Month: May 2009

“Suitcasing” your way to a viral trade show.

My first DM Days in NYC is coming up since I moved to NY, and I’m debating whether to attend. (Crikey, it’s expensive, and I missed the early bird deadline!) I find that I am at least as fascinated by the sponsors’ warning against “suitcasing” as by the program itself.

Now, if you have young children in the house, please do NOT look that term up on Google. Stay here with me while we read on the DM Days registration page that “Anyone observed to be soliciting in the aisles, lunch tables or other public areas, or in an exhibitor’s booth will be asked to leave immediately.”

Now I guess it’s fair enough that a vendor who decides to stand in the aisle and distribute their brochures from a suitcase (I’d actually recommend an open carton on a luggage carrier, so you don’t have to constantly zip it open and shut as you would with a suitcase, but I digress) is stealing good money from this show which like others is probably financially strapped. But I’m worried that I, a freelance copywriter, might pull an article out of my pocket or use my iPhone to show a colleague a web page I’ve written—and be 86ed as a “suitcaser” who not only gets ejected, but is publicly branded in a very embarrassing way. (You did look it up, didn’t you? Then you know what I mean.)

I also think there’s a place for think-outside-the-booth trade show marketing of the type that Foodzie did at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference.  Foodzie is an up and coming mail order company “like Etsy, but food”—they find farmers and artisanal makers who are too small to have their own ecommerce site and they sell their food on the web. Their four partners were everywhere there was a line at the show, handing out samples of their vendors’ wares. Maybe they should have paid something for a both at the trade show at SXSW (which was extremely lame) but this is where they belonged, making their pitch to a captive audience of slightly buzzed developers and venture capitalists standing in line for free booze at some party.

Suitcasing? Perhaps. But also effective marketing.

P.S. After the colorful definitions at the top of my “suitcasing” Google results, I scrolled down and found that the International Association of Events and Events offering various anti-suitcasing tools including this poster which you can download here.

More thoughts on “cheap” creative

If you’re a manager who hires creatives, here’s some friendly advice: pay them on time, Or, even better, surprise them with a check well in advance of the due date. Most writers and designers are not the best money managers and this simple gesture will earn you Pavlovian gratitude as well as better, prompter work in return.

On the other hand, if you have an accounting staff that uses the “slow pay” scheme to manage cash flow, fight like hell to get your creatives excluded from the extended payment schedule. When they are distracted by worrying about paying their utility bill or putting food on the table, how can they give you their best work? When you don’t honor your commitment to them, how can you expect them to be conscientious about your own deadlines?

I forgot to mention the above in my earlier post on pricing and getting paid during a recession. Meanwhile, my own experiences with clients coping with tough times continue. I engaged in extensive dialog and estimating with a prospect and she finally told me her budget was $300-500 for a new website and collateral. It’s hard to imagine what you can get for that except maybe installing a pet door.

Meanwhile, just started working with a new agency client which said my rate is fine, I can track my own hours, and they’re sending the paperwork in the morning. I was so pleased to be back in a grown-up relationship that I immediately spent a couple hours researching the project, on my own nickel.

How to use a creative brief

A creative brief is a contract between the account team or project “owner” and the creative team. It quickly defines a marketing project so the creatives know what it is all about, what it’s trying to accomplish, and what are the budget and other parameters—no coming up with a web video when the brief calls for a small space ad.

I’ve worked with creative briefs from several dozen marketers and agencies over the years. Although there are variations, most follow the same outline—a series of questions which are answered by the account folks, approved by the client, then handed off to creatives:

  1. What is this project about in a sentence?
  2. What are we trying to accomplish?
  3. Who is the audience?
  4. What do they think about our product or service now?
  5. What do we want to think? Is there a specific action we want them to take?
  6. How are we going to accomplish this?
  7. Is there a specific offer?
  8. What are likely objections and how can we handle them?
  9. Are there any delimiting budget or production considerations?
  10. What sacred cows, legal mandatories etc. should we be aware of?
  11. What is the schedule?

As a copywriter and creative director, I like working with a creative brief very much. It reduces the element of surprise, tells me my clients will act professionally (and not pile on deliverables or insist “that’s not what I asked for”), and helps me organize my own thinking. In fact, if a creative brief isn’t provide I’ll write one for myself as a way to jumpstart my diminishing brain cells. (But I don’t tell anyone… this is a private and personal exercise. And I never write a creative brief on behalf of a client—something I’ve been asked to do—because that defeats the whole purpose of the document.)

In my copywriting class, I ask the class how many of them have worked with a creative brief and the “yes” group is always under 50%. Then we do an exercise in which we divide into teams and each group follows a prewritten brief to come up with a concept for a space ad. (The class is primarily about writing email and direct mail, but the space ad gives us something to show.) This is a very popular activity. Afterward most of the students say they will demand, or write (if  they’re managers), a creative brief for their next project.

Not everybody I work with personally gives me a brief. Almost without exception the clients who provide a brief are more organized, better funded, and less likely to self-destruct in the middle of a project. Yet it doesn’t cost anything to write a brief, just time and thinking you should invest anyway toward a successful result.

If you’re not now using a creative brief, give it a try on your next project. You will be pleased.