I thought to myself, “Odd. I must’ve really fucked up my portfolio if he didn’t pick that up. I mean, that’s a pretty accurate description of me.”

Analytics are cruel because when I looked at the web analytics on my portfolio between when I sent it to him and when I received the rejection email, there was only a slight uptick. Very few pages were viewed for more than 10 seconds. And none of the larger “zoom in here to read” files were viewed. None. So I can surmise that he spent about 90 seconds on my site.

Analytics are cruel because I know that I wasn’t even really considered. Pity, that is.

(Oh, and I stole the title. We had Ze Frank as the emcee for the Webtrends Engage conference a few weeks back. And he had this bit about how “Analytics are Cruel.” It’s good! Watch it below.)

Just click through and read. It pretty much explains itself.

Click to get krunk, meatsack!

Click to laugh. Well, first the image will get bigger, and then you'll read the copy. But then you'll laugh, I promise.

Ironically, I left Pop Art shortly thereafter, and ended up at Webtrends where I was tasked to do the final analysis of the campaign. To be honest, I didn’t agree with doing it. The whole fiasco had died down, and it seemed folly to bring it up.

Since this is my portfolio section, the thing to point out here is that I did all the sentiment analysis and calculations myself. (Yes, I can do math.) And then I wrote up my conclusions for a downloadable PDF.

Our goal was to highlight our online tracking and measurement capabilities measure and analyze the content and sentiment of the resulting online conversation.

In other words, we try to understand what people say and how they feel about the topic. This measurement can be helpful for businesses and organizations who are exploring new ideas, and who want to find out how the ideas will be received, unearth misconceptions, and identify influencers.

Measuring sentiment and opinion is not a new science — public relations firms and politicians have used it for decades through opinion polls and surveys. We apply similar fundamentals and modern tools to digital conversations.

It’s not the most exciting thing in the world — I intentionally wrote it more like a flat research paper so that it wouldn’t inflame the conversation again. But given the way I naturally write (kinda like a smart ass teenager), it’s a good example of my ability to write in a different voice.

It’s also a good example of my ability to hold my nose while I do something I strenuously disagree with, both on a business and personal level.

Situational morality: That’s why I work in marketing!

Click to giganticize the Webtrends Great Data Giveaway screenshot

Early on at Webtrends, we decided to run a Facebook contest. That was pretty much the direction: let’s run a contest to see how it works.

So we wondered: what would make Webtrends’ faithful excited? And I came up with this idea of embracing the data nerd element. “Fly your nerd flag high” was an ad headline I remember.

We got sponsors like Wolfram | Alpha and ReadWriteWeb to give away a bunch of datasets our winners could correlate to their own data.

Anyway — I still love this text:

“Because you collect data the way some people collect unicorn snowglobes. (And get just as many puzzled stares.)”

It was a pretty successful contest. A few days into the project, once someone in management realized it wasn’t going to go down in flames, we picked up a new goal: to increase our “quality fans.” Considering we were giving away .csv files of historical Twitter data, these fans were definitely quality. And we went from 500 fans to about 2500 fans in a month.

I also created, bought, placed, and optimized all the ad campaign for this. It was during this time that we started to notice the 3-day rot for all Facebook ads. What that means is that most Facebook ads do pretty well for the first 3 days. After that, they start to get ignored by users.

So here’s a little media-planning tip: if you’re resourcing for a month-long Facebook campaign, you need 10 fresh ads. (And really, if you just use new images and new headlines, you’re fine.)

Click to embiggen.

Webtrends is best known for their web analytics software. When they came out with an analytics offering for mobile apps and mobile sites, we wanted to inject some personality and life into the launch.

What I love most about this headline is that, in hindsight, it seems completely obvious. The software lets you compare the performance of all your apps — regardless of platform — in one place. It lets you compare mobile to web. It lets you see app usage and adoption, rather than just how many downloads.

Click to enlarge and read.

The “Beyond Wow” section is the sort of thing that I tend to dig up in most projects — the most obvious and plain spoken way to describe the product’s benefit. It never seems to be in the creative brief or messaging direction. It’s my inability to defend and pitch my own work that it always seems to get hidden away, moldering at the bottom of the page. Hell, given the direction that the product team has taken the mobile analytics page today, I’m shocked that the word “wow” ever made it on there at all. Boooring.

Doing my own SEO research and optimization, the page sat at No. 1 for “mobile analytics” for months. I credit the opening paragraph and H1. Keywords, I gotz ‘em. Since the “enhancement,” it’s fallen to No. 3. NOT THAT I’M BITTER OR ANYTHING.

We ran some banner ads, too, which I directed more than I wrote. Killer stuff. I’ll have to dig those up — they totally slayed.

The King Retail Solutions homepage. Click for a larger view to read. We got a new client in Europe within a week of launching the site, who specifically said it was because of the site.

