Why India? Why Now?

New conference for the creative industry.
http://www.whyindiawhynow.com/

New conference for the creative industries, with event promotion from Clear Focus Design and Marketing.

One of our more recent business wins was the Why India? Why Now? conference, run by Creative Connexions (http://www.creativeconnexions.com/) a government backed initiative and The University of the Arts, London. This is an exciting project with work aiming at other creatives so pressure is high for us!

To view details of the creative conference click here

---------------------
About the conference
---------------------

Announcing the Why India? Why Now? conference for UK creative industries, a new event featuring experts experienced and successful in exporting the best of British creativity. The day will provide those working in the sector with a rare insight into how industry pioneers have led the way for British companies to enter and win market share in India – one of the fastest growing and potentially lucrative economies in the world. Brought to you by Creative Connexions the conference is a project from The University of the Arts London and is partnered by King’s College London, London Business School, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The event features an impressive creative industries speaker list, including:

• Rodney Fitch CBE, the leading world expert on retail design and founder of Fitch, the leading international retail design consultancy.
• Parminder Vir OBE, the critically acclaimed film producer, BAFTA member and
  key figure in uniting British film industry with Bollywood.
• Alpesh Patel, the highly acclaimed financial and economic commentator and author.
• Graham Cartledge, a leading architect who, as chairman of Benoy, led the company
  from design in the UK to export their designs around the world.
• Sharon Bamford, Chief Executive of the newly formed UK India Business Council.
• Peter Day, renowned BBC Radio 4 presenter and anchor of the In Business show.
  

The conference is on Monday 28th January 2008 at the Brunei Gallery Conference Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, London.

New wins

September 24th and time to update with a few new wins.

The last month has been exciting for new business and business developments with some big-name clients.

Recent wins include:

• Cadbury Schwepps, in association with Chandler Gooding, the internal communications specialists
• DMG World Media
• The University of the Arts London

The first newsletter for Cadbury Schwepps - CS News has now been sent around the world, in three languages and twelve pages long full to the brim with illustrationrs in the fun slightly crazy Cadbury style. A full week spent creating handdrawn illustrations to accompany the news stories left designers with sore fingers but a piece to be proud of. We heard down the grapevine that no fewer than three Cadbury Schwepps high-ups said it was the best issue they've ever seen.

DMG World Media, part of the Daily Mail Group are famous for the Ideal Home Show, we are working with their in-house design team on the relaunch of their bathroom and kitchen expo the kbbreview EXPO.

Following great antipation and a wide ranging pitch we won the contract to launch the Why India? Why now? Conference a new event for Artscom, part of the University of the Arts London and run in partnership with the Creative Capital - World Cities initiative. The campaign includes all the PR, marketing, design and branding. This is a very exciting project for us providing everything using all of the skills available.

Looking forward

October looks to be just as busy, with The WSA Show hotting up and new work for some other big names - watch this space.

If you are interesting in talking to us about marketing, advertising or design please pick up the phone, we're here to help and happy to talk - 0845 225 0325 or email info@clearfocusdesign.com, to see some work examples: www.clearfocusdesign.com/our-graphic-design-marketing-portfolio.html

News [two]

New website launched

The new www.clearfocusdesign.com check it out.

New site, freshened identity and an even more focussed approach, the new Clear Focus Design and Marketing site is now live. In line with the revised branding and ready to go.

Designed for usability and accessibility the design works cross-browser and across different media. Try printing a page – the printing will actually work neatly, without wasting your whole ink cartridge on a single sheet!

This website sees the start of a new business drive – watch this space.

Check out the new site and drop us a line with your opinion, www.clearfocusdesign.com.

News [one]

Time to blog…

What’s multi-coloured and read all over?
Yep you’ve guessed it, the internet.

Ouch sorry! Awful but how else to start the first piece of a new blog? A bad joke is as good a way as any other.

