the same time and (here comes Zen again) it really reminded me that it was all about the journey and not the destination.

Well, the competition was yesterday and during my rides I really focused on being in the moment. I came in 2nd place and got my highest score ever.

So what does that have to do with being the Executive Vice President for business development at a digital creative agency? Quite a lot actually, I'm pleased to know. My work is all about preparation, attention to the small details and the day to day tenacity that's necessary in order to keep opening doors.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Ode to Sequential Liability

Oh the joys of sequential liability

An adventure in fiscal futility

Omnicom says the cost


Is to sign or get lost


If we did we'd lose all credibility.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Virgin Pitching

Virgin Atlantic is launching an in-flight channel called PitchTV which will feature entrepreneurs pitching their business ideas. You submit your video on Richard Branson's Business Stripped Bare website and then your piece is voted on by the community. Each month the video with the most votes gets to be included on PitchTV. Branson came up with the concept because he wished that he had some platform to pitch his ideas to the people that could have helped him when he was starting out. I love this idea and it totally makes sense in that business travellers are an ideal audience to whom entrepreneurs can connect with. Branson is always coming up with something cool. Time to put my 2 minute pitch together...

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Idea Rules

Great ideas don't need to take a million dollars to execute. In fact, some of the best ones cost practically nothing at all to make. Take for example this hysterical video that's a spoof (I think) of a tourism ad for Cleveland. Very low fi, clever, funny and memorable.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Dominos Delivers

Two dunderheads at a Domino's Pizza franchise in North Carolina thought it would be funny to video themselves doing nasty things to some sandwiches they were preparing for delivery. But the bozos didn't stop there; they went ahead and posted the videos on You Tube. One million views later the videos had caused a public relations nightmare for Dominos. Needless to say the pranksters are now ex-employees and in fact have been arrested for their misdeeds. Dominos has responded by creating a special Twitter account to address its customers concerns and a video of their President doing damage control was placed on You Tube. It's another example of the power of social media. If content is compelling enough people will spread it like wild fire. You can't buy media like that. I think I'll use this as a case study in future sales presentations.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Seth Godin Rocks

This morning, my colleague at Firstborn, Dan LaCivita, passed along this TED presentation by Seth Godin. It’s an oldie (from 2003) but definitely a goodie. Seth talks about how marketers need to figure out what people really want and how to give it to them. Not only is his message fascinating but how he delivers it is awesome. Seth is a dynamic, charismatic, engaging and funny presenter. This is story telling at its best and all under 20 minutes. And there wasn’t one slide that had a bullet point; they were truly supporting his talk rather than competing with it. Coming in with a presentation like this would knock any marketer’s socks off and Seth has done much sock removal in his career.

Monday, April 13, 2009

When Low Fi is Hi Fi

Our friends at Big Spaceship have just re-launched their website in blog format. EVB and Juxt have also recently revamped their sites using the Wordpress platform. It's an interesting marketing strategy that not only has a low cost factor but also emphasizes the conversations that brands are seeking out these days with their customers. The latest incarnation of the Firstborn site debuted in October of 2008 with a Flashed-based design that showcases our most important selling tool, our portfolio of work. We've no intention of a redesign anytime soon - our previous version stood the test of time for almost 5 years - but nonetheless the low tech trend happening with some of our competitors is noteworthy from the standpoint of how everything old is new again.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Bad Times/Good Times

Awesome keynote presentation at the Mix09 conference by Bill Buxton about experience design that I viewed on the Mix website. Bill is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and kicks butt in his speech pointing out how the current economic downturn is actually conducive to breakthrough experience design. Bill cites some examples of innovations that came about during the great depression of the '30s. This is a very reassuring message and while there are probably going to be tough times ahead for everyone, hopefully the brands we work with are even more receptive to the innovative work Firstborn always strives to produce.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

The Passover Question

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" That's the question being asked at seders all across the globe. In addition to fond family memories, thinking about the Passover question always reminds me of one of my old playwrighting instructors. He always said that when writing plays you had to have an answer to that question in order to guage whether or not your story is compelling enough. I think it also applies to many other areas. I've been thinking and talking about sales presentations a lot lately, for instance. What is so special about what you have to tell your audience? Why should they listen to you? Why is your company different from all other companies?