I fought solutions. A lot. I mean seriously. You want one navigation item to be the word, “solutions” and the other to be the word, “integrated”?

The "integrated" section of the KRS website.

As you can see, I lost that battle.

And yes. Solutions. "Hmm, what should I click on here? How about solutions?"

But the site was a winner.

When I took the job, we’d just started re-designing the website with their agency, DeepPlay. Awesome group. They did the design and I did all the copy.

And interviewing the department heads (so I could actually write the copy) turned out to be a great way to get up to speed on the company and the industry quickly.

I also coordinated several other marketing endeavors: brochure writing and printing, sales sheets, PR, and design contest submissions. I even got some of our photos into a coffee table book about grocery store interiors. (I didn’t know they existed either.)

Side story

It was at King that I first learned about search engine optimization. The day after the new site launched, the CEO called me in. He liked some things, disliked a few others. But the reason that the site “utterly fails” was because when he Googled “King,” we didn’t show up on the first page.

” Wait, did you say, ‘King’? The single word ‘king’? Really, the King of England comes up before us? Martin Luther King Jr. comes up before us? Burger King comes up before us? Wow, you’re right, that is really WEIRD. Hey, what happens if you search for ‘grocery interior design’ or ‘grocery interior manufacturing.’ Oh sweet. Front page? Yay us.”

I can be a defensive and snarky SOB at times. I’m just saying.

Slam City, a knock off of Sin City. "Every city has a dive like this. The neon sign says it's 'The Post,' but it's really a gauntlet..."

SPARQ stands for speed, power, agility, reaction and quickness. The sports company’s goal was to scientifically improve the training that young athletes did — focusing less on the weight room and more on well-rounded athleticism.

It was a fantastic job. Combine my love of sports, coaching, and teaching, then add in a team of psychotically brilliant people who’d rather work until midnight than accept mediocrity. We did five years’ of worth in one year.

A team of three of us published a 60+ page quarterly magazine (I was the managing editor) coordinating writers, photographers, designers, and even other editors.

I also ran the website and the email campaigns. We had events across the country, did mailers, signage, packaging, five different mobile bloggers, and re-launched the whole website all over again.

Homepage layout when we had two brothers earn SPARQ Ratings over 110. Insane!

I’ll soon show more of the narrative work we did in the magazine, take a quick look at a  few PDFs in the meantime. And drop me a line, and I’ll bring in a few hard copies when we meet.

Reggie Bush lights up the cover of the last print issue of SPARQ Magazine.

• Slam City with Brian Grant and Fred Jones.
• USC football’s first Hollywood pro day.

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.

1. The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
2. At some early point at Pop Art, we moved a lot of the SEO responsibility over to editorial. Here’s why.
3. What good will those brand workshops do if your writing doesn’t reflect it?
4. Viral ideas need support to get them to pandemic mode and beyond the sniffles. One way to do that is to study how wildfires grow.
5. I actually had a client say that they wanted to market their small travel agency to everyone. Bad idea. But here’s a good idea: figure out different elements of your company and let them appeal to different people. Targeting online is a great way to do that.
6. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a recession on. Here’s what I’ve learned about managing people and balancing work demands during lean times.
7. When we set out to re-do the Pop Art site, one concept we considered bringing forward was the people. I did some quick and dirty research into our team. Very interesting.
8. How do you measure creative? Perceived ad spending.
9. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place.
10. When I look back on hiring my most recent intern, Kevin, I’ll remember the experience not so much for finding him, but for having to say “no” to three other insanely qualified people. One continues to work for Babywit.com, and we correspond every so often about interactive marketing. Here’s an interesting conversation about e-commerce and email.
11. Social media and transparency. Duh.
12. Last, but the first blog post I wrote at Pop Art: The nine-point copywriting checklist.

They stripped this tool to the bone. There’s nothing left but the tools you need. If you can’t get out of trouble with these tools, you probably don’t deserve to get out anyway.

These ads helped launch the Leatherman Skeletool and Skeletool CX. I carry mine everywhere, and despite how light it is, I can feel it when I’ve somehow forgotten it. Forgetting your Leatherman feels like forgetting to wear your seatbelt. It feels like walking out with your fly down. It feels like going on the jobsite without a helmet.

Target Audience

Alternate GIF backup to the Flash ads we created. I wish we'd made a poster out of this one.

The Leatherman Skeletool represented a giant step forward for the brand. It spoke to a younger audience: more outsidehub.com and less Field & Stream. More GPS and less Jeep. More backpacking and less horsebacking. (Yes, I know “horsebacking” isn’t a word. Who’s the copywriter here?)

The Skeletool also looks completely bad-ass.

Using data from Nielsen @Plan, the team targeted a younger outdoor crowd online. We found they post their photos online, love to talk gear, and tend to be a little more affluent.