Our new design and marketing blog is going to be a place for the team at Clear Focus Design and Marketing to pop our company news and the ThinkThink thought pieces. So over time we should build an archive of useful bits of information offering marketing and design opinions, tips and inspiration.

There will of course be items of news about the growth and new clients for us and the new projects we are undertaking.

If you are interested in what we are up to check out the website for a proper read about the company, there’s no point re-iterating everything here…

ThinkThink [three]

Taken from www.clearfocusdesign.com

Pushing the envelope

Does the way the Post Office has “reorganised” the way it charges for mail impinge on creativity? Probably not.

Rats. That’s the end of exciting and interesting formats then, isn’t it? On August 21st 2006, the direct marketing business suffered its biggest blow since the Data Protection Act’s poxy opt-out box in 1984.

Since the unassailable monolith that is the Royal Mail changed its charging structure to make more/some/any money, art directors and designers everywhere are crying into their carrot and mango smoothies. Clients are shuffling along corridors, wincing as they pass a C4 envelope. And the Royal Mail’s bean counters are sitting back rubbing their hands and watching their cunning scheme pay off.

The Post Office can only have introduced this tariff in a bid to make more money. Maybe they’ll spend it on another rebrand! Perhaps the extra revenue will go towards funding more bean counters – the consultants who came out with this schemey little scheme. Maybe they’ll spend it on training and teaching their van drivers to, well, drive. (According to a survey, Post Office delivery people are the worst drivers in London.)

Let’s get down to how much more it’s going to cost you. These are the cold, hard facts.

Before August 21st 2006, if you wanted to send 4,000 A4 brochures (the national standard size for crying out loud) with a letter totalling sixty grams or less it would cost you this much in postage:

£1,280

If you wanted to repeat the exercise today it would cost you this much in postage:

£1,760

That is what we call a substantial increase. It is, in fact, an increase of exactly:

37.5%

Most people who read this occasional column are in the business of sending about that many brochures a few times a year. And it really doesn’t matter how hard the Post Office try to say in their brochures and advertising that they are ‘changing’ the pricing structure. They are in fact sending the cost of postage quite a long way north. No consultation. No negotiation. Tough. Live with it.

But what can you do?

Size isn’t everything. Make your packs small but perfectly formed.

Well, what you can do is this. Play them at their own game. Play to win. By way of some kind of compensation, the Royal Mail has increased the weight limit from 60g to 100g for standard postage of a “letter”. (They have done this because hardly anything sent in a C5 or DL envelope weighs more than 60g anyway.) So stick to C5 or DL for your promotional literature but splash out a bit more on the quality of the finished piece. The last research ThinkThink saw on this subject indicated that format actually had very little effect on response in any event.

Die-cuts and embossing were always thought to be expensive but because we’re forced to reduce the size, we can increase the quality to achieve the standout that you need. If you tot it up, you can have a much plusher, albeit smaller, piece for less than the cost of a standard A4 six, eight or twelve-page format. Ask your designers to recommend more interesting stock. Don’t flinch when there’s an interesting die cut on the visual because, chances are, the whole thing’s gong to be costing you less than it did when we felt it necessary to make sales literature almost always A4.

When you need a larger space to show something like a floorplan, there are interesting folds that can come out of an A5 piece to give you a bigger spread. Look at pop-up formats. Things that attract attention.

And, here’s the killer, when you’ve got a lot to say, let the website do the donkey-work. Get your copywriter to pile on reason after reason to go to the website rather than act off the page or leaflet – and let the team run riot with creativity online rather than in an envelope.

But, please, please make the piece as close to 100g as possible to get you money’s worth.

Closing music

There’s something that is puzzling your correspondent beyond belief. Why, in the name of all the gets posted, did the business consultants and bean counters fail to suggest the one very thing that could have turned the Royal Mail round eight or ten years ago? OK, it’s easy in retrospect but that great ogre that is biting lumps out of the Post Office’s revenue as we speak has been clearly visible for at least the past decade. Did they not see that this thing called the internet and, ergo, email was happening? Or were their heads buried so deeply in the sand that they thought it would just go away.

