Folks

First let me state that i am guilty of this so its a change i must make.

I have had 2 clients mention that it often seems our smartphones more interesting than the live conversation at the moment.

This is not good.

Even among our own production meetings and internal meetings we find ourselves “locked in” on our smartphones than the current moment.

So, starting now – lets all agree NO smartphones in any meetings with clients and internal meetings. Dont even bring them in.

And if we need to police each other and call someone out do it. Lets show our clients and ourselves more respect.

This applies to all of us and everyone has permission to call each other out.

Me included as this is something I need change.

Everyone in. All in

Welcome to the “Real World”

My name is Jessie Power. I’m a Memorial University Commerce student and I am on work term #2 with the Idea Factory. I’ll graduate in April, and these past few months I’ve had the chance to really dive in to the marketing world. My program is set up so that every four months I can take the knowledge I’ve learned in the classroom and apply my skills in a work setting.

Let me explain a few things first: starting with my very first marketing course, I have been told to prepare for the “real world”. From class presentations, to writing reports, to dealing with some more challenging group members, everything I have learned through my classes was set up to prepare me for these “real world” experiences. Keeping this in mind, I centered my extra-curricular activities, and my course selections around helping me prepare for this so-called “real world”.

I considered myself a fairly well-rounded student, and figured I had a pretty good handle on what was to come. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in my fair share of business conferences and competitions; represented my university at a SIFE Regional Competition, two SIFE National Competitions, and a SIFE World Cup; was a finalist for the Inter-Collegiate Business Case Competition; a Memorial Ambassador for two years; and I’m President of my Commerce Class. So, all in all, I felt I was doing alright. I thought I had a fairly accurate idea of what the “real world” was going to throw at me.

Then I landed the job at the Idea Factory; this new world had opened its doors, and I was finally walking through to see what the fuss was.

My initial thoughts? A very precise mix of panic, excitement, drive, and a constant feeling of being overwhelmed. There was so much to learn. So many aspects of the business I had never even heard of, let alone had any experience in doing. The event-planning, the client meetings, the research, the email after email after email…how was I ever going to learn all this?

That Red Dot

I decided that I needed to differentiate myself. I needed to become that red dot in the sea of black. If I’ve learned nothing else through my time at the Idea Factory, it’s that differentiation is important. You need to really know your strengths and your weaknesses. You need to be able to adjust people’s expectations, and you need to be able to take a chance on yourself.

Constant improvement is a necessity. Knowing which aspects of the business you need to work on, and which ones you need help with, is crucial. It is a continuous cycle of learning, and it comes in many different forms. From realizing the correct (and incorrect) way of addressing someone in an e-mail, to the importance of considering every.single.detail when planning an event; it’s been an fantastic few months so far, and the feeling of being overwhelmed is slowly subsiding.

And being a student in this wild world has more than its share of positives. The people I’ve met, the projects I’ve been involved with, and the opportunities in front of me are truly incredible. And the chance to learn from the best is helping me become my best. The team at The Idea Factory are an invaluable addition to my learning experience, and I’m learning that the wild world of marketing really isn’t so bad if you’ve got a good crew of people helping you weather the storms.

Heavenly Creatures is a local no-kill animal rescue organization. I’ve been fostering kittens for them for over two years now. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience to help an animal in need, but it can also be hard not to become too attached and be able to say goodbye when the animal finally gets its forever home. I’ve gotten used to this routine; the goodbyes are always tough but the reward in helping raise a wonderful animal is the best feeling in the world.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people that run Heavenly Creatures and similar rescues. They are truly dedicated to the animals, and the team they have behind them is incredible. They maintain a great website and, as I’ve newly discovered, a Facebook page! Having these kinds of tools is essential nowadays if you want to get people’s attention quickly, even when you’re just trying to find a new home for a kitty.