We also found a sub-genre of people who love techy looking gear like this, and while they may not be the ones leading the charge up Mt. Baldy, they do aspire to be that guy.

The Creative

The copy had to stay sparse. We knew we just needed to show the tool and the name and we’d have people hooked.

So knowing all that, I Sharpie’d up a few approaches with my designer. The GIF ad here was actually just a back up, albeit a very provocative one. The brand has headed in a different direction (see our re-launch of the Leatherman website).

This GIF represents the tougher side of Leatherman, but it’s not a position they actively court. Their competitor, Gerber, is the Red State, blood-n-guts, Ford F-350 brand. Leatherman wants the smarter, wilier, quieter, more respected outdoorsman.

The SWF ads took a more aspirational approach. One thing that I’m particularly proud of is very subtle: Notice how the clouds are sort of moving in the background? We were struggling with that last screen feeling very static, so I suggested we copy the look of those sweet Gatorade ads with Kevin Garnett — the ones where they fake slow-mo using AfterEffects? — to give it a little bit of motion.

Inspiration: League of Clutch from Gatorade

I rewrote this headline about a million times. I think I still like "Born in the Wind Tunnel" better, but it didn't explicitly talk about saving money. Go check it out at Drive Cascadia.

In 2007, Freightliner called together all its marketing and advertising vendors to announce its first new truck in nearly a decade. And Freightliner loved this truck. Our job was to get fleets and owner-operators to love it, too.

Here’s the thing: Fleets and Owner-Operators have two very different mindsets. Two distinctly different audiences? Two distinctly different sites. Ah, the beauty of interactive marketing…

And now, something a little more fun. Have fun when you go to Visit Cascadia.

In hindsight, it amazes me that I finished this writing in about three weeks.

OnMouseover: The horn says: "Excuse me sir. Please note my strenuous objection to your abrupt and reckless lane change."

Drive Cascadia: Rational Doesn’t Mean Boring

The Drive Cascadia site, in particular, required an ungodly amount of interpretation of “FaBs” documents (Feature and Benefits), and interviews with engineers and product managers. There’s no shortage of rational, long-form selling in the Drive Cascadia site. But more importantly, we pushed the client to use a tone that was a little more personable and entertaining:

The Reverse Ejector Seat

Nightmare scenario: somehow the Cascadia rolls, and the safety features snap into action. The seatbelt tightens and the side airbags deploy. And to make more headroom, the truck’s seat fires downward to the floor like a reverse ejection seat. Everything happens in less than a second, greatly improving the odds of walking away from a bad wreck.

Visit Cascadia: Change Drivers’ Perceptions

The issue facing Freightliner was that its trucks are considered the white Ford Taurus of trucks. The perception is that they’re the least expensive, most reliable, but least sexy fleet truck. There is actually a country song called “White Freightliner Blues,” which reflects the easiest color truck for a fleet to resell.

The Cascadia does NOT suffer from this perception. Every driver who climbs up and takes it for a spin remarks how quiet and smooth the car is. “Like a luxury car,” they say.

So as I wrote the the Drive Cascadia site, I kept a joke file on my desktop for the Visit Cascadia site. While the client reviewed the Drive Cascadia content, I started cracking myself up with such articles as:

• The Seat on a Seat Contest, which is going into its second month.
• The Virtual Tour of Cascadia, which includes the Jackelope Ranch amusement park and petting zoo.

Jackelope Ranch Petting Zoo and Mini-Golf: All the holes are named after myths: Sasquatch, Jumbo Shrimp, Traffic Flow, and Clean Truck Stop.

Perhaps the most interactive piece from Visit Cascadia was the Request-o-matic. It allows drivers to have an email sent to their boss, buddy, wife, hubby, or someone else recommending the Cascadia. (Remember, the bulk of drivers in the U.S. work for a fleet, and fleets are Freightliner’s strength.)

"So who do I have to convince to put you in a Cascadia?"

And below, here’s the resulting letter. To write this, I ended up making an INSANE matrix of copy based on options chosen in the form. There are a few hundred variations of the letter. Even then, I missed about 15 different variations, and ended up doing some of the programming with a template provided to me by our developers. It was like Mad Libs on steroids and amphetamines.

Letter excerpt: "I know repeat customers are good, but Thom is here too much. He hangs out in the lobby for hours. He drinks all the free coffee. He eats all the free popcorn. And he ruins the crossword puzzles in the free magazines by writing in pen. What’s a 4 letter word for nuisance? T-H-O-M."

The campaign was a success. The client was thrilled. Freightliner Trucks ranks No. 11 on Google and No. 6 on Yahoo for a search for Cascadia. The buzz about the truck is positive. Over time, we’ve done a few more projects around the launch, such as a Google Adwords campaign targeting the competition, a video banner ad campaign, and numerous messaging updates.