Month: February 2007

  • How Does a Creative Agency Set Itself Apart?

    These days, I’m fortunate enough to work with a ton of great creative agencies. Turnstyle Studios, Don’t Blink Media, Angelvision, and PanBuilt are four that immediately come to the top of my mind. 

    It’s a world with more start-ups, where more companies (and the VC’s that fund them) are demanding more work for less money from a talented team that isn’t part of the "big agency" experience.  In a world of thousands of agencies, the question is, how does one small agency stand out?uselessaccount.jpg

    Well, the answer is to create compelling materials that market yourself.  And that doesn’t mean one-sheeters and direct mail pieces anymore. 

    Brisbane Creative launched a funny site last week called Useless Account, in which they mock start-ups around the globe.  I found it through TechCrunch, and it’s likely Brisbane sent a link to Michael Arrington.  From a revenue perspective, they gain nothing.  In fact, the server capacity may even be an expense. 

    But now you know who they are.  When you are in a meeting, you may say something like, "We need an agency as creative as Brisbane."  This is a long post to say that this we’re all trying to figure out what the "new" forms of marketing will be in the net 5 years.  But the creative agencies really should be the ones driving that.  They’ll come up with genius guerilla tactics, we’ll notice them, hire them, and we’ll want the same type of genius when we start cutting them checks.

    Update: Turns out Brisbane Creative is actually a University student in Australia named Jim WhimpