layout – Maria Tamming

30th November 2017

What to expect from a marketing specialist?

The correct answer to that one would be:
Depends on which specialist. Even within the same field the competences can differ a lot and yet it seems like often people who are specialists of something else or even of a different sub-specialty have very unrealistic expectations.

For example, I read a job ad today. An ad that I would usually not even open as it was titled Graphic Designer but since it was selected for me as a part of my job alerts, I decided to take a look why.

It took me less than a minute to decide that I should close it but what really surprised me is that any decent graphic designer, who knows their value and strengths-weaknesses, would have as well. Here’s why:

Responsibilities:

Graphic design and production of original digital and print material
Translating, proofreading and quality reassurance of sales material and text

I didn’t have to read further though the list of responsibilities was way longer. Why? Because they didn’t bother to put any thought into the title of the role they chose. People have different competencies and strengths as well as weaknesses and that should be okay. No-one is good at everything and you can either know a little about many things or a lot about a few. If someone claims differently, they are lying. Probably also to themselves.

It is very difficult to understand what someone else’s specialty entails, how broad their competences are and how deep they go. I once hired a replacement for myself and ended up choosing someone who studied exactly the same programme as me, thinking that this way I know exactly what they should know as well. Only a few days later it became clear that we were still very different and so were our skills and interests.

I am sure you all know someone who can draw very well. Does that mean that they write very well too? No! Maybe they do, but those are completely separate competences and in that case, it is just a coincidence. The guy or a girl who draws very well might decide to pursue a career in graphic design when he/she grows up. Or not. But let’s assume he/she does. She might go to a school to study more about art, practice its different forms and learn to use the most common design programmes. If he/she is lucky, he/she will have the opportunity to keep practicing both, their skills and programme use, but since everything costs money and takes time, they might not and will forget some things.

Let’s say that this young designer is really talented, studied hard, took on some design internships and even worked a few years in the area. He/she can now produce impressive graphics, maybe edit photos, follow some recommended ways of working and perhaps even dare to try out some bold new looks for different types of graphics. Specialists, you can improve my claims about you probably. But why on Earth should anyone assume that he/she has any text skills!? Yes, most people can read. And write. But professional writing is a whole other game and divided between various specialists. Your graphic designer should only be able to catch the obvious mistakes.

The job ad I paraphrased before asked graphics experts to waste their time and might have never even been seen by others with more relevant profiles.

I can understand better when someone is looking for a marketing coordinator, specialist, manager or content producer that various skill requirements might be hidden under the title. Yet, no-one is a specialist of everything, still applies so every recruiter should think through whether they want the best of their field or someone who just gets by.

This job ad aspired to find someone capable of doing translations (one specialist, but you should really have two for each language pair as ideally one should translate only into their native language), editing (at least two as some specialise on editing content, others on language – a person who can assemble a catchy text might still be bad at grammar and spelling and someone with great grammar might write boring text), and copywriting (someone who can easily understand various topics and turn them into great text suited for its purpose and target audience). You could add here digital specialists who analyse SEO requirements etc.

It is still easier to find people who can take care of all writing-related assignments quite well. A specialist could probably improve their work but the work might be good enough for its goal.

I can tell you that I am quite comfortable working with texts. I love writing myself, I’ve done a lot of it and I’ve spent years editing and managing edits of others’ texts. I am no stranger to SEO principles or English-Estonian-English translation either and I have worked quite a lot on visual marketing materials.

I have had to learn to use Adobe InDesign because I didn’t have the budget to outsource all design and layout work. Actually, I had no budget at first. Just demands to do things. So I did. As well as I could. And I learned on the way. But knowing the basics of a programme or some design principles is not enough for me to say that I am good at graphic design, photography or layouting. I might be able to veto bad images, pick some quite good ones, mark some editing needs and fight for what goes where but in the hands of someone who does design full time, the results would most likely be better.

Therefore the trend of demanding so many different skills from one person deeply worries me. I get it that today’s marketing specialists should be flexible and capable of handling many different assignments as well as learning fast but is it worth saving the money at first by hiring someone who manages to convince you that they excel at everything and then fails? Or would it just mean that you’d soon need to start another recruitment process or just have to outsource parts of planned work?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

26th April 201726th April 2017

Two very different approaches to the same ad

Today I want to talk about – you guessed it – how differently same things can be advertised from the whole concept to visuals. Advertising space in mass media is expensive so it is very important to first plan thoroughly what to advertise where, why and how.

Actually also targets for each ad or campaign should be set, but I’ll admit honestly, I haven’t found a great way yet to measure the usefulness of our ads as sales are influenced by many other factors as well and customers might come to us after engaging with us in various ways repeatedly.

