andydidyk.com

From:

to:

“Show me that smile…” I know that is the song that anyone born before 1980 undoubtedly had playing in their heads when they read the title of this post. Although I’d love to have some witty commentary on one of the legendary episodes from the early 80’s sitcom, I’m afraid that my title is alluding to something much less nostalgic (and notably lacking Kirk Cameron or Tracy Gold).

The agency I work for, now named n-tara Interactive, is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s very exciting to be working in an environment that is aggressively growing, because you always end up with something new to do, and limits are often tested. Our marketing department is working like crazy to crank out our new ID set and other materials, but the new logo and materials are just a small part of how our agency is growing. We’re adding more people, capabilities, and expertise, and running out of room in our building.

Where that affects me is that we’re obviously adding more clients with bigger budgets and more strategic objectives. It’s certainly kept me hopping and my blogging activity to a minimum, which in turn does not represent very well what I’m actually learning and experiencing on a daily basis. New trends in analytics, guided-selling, and the value of social media are all at the top of my mind, as well as the old favorites of agency project management and the proper way to manage client expectations (one in the same, to some degree). It’s become comical to me how much being a successful agency involves balancing bleeding-edge creative and technology with the basic principles of listening, managing expectations, doing your homework, and respecting those you work with.

Here’s an interesting thought for all of you career-minded folks out there: if you went back in time as your current self and was able to meet your self at 9 years old, what would your younger self think of your current self?

I recently read an article in this month’s Popular Photography that said a key to creativity is “unleashing your inner 9-year-old”. In other words, allowing your unrestricted creative side to take center stage, ignoring aspects of practicality and the limitations of your current camera technology.

It made me wonder, “Would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool?” And also, “Is this even remotely important to the world of advertising and interactive media?”

I’ll address the latter first: business of any kind without creativity is dead. And I’m not just talking about artistic creativity here, but creativity with finances (within legal limits), HR, infrastructure, sales, project management, IT, etc., is all critical to a properly functioning business. As a former project manager, I can often let my obsession with proper details ruthlessly crush the big idea of a dreamer, simply because the idea at the time seems impractical. But I digress. Indeed, we need to be at least as creative as a 9-year-old in order to be successful.

Now, the former: would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool? After much debate, I think little Andy sure would, at least for the most part. The reason I can be confident about this is that I’ve been blessed to do now what I’ve always thought I’d do: have a career in advertising and in sales. So on the job front I think I’d think I was pretty cool (follow that?). Sure, my job isn’t as cool as GI Joe’s, but I wasn’t really allowed to have many of those anyway (thanks Mom).

Plus, I’ve done quite a few things to keep my 9-year-old dreams alive. Through luck, I was able to marry a wonderful woman who grew up in Kenya, and thus in 2005 I was able to drive in the African bush in a Land Rover, one of my childhood fantasies. I’ve also purchased several large kites, and thus fulfilled my childhood dream of regularly being dragged across the ground by a giant kite. I have a son, some incredible friends, and I get to do crazy stuff like stand in a freezing waterfall in January with my best friends pointing and laughing. I feel like these things would be cool to my 9-year-old self, because although I’m constantly creating new goals and priorities, I still come back to wanting to do something crazy every now and then. I think the day that stops is the day I stop being creative.

That doesn’t mean that I’m never constrained by the harsh realities of life; far from it. But I think my 9-year-old self would understand that in order to buy a new bike, you have to mow the neighbor’s lawn to make some coin. I just want to keep some dreams alive and parts of life ridiculously fun.

What things do you do to keep your inner 9-year-old satisfied?

