In Blog on
3 August 2010 with 4 comments
Desperate times, it is often said, call for desperate measures. And desperate measures are rarely rewarded. I learned this the hard way when I agreed to work for New Century Publishing, a vanity press in Indianapolis that has recently come under fire for failing to live up to its contractual agreements with an untold number of authors, editors and designers.
That’s the nice way of putting it. In short, they’re scam artists. But to endow them with the word “artist” would be an insult to artists.
I first met with David Caswell, president of New Century Publishing, in early 2009. I had recently been laid off from my full-time gig as an advertising copywriter, and was looking for work — any kind of work. A friend of mine who had interviewed with New Century — but ultimately turned down their request to do some developmental editing work — referred me to them. Very much in need of income, I emailed the NCP office, and they immediately emailed me back to schedule an appointment.
(That was the first red flag, by the way — the low barrier to entry. A single email that yields an interview, without any references or work samples, or any evidence whatsoever that you’re qualified for the gig? That doesn’t happen. When it does, you best be skeptical. I was, but my skepticism was outweighed by my desire to get paid.)
When I first met Mr. Caswell, I found him friendly — too friendly. An older man with neatly combed silver hair, dressed conservatively in a slacks and a white dress shirt that strained to contain his prodigious belly, Caswell was jocular — jolly, even. Yet he exuded the oiliness one expects from used car salesmen and the sorry folks who sell Amway. To put it more bluntly, he smelled of bullshit.
Caswell eagerly regaled me with stories of his friendships and business dealings with Hoosier politicians such as Rex Early and local quasi-celebrities like Abdul Hakim-Shabazz. He talked about how serious New Century was about the editorial quality of the books it published. He purposely misled me about the nature of his business — a pay-to-publish vanity press — and stupidly, I didn’t question it. Not at first, anyway.
Now would be a good time to mention that I had no experience as a developmental editor. None whatsoever. So when Caswell told me that I would be in charge of developmental editing an “important” book written by a prominent local lawyer, I backed off. “I’m not sure I’m the right guy for the job,” I told him. He insisted I was. The endorsement of my friend who referred me was all the proof he needed to know I was the perfect candidate for New Century. Which, looking back, I obviously was: inexpensive, inexperienced and desperate for an opportunity.
I won’t bore you with the details of what happened over the next nine months. It suffices to say I was never paid in full (I got $700 up front, and never saw a cent of the other $1050 NCP owed me — and still owes me.) But after reading this story at IBJ, it’s clear that I’m far from alone in having been bilked by Mr. Caswell and his motley crew of co-conspirators at New Century.
I blame Caswell for my plight, sure, but more than that, I blame myself. I should have known better. You, reader, can avoid similar misfortune in your professional endeavors by following a few rules that I, unfortunately, failed to acknowledge in my zeal to get paid.
1. Always Google a potential client or employer. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it can save you a world of trouble. Googling David Caswell would have told me right away he had been in legal trouble for deceptive practices before — among other things.
2. If it seems too good to be true, it is. I should have known that a real publishing house with professional standards would never hire a developmental editor without any evidence he could do that job confidently. This is the mistake I’m most ashamed of. It should have been a no-brainer.
3. Listen to your gut. Although Caswell was a nice enough guy, something about him gave me what some people might call “the heebie-jeebies.” Now, I know why: He’s a conscienceless liar. Shame on me for not trusting my instincts. Don’t make the same mistake.
In Blog on
8 July 2010 with 2 comments
Oh, to be a marketing and branding consultant. What other vocation affords one the opportunity to sit around with a straight face and bandy about phrases like “leveraging relationships” and “creating synergies” like shuttlecocks loaded with meaning, when, in reality, nobody has a clue what you’re talking about?
This kind of silly talk happens occasionally even among people who, surprisingly, are somewhat reasonably educated in the fields of advertising and marketing. So imagine what happens when a few 20-somethings with negligible experience — in marketing and in life — find themselves with vast financial resources, and a desire to launch a high-profile “marketing and branding” agency? For starters, you end up with vision statements like this:
“Committed to developing and executing successful partnerships between brands and the world’s most recognized talent while also leveraging relationships and consumer insight to conceive and deploy innovative marketing initiatives, LRMR offers its clients a unique portfolio of services. LRMR is about partnerships not sponsorships.”
O RLY?
