The Scribblepad

Why do some organizations look great… and get great results from their design efforts and ads… while others languish in mediocrity? I think it has little to do with who they hire and a lot to do with how they work with their agencies and designers.Here are the things your design team wishes you would know:

1. If you want average (mediocre) work, ask for it. Be really clear up front that you want something beyond reproach, that’s in the middle of the road, that will cause no controversy and will echo your competition. It’ll save everyone a lot of time.

2. On the other hand, if you want great work, you’ll need to embrace some simple facts:

3. It’s going to offend someone. If it doesn’t offend them, then it will make them nervous. The Vietnam Vets memorial offended a lot of people. The design of Google made plenty of people nervous. Great work from a design team means new work, refreshing and remarkable and bit scary.

4. It’s not going to be easy to sell to your boss. That’s your job, by the way, not mine. If you want me to do something great, you’ve got to be prepared to protect it and defend it. Come back too many times for one little compromise, and you’ll make it clear that #1 was what you wanted all along.

5. You can’t tell me you’ll know it when you see it. First, you won’t. Second, it wastes too much time. Instead, you’ll need to have the patience to invest twenty minutes in accurately describing the strategy. That means you need to be abstract (what is this work trying to accomplish) resistant to pleasing everyone (it needs to do this, this and that) and willing, if the work meets your strategic goal, to embrace it even if it’s not to your taste.

6. Help me out by pointing out the work you’d like this to be on a peer with. If you want a website to be like three others (in tone, not in execution) then point it out. In advance.

7. Be clear about dates and costs. Not what you hope for, but what you can live with!

8. You don’t know a lot about accounting so you don’t backseat drive your accountant. You hired a great designer, please don’t backseat drive here, either.

9. If you want to be part of the process, please go to school. Read design magazines or take a course from Milton Glaser or get a subscription to Before & After. By the way, that one link is the single best part of this post.

10. This one may surprise you: don’t change your existing design so often. Not when your kids or your colleagues tell you it’s time. Do it when your accountant says so.

11. Don’t get stressed about your logo.

12. Get very stressed about user interface and product design. And your packaging.

13. Say thank you.

(Via Seth Godin)

Are we trying to implement a technology solution for a management problem?

I think this is a HR and Management problem more than a security or technology one.

If people have projects, and they complete them on time, with good quality, then what does it matter? The problem is that many managers and senior management fall into the trap that people should be working all the time, and thats really not a good way to do things. Some people are incredibly productive for 2 hours, and do nothing for the rest. Others work diligently, but slowly, for 8 hours. At the end of the day, if they turn out the same product, what does it matter?

The real problem is that most management and large companies do not have effective project and work measurement systems and expect their employees to work like robots.

Working in a factory or in telephone support is different from working in a job which requires thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. People can’t invent new solutions for things for 8 hours straight, with only a rigidly-timed lunch break. Our brains don’t work like that.

Sure, if your job is making chappatis and refilling soft drinks, it doesn’t take much brain power to do that, and there’s no reason to be goofing off on the job. Just turn your brain off and follow the routine, day in and day out. But if you’re trying to devise creative solutions to complex problems, this simply isn’t going to happen according to a rigid plan, timed to the minute. What creates the problem is that management often have misguided ways of measuring whether they think someone is working or not.

If your background is in technical support, or sales, or running an assembly line, browsing the web likely means you are ignoring something else that you are supposed to be doing.

I have seen many cases where management dictates that IT implement a technology “solution” to a management problem. I believe this stems from management’s “not wanting to deal with the issue at hand” and “foisting responsibility for dealing with it onto underlings.” It’s the same reason why middle managers exist; as a buffer between the people who are instructed to do their work stupidly and upper management who dictates the stupid way to work.

Upper management wants to make decisions in a vaccum, and have those decisions obeyed without question. This is why creative underlings who question and have fresh ideas about how to manage are not promoted and “yes men” and old toads are.

Any company needs to have objective ways to measure an employee’s performance. Good work is measurable — it is not always observable.

Seriously, work is a compromise. If we want humans to work for us, then we need to be prepared to meet them halfway on their social needs. And that includes salaries being credited on time!

Or we might get a reputation for being an arrogant boss and a ‘fascist company.’ If word gets around then we might have a situation where talent will never come knocking at our door and we’ll be stuck with people who love or can tolerate harsh policies with people who dont use the web as the resource that it is.

And how competitive is a company with these draconian policies? In my experience its crappy little small business with paranoid micro-managing bosses who demand hardcode filtering.

Also, professional work is rarely sitting at a machine and putting in x amount of work like a typical blue collar job. Its collaberation and social skills. Its finding out new things. That means you need tools to communicate. That means there will be slow periods and downtimes. That means using the internet with as little restriction as possible.

Also, there’s a real difference between a technological and social problem. If someone slacks on their job because of the internet (or any reason) it becomes obvious after a while. If this happens its not because you lack a decent filtering system its because you lack a good employee.

If you want to read great fiction, you could pick up Wodehouse or Dickens. But nothing can beat the voluminous garbage that passes for creative briefs in agencies and in-house departments the world over.

This has been a particular sore spot for me for years. Account executives and strategists return from a client meeting and scribble together dozens of paragraphs that are supposed to give us clear creative direction.