Debuting during the Super Bowl (and what a Super Bowl it was!), Coke’s new ads got my ad-sensibilities as tingly as Mitt Romney in a Utah primary. Gone were the ridiculous, “soft branding” tactics of bubbly music and roller-skating hotties, and in were a couple of ads that really get to the heart of who Coca-Cola undeniably represents worldwide today: America, and her uncanny ability to be the melting pot of the world.The spot with Democrat James Carville and former Senator Bill Frist is definitely my favorite. What other soft drink brand could make the claim to bring disparate people together and not be totally laughed at? Sure, Pepsi tastes better, but globally the world revolves around Coke. Overall, I was disappointed with the rest of the Super Bowl ads. Sure, it’s easy to be critical when my client’s $2.7 Million isn’t on the table, but I was pretty shocked at the overall mediocrity of the ads. Most disappointing to me (besides the horrific salesgenie.com ads) was the fact that several companies tried to bank on the success of a previous idea rather than coming up with something original. During the Bowl, I spotted the following:

• Audi R8 – parody of The Godfather “horse head” scene
• Budweiser – gratuitous use of the Rocky theme song
• Bud Light – “Breathing Fire” spot is a direct rip-off from the DQ and Taco Bell “breathing fire” commercials
• Diet Pepsi Max – ripoff of Saturday Night Live “Night at the Roxbury” sketch
• Life Water - ripoff of Thriller, with a dancing girl

I use the term “ripoff” and “parody” loosely, just to conserve words. What I’m talking about is using an existing, popular idea instead of a new idea in order to sell your product. Sure, it’s great to make your ad buck go the extra mile in today’s congested, information-laden airwaves, but using iconic, if not the classiest, entertainment parodies to promote your brand doesn’t seem that valuable to me. It was also unusual that only a couple of advertisers decided to push a website along with their ad (Tide and Doriotos).

Either way, even though USA Today would disagree with me, I think Coca-Cola won the day. And I’m pretty non-biased because I only drink a soft drink about once a month, and it’s usually a Pepsi product =).

Well. Wow. I’m still in a bit of shock. Philips launched the “Shave Everywhere” campaign last summer, and mercifully it looks like I missed out on it back then. It’s a site that unabashedly describes the benefits of, well, shaving everywhere. They’ve even coined a new phrase, which may be creeping into our everyday language as you read this: “Second Puberty”, or the process by which men begin growing hair in undesirable places as they age. A marketer’s dream.

Tasteful or distasteful? Appropriate or inappropriate? Bravo for broaching a taboo subject in mainstream media, or Shame-on-Philips for assuming men are so base and unintelligent? Everyone may draw their own conclusions, but in the end the site has definitely accomplished its goal: to gain brand awareness by being disruptive.

While I don’t personally find the campaign to be in good taste, I have to tip my hat to Philips for being willing to try something truly creative and potentially dangerous. I think I would echo a lot of creative people in agency jobs in saying, “Wow, I wish the clients I work for would be willing to do something that crazy…looks like fun”.

What could your company do if you weren’t constrained by traditional social mores or accepted advertising tactics? I guess the only way to find out would be to give more marketers and agencies permission to fail while trying out new ideas. Looks like fun.

Thanks to Steve (sort of) =) for the link.

In the world of marketing, you can score a double-play whenever you can create a promotion that is so noteworthy that more attention is drawn to your methods of promoting than to the promotion itself. A few months ago, the alternative music group (an overly simplistic label on my part) Radiohead released its first major album after parting with its record label. The album is available for download for whatever price its listeners are willing to pay, which was and is an amazing concept for artists and marketers everywhere. Check it out…it’s an interesting site and a great listen.

Of course, this model is only truly economically viable if you are fairly confident that you already have a strong, loyal audience that will carry the majority of the financial burden.

Steve Thorson, one of my friends and a co-worker from a previous life, is a designer for Paste Magazine’s website, and he let me know that Paste is using the same model to sell a year-long magazine subscription - you pay whatever you feel the magazine is worth to you. 11 issues, plus 11 full-length CD’s full of the latest and greatest music for progressive tastes. What’s great about this promotion, is that it’s also a gauge of the loyalty of its current subscribers, as Paste is allowing renewal subscribers to get the same deal. As an added incentive, Paste is highlighting those who pay more than the $19.95 for a standard subscription rate (although Steve tells me this experiment has yielded an unexpectedly high number of subscriptions at $19.96 by those who just want to be featured in the magazine).