It just so happens that you also end up with one of the most egregiously mishandled PR situations in the history of professional sports. Tonight, after a long and dramatic build-up that came off so staged and ridiculous it must have had the creators of “The Apprentice” drooling in their leather chairs, Lebron James will commandeer ESPN for an hour-long “special” to announce which team he will play for next year. “The Decision” will serve as the final, backwash-heavy swig from a lethal cocktail of PR tone deafness and brazen, unmitigated narcissism that has quickly and decisively transformed Lebron from a widely beloved icon into an object of widespread disgust and derision.
Not surprisingly, this whole misguided scheme was concocted by LRMR: a quartet of 20-something kids from Akron, one of whom happens to be Lebron himself. And it has never been more abundantly clear that none of them, not even Lebron himself, knows the first thing about that stupid, insufferable word “branding.”
Everybody has different ideas about what “branding” actually is. But even the most intellectually challenged marketers can agree that no part of “branding” — or marketing, for that matter - should result in widespread hatred of the product in question. In this regard, Lebron has failed more miserably than he did in this year’s Eastern Conference Final – no small feat.
“Leveraging relationships and consumer insight to conceive and deploy innovative marketing initiatives?” Yeah, whatever. Of course, Lebron’s mammoth celebrity and concomitant bankroll will prevent him and everyone else at LRMR from suffering any meaningful consequences for their stupidity — or from ever getting any smarter.
In Blog on
24 June 2010 with no comments
One of the odder aspects of getting older is watching your favorite purveyors of entertainment get old with you. Case in point: As I write this, I’m getting ready to go see Ween tonight. If you don’t know, Ween’s a prankish rock band that started out in the late ’80s as a couple of drug-addled teenagers who made music to do drugs — particularly marijuana, LSD and alcohol — to. Their early albums were amateurish and schizoid; amalgams of dirty jokes, drug references, genre parodies, earnest love songs, and make-your-skin-crawl weirdness for weirdness sake. It was punk rock for Generation X/Y — but far more interesting and subversive than the rote rebellion of Rancid or any other direct descendants of the London punk scene, or even the American hardcore scene, for that matter.
Youth was a key element of Ween’s appeal. Their primary currency was always mayhem and mischief. A big part of what made Ween so incredible to their fans was their all-out commitment to their quasi-nihilistic ethos. They drank entire bottles of whiskey while onstage, did all kinds of drugs, and were gleefully apolitical — just completely and totally irreverent toward everything. Then, about seven years ago when the band went on hiatus, guitarist Mickey Melchiondo cited “the health and welfare of one of its members” as the reason for the time-out. And fans knew it was just a euphemistic way to say that lead singer Aaron Freeman — always the more troubled one of the duo — was heading to rehab.
Since then, Ween has released exactly one album. In the meantime, Mickey started up a side business as a fishing guide in Ween’s hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Aaron, presumably clean, began touring as a sort of singer-songwriter with his own backing band. And as I get ready to go see the band tonight, it occurs to me that these guys, who are both closing in on 40, are OLD — probably closer to 50 or older in “real age,” considering the damage they’ve done to their bodies.
The product of their profligacy is easy to see in their bulging paunches, prematurely tired eyes and ashen pallors. And while I’m looking forward to tonight’s show, it sort of feels like I’m going to visit an old girlfriend from when I was 18 years old. It will be great to see these guys who, many years ago, I loved so much, and who were actually an integral part of my identity back then, for better or worse. But after the initial excitement of seeing them is replaced by the vaguely sad reality that none of us are who we were 15 years ago, the whole thing will start be less fun and more depressing. And you know what? I’m alright with that. Because although I’m happy to be where I am now, I find it satisfying to visit where I’ve been — even if the trip is really just a sobering reminder that I can never really go there again.
In Blog on
23 June 2010 tagged design snobbery, logos, NBA with 2 comments
The Golden State Warriors are one of four NBA teams who recently revamped their logos. While the other three teams made relatively minor color and type adjustments, the Warriors went for a complete identity overhaul:
Golden State is clearly looking to cash in on the retro-chic trend that has been hot in the NBA (and professional sports world in general) for going on a decade now.
It reminds me of the throwback Pacers logo, both in its colors and its disarming, almost naive simplicity. But the critics at Brand New aren’t impressed. Writes Christian Palino:
“Nothing about this execution could be called good or professional. Not the formal properties of the bridge composition, not the poorly conceived and handled illustration, not the off-set containing circle, not the overstated Copperplate Gothic and its thoughtless kerning, not the color use, not its ability to be reproduced — nothing.”
On the one hand, I agree with Palino. The execution is amateurish. The type treatment is sloppy; the choice of the Copperplate font is questionable at best; the composition leaves much to be desired in the way of form and symmetry.