The real question is this: given that every forecast in the business universe predicted that the internet revolution would explode (and most of them underestimated the size of the blast quite considerably), why is the Royal Mail not the biggest, best run, least expensive and most respected internet service provider in the UK if not the whole of Europe? Why is there not a state-regulated Royal eMail? They could have had it but they didn’t.

They managed to miss the ship to cyberspace and now they’re making you pay the cost out of your budgets. Don’t let them get away with it.

Give someone a call who can make the most out of your budget, achieving better results for the same money! Spend it where it counts don’t waste your budget on postage because your designers can’t see past A4!

Check out our website and give us a call, www.clearfocusdesign.com.

ThinkThink [two]

Taken from http://www.clearfocusdesign.com/

Is it too long? Is it too short?

This week, ThinkThink was asked again the eternal copy question: How long should text be? The long and the short of it is that copy should be as long as it needs to be to get your marketing messages across. That’s, er, it.

OK. That’s not it. It depends what you’re trying to sell or promote, to whom and in what medium. Clearly, you don’t want 300 words of prose on a roadside 48-sheeter but on the other hand, what about on a platform-facing poster on the Tube? We know at least two things from research (station exit questionnaires): platform-facing posters are read and understood by people and, secondly, most people who actually go ahead and purchase your products, read all the copy available to them before they make the decision to buy. That bit’s so important, it’s getting a repeat:

The vast majority of people who actually go ahead and purchaseyour products, read all the copy before they make the decision to buy.

That means you’ve got a fantastic chance to fill your prospects with the benefits, to encourage, to persuade, to illustrate, to point out, to show what makes your product different from the competition’s or unique in its own right. The old adage still stands: the more you tell the more you sell. And the last A/B split test that ThinkThink heard about where copy was tested revealed that the long version out-performed the short one by more than 800 per cent.

Copywriting is selling on paper. And what copywriters do – good ones anyway – is take the benefits of your products and services and help you communicate them in the most appropriate way. The benefits are the reasons to buy and the more reasons you supply, the better the argument. You want your prospects to read about your product and, when they’ve finished, they should feel that it would be stupid not to buy. Good copy should talk. Often, you’ll hear copywriters talk about what they’ve said on paper, not what they’ve written.

As far as ThinkThink knows, the subscription drive letter for the Wall Street Journal is still four A4 pages of single-spaced typescript long. Why? Because it works. How do we know it works? Because it’s been running for donkey’s years, virtually unchanged and, what’s more, it’s a brilliant piece of copy.

“People are too busy to read all that.”

Is that really an argument? People will read the copy if they’re interested. And it’s the copywriter’s job to engage your prospects, create and sustain the interest and then get them to act. If the readers are not the slightest bit interested in what you’re offering, then the fault probably lies with the media or lists that have been selected, rather than with the copy. The same people that are “too busy” to radically improve their life by buying your products are perfectly capable of reading the sports pages, feature-length articles – some of your prospects may well even read entire novels running to hundreds of thousands of words.

It takes a normal adult one-sixth of a second to notice, interpret and react to an image, then the headline should reinforce the visual proposition and directly or indirectly tell the prospect to read on. If the interest is there, the copy will be read.

Strange and true

Years ago, ThinkThink knew a copywriter who was charged with the task of writing about a new modem that had been introduced by a major consumer electronics manufacturer. The brief said they wanted the advertising to be “cool” and “funky”. The copywriter spent the requisite amount of time digging through datasheets, looking for the beautiful, golden nuggets of information to be converted into benefits that would help sell the modem.