This is a great deal for consumer, and a great deal for Paste, as they can expand their subscriber base to uber-frugal people like me that wouldn’t normally pony up the 20 bucks for a magazine about music (yes, guilty, I paid a dollar, but I know that Paste will make it up in ad revenues). Asking people to pay what they want is the next best thing to giving it away for free, and it offers the added benefit of giving you, the marketer, a very real picture of what your value is to your customers.

>>UPDATE: Steve just let me know that the slew of subscribers at $19.96 was inaccurate (and third-hand) information.  So far, only one person has done that.   On the upside of things, he said the highest price someone has paid so far is $70.  So now, I can officially feel less guilty about only spending a dollar.

After a semi-long absence, I’ve decided to go a little Seth Godin on you and post a picture from my camera phone.

Sure, as a photographer this image makes me cringe, but my trusty Treo was all I had on hand. While on a client pitch in NYC earlier this week, I spent a few minutes in a lobby with a DHL drop-off box. I was inspired by the simplicity of the answer for a very important question that anyone about to drop a package in the box may have, “Have they picked up packages here yet, or not?”.

The large, block letters in all caps that indicate if a package has been picked up or not are not sexy, or even all that interesting, but they are 100% functional. I think that can be a hallmark of great design. DHL could have gone with a really slick system of lighted buttons, color-coded tabs, or whatever, but instead they chose the direct route. If I can walk up to the drop-off and see immediately that the packages for the day are “NOT PICKED UP”, I can drop my package with confidence and not have a second thought, which I would bet is exactly what the drop-off box designers were going for. Bravo DHL.

You can say what you want about the “green” movement, which has as many political overtones as a Dixie Chick concert, but some aspects of it are great.  MountainSmith, a well-known manufacturer of outdoor gear, has recently announced the arrival of two new lumbar packs that are made from recycled plastic water bottles.  By their estimates, it sales of these products will keep approximately 1.1 million bottles out of the landfill each year, which is great news.  The sad thing is, the technology to achieve this isn’t really anything new, so I’m grateful for the political firestorm that’s yielding things like hybrid cars and recycled fabrics.  Most outdoor equipment manufacturers know that they cater to an environmentally-conscious crowd, so innovations have been abundant (and well-promoted) for years, but now utilizing such techniques can generate a very real ROI from an increasingly aware public.

Of course, I didn’t see a lumbar pack recycling program mentioned anywhere…yet =).

Didyk is an uncommon last name. The 64,574th most popular last name (surname) in the United States, according to this site. And it’s a name that I proudly share with the roughly 120 other Didyks (mostly no relation) in the US and Canada. One of them is also named Andy Didyk (no relation), and he’s a prominent Biologist in Canada. He’s a nice guy, but as a communications professional I don’t appreciate having articles on the reproductive habits of shorebirds showing up in a search engine when someone is looking for me.

At my previous job at a small marketing communications firm, I had the opportunity to hire several new customer-facing staff. Everyone who’s been through this process knows that the typical “resume, then phone call, then on-site interview, then second interview, then contract negotiation” process is riddled with problems in terms of actually knowing who you are hiring. In many ways, it’s the business equivalent of marrying someone that you’ve been on 5 dates with because they happened to be more articulate than the other people in the pool. In an attempt to break through the facade, I decided to take an extra step and, after selecting resumes that were promising, searched for the candidates on Google, Myspace, Linkedin, and other social networking sites. The results? Most searches turned up nothing. For a select and unfortunate few, I struck HR gold by finding their personal websites that made it very clear at a glance that they would not be moving further in the interview process.

Here’s the point: if you are looking to make an impact in the new economy, and haven’t yet achieved mega-superstar status, you need to be proactive in managing your own brand online. Granted, if your name is already famous, like “Brad Pitt”, you’re going to have a harder time than if you’ve got a name that hasn’t been hijacked.

Hopefully andydidyk.com will rise above the shorebirds in a few months. I’ll let you know when it does.