Some clients, especially those that do no business over the web, question the need for a website or an SEO effort. But they seldom question the need for local publicity.

My wife writes magazine articles. One recent assignment had her seeking out local farms. They were hard to find, in part because few had any web presence. After all, why would a small farm need a website?

Yet, here was an experienced writer, story assignment in hand from a respected regional publication with some 400,000 readers. As publicity, it was priceless, and it went largely to those enterprises that could be found online. And this situation happens again and again.

Search engines are key research tools for journalists and editors. That makes having a website, even a simple one, an essential step in the local marketing/P.R. efforts of any business. Even those that “don’t do business online.”

How much is that logo worth? $500? $5,000? $50,000? $500,000?

There are designers and brand developers at each of those price points.

But, how much is a brand worth?

How about $66,434,000,000? That’s Google’s brand valuation – the amount of its overall value contributed by its brand.

Don’t have $66.4 billion? General Electric’s brand is valued at about $61.9 billion. Microsoft’s brand is worth almost $55 billion.

These brand valuations come from the Millward Brown Optimor 2007 BRANDZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands, a 27-page report you can download as a PDF from the Millward Brown website. This study says that branding accounts for about a third of the value of the Fortune 500.

Obviously, it takes more than a great logo to achieve valuations like these. But, just as obviously, in creating a brand you create a potentially very valuable corporate asset.

DOWLOAD Millward Brown Optimor’s 2007 BRANDZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands

When I first started out in the business an older colleague advised me to “collect copies of any and everything that I was the least bit involved in”. I only took half of his advice, and at first I saved copies like mad but soon I was cherry-picking my favorite projects and leaving the rest to
collect dust in ad agency archives. (more…)

In the latest issue of Showroom (http://www.theshowroom.se/ ) Eric Block, the Managing Partner from design firm Duffy & Partners, tells us that design is the future.

“People don’t want to hear what you have to say, no matter how cleverly you say it or how slickly produced your story is. This includes anyone involved in a profession that’s about telling a story - particularly advertising.” The solution he says, is design. He mentions well designed products and brands such as Apple and BMW.

“All of them put design at the forefront. Good design influences everything they do. Design can make things clearer, simpler, personal - all things people want today. Put your money into the design of your product, not into elaborate stories about it no one wants to hear.”

I partly agree with this, nobody listens to a boring person - but, a pretty person with all the right gear won’t hold your attention very long either if it turns out that they have nothing interesting to say. Remember Bernbach “Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed… but dull?” The solution is not just to design better products - but to not be boring. Boring comes from telling stories nobody wants to hear. So while we hail design as the way forward, don’t forget to pat research and development on the back as well.

One mustn’t forget though, that the consumer never really cares to make your brand famous, they want to make themselves famous. MTV style VIP-treatment prizes are a bigger hit than a few bucks and a chance to see their own ad on TV. Heck, put their name in the ad on TV, and I’ll promise you they’ll work harder to win. What wins though?

The best ad from a strategical standpoint, or the one with the popular vote? That’s a rhetorical question as the consumer doesn’t have any interested in keeping the brand alive for years to come.

I don’t think that user generated ads are the end-all solution to the problem of reaching consumers these days, nor will it die soon - like the jingle-contests, it will always be around in some way or another. Right now it’s having a hyped up field day because it is refreshingly unlike the big agency produced big ads for the big client, who have spent the past ten years creating ads for the greatest number of people with the least common denominator. User generated ads are actually oddly targeted, and that is why they succeed.

So we’re back to square one. Why is it so, that when the web can offer pinpoint targeting on specific consumers, agencies like to paint with the big brush still? It’s not shouting into a megaphone that will get you more customers, it’s leaning over at the right time and whispering the right thing in the right ear. Remember kids, advertising becomes information when in context.

I’ve always wondered why the web, which is a medium perfectly tailored to be perfectly targeted, so often carries advertising that is not. True, people don’t like to be spied on, and rarely leave the true information about what they earn in a year on some form they have to fill out - if they even bother filling it out - but how difficult is it, exactly, to place baby clothes ads on expectant mothers’ sites, and apple software ads on apple fan sites? Thanks to google adwords these days,
you can place ads nearly everywhere that fit quite well in the context they are in. But advertisers tend want a bigger bang than a few points of text on some random blog.

Enter user generated ads. Back in the times of pens and home pianos, it was “write our slogan” or “write our jingle” contests that were all the rage. When everybody had cameras, photo competitions took over, and now that seemingly every kid has a video camera, a software editing suite and loads of spare time, we’ve arrived at “make our commercial”. User generated ads
are simply a new twist to an old truth: to get the consumer involved with your brand, involve the consumer.

One mustn’t forget though, that the consumer never really cares to make your brand famous, they want to make themselves famous. MTV style VIP-treatment prizes are a bigger hit than a few bucks and a chance to see their own ad on TV. Heck, put their name in the ad on TV, and I’ll promise you they’ll work harder to win. What wins though?

STAY TUNED (The rest of Ask’s post will be up before you can say, ‘WEEKEND’)

Outfoxing the Small Business Owner: Crafty Techniques for Creating a Profitable Relationship, by Gene Marks (2005, ISBN 1-59337-157-8) is worth reading if you’re thinking of freelancing. Small businesses make up the vast majority of potential clients, and the approaches you’ll take to work with them profitably are different from those you’ll take with large corporate clients. I’ve worked with both, and found this book to be up-to-date and practical.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I received my copy as a gift for contributing to one of Gene Marks’ other books about small business management.)

I am among the last generation of copywriters who sat with art directors and designers as they sliced into type galleys to hand-kern letters, adjust word or line spacing, or piece together new words and sentences.

“Can we cut seven characters out of this copy block?” they’d ask, and I’d take up the challenge, think of another way to say the same thing in the same voice using not only seven fewer characters but also only the words and characters already typeset.

It was the final, laborious polish on the mechanical, and it was a team effort.

Now it seems there’s less sweat equity in the way copy looks. And that’s too bad.

Why accept an imperfect line break, a stray widow or orphan, or a repetitive word stack when the solution might be a minor re-write? As a copywriter, I think anything that enhances the visual appeal of copy, makes it more inviting, is worth doing.

It’s not just about legibility. It’s about fine-tuning the details to create great work.

When the ideas flow, concepting is fun. When they don’t, I grind away over award books, archives, and stock photo sites producing page after page of tedious, trite, irrelevant, stupid ideas. Yes, I may be laying the groundwork for later brilliance. Or not. That’s why, when the deadline looms, it pays to have a few different approaches to concept development in one’s mental toolkit.

Here are more than 100 creativity techniques to unclog the brain. Many of them are actually information-gathering or evaluation techniques, but there are still a lot of different ways to approach a problem here. Three techniques that I’ve found useful are Brutethink, Laddering, and Osborn’s Checklist.

http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques

An ad concept does not exist to win awards, or to set trends, or to break rules. It exists to solve a problem. That’s the challenge of commercial creativity.

The glory part is that if you solve the problem in an unexpected way, you sometimes achieve those other objectives too. But, you have to solve the problem. And, to do that, it helps to start with a good creative brief.

Here’s the form I’ve used as a starting point for 20+ years. I like that it’s short, yet comprehensive enough to suggest other avenues of exploration. I’ve tweaked it many times over the years, so feel free to modify, copy, and use it as you please.

CREATIVE WORKSHEET PDF