The product marketing manager, when presented with the campaign visuals, said he didn’t want any copy; just the headline. The copywriter fought his corner until he was beginning to think about not just losing the client or his job but also, potentially, some of his teeth, and then gave up. All the text apart from the headline was deleted from the page by the designer – his most celebrated keystroke of the week – and the ads eventually went into production.

Because it was a mainstream consumer IT product, the media was selected appropriately: mainstream consumer IT magazines, and they’re rather expensive for full-page, full-colour display advertising even if it does look cool and funky. Two months into the campaign, the figures were all scrutinised by the bean-counters at the computer company. The cost of sale was huge, the number of modems still in the factory was likewise and the product marketing manager didn’t manage to work for the company much longer.

Closing music

What’s important is what you say and how you say it. Sure, there are cases for shorter copy but only if it can still do its job. One copywriter described his work as “making his clients richer than him by making lists not look like lists.” You can see some of his work in The Copy Book: How 32 of the world’s best copywriters write their copy.

Because the internal people to whom you present expect everything in PowerPoint bullets (short ones at that), that doesn’t necessarily mean your targets want the same. The thing is, when you’re trying to sell something to somebody, it’s probably not the best idea to start firing bullets at them. Let your copywriter use his box of magic tricks to cajole, entertain and persuade, to massage and inspire. It’s what you pay him or her for and you will both be better off as a result.

If you’d like to know more about how Clear Focus Design and Marketing’s writers can make your copy positively sing about your products, you can contact them by clicking here . One of them will call you back personally.

That’s coming up for a thousand words and, assuming you didn’t get interrupted, it probably took under five minutes of your time. Thanks for listening.

If you are interested in speaking to someone further check out the design and marketing advice and services on the clear focus website.

Think Think [one]

Taken from www.clearfocusdesign.com

When marketing directors need shooting dead. Or the true value of awareness advertising, in our opinion.

The fish, she never cackles ’bout
Her million eggs or so.
The hen is quite a different bird,
One egg and hear her crow!

The fish we spurn, yet crown the hen,
Which leads me to surmise:
“Don’t hide your light, but blow your horn!
It pays to advertise!”
—Trad.

Keeping your knowledge, expertise, products and services a secret probably isn’t the best idea – unless, of course, you’re the Ministry of Defence. If you want to sell, you do have to make some noise in the marketplace. So go ahead: blow your horn for all you’re worth.

But wait. A few decades ago, this stuff called ‘direct marketing’ started to become popular. John Caples, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Drayton Bird and David Ogilvy – not in any particular order, and to mention only a few of the more famous names – were instrumental in changing the face of the whole way we thought about advertising. David Ogilvy wrote in one of his earlier ‘my life in the business’ books after he put a telephone number and a coupon on a leaflet and started receiving direct enquiries as a result: “I had tasted blood.”

Who’d have thought it: you give your target audience a way of communicating with you and they, well, do just that. Amazing. Today, we wouldn’t dream of running a campaign without appropriate ways for prospects to start the buying process. Would we? OK, it still happens. And it seems to ThinkThink that the more money that’s unleashed on a campaign, the more direct marketing crimes are committed.

For example, last night’s prime-time television featured no fewer than 14 thirty-second commercials with no call to action at all. Even if viewers were concentrating hard on what was being advertised (which they almost certainly were not), they were left with no way of enquiring about or purchasing the product. Two or three of the commercials had production values to rival a Hollywood blockbuster. The space on the TV channel itself would have run to tens of thousands of pounds per slot. And there was no way of buying or enquiring about the product. At all.

This is turpitude. The marketing directors who sanction such activity need shooting in the head. Put them out of their miserable, vain, insecure and nonsensical excuses for an existence. If I were the managing director or See, Eee, Oh! of the corporation that spent that amount of money on awareness advertising (what kind of justification is that? People do lie on surveys and wrestling, I’m sorry to have to tell you, is fixed.) I would ask, before pulling the trigger, some pretty serious questions. And then I’d turn the gun on myself in utter desperation.