I sent an email to many creative people I know asking them what their worst creative-brief snafus were. Here are the phrases we’d like to see permanently erased from creative briefs:

• Break through the clutter. Obviously you want the package, commercial, or web site to be viewed.
• Make it breakthrough creative! As soon as it gets through the client’s legal department, compliance department, and seven layers of management, it ends up being the same as the last time, only blue.
• It should appeal to everyone. Wrong. No matter what you’re selling, it should appeal to a very specific market. It’s virtually impossible to appeal to the entire world.

What the Creative Brief Should Include

A clear, concise target audience. Who is the ultimate recipient of this ad? Arthritic volleyball players? Men in their fifties returning to college? Ph.D. circus performers? It makes a difference. Get this part right, and the rest falls into place.

What is the ONE unique selling proposition? Don’t give us the Magna Carta. Here’s an easy way to answer this question: When the reader or viewer is done seeing your work, what is the ONE thing you want him or her to remember about your product and company? As Herschell Gordon Lewis says, “When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.”

The “B” word. What is the budget? If it’s a direct mail piece for 100,000, is there money in the budget for a dimensional mailing or only enough to do a great self-mailer? It will prevent a lot of headaches if you get this information up front. Good strategists and account managers do it every day.

Let us show you 40 concepts we’ve been creating. Let’s face it, no matter how creative you are, you’re not going to come up with 40 winning ideas for each campaign. That leads to the obvious question: How many concepts should you present? Here’s the weasel’s answer: More than one but less than five. And remember, the client ALWAYS picks your least-favorite concept. Don’t present something that you don’t feel is strong, or it will inevitably be picked.

Internal presentation date and client presentation date. Yes, I’m advocating ALWAYS presenting to the internal team 24 hours before the real presentation. Presenting comps in the airport on the way to the meeting is no way to work. If you don’t have buy-in from everyone involved, they’ll do a poor job presenting your work. This also gives you a chance to make sure that you’re on strategy, haven’t offended anyone (unless that’s your intention), and can present your case to your team.

True story: While working for an ad agency, I was presenting to 11 members of the client’s executive team who had flown 2,500 miles to see my ingenious concepts for a new product rollout. Also present were my boss, his boss, HIS boss, an archduke (I think), and four members of the creative team. I was even wearing a tie. I stood up to do my presentation that I had practiced over and over again by myself. After wowing them, I sat down already planning where to spend my bonus check. All I heard were crickets chirping. One of the client’s looked at me and said, “Nice job. Too bad that’s not what we asked you to do.”

After crawling out of the conference room to update my risumi, I learned a lesson: Include internal presentations as part of your standard operating procedures.

Address the obvious stuff in the first dozen paragraphs of the brief. Don’t spend the first half of the brief telling us what the company does. If the client is signing off on this document, you have a real chance of getting something wrong. If everyone is working together, you already know what the company does. Get to the point, and get to the creative/strategic problem.

Keep it short. Very rarely does a good brief need to be lengthy. I’ve seen great one-page creative briefs that give all the information needed to do killer creative and five-page monstrosities that are a waste of good paper. (Insight: Creative people don’t read past page two anyway.) If you’re writing a five-page brief, it probably means you don’t have a clue what’s going on. If you can’t say it briefly, go back to the client for clarification.

If you have a great creative brief format that you’d like to share with the world, please send it to me at vikram@thescribblepad.com

via (Peter Kaufman)

As I write this, it does seem a bit strange, but all of us need to accept responsibility for what we are going through. And yet, I know that the first step towards starting to get back on track is realizing that one is on the wrong track.

I had always hoped that we will be either able to grow our existing business fast enough and have our new ideas start generating enough cashflow so that we will be profitable, and that would give us the launchpad for growth.

But, increasingly as obvious, what has become clear is that the income and expenditure lines are diverging, not converging.

A couple of things might have landed us in the present position. Maybe our ideas were far ahead of reality. Or maybe we forgot a simple lesson of managing the short-term and the long-term. I think there is a great vision that is there for tomorrows world .

But in this, the short-term has been sacrificed we haven’t managed to build our first profit platform.

So, the challenge we now face is manifold: thinking whether the current business we are in can be made profitable, and if so, how; creating a sustainable profit engine either from the current business or a new business and doing so quickly; ensuring that we also stay on track for the long-term vision that we seek to implement; and doing the transition quickly.

There is a desperate need for putting ones head down and focusing hard on the business we are in, and where we want to be. There is a lot of experience that we have gained which we now need to put to good use. But we have to make decisions quickly and then operationalize them.

When I look back, I see a lot of similarity between now and the earlier period that I went through. This was not apparent until some time ago when I started realising that even as we continue to want to grow and have big dreams, we are not taking care of the present.

Then too, I had big dreams but the reality of today did not match the vision of tomorrow. It does not make the situation any easier even though I’ve gone through it before. I am confident we will pull ourselves out of the hole that we are in because at least I now recognize that we are in a hole.

No one is going to argue against getting more creative. We honor it and admire it and aim for it. And all of us wish we’d come up with that clever and creative idea. But I would like to see equal time given to strategy. Clients want results. They want problems solved. They want good ideas that work. While we must put a premium on thinking outside the box, when sometimes the task can be as (or more) effectively accomplished with solid delivery of an inside-the-box, well-executed idea?

I hope it goes without saying that at this level, we’re not trying to be creative, just to be creative. Solid strategic thinking is essential to developing effective creative programs that achieve objectives and underscore our clients’ brands. I guess it’s not so much about operating inside or outside the box, as much as it is being open minded about helping our clients and taking the extra time to turn an ordinary effort into a great one. Clients hire us with a certain level of expectation about our brand and the quality of our work. We owe it to them, and to our own brand, to deliver on all fronts