Not always knowing how much we might gain, we can still do our best to assure that our ads look good, the messages are clear and the probability of the right people seeing them is high at the time when they might need the product/service advertised.

Enough of theory. I always feel that concrete examples make understanding things easier which is why I am sharing with you an ad made and published before my time and another that I made which is in media this week.

I don’t dare to say that my version is the best possible – most likely as I get more experienced, my views also change and next year even I myself might come up with something better (or afford professional agency help), but here is what I think of both:

As you can see, the first example has a lot of different elements – colours, shapes, text and images. It is very detailed, including even article numbers of specific products. It is as if someone just used a page out of a really tacky catalogue and now all those elements are fighting for the magazine or newspaper reader’s attention. Notice me! I am big and yellow and pointy, they scream. Yet, the whole ad lacks focus.

The yellow stars are like something out of a 90s shop window discount ad while the visibility of white text on yellow background is one of the worst possible. There are also red and blue circles of different sizes and there is no way to tell if one of those is supposed to be more important than the others or if the sizes were chosen only based on the amount of text someone wanted to fit on the element.

The photos, on the other hand, are small and seem somewhat randomly chosen to show off some products. None of them give a good overview of the system nor seem they to strongly support products in the campaign. They might has well have been skipped all together if it was important to give a lot of product information. Without the “illustrative” images, there would have been more space and “air” between product units, allowing them to stand out more.

If we now look at the introduction then at least it is clear from the start what this ad is talking about – electric fencing. But then for some reason we seem to have three different slogan versions in a row.

“Keep your… secure” in itself seems like a pretty strong call to action. It highlights something about the reader and makes it personal. It also involves a strong verb and adverb. “Livestock” however seems to me not as the best choice of words. It is definitely a commonly used term, covering various animals, but I would have gone with something more… lively. Like “herd” or “animals”.

Next we have a cliche about grass being greener on the other side which doesn’t seem to be connected anyhow to what’s offered nor is it explained elsewhere. Where is this better place with greener grass then?

And then we have a third approach – a question. Questions in general are good, in my opinion. They make people think and attract interest. But this concrete question could have been phrased better. Why ask if it is time to check something? Here is a place to come from an authoritative position and just let the reader know that it is time to check their fencing supplies. A better question would have been something like: does your fencing need an upgrade? If we as the experts seem to already question whether it is worth to check something while we do want people to check, decide they need new stuff and choose to contact us, then why should they come to us? Especially after such a long line of steps in between. Does it make sense what I am trying to say?

Picking more on the same question, I would have chosen some other phrase than electric fence. Fencing involves a very wide assortment of products. There are all kinds of wires and posts and energizers and isolators and gate pieces and so on. Each of those might or might not need replacement. Currently to me it seems that the only likely broken or worn thing is the wire. Or on the contrary, the whole thing is in bad condition. Truth is often somewhere in between and the ad copy should factor it in, leaving room for flexibility and making the reader think through their equipment.

I could pick here on many other smaller details like the animal icons placed under some products but not all or warranty icon in three places (twice so small no-one can tell what it means).

I would argue that adding article numbers on an ad is a waste of space and it’s not a customer’s job to make a sales guy’s life that simple. A product name should be enough to inquire about something in most cases and sales stuff has an overview of campaign products anyway.

If I would have had a chance, I would have fought against using randomly capital letters in the beginning of some words.

And I would have screamed at the all over the place formatting of text paragraphs of which very few are aligned with each other.

As you might have guessed, the ad above was not at all my taste and I would have done many things differently. Some of those are very subjective. Some not. But if you are reading this and someone has given you an assignment to prepare an ad, you might want to pay attention to my criticism above. It might save you some money and reputation damage.

I have critiscised now quite harshly someone else’s work so I think it is only fair if you have a chance to critiscise mine as well (below). But first let me explain why I did what there.

I am not a designer myself, but life has forced me to learn how to do the basics at least in Adobe InDesign. That is a very common layouting program that I work with. It lets me work with text boxes easily and add nice images. It also allows me to resize photos, pick which sections I show, flip them, add shadows and much more. Trust me, it is a great tool and life has forced me in the last months to use it daily again for all kinds of marketing materials from quarter page ads to catalogues to wall size banners. But back to this specific ad.

Mostly fencing is communicated with images of cows (or other animals) on a field surrounded by fencing. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing new with that either and in an ad you want to stand out. So I was looking for a different visual.

My first idea was to play with some lightning symbols and safety signs, but before I could start looking for those or plan for purchasing something from picture banks, I decided to take a look at our own image bank and after scrolling up and down fencing related images I finally noticed something different. An angle not so common, yet an image that impressed me. Hopefully it will impress you and others as well.