I think one of the things I respect most about this rescue group is the way they market themselves. These organizations tend to pull at your heart strings. The feeling I get when I visit HC’s site or talk with them is that any help is greatly appreciated. It’s a very positive experience. They list some hard cases on their site—animals that need treatments or surgery—and they appeal to the public for help with donations to pay for these operations. They also take different kinds of donations like recyclables and even Canadian Tire money. And of course they’re always hosting lots of different fundraisers, from flea markets to bake sales. The opportunity is there if you want to help out. I feel genuinely lucky to be able to help them and that’s why I continue to foster.

On the completely opposite side, you have places that love to target your guilt. They show you pictures of starving and abused animals or post banners on how if you don’t do something now you are basically letting another innocent puppy die. How can you be so cruel? How many of us have seen Sarah McLachlan’s Animal Cruelty commercial? It’s pretty rough, at least for an animal lover. You watch that commercial and then feel like crap. You’re grabbing at your wallet to donate some money just to make sure that sad little broken kitten or puppy will get better and have a loving home. That’s the whole point of the commercial right?

Personally, I don’t respond well to guilt trips. Ask anyone in my family. There is some kind of guard that automatically goes up when I start to feel like someone is trying to make me feel guilty. That’s probably why I’m not that fond of this commercial. It’s “guilt marketing” at its finest but that’s what makes it effective.

I guess I’m torn as to how I feel about that kind of angle. I want the issue of animal abuse to be addressed too but I don’t want to be made to feel personally bad and responsible for it. Maybe all of those types of ads have played on my guilt over time and that’s why I now foster. I want to help out. If the organization I was working with made me feel like I needed to do more or wasn’t doing enough, I would have a HUGE problem with that and I’m not sure I’d continue to support them. So what does that say about me? I have nothing against the animals but I do have an opinion about the way organizations run themselves and I guess that’s the bottom line for me.

I love St. John’s and I love the animal rescue organizations they have here. It’s good to see so many people that want to help out. So, if you ever want to help a little furry friend in need there’s lots of ways to help and you’ll feel great in doing so! Take it from me and these two cuties I took in this weekend! Go to www.heavenlycreatures.ca to learn more on how you can help!

Welcome to “The End of Business as Usual”, a seminar to help you whip your company’s social media accounts into shape. And the best part? It’s free! Learn what your business, whether small or large, can gain from a properly managed Facebook or Twitter page, and how to allow your followers to be part of the experience, rather than observers. It’s all happening at the Clovelly Members Lounge on May 30th – get full details by clicking here.

Like what you see? Reserve your seat now (limited to 45 people) by emailing lesley@ifactory.ca

As a warning, this blog doesn’t have much to do with marketing or art. Except maybe the fact that everyone has a need to figure out their own thoughts in order to create something, be that a great campaign or a fantastic illustration.

I, like most everyone (I hope), have my good days and my bad days. Not bad in a self destructive way but bad in a “What the hell am I doing” sort of way. Now, I’m not going to get into personal details, I just wanted to share a few things that tend to put things in perspective for me.

I’ll start it off with this song. (You can stop watching from 3:05 on, it turns into a vlog)

I listen to this one just about any time I get all up in my own head. The entire song is about making sense of the things you think. Every time Nick Hornby opens his mouth, he blows you away with a profound thought followed by something very mundane. It makes you feel bad, I suppose, at how most everyone has very little ambition, however, I choose to view it as a motivator, to drive me to have more ambition.

In that song, though, there is one fact that stands out among the rest for me:

“Our universe consists of between 30 to 50 billion trillion stars arranged in 80 to 140 billion galaxies. Our nearest neighbouring star is called Proxima Centauri and it’s 4 light years away. We need some bread, but it’s really hot outside and I can’t be bothered to walk ’round the corner”

For some reason, thinking about the size of the universe, how complex life and everything else is tends to ground me and drive me forward. Perhaps it’s the thought that I am very small and insignificant in this vast universe and therefore my thoughts, my rationalizations of those thoughts and ultimately my actions based on those thoughts are completely inconsequential once I look at that big picture, but, it’s still up to me to make some kind of impact no matter how insignificant. Alternatively though, perhaps it is the idea that we as humans, and myself by extension, are very much one with that unimaginably massive universe. We have a part in it.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says it perfectly in the video below. He believes that the building blocks for life and the knowable universe are what makes up everything, including you and me. He says that despite the size of the universe, that fact, doesn’t make him feel small, rather, it makes him feel big. He feels that way because of that connection to everything. It’s inspirational and motivating and I could not agree more.

