A client who subscribes to this blog pointed out that it’s been more than a month since I last posted.  Other than a crazy mad launch of a new Social Networking site, a big-time scare where I thought I had a heart attack (and the subsequent revisiting of my life priorities), and the continued successful growth of Acorn Creative, the month has been pretty light weight.

I decided this morning to dive back into the blogosphere … OK, it’s less like “diving” and more like wading out into the shallow end of the kiddy pool.  But I am back in the game.  Hope you missed me.

Now for the post …
Also in the past month, I’ve given NUMEROUS training programs to clients on the use of Dreamweaver and WordPress.  The question always comes up, “can I add pictures?”  “Of course”, is the reply … and I proceed to tell them that there are any number of free or low cost applications that will allow them to resize, crop and save (pretty much all you need to do for blogging or simple page creation).

For all of you looking for an online app that will do the job, here’s a post from Mashable that reviews seven image editing tools.  Take your pick.

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..This one has nothing to do with business … unless you’re a squirrel. Check out this video showing how tenacious a squirrel can be when there’s food at the other end. All I can say is “GO NUTS!”

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“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

…€” David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

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On behalf of Graphic Designers EVERYWHERE! Your message should be heard far and wide … shouted from the mountains … whispered in back alleys … passed as notes from person to person on little scraps of paper … etched in granite … OK, you get what I’m saying.

Trust your graphic designer. DOWN WITH COMIC SANS!!!

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Emily Bloss with Excelsior Computer Services, shares this web site with us; www.Oddee.com…. Areas I found interesting were;

• Most Unfortunate Logos Ever (Caution … some of these are pretty risque!)
• 20 Chinese Fake Brands and Copycats

Enjoy…. Thanks Emmy!

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Creative branding, for sure, includes the first (and hardest) step …�� coming up with a fabulous name … a corporate name, a product name, or a service name. A LOT of your branding potential rides on the back of how creative and “on brand” the name is. My question to you is, “WHO should do the heavy lifting of name research and brainstorming?” Probably the best group would be the brand/marketing people. That is their job, is it not?

The trick is to give this task to the people with the right mindset and the right creative skills… somone who understands the process of how to creatively build brand. It certainly shouldn’t be the engineering team. Definitely not the line workers. Not the sales folks. These are all pretty obvious but what about the thousands of companies who have a C-level person (usually due to control issues) dip their hand into the name-game a little too deeply at the expense of brand effectiveness? Or, now my favorite, how about when you let your corporate attorney do the naming?

Read this hilarious Dilbert strip by Scott Adams!

When the wrong people are involved in this critical process, the brand suffers. When a process allows personal opinions and “design by committee” to overide and squash a well thought out creative plan, the brand suffers. BE PICKY PEOPLE! The committee should be 3-4 hand picked individuals who understand:

• the creative branding process
• the importance of indirect, lateral thinking
• the direction and the mission of the company
• great brainstorming session rules

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ClickZ’s expert on Rich and Streaming Media and Tribal DDB’s SanFran Executive Creative Director, Dorian Sweet, posts a beauty about the clash between online and offline agencies.  Most laypeople don’t even know the battle is heated or what the relevance is to their own marketing strategies.  The most important comment (IMHO) in the post is:

Online advertising will change. And three things will lead the way: measurement, the idea, and the user.

Dorian continues to point out that we’re focusing now on the “idea” component and that the other two will quickly follow. I’m a product of 1960’s and 1970’s traditional advertising so I wasn’t around in the hay-day of early television advertising.  I suspect the process was similar.  The ideas shifted, evolved and changed direction as the industry matured.  So goes the world of online marketing.  Now in its infancy, there are few tactics that can be considered “mature.”  And, although we’re still in the honeymoon phase of development, it won’t be too long before we’re back to the real world …€” and that world will be completely different than the one we left behind just a few short years ago.

In support of this view of change, Dorian points out Nike’s recent decision to ditch Wieden + Kennedy, it’s LONG TIME agency,  for some of its running shoe business because they’re just too traditional and are not embracing this shift to the digital/online world of marketing.  This is a VERY big deal folks.

At the Global Marketing Summit in Myrtle Beach last month, almost every EVP-Marketing that we spoke to had specific inquiries about how we could help them become braver in this new world of online marketing.  Questions about blogging, vlogging, social networking, forums, etc., were the flavor of the day.  Even the presenters were orienting their material to this dynamic.

Sooooo, what does a business owner do with all of this?  The quick answer is “ANYTHING”.  This is the new frontier … boldly go where no man has gone before! (sorry about that … I couldn’t help it.)  Because there are few rules, the opportunities are boundless.  GO NUTS!

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