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Remember the Alamo

I've been to the SXSW conference a couple of times but I didn't know Austin was this much fun. I read on Ben McConnell and Jacki Huba's Church of the Customer Blog about an amazing event at the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater. They were holding a special screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn along with a 10 minute clip from the upcoming Star Trek movie. TWOK begins and after about 10 minutes the film"breaks". Who walks out on stage? None other than Leonard Nimoy! He suggests that they show the new Star Trek film in its entirety. And that's what happened. It was all just a stunt in order to stage a sneak preview of the new movie. What a great idea and it made me think of what an awesome moment it must have been for those Trekkies when Nimoy came out. Although limited to just the people who were lucky enough to be in that theater at the time, what a dramatic and thoughtful way to reach hard core fans of the Star Trek franchise. I wonder how this might be applied to other brands?

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

At the Source

Doing great work and be compensated for it fairly is what we all strive for. As they say, half of show business is business. Firstborn's contracts are structured in such a way that our clients own all the files necessary to run the experience whether it's a website, online advertising, kiosk, application, etc. But when it comes to ownership of the source files that were used in the creation of said project, we prefer to retain ownership. This is particularly the case with all the 3-D work we've been doing. In the past, the 3-D source files that we used for a website project were being re purposed for print and broadcast without our company getting paid for it. Now if a client wants to use our work in a medium other than what we were originally hired to create, we negotiate a separate license fee. This isn't meant to squeeze out of our clients of every penny we can but in fact, it sometimes can actually work to their advantage. There was a ton of CGI work in a recent M&M's site we did collaborating with our friends at proximity Canada. They asked us to do the broadcast spot leveraging these assets and it ended up costing them 70% less than if they had hired another company to produce it from scratch. It was a win for everybody.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Cubed

Hats off to Nissan for plunking down $20 million on an upcoming campaign for the new Nissan Cube, a vehicle not unlike the Honda Element and other dudemobiles marketed to the younger set. It's encouraging that they're willing to do a major push during this economic downturn and not only that but it's yet another example of how the digital world is influencing communications in the world of advertising. The Cube is being positioned as a "mobile device" and as Stuart Elliot points out in his NY Times advertising column today, several other words and phrases associated with the digital arena are being used to describe features of the car such as "search engine" (pretty clever actually), "storage capacity", "browse", "add friends"and "set preferences". It also reminds me of the Dentyne Make Face Time campaign last year which borrowed from the technology lexicon with the tag line "power down, log off, unplug ... make face time". I'm not sure how effective the Cube campaign will be but when it comes to connecting with the younger demographic, more and more marketers are utilizing digital speak to reach these consumers.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Telling Stories

I just read a wonderful book on how to put presentations together called slide:ology The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte, one of the principals of Duarte Design. I really got a lot out of reading her thoughts on how to create ideas and stories instead of just slides. At Firstborn, we've been working on refining our message as well as our presentation materials over the course of the past few months and her book has inspired me to look at our presentations in a new light. A presentation needs to serve as a visual aid to your message not as a document. There's a great quote by Seth Godin in the book: "Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you're excited (or sad or optimistic, or whatever else you are). If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures then cancel the meeting and send in a report".

Thursday, April 2, 2009

The Subject is the Subject

E-mail can be an effective sales tool. I'm not talking about all the obnoxious spam we're getting because some poor souls out there actually do buy Viagra and do send money to that guy from Nigeria. What I mean is a targeted, well thought out introduction to you and your company to someone specific you'd like to do business with. I try to be as brief as possible - long blocks of text can send people screaming into the night. One of the most important facets of a sales related e-mail that's often not considered carefully is the subject line. Your subject line is the first element people see when a message hits their in box and you've only got seconds to grab their attention. Again, I don't mean something along the lines of READ THIS NOW! that shouts people to hit the delete button but a few honest words or a phrase that's at the core of why the recipient will want to read on. Make your subject line as good as what you say in the rest of the message.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Believing the Hype

We recently met with a client that markets a cool collection of brands. In doing our research prior to our initial meeting we came across this very clever application they developed that really impressed us. During the course of our praising the client for having come up with such a great idea, we learned that they made it all up and never actually created the product. Well, their plan worked. It certainly got our attention and they had already gotten a lot of press mentions which was how we found out about it in the first place. Is this dishonesty or one of the oldest PR tricks in the book? Technically anything you want to mention can be "in development". Of course, here at Firstborn we would never hype a project that we couldn't show since our portfolio of work is our most effective marketing tool. Nonetheless, just as impressed as we were about this client's idea, we came away even more impressed by their idea of hyping the idea.