Maybe I’m alone in this, at least in this way of thinking about it. However, I’m sure we all have that thing, that thought, that makes us move ahead in life. It motivates us, drives our ambition forward and allows us to keep on living the life we choose (or at least one we hope to choose). For me, it’s thinking about the scale of the universe and our connection to it (strange as it is). What is it for you?

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As a little bonus, this site never ceases to astound me. For those who have the same curiosities as me, you will love this. It helps you put the universe in perspective, all the way from strings to the Sloan Great Wall.

Scale Of The Universe

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a pack rat. I’m not talking hoarders-style, but I do have trouble parting with little things that are memorable for me. Not just the special toys, books, and photos — I’m that person who keeps every movie ticket stub, boarding pass, and concert ticket neatly in a scrapbook to reflect on every now and then.

My tendency to hold on to memories has naturally crossed over into the digital world. I keep all e-mail conversations, I rarely delete tweets, and I have extensive archives of photography and artwork. Even MP3s of songs I’ve grown sick of are more likely to end up backed up on a CD than thrown in the Trash.

The physical scrapbook of travel memories sits on my bookshelf and belongs to me — it’s in my control. But what happens when we entrust our memories to a service on the Internet?

It seems we’re reminded about how volatile digital data is all too often. A few days ago, one of my favourite social networks, Gowalla, was permanently shut down after being acquired by Facebook in late 2011.

If you aren’t familiar, Gowalla was a popular location-based iPhone app that would allow users to “check in” to any type of place, whether it was a shop, office, landmark, airport, or anything else you could think of. Once checked in, the user would receive a “stamp” — comparable to a digital passport. And, if it was your first time checking into a new state, province, or country, you’d receive a stamp for those, too.

Gowalla, and other check-in apps, aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. People have often wondered why I would ever use it, but it all boiled down to one thing — it kept a detailed history of my travels. They were my memories.

While Gowalla is no more, the people behind it understand that we want to keep those memories and they’re working on making a tool that will allow us to export our data. I’ve since switched to Foursquare as my primary check-in app. But how do we know where Foursquare will go? Will they also be acquired by the great Facebook vacuum, or will popularity fade? Of course, the benefit outweighs the risk and these things don’t stop me from using new services, but they do make me think about how I use them and how to preserve my data if they too disappear someday.

At the web conference An Event Apart in Boston last year, web developer and author Jeremy Keith discussed the topic of long-term design challenges in his talk titled All Our Yesterdays. Here’s an encore of his talk from Build in Belfast in December 2011. It’s long, but worth it — Jeremy touches on some incredibly important topics including web hosting, file formats and media, domain names, and DRM licensing issues and restrictions.

Jeremy Keith – All Our Yesterdays from Build on Vimeo.

Jeremy also talks about one of the largest and saddest shutdowns of an Internet service: when Yahoo! closed Geocities in 2009, losing at least 38 million user-built pages.

A quote Jeremy referenced, from designer Phil Gyford, says it best:

“GeoCities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess. And this is why it will be sorely missed. It’s not only a fine example of the amateur web vernacular but much of it is an increasingly rare example of a period web vernacular. GeoCities sites show what normal, non-designer, people will create if given the tools available around the turn of the millennium.”

Just last week, through a combination of some clever googling and the website Archive.org, I was lucky enough to find the remnants of one of the first websites I made and hosted on Geocities. It’s ugly and embarrassing, but what it contributes to the story of my design career is priceless.

Can we really continue to depend on third party services to entrust our data? As Jeremy said so well in his talk — nobody’s too big to fail on the web.