I liked that the image itself remains a bit mysterious and without reading the text, it is far from obvious what is advertised. Perhaps you don’t think this is a good tactic. I am counting on curiosity.

So I found a low angle image of a guy’s rubber booted leg pressing a fencing pole into the ground. Did you guess it?

I wanted the ad to look nice and clean, have focus and get quickly to the point. I also love word plays if they are used well. In this case, “Step up your game” came to me within minutes, I think. As the other ad, this one too is turning directly to the reader with the “your game”. And “step up”, because it’s not a very common phrase and the picture is a boot. “Up” because our company offers premium products.

The following call to action is very much straight to the point. Buy X from Y for Z. There is another more specific call to action which actually introduces a way to call someone. The previous ad had also contact info which I cropped. Adding contact info is no new invention, but research says that actually asking people to call or write etc makes more people do that.

About the web address, I hear there are different opinions about whether it should be a specific web address taking a customer to a product/campaign page or just the main address. Usually, when possible, I believe in adding simple but specific addresses. This time I didn’t as the web is about to be completely rebuilt and I thought that a generic link is better than a soon broken one.

There is actually also a third call to action that asks for attention in a special blue bubble which mentions quickly that there are special offers available for fencing. At first I even wrote “special”, but highlighting fencing area there as well seemed more important and I didn’t want to overdo it.

Every word in that ad is thought through. Every element is carefully aligned to work together with the image well and assist people in deciding what is important even if they just spend a second or two screening the ad. There is lots of empty space to create harmony between the important info and the background (noise). And though the ad stays on a very high level, everyone should get the point. And no rocket science was needed to make it.

Which one do you like best and why?

21st March 201710th April 2017

The small changes and their consequences

Tonight I want to talk about wishes and opportunities. I am sure that all of us – no matter what the field discussed – have experienced different expectations from what’s possible. That happens a lot in marketing.

No disrespect to the person whose wishes I am about to discuss as he is a specialist in his work, but I just wanted to share a fresh experience with you. Perhaps it will sound familiar. Perhaps it will help understand better how marketing materials are made.

I was given a task to update all marketing materials of a specific product as its specification changed. I was only told to remove the “feature” from everywhere. No-one mentioned what is the “consequence” of it, but since all material covered both, I had to first clarify both parts and then remove them. In simpler words, if you are out of specific door knobs, there is probably one of more cupboards that can’t be produced as they were anymore. But which ones? Perhaps not the best example, but this is what happened to me in different context.

It was simple to remove some claims from digital channels. Ok, videos will require remaking later, but print materials are a whole other story.

I was to update a small brochure. And, as often happens when some change work is in progress, more change requests came. I was asked to add two images and a Powerpoint file was given to me as a source of images. Now I was facing two problems: I had image files of bad quality and had to make room for the new images.

I tried searching for the same images in better resolution – for print usually 300dpi is required and that can be checked in image properties. The originals were only a couple hundred kilobytes big so even without checking I was quite sure, they won’t do. I usually ask my colleagues responsible for providing me with input to send me at least 1MB files as then they won’t even have to dig into image specifics to see the size of it. And even if I would like them to, for different reasons, they don’t.

At the end, I found a bit bigger image versions, but still not as good as I would have liked. Sometimes we just have to live with it and risk having a bit pixelated images on paper.

The other problem was space. After I asked if I can remove anything else from the brochure, I was told that I can remove something from page 5. The new images however had to be placed on page 2. And that might be ok if I was working on a Word document and didn’t care what page exactly something landed on. But I was working on a brochure where every page was covering its own subtopic. Big problem, but could have been even worse if there was anything running over two side by side pages (imagine a newspaper article with a big image over two pages). This is something to keep in mind when planning for changes.

To do what I was asked, I would have had to probably change not only pages 2 and five, but also pages 3 and 4 and maybe also the ones after 5 until layout looked ok again. And even so, it might not have looked so nice anymore as moving some other things around would have broken the layout. Subsections would have poured over to several pages and instead of saving space we might have faced even more ugly empty space. Why? Because, for example, if there was 4x20cm space left at the bottom of a page and the first item of the following page was an image of 10x20cm, then it would not have fitted. And with shrinking the image or leaving it, we would still have had problems.

In the end, I got lucky. I completely rebuilt the structure of page 2 and managed to make enough space for the extra images. It wasn’t as nice as it was before and the logic was a bit worse, but it was still the best option.

These things happen with in-house marketeers as well as with agencies and perhaps it helps some of you understand better why a “small image change” can take so long or cost so much.