ThinkThink is about to try to summarise the last fifty years of what we know about advertising in a few bullet points. There’s a bombshell at the end, so stick with it.

We know that data is everything.

If we know who we’re talking to, we can communicate with them better. The more time and money we invest in our data, the more successful our campaigns will be. And take a good look at the Data Protection Act’s requirements – as well as preventing you from falling foul of the law, what the DPA says will save and make you money. Simple as that. ThinkThink will be doing a piece on this later.

Put a call to action on everything.

Please don’t ever forget. TV commercials, leaflets, brochures, press ads. ThinkThink promises it won’t hurt.

Unless you’re selling stuff for babies, don’t use babies.

Your children are beautiful to you and your ‘life partner’ alone. Harsh but true. Using babies in advertising is a mistake. Similar story with dogs. ThinkThink knows people who don’t buy Andrex out of principle.

Put the proposition in the headline.

Think about what you’re selling and what you want the reader (or viewer) to do and ask them to do it. In the headline. If your copywriter comes up with something really clever or funny that doesn’t sell, ask them to have another bash. (ThinkThink admits he is asked to have another bash every so often. Especially when the only person that found the headline clever or funny was, um, him.) Really basic stuff this, but worth saying.

Get another opinion. One other opinion.

When you’ve briefed your agency and they come back a week or ten days later with the concepts, let them do the presentation, make your own judgement and then, the next day, pick what you think will work best (not your favourite, the one you think will sell hardest) and then show them all to a colleague who isn’t familiar with the brief. Listen to what they say and give your own and their feedback to the agency. If your agency listens and understands, you’ll get a successful campaign. You’ll make money.

Alternatively, show the concepts to everyone in the office, your mum, the au pair and the landlady of the local pub before you make a decision. Because creating great advertising is best done with a mish-mash of ideas from a committee of various unqualified and disparate people. However, the agency for which ThinkThink writes, would really rather you didn’t.

The bombshell. What advertising is now for.

ThinkThink took a while to get round to this – about two years, believe it or not. There is now only one purpose for advertising and one purpose is all. The singular raison d’etre of advertising is to point people in the direction of your website.Every weapon in the direct marketer’s armoury is there for the firing.

• Testing – you can put different URLs on the advertising and gather the results by measuring the hits.
• Knowledge – you can track where people go, what they look at and how long they stay. You can gather further information about their buying habits, what makes them tick – and what makes them click. You can get valuable information from your prospects directly by asking them to complete a questionnaire – and offering them an incentive to do so.
• Unlimited selling space – there’s only so much copy you can cram into an ad, only so many messages you can put in a commercial. Your website – or a tailored landing page on it – can fill your potential customers with reason after reason to buy.
• Dynamic content – you can adjust messages based on the knowledge you have acquired about your prospects. Sainsbury’s, for example, knows that ThinkThink is slightly partial to Rioja. Sainsbury’s also knows (because of ThinkThink’s Nectar card) that ThinkThink buys a particular brand of Rioja. So when Sainsbury’s started stocking another brand of Rioja, they emailed him to let him know – and offered a discount if he bought half a case of the stuff. It was on offer for £4.49 a bottle (which had to be a loss-leader). When it returned to its normal price of £7.49 a bottle, ThinkThink was already in the habit of buying the brand and merrily went on buying it. It was good, but a tad overpriced.

Here’s the message writ large: the only purpose of any advertising campaign you carry out is to direct people to a tailored landing page on your website. This is the new “don’t forget to put a call to action on your ads”. It’s sensible, elementary and vital.

Closing music

Clear Focus Design and Marketing can help you build great, integrated campaigns. Come to us with a marketing problem and we’ll work with you to solve it. We have skills in direct-response advertising, direct mail, brochures, radio, websites and emarketing. We can also help you align your marketing strategy with your business or project plan to help ensure you get the maximum return on investment.

Click here for clear focus design and marketing - for your strategic marketing and design