Canuckflack

When I was young, I maintained an ever fresh list of potential careers that impressed - at the time. There were some commonalities: use of large or unusual equipment; authority to halt games, traffic or adults at will; and no need to work as part of a team.

• Zamboni driver
• Italian or French traffic cop in a piazza
• Runway model handler/stager
• Fixed gear bike courier
• That guy with the fluorescent wands at the airport
• Tennis umpire (”quiet please!”)
• Large backhoe operator
• Mr. Hand, American History Teacher
• Streetlight repair truck operator
• The guy who indicates a successful conversion in Australian Rules Football
• Escalator repairman

I now realize there are similar jobs in the professional world. Jobs that are fulfilling and rewarding - and do not interest me in the least:

• Meeting facilitator
• Wedding Master of Ceremonies
• Working Group chair
• Head Volunteer at a Primary School field trip
• Front end reception at Cracker Barrel
• Bouncer

Technorati Tags: career, teamwork, counselling

Persona. A persona is an artificial identity derived from demographic analysis, survey results, focus group findings, and secret shopper interviews. It’s a convenient shorthand in the toolbox carried by user experience specialists - people like product designers, process architects and interior designers.

A shorthand that allows them to pick and choose behaviours, attributes, prejudices and generational stereotypes to support their artistic work.

(let the flood of emails begin - the ones where I’m accused of understating the value and overstating the harm created by personas)

I found this gimmick popping up in a discussion of the design aesthetic (and financial assumptions) behind Aloft, a new chain of high concept, low service hotels.

“… “We believe in trip personas,” [VP of Aloft Brian] McGuin­ness says. “You go somewhere with a persona in mind.” Project architect Bakos talks about the personas he expects will be drawn to a place like Aloft. They’re on-the-road, business-oriented people. And they don’t need shoe shining, laundry service, or a great restaurant. What they need is a place where they can check in, access their e-mail, go to sleep, wake up to natural light, and be able to grab a quick banana on their way out, all in an atmosphere of aesthetic attention and awareness of design. What they don’t need is another Ramada, Quality Suites, or La Quinta….” (Metropolis)

Ahh. So Aloft is like Target. It’s essentially a discount chain, but charges a slight premium for the appearance of exclusivity and the inference of personal taste and influence.

As a concept, it may just work. If Starwood, the chain behind Aloft, can find a way to design and construct visually appealing overnight accommodations while keeping room rates low, it may be able to draw in high-falutin and snobby travelers who suddenly find their expense accounts trimmed.

Of course, you can always wake up to natural light by … camping. Better have a Perma-Prest suit, though.

Now, I know that advertorial copy doesn’t exactly attract the “A team” of writers, designers and editors, but you would think that the New York Times would catch an error this egregious: using the same stock photo clip for a fake article on “nursing excellence” and an adjoining ad for Mount Sinai Hospital.

From last week’s New York Times magazine (May 4, 2008)

You know, with all the focus on immediate prototyping and taking Alpha products to market, I think we forget the basic principles that underly most theories of public opinion research.

If you rely on user testing, your development process is only as strong as the variety and depth of demographics in your user pool.

Image courtesy vcwear.com

• Is George Foreman a design genius? Otherwise, he’s just a thief. Remember the Meat Toaster! (Armagideon Time)
• Los Angeles is awash with illegal billboards - and not small ones. (LA Weekly)
• You know what would make a cool business card? Something that looked like the card from an old-school library card catalog.
• How “historical sociologists” work, by Charles Tilly via MR.

The lilting harmonies. The aged war veterans, Salvation Army Band volunteers and balloon-wielding youngsters, meandering down the northern dell to the village centre. The overgelled hair.

Those are my memories of “Life in a Northern Town,” a wonderful song by Stephen “Tintin” Duffy and the Dream Academy, and a top ten hit in 1986. A real product of 1980s Britpop.

As an economic history nerd, I also saw the song as an homage to the personal experience of a region stereotyped by a several centuries of wrenching industrial development - textile workers, shipyard workers and miners.

Which is why I was confused to see this video on CMT today:

Thankfully, Sugarland, Big Town and Jake Owen don’t drift too far from the original … and didn’t make their version too “twangy.”

Still, Blake’s Jerusalem did not refer to the hills of West Virginia, and neither does Life in a Northern Town.

Technorati Tags: Dream Academy, Life in a Northern Town, Sugarland, country music

I’m mulling over an idea - a Conversation Audit - that would help companies evaluate whether they need a social media component to their regular marketing and public relations campaign.

The idea behind a Conversation Audit is to actually stop and take stock of the many ways you communicate with audiences, customers, consumers, stakeholders and regulators.

Only at that point will a company be truly equipped to judge whether a social media campaign is important to its needs.

Technorati Tags: conversation audit

Meet Hunter Somerville. While an intern at Ogilvy & Mather in Toronto last summer, he was asked to chip into a campaign by taking a shot at redesigning the back of the Shreddies box.

He now works there as a creative.

The key to winning a promotion in the advertising world?

Demonstrating a canny understanding of the product and its features. Groundbreaking insight into the market you are targeting. (And more than a dash of Machiavellian office intrigue, but let’s leave that to the senior creatives.)

Somerville’s fantastic insight? Tilt the square Shreddies by 45 degrees - thereby creating Diamond Shreddies!

“…”It came from an exercise of redesigning the back of the cereal box,” says chief creative officer Nancy Vonk. “We gave the task to a lowly summer intern Hunter Somerville. His joke idea–make the back look like the front of a new bogus product–was quickly seen as a bigger idea that could become a 360 campaign.” (Creativity-Online)

The idea was so simple, yet so fundamental, that it stopped me cold in my feet. Or cold on my sofa, waiting for American Idol to come back on.

Nothing had changed in the 67 year-old product. Nothing had to change on the production line. Yet the product was positioned as having fundamentally changed.

Even the focus groups were fooled. That’s right. As part of the marketing campaign, Ogilvy & Mather conducted focus groups to test the perceived difference between traditional “square” Shreddies and newfangled “diamond” shreddies. See for yourself. Focus group participants work themselves into identifying the improved qualities of the new product.

As the CMA blog wrote, “Poor consumer. They didn’t stand a chance.”

Even the food obsessives at the Kraft Canada forums are praising the campaign.

In perhaps the funniest twist of the re-branding, Vancouver lawyer George Gould put the “last square Shreddie” up for sale on ebay.

Technorati Tags: Shreddies, cereal, O&M