Week 1 of funemployment?
Tough. A lot of near misses. A lot of helpful emails. Tons of support from the best cast of friends I could ever hope for. A few meetings with a lot of coffee and a fair amount of beer.
Just ordered business cards from moo.com because, yes, my copywriting services are for hire. Plus the Moo interface slays with its simplicity. Highly recommend them. I wrote different sayings on the back, with just my name and contact info on the front.
My business cards, from Moo.com
They’re supposed to arrive Oct. 6. We’ll see.
Cross-posted from my Pop Art blog.
There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.
Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.
They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
How do you test an awareness campaign with traditional and online display media? What if you ran a Facebook cost-per-click campaign that tested all your messages and offers across your demographics?
By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.
In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.
This cracks me up to no end.
Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.
Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.
Every May, I get about 10-15 emails from graduating copywriters hoping to share their portfolio, and looking for copywriter portfolio tips. Most of them suffer from the same problem: no context. So here’s the portfolio tip I usually email back to them.
Dear Madison/Toby/Emily/Tyler,
If I could make just one (very long) comment on your portfolio, it’s this: I want to know why you made the choices you made for each ad/campaign. What business or creative needs led you to these executions? What funny dead-ends did you find along the way? Tell me a little story that explains why you did what you did. Read the rest of this entry »