Publishing on the Internet is not just about blog posts, news articles, and Wikipedia entries. It’s about what everyday people do in their everyday lives. How we go about solving this problem is daunting — but acknowledging that it is a problem is a good start. If we don’t change our mindset about how we treat our data, we could look back on this time with very little of our digital history preserved.

You see, or hear, it everywhere these days. Businesses shouting “Like us on Facebook!” “Follow us on Twitter!” “Add us to your Circles on Google+?” We hear it so much that I imagine most people stop hearing it altogether.

So here’s a suggestion: stop telling your customers or potential clients to do whatever to you on whatever. At this point in human history, it should be a given that you have a Twitter account and a Facebook page. If someone is actually, legitimately interested in your business, they will seek you out on social media sites themselves. Do you know how many people have said, “Gosh, I really like this company but their radio ad didn’t mention that I should Like them on Facebook so I guess they don’t have a page?” ZERO. ZERO PEOPLE HAVE SAID THAT.

Notice the words I used earlier: legitimately interested. Gaining followers that are not actually interested in your product does not help you; this isn’t a numbers game. If you have 1000 followers that don’t care about you, you might as well have none. Social media is about social interaction, and if you trick or cajole people into Liking you, they will at best ignore you, perhaps resent you, and at worst, decry you. And none of those reactions are things you want.

You know how to get people to follow you on Twitter? Say interesting things! Give away interesting stuff! RT other interesting tweets! And if you don’t have anything interesting to say or give away, then maybe you don’t need a Twitter account at all. Not everybody needs to have a Twitter account or Facebook page or Google+ profile. It’s simple: If you don’t have to time or inclination to tweet or post yourself, then don’t bother with them at all. Twitter accounts run by actual human beings will always be better received than Twitter accounts run by robots. Except for @horse_ebooks, of course. But that’s a special case.

So stop shouting about your social media profiles. We’ll find them if we want to find them. And when we do, we’ll be the people you want.

Amazed. Surprised. Disappointed. These are just a few of the feelings that are rolling around my mind at the moment. Why you ask? Well, as I am driving home from work the other day I hear on the radio that LL Cool J has an opinion on the young boy that has been “Febreezed” because he smelled like capelin. This is a story that blossomed from the Town of Twillingate, with a population of less than 2500 people.

Ten years ago and this incident would have been no more than a heated discussion in the local town hall or over the phone lines. I have grappled with the fact that even writing this could compound the magnitude of this child’s troubles and future monikers. But I believe there is a lesson to be learned here, one of value to how we deliver and consume our information digitally.

This article appeared in The Telegram referencing the story. It and everything else I have read are missing one thing… the “full” story.

I’m not going to argue whether the actions taken by the mother or the teacher were correct because I believe there are faults in both. The question is: where does our digital responsibility lie? Even the mother didn’t understand how the story received so much attention as she herself did not “post” anything regarding it. Who would have thought that the story would have made it to the show The Talk and that it would have garnered a 4 minute debate? Even LL Cool J, one of the stars of the hit show NCIS: Los Angeles and host of this year’s Grammies, had an opinion:

I believe there are 3 lessons to be learned from this.

1. We have a responsibility to what we consume with respect to media and how we decide to share and/or act on that information.

The sharing of information online is exponentially compounded. Each of us helps to make up a digital wave of information. With that in mind, we should try to understand the legitimacy of the information we consume and pass along. By deciding to share or not to share information, you are in essence adding to or minimizing your effect on this digital wave.

2. We have a responsibility to have an understanding to the power of mass media in this digital age.

As in this mother’s case, you do not even need to personally post anything digitally for a story to grow “digital” legs. Traditional media is so intertwined with social media and the digital world that a simple print story can explode digitally when it strikes a chord with the masses. Using media as a method to get a thought or concern out can quickly turn against you, as shared opinion can change context and direction of any discussion. To anybody that may believe you can “guide” the discussion of opinion online – forget it.

3. The largest responsibility we have is to our children; we need to educate them that their public image no longer only consists of how they look and act when they walk out the door, but also includes their digital image.

