As someone once in marketing agency sales, what I had to overcome was not the hesitancy to invest in marketing, but the hesitancy to trust agencies. Everyone had a bad experience being sold something they didn’t fully understand and it failed.
I thought it was a resume trend a couple years ago, but I’m still seeing it. It’s quite common with designers who like to add that extra little crispness to their resumes with graphics, colours and snazzy stuff. You go down the rows: 9/10 in HTML, 9/10 in CSS, 10/10 in excel and so on.
The infamous Business Manger incident, or how we knew when we hit bottom.
Once upon a time when I was working accounts, we had a flurry of quality issues with our ad work. Websites with broken links, brochures with typos, and even a billboard with a big mistake. There was a common knowledge that things weren’t going well, but there wasn’t a sense of accountability.
Over lunch, a friend showed me a photo of their new corporate business cards the made in-house. He works at a design company, so they make cards all the time, but this time it was special. These particular ones were for an owners, and he received a full box of cards that read ‘Business Manger’. A typo – from a design company – to one of the owners. Things got messy.
A little shy and very much conscious of the people around the office, my friend whispered “It looks like a uterus.” He shared in the popular consensus that the new Airbnb logo does in fact resemble certain body parts. Genitals in fact; junk, vagina, whatever your mind leaned towards.
“To you marketers, the greatest burden of your generation will be the Old Spice ads.”
This was proclaimed at a lunch and learn some time ago, with some guy I’ve forgotten, but I will remember his words. The brilliant idea propelling sales and reinvigorating the old man brand into a modern essential of the iconic bro culture was a catastrophe because of its success.
It wasn’t a dramatic discovery, but a disappointing one. Seeing a rudimentary debit system in Monopoly to assist kids by removing the almost desperately basic math required.
This has dug under my skin as I see more young workers unable to mentally compute basic change when I order a friggin coffee. Take $3.68 (because coffee is stupidly over priced) from $5.00 and what do you get?
What the hell does cranberry and frost smell like? Or vanilla and moonlight? I’m not interested in how an air freshener borrows from Pocahontas to transport me into a whole new state of being. How does a fragrance, or anything else for that matter deliver on the expectation of altering our physical interpretation of reality? Particularly when I need it to remove dog odour, not promise me a voyage through 'blossom and breeze'.