Marking your calendar for marketing

mark your calendar for marketingFor many creative professionals, marketing oneself is perhaps the toughest and least favorite aspect of one’s work. Between promo mailings, emails, cold calls, and an assortment of other techniques, it’s easy to get lost, or worse yet, allow these tasks to routinely take a backseat to the countless other daily activities. Unless you have a well-thought, written plan to follow, you’ll likely be inconsistent in your marketing efforts, and, consequently you’ll likely see inconsistent results, at best.

For this reason, the folks at HOWdesign.com have put together a nifty marketing calendar for creatives—a Marketing To-Do List. The calendar, writes HOW’s Ilise Benun, “covers activities to do daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly, all of which need to be integrated into the running of your business. All you do is plug in your specifics.” You can choose from two:

  • The Plan for Rookies, if you’re just starting out, either with a new business or maybe a new market; or
  • The Veteran’s Plan for those with a mature business in place.

Download the 2008 Marketing Calendar (100KB PDF)

May 2008 be your most successful year yet!

Green Paper Guide

For those looking to use environmentally-responsible paper for their projects, the number of vendors and product lines has grown considerably in the last two years. To help make sense of this expanding list of choices and find just the right paper for your needs, Design Can Change offers a terrific resource, a handy guide to “green paper”:

Download the Green Paper Guide (PDF)

dcc_tab_120x60.gifDesign can change is an effort to bring together the world’s graphic design community to address the issues surrounding climate change. The philosophy behind this pairing of industry and issue is summed up nicely on DCC’s website. “Designers craft much of the world’s products/media and as such are well positioned to build awareness around this issue while encouraging more sustainable industry practices.”

Sproutreach is a member of the Design Can Change community and is proud to support this effort.

Ten commandments of “good design”

From the London-based furniture manufacturer Vitsœ (gotta love a furniture store that values bicycle transportation enough to place bike racks INSIDE their showroom):

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way, he set about expressing the ten most important criteria for what he considered to be good design. Subsequently they have become known as the ‘Ten commandments’. Here they are.

Good design is:

  • Innovative
  • Useful
  • Aesthetic
  • Self-explanatory
  • Unobtrusive
  • Honest
  • Durable
  • Thorough
  • Environmentally-friendly
  • As little design as possible

Suicide prevention center ad

(via AdsoftheWorld)
A series of ads for the Brazilian suicide prevention center, CVV:

cvv_ad1.jpg

Copy: Help Yourself

cvv_ad2.jpg cvv_ad3.jpg

Agency: Leo Burnett São Paulo
Client: CVV (suicide prevention center)
Creative Director: Ruy Lindenberg
Art Director: Ricardo Toledo / Andre Gola
Copy: Carla Cancellara / Digão Senra

IMHO, an interesting set of ads. Despite being quite similar to a recent Chinese blood donation ad, and appearing much like the style of artist Peter Callesen, these ads are attention-grabbing, blend imagery and copy well, and deliver their message effectively. That said, I’m not sure that this particular message, help yourself, is the message we should be sending, particularly with sharing one’s thoughts and getting help from others being such critical elements in prevention of suicide. Having too much personal experience with this issue, I would suggest that some more effective directives for prevention might include any of the following:

Take it seriously,
Know the warning signs,
Make no promises of secrecy,
Know where to turn,
Act fast,

…or perhaps just Talk about it.

Marketing rewewable energy

A climate of controversy

This morning, delegates from the world’s top 16 polluting nations are in Washington DC for a controversial climate change meeting, organized by President Bush. Many across the world are questioning the motives behind Bush’s climate summit, seeing the 2-day meeting as an attempt to undermine the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference being held December 3-14 in Indonesia. The White House on the other hand, sees today’s meeting as a opportunity to pursue a “portfolio” of alternatives to than mandatory emissions restrictions. Graciously (sarcasm), they apparently do not object to other countries controlling their own pollution through mandatory restrictions…

Kristen Hellmer, of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the president did not object to other countries committing themselves to mandatory curbs on carbon emissions but rejected that strategy for the US.“Diplomats accuse Bush of attempting to derail UN climate conference”, Ewan MacAskill, The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2007

In light of these events, I thought I’d share a new ad campaign I encountered closer to home. The series of ads comes from HealthLink, “a Massachusetts North Shore citizens group working to protect public health by eliminating toxins in the environment through research, education and community action.” The ads are appearing this month on MBTA Blue Line subway cars.

howgetfossil
howgetrenewable
howlongfossil

Having had an opportunity to work with HealthLink during my time working with Salem Sound Coastwatch, I fully support this group’s efforts. I applaud their work on this particular initiative, their first real advertising campaign. However, I do wonder if perhaps there couldn’t have been a more effective choice of placement than addressing an audience already using mass transit. Terrific work nonetheless.

What do you think?