Parents spend years teaching children manners, respect for others, and all that goes with presenting yourself in the proper manner. There is no need for parents to panic as you realize that you can’t follow your children digitally everywhere they go. But you can instil in them the same values that are taught for use in everyday life, applied digitally as well. Let’s face it: digital is now a part of everyday life for a lot of people. Be aware of what is out there for your kids to digitally participate in and at least get a basic understanding of what it is. This will make all the difference in teaching your child digital responsibility.

Remember that all it takes is an ill-advised moment, a camera phone, and a social media account, and a fun prank can become a digital scar that can be very hard to remove. The Internet never loses its memory; in 5 years Google “child febreezed by teacher” and you know what you’ll get.

Are you digitally responsible?

A funny thing, humour. When used in advertising correctly, it can be like a surgical tool, cutting through the walls of boring, forgettable messaging and making a precise incision into somebody’s attention span. When someone sees an ad they find funny (I mean something they really find funny) they usually can’t wait to describe it to their friends, or show it to someone on YouTube. The best advertising makes the humour identifiable with the brand, so that people remember not only what they found funny, but what the commercial was for.

The hitch lies in the fact that no two people have the same comedy “DNA”. There’s always a different point of view as to what makes something funny. Sometimes, we laugh at a piece of advertising because it reminds us unexpectedly of something from our past, or because we can recognize one of our friends in a character or a line of dialogue. Other times, we just don’t know quite why we laugh. It’s just… funny.

So when it comes time to bring the laughs, what can a creative team produce that keeps everyone happy? While it’s true that there exists a broad style of humour most everyone could enjoy, that doesn’t mean it’s always the best thing to aim for. The problem when you try to please everyone is that you end up with something that, while it might be amusing, just isn’t funny. It really comes down to a question of whether you want a majority of people to grin and chuckle briefly and then forget your commercial, or a smaller number of people spilling their drinks and wiping their eyes because they can’t stop laughing.

The fact is, most funny ads actually try to focus their attention towards a specific audience, with a specific taste in comedy. There are lots of different categories of what people find funny, and nobody’s taste in humour is limited to just one style. Here’s a few examples of the type of person you might be looking to amuse:

The Oddball

Oddballs like their comedy to spit in the face of normality. Weird and wonderful things are possible when you create something tailored towards those with a screwball sense of humour. These people understand that life is full of strange turns, awkward moments, and bizarre happenings, and that these things are worth celebrating. The beautiful thing about this style of humour is that in can embrace randomness, which is also what makes it dangerous, since randomness is never far from chaos. It often works best to juxtapose this kind of stuff with mundane, ordinary things, reminding us that for every moment of our lives that could be considered boring, something flat-out freaky could be right around the corner to spark our childlike imaginations.

The Thinker

These people like their humour a little more high-brow. It is possible to get a laugh out of someone while also being thought-provoking, though it’s not easy. When done right, humour that caters to the deeper thinkers in the room can be pretty clever indeed. The great thing about this style of ad is that once it gets you thinking, it can often let you see something you’re very familiar with in a whole new light.

The Slapstick Aficionado

There will always, always be a market for slapstick. There’s something hard-wired into us as humans that makes us love watching hapless people have things destroyed around them. The problem is with this genre of humour is that it’s hard to bring any fresh ideas to the table. How many more ways can we dream up to show people having accidents befall them? The following ad shows that it is possible, and combines slapstick with a touch of the oddball style. Here, we see one of the main advantages of slapstick comedy: it transcends language barriers. You don’t need to rely on anybody’s understanding of a language, or the comedic timing of words, when you have a guy in a giant panda suit beating things up.

So, if you’ve decided to use humour in a campaign, you’ll have to decide who it is you’re going after. Laughter is a very personal thing, and it’s very hard to predict what anyone is going to find funny. But isn’t it better to swing for the fences and go for a hearty guffaw than a weak giggle?

Feel free to share some ads that got you laughing below!