Part of running a boutique advertising agency is handling incoming calls and request for work (and revisions, of course). As you get more and more busy, you’ll be faced with the dilemma of what to do when you have more projects than time to do them and more and more of a need for an 8th day and 25th hour tacked on. This is where the “Shirley Principle” comes in. The SP dictates that he/she who is easiest to work for and with gets all requests moved to the top of the list. Its very much like having an automatic “RUSH” stamp on every request that lands in the...
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I was able to spend last week at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Anaheim, CA with Taylor Guitars. To give you a quick rundown, NAMM is an industry-only trade show held twice a year, but the Winter show is the big kahuna of them all. This is the place where manufacturers of all things musical launch their new products for the year- and they pull out all of the stops. My first year there, I saw my favorite guitar player idol (John Jorgenson), the actor Keanu Reeves, and the awkwardly captivating Elvira all in the span of 90 seconds. Companies spend hundreds of...
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Every now and again, we see an advertising campaign that sticks with us. Which isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the caliber of its genius, it’s just the barometer of how different it is.The first of such cases is this campaign for the tv show, Desperate Housewives. The responsible advertising agency chose to print rubberized dummy stripes for parking lots at a boutique (read: expensive) grocery store here in Southern California. It reads, “This Parking for Desperate Housewives Only“. It’s an interesting way to help your market identify with the product. In a...
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I guess some would call us crazy for pointing site visitors to another design firm. But you can’t argue with quality. I had the pleasure of going out to visit these fine folks last summer and can’t say enough good stuff about them. BUT, good people come through our lives all the time. It’s the design that comes out of this place that is abso-stinkin’-lutely unbelievable. Check out their portfolio. Buy a
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It’s rare that a company actually feels bold enough to use tongue-in-cheek presentation in their advertising and printed materials. This is the first page of a user’s guide for a guitar amplifier by Line 6, a manufacturer of digital music products. Publicly traded, advised by Ivy League suit-types, shipping quantities in the hundreds of thousands, doing millions and millions of dollars in sales each year, pioneering digital technology in the Musical Instrument Industry. No slouch. Perhaps one reason for their success was the early adoption of a “3-C”...
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