What's in Store

This is the flip side to our previous blog about how a client can shut down the creative process. Agencies can also be part of creating a bad relationship with their client and the creative output will surely suffer. The worse case scenario is “you’re fired!” Here are some sure ways to ruin a great relationship: 1)    Don’t Listen. Often times a project will start out and the client has their own vision for what they want to see (or their boss does). Don’t put on your prima donna hat and ignore their request. Look deeper into the request and ask why they want to take this approach and explore it in one of your directions. When presenting this, reiterate how you incorporated their original input. Resist the urge to try and make this direction look the worse, or they will surely choose it. Address your client’s input in your designs. 2)    Ignore Deadlines. Let’s face it, we are in a deadline driven profession and we pride ourselves on ma...

As a creative marketing agency, we want to provide the best possible service and product for our clients. This includes the best creative that yields the best results. But sometimes, the creative process gets shut down. Here are 4 ways the client derails the creative process: 1)    Don’t provide clear objectives at the beginning of the project. There is no better way to dampen a designer’s enthusiasm than wasting their time and efforts.  To prevent this, every design project should begin with a clear and concise creative brief. The brief should include a list of design objectives and design criteria that the agency and the client judge the designs against. Many times a project begins with a simple statement like “we need a brochure”. So the agency goes off and provides their best guess of what is needed. Only then can the client provide more concrete input because you showed them what they didn’t want at all. “Oh, I forgot to mention it has to fold to 3 ...

From the restaurant that brought you "Self Promotional Overkill" ,  here's "Extremely Ambitious Tactics to get Customers to Come in More." I found this box sitting on my doorstep one day. Supposedly not everyone received this box. I was surprised it to see it was put together better than their above-mentioned mailer. Upon opening the lid you're met with a folded card inviting you to "solve the puzzle" and win a trip for 4 to Hawaii. Another folded card explains the rules and shows a "treasure map" to this local Mexican restaurant in my town. After removing the two cards there are 4 puzzle pieces nestled within a folded insert. It's an incomplete puzzle, of course. The rules of the game state that whenever you eat at the restaurant, you will be given a new puzzle piece, and when you finally complete your 9-piece puzzle is when you'll actually win. If I had received this puzzle first before that cr...

Every now and then the creatives at JDA go on walks during our lunch hour or head to the nearby Starbucks in the afternoon for a quick pick-me-up. Along the way we'd pass a small traffic circle surrounded by giant spherical concrete barriers.  For some reason traffic circles (even the small ones) notoriously attract drivers who don't know how to navigate them, and in our case it sometimes came at the expense of one of the concrete barriers. In late October we would walk past a destroyed barrier and we would always point out how it looked like Jack in the Box because of the traffic cone the maintenance crew placed on top of it and around it for safety. Every time we passed it, we'd make some sort of reference to "Jack". One morning as I was settling in to work I came across this news article about the infamous street artist Banksy's recent exploits in NYC: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/banksy-ends-new-york-residency-article-1.1502984 Needless...