And yet this is exactly what I find so charming about the logo. It bears many of the same hallmarks of the classic retro logos of yore, when the Adobe Creative Suite wasn’t around to facilitate the pursuit of perfection when it comes to kerning, text alignment, et cetera. There is a gracelessness to it that captures the spirit of the era it pays homage to perfectly. It’s too bad that the folks at Brand New are too hung up on mechanics and aesthetics to see that.
In Blog on
4 August 2009 tagged advertising 2.0, user-generated content, Youtube with no comments
The paid endorsement is an advertising institution. From Billy Dee Williams and his Colt 45 to Osi Umenyioria and his 5-Hour Energy Drink, it’s old hat.
Newer hat, though, is the practice of compensating young video bloggers (or Youtubers, as they call themselves) to incorporate products into their videos.
Take the case of Kristina Horner, publisher of the fairly popular (she has more than 23,000 subscribers) Youtube blog “I Talk To Snakes.” Personally, watching an acutely attention-starved college kid talk incessantly about herself sounds like the opposite of entertainment to me — but I digress.
Horner recently won a Ford contest to become an “agent” for its “Fiesta Movement.” For the project, Ford selected 100 online personalities to test-drive a Ford Fiesta for six months, completing “missions” in the vehicle, and publishing content related to it.
It’s a fairly innovative strategy that aims to capitalize on the web 2.0. marketspace — all fine and good. But not so fine or good were the responses of some of Horner’s subscribers once they found out about it. Before long, “sell-out” and Horner’s name started showing up in the same sentence on the comments section of her Youtube page. In response, Horner posted a video explaining why she’s no sell-out, and, furthermore, why she’s on the cutting edge of a kindler, gentler new era of advertising.
Young people reject the strong-arm tactics of traditional advertising, she argues. The only way to get through to them is through less pitchy, more conversational marketing — like what she’s doing (and like so many marketing gurus preach in so many boring blogs and marketing books). Horner goes to great pains to distinguish what she’s doing from traditional product placement, explaining that Ford is “subtly” integrating its product into her videos, so it isn’t off-putting to the viewer and doesn’t compromise the integrity (a strong word, in this case, but whatever) of the Youtuber. Her argument boils down to this: When it comes to advertising in new media, the subtler, the better. The Youtube generation likes its product pitches couched unassumingly in user-generated content — almost ambiently, if you will.
The more you listen to Horner ramble on, the more it sounds like the lady doth protest too much. But the questions, in the end, are these: Is Horner right? Is this a winning strategy for Ford? And is it really the future of the advertising, or just another noble but flawed attempt to evolve it?
In Blog on
7 July 2009 tagged Joshua Glenn, Rob Walker, Significant objects with no comments
My fiancee and creative partner, Amy McAdams, recently attended the HOW Conference in Austin, Tx. (and if you’ll excuse me, in a tangentially related note: Her design work is prominently featured in this new book published by the How folks, and, as chance would have it, it hits the shelves tomorrow. Ahem.).
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, Amy went to HOW recently, and found not only the conference, but the city of Austin, wholly agreeable, if a touch hot. Among the highlights of the conference, she said, was getting to listen to Rob Walker speak.
Mr. Walker writes the Consumed column for New York Times Magazine, and prior to that, wrote Ad Report Card for Slate. His book, Buying In, was published last year. He also appears in the new documentary Objectified, a stylish, thoughtful look at the design and use of — what else? — objects.
Whatever interest in objects led to Walker’s involvement in Objectified has landed him in a new creative venture, this one a Web site, called Significant Objects.
Co-curated by Walker and Joshua Glenn, Significant Objects is an experiment in creativity and commerce, with what otherwise would be considered insignificant objects as its focus. Walker and Glenn have corralled a number of cheap, quirky items from garage sales and flea markets, and have given them to creative writers, who have written short pieces of fiction based on them. The items are now on eBay, and, in lieu of a product description, they are accompanied by short stories. The point? To test Walker and Glenn’s hypothesis, which is this: When an object has been invested with new significance, it will acquire “not merely subjective but objective value.”
Learn more about Significant Objects here. Buy a significant object here.
In Blog on
3 July 2009 tagged it's very amusing, vintage ads with no comments
Advertisements, maybe more than any other popular media, accurately reflect the prevailing attitudes, fears and desires of the time to which they belong. Of course, times change — a lot — and forty, fifty, sixty years on, many old ads are immensely amusing in light of social movements, medical revelations and technological advancements (not to mention shifts in taste) that have occurred in the intervening years.
