Online mainstream personals sites such as Match.com and True.com are taking a trick of the trade from the pornography marketer’s toolbox and showing interactive, obviously bored and available to chat, “web cam girls” in their ads.

Although these ads have four equal sides, they are anything but square. Commonly found alongside back end Myspace control panels, these flash-driven (no pun intended) video ads, appeal to the more superficial senses of male Myspacers, and act as direct response vehicles of users already in a social “make friends” mode.

**Warning: Large screen shot of corresponding ad example inside.**

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One of my favorite marketing campaigns of the past few years has been that of the Geico cavemen.

Today I found a great site that makes the whole campaign a little viral; and you know how we feel about viral campaigns around here at LevelTen. Lots of interactivity make the Cavemens Crib a great time waster, and unlike the subservient chicken (Burger King), far less guess work is required to move about.
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If you spend enough time at the bookstore or browsing around online most likely you’ll find hundreds, dare I say thousands of books and articles on being an effective salesperson. While each has its place and overall some valuable ideas, it has been my experience that Passion makes all the difference in being an effective and successful salesperson. Passion provides you with a belief in the products or services and that what you provide truly can make a notable and quite possibly an inconceivable difference in their clients business.

As sales professionals it is our responsibility to know and understand the products or services we provide, but knowing that information is only a fraction of what’s needed to have true sales success. Passion, Spark, Energy and Enthusiasm whatever it’s referred to, it all comes down to one truth, do you honestly believe in the product and that it’s going to make a difference. No matter if you’re selling paper or cars, websites or magazine subscriptions; if you firmly believe in your products, dare I say bleed your product, and convey that in your approach you will be a successful sales person.

Copywriting was by far the most influential and rewarding class of my college career. I sometimes wonder what my academic experience would have looked like had I taken it as a freshman instead of as a senior. Professor Shaw was a witty, sixty-something professional who had worked in the industry for decades. She was a quality assurance Nazi. If your work stunk (and it usually did), she would look you in the eye, smile and say something like, “I said to use your words sparingly,” or, “spend more than ten minutes on the next draft.” If it was a bad final draft, she’d tell you it wasn’t the final draft. She was as sparse in speech as she was on paper. I learned much from what wasn’t said.

On the first day of the semester, Shaw greeted the class with something very close to the following address:

“You’re all horrible writers. Don’t feel bad, it’s not entirely your fault. You’ve been taught to write poorly. Your English teachers may have said, ‘It’s quality, not quantity that’s important,’ but I’ve no doubt they still pushed for ‘ten pages on this’ or ‘one thousand words on that.’ If you write one sentence, you should write it well. And if you’ve written one good sentence, a second will often be superfluous - at least in the world of advertising.”

Years later, that address still rings in my ears when writing. So get on with it already, Donovan!

The Copy Workshop,” is so much more than a book on copywriting. It should be required reading for anyone who has to write or even speak to anyone ever. This is THE textbook on making a point. It’s PACKED with entertaining example ads and fun (albeit challenging) exercises. Bruce Bendinger quips his way through his instruction in four sections: Forewords, More Words, Your Words, and Onwards. From history to how-to, from typography to television, Bendinger covers the gamut. This was my course reading for Copywriting 3401. If you talk and/or write to people on occasion, I commend this book to you. If you work in Marketing - you should have read this years ago. If you’ve already read it, you should read it again. I return to it annually.

I just read an interesting article . . . A well-known online logo design mill who prides itself on having the most “experienced” designers is allegedly being accused of selling unoriginal logo concepts to their clients. Being a designer myself, I do look for inspiration in design books and other designers but never let my work get overly influenced . . . I couldn’t bring myself to just outright copy someone’s ideas. I also get more satisfaction out of knowing that I have made the client happy using my own concepts and talent along with their needs. Well, apparently this company doesn’t follow that standard b/c some of their logos were deliberately ripped off or had very similar design elements as some already out there. Read the rest of this entry »

As a designer trained in fine art and traditional graphic design (of the gouache-color-studies-and-hand-tooled-type-sort), my transition from dabbling in print to a world of divs, navigation, accessibility, and Arial-Verdana-Times limitations was not effortless by any means.

Designing for web is an interesting field; the diversity of websites out there is so great because while many novice ‘designers’ struggle with layout, color, and typography—because they lack training/awareness of these fields and lay out text as one would in a word processor—others put a lot of consideration into creating a navigable design with strong composition, color balance, and attention to detail. This creates the difference between a web page that is, as Joe Gillespie calls it, “not an end result but only the messenger” versus a fully integrated showcase of design, information, and accessibility.

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