Product Vs. Proposition

“The better the singer’s voice is, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.” – David Byrne

Advertisers have historically been tasked to give our clients beautiful singing voices. As the auto-tune of the corporate world, we’ve continually been asked to create breakthrough campaigns that grab attention and generate popular interest. But the dilemma here is if we are successful, we are more likely to be exposed for selling unremarkable or irresponsible products.

Being a marketer today – when the exposure rate is faster than ever before in history – can be disheartening. You’re so often briefed with unbelievable reasons to believe. Or you’re tested to solve non-advertising problems with advertising tools. So even when your campaign succeeds in gaining cultural relevance, the product review forums squash the doubtful claims the client pushed through. For unremarkable products, advertising is both a tax and a band-aid solution (albeit an increasingly ineffective one).

There are cases where you see unremarkable products with remarkable marketing, and also cases where you pair remarkable products with unremarkable marketing. In both scenarios, something is missing.  The true win comes when we marry stand-out communication with stand-out products. More easily said than done.

click on image to view clip.

A Tween’s Take, circa 1993

A look through some old boxes from Allie’s childhood turned up this sheet of gold. We’ve deduced that it was penned in or around 1992-93 when she was 11 or 12 years old. If you’ve ever met AJ (in all her kindness & delight), you’ll definitely understand why everyone is especially taken aback when reading through this for the first time. (click to enlarge)

We forget how widespread these sorts of fears were some 15+ years ago. It’s  also funny to recall how we understood human and technological interests to be so fundamentally opposed, or disconnected, back then.

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If you’re curious, Allie got an A on her project. Her teacher’s comment read “May I have perspective? You have caught the feeling many have of computers.”

The Pressures and Anxiety of Digital Neglect

So we haven’t posted here for a while. Sorry. Between the upcoming HNHN wedding and the new job on my front, it’s been a jam packed summer to say the least.  And as the blogging guilt mounts, it’s funny how I feel increasing pressure to make the next post a doozie (which  in turn makes it mentally tougher to make the time to sit down and actually write something up).

So while I have a few doozies half-written in my head, in the interim I thought I’d fight through the anxiety and put up a quickie to say hi, we’re still here, and we’ve not abandoned this place. In the future I promise not to use terms like quickie and doozie. Obviously I’m a bit rusty.

Via ThisIsIndexed

For a little creative fun, I teamed up with Ryan Teixeira, a bud and awesome designer, to enter this year’s Globe & Mail 24 hr Yong Lions competition.  Representing all the Design/Strategist teams out there, we had a strong showing with a silver in the traditional Print category!  Had we won we would have received an all-in trip to Cannes to represent Canada, so as happy as we were, it was also a little bitter sweet. All-in-all still a very cool and rewarding experience though, especially seeing as we were so out of our element.

Below is our entry (click to download). In hindsight we would have definitely changed up a few things, but that’s what makes a 24 hr deadline so challenging.

The full list of winners is posted here.

Download The PDF

Seth Godin and Daniel Pink are probably my two favourite biz thinkers. So naturally I get excited when they link up. Both promoting relatively new books, Linchpin and Drive, here’s an excerpt from their recent interview:

PINK: …What I think is going on is that until recently, the business world didn’t much prize people with these kinds of skills [poets, painters and playwrights]. So if you wanted to do those things, you weren’t going to get paid much. Today, these right-brain types are much more in demand. That said, there are maybe fourteen people on the planet who are going to make a living as poets. But, again, there are maybe a million who can use their talents as poets in work as teachers, copywriters, bloggers, journalists, and other professions and business centered on creation.

GODIN: Do you agree with me that every successful organization needs people like this today? Problem solvers, self-drivers, artists?

PINK: Of course. Not even a close call.

GODIN: How then do we merge the two motivations? How do we get people to bring their artist to work?

PINK: Stop treating people like horses and start treating them like human beings. Instead of trying to bribe folks with sweeter carrots or threaten them with sharpen sticks, how about giving them greater freedom at work, allowing them to get better at something they love, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose? If we tap that third drive more fully, we can rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.