Thus, we love to look at these old ads and marvel at the ridiculous, antiquated — and sometimes, stupid and vile — persuasive techniques they employ. But for those of us who work in the business, they serve as a stark reminder of the moral and artistic peril of creating advertisements. We think we’re above this. We think we know better than the art directors and and copywriters who dreamed these up. But, deep down, we know there’s no way to know how our work will appear to far-off-in-the-future audiences.
Anyway, let’s look at some hilarious old ads, shall we? (Thanks to Rob and Amy, who got me thinking about this with their Facebook links.)
I genuinely love the composition and type treatment in this ad. But I have no idea who its audience is. Seniors themselves? They’re care-taking sons and daughters? Probably. That cut-out photo of the agitated old man against the white background is great. Love his vest and tie. Borrowed from Eatliver.com. See more here.
Some argue that the moment Hitler is used in a debate, the person invoking him loses. I think the same goes for PSAs. I wonder if the artist who drew “Archie” worked on this. See more from the collection this was borrowed from here.
I get the appeal to a man’s libido. I get that they’re saying women love the smell of Tipalet cigarettes. What I don’t get is why, in any universe, a writer would write that headline, and that a creative director, and then the client, would approve it. See more at Print magazine’s Daily Heller blog.
Love the use of “chubbies” as a noun to describe the brand’s audience. Clearly, the word’s connotations have changed over time. Also, that young lady in the ad isn’t much of a chubby — not by today’s standards, anyway. See more at Retro Comedy.
In Blog on
18 June 2009 tagged Positive Energy, Robert Cialdini, weapons of influence with 2 comments
How do you get people to do something that’s good for the environment, but doesn’t immediately benefit them, and might even be an inconvenience?
You exploit their need to belong.
In his 1984 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, social psychologist Robert Cialdini famously outlined six “weapons of influence.” Among the most important and effective of those weapons is “social proof.”
Social proof is based on our primitive need to fit in. When we’re uncertain about how to act, we look at those around us, and mimic their behavior. According to Cialdini, this isn’t so much peer pressure as “peer information.”
Cialdini made his name in the marketing field because of the nature of his research, but he’s an academic at heart. In addition to being Regent’s Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, he’s now the chief scientist for a new company called Positive Energy. There, he’s using his research to persuade people to consume less energy — something no amount of public service announcements about unplugging unused appliances or using compact fluorescent lightbulbs has been able to do.
Positive Energy’s pilot program has already begun in Sacramento, and according to this recent Atlantic Monthly article, it’s getting excellent results. Using software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood, Positive Energy sends consumers reports on their usage stats compared to those of their neighbors. For example, a household might receive a report that reads, “You used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors this year, and it cost you $740 extra.”
In 2008, those who received the reports reduced their energy consumption by an average of 2 percent over the course of a year. That might sound small, but in terms of energy, it’s huge. According to the Atlantic, it’s equal to taking about 700 homes off the grid.
I’m not a fan of the smarmy way Cialdini has characterized his research to sell books. “Weapons of influence?” Please. But you can’t argue with the results he’s getting with Positive Energy. And only the most curmudgeonly anti-environmentalist type would refuse to acknowledge the nobility, not to mention utility, of this project.
In Blog on
12 June 2009 tagged Grand Duchy, Inc.com, SeeingArrangement with no comments
Ruth’s Chris. Vonage. Fairtilizer. They’re three of the worst company names of all time, according to Inc.com. Not a bad list, but note this notable omission.
Forget eHarmony and Match.com. Seekingarrangement.com cuts the courtship and pleasantries out of online hook-ups between well-off men and shallow young women. The women get paid, and so does the web site. In the end, everybody’s happy. Or not.
Ex-Pixies lead singer Black Francis has a new band. It’s called Grand Duchy, and features his wife, Violet Clark. Unfortunately, she’s not nearly as talented as Francis is. Read my review of their debut album, Petits Fours, here. It’s been heavily revised (the editors didn’t appreciate a reference I made to a competing music review Web site in the original lede), but the gist is intact.
In Blog on
29 May 2009 tagged Fast Company, Links, Made To Stick with no comments
- So you’re charming in job interviews. If employers start taking this advice, it won’t matter. Made To Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath argue that an in-person interview is one of the least effective ways to evaluate a job candidate. “Even a simple intelligence test is dramatically useful,” they write.
- Using her very own words, I imagine a boxing ring announcer introducing this copywriter to her audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, Asia’s No. 1 first free-lance copywriter, the Wizardrette of Words, Marsha Mauna!”
- Wanna know how to ruin your blog? Follow the advice of “experts” and blog with manic frequency. That’s what Mens With Pens suggests in this post that argues for quality over quantity in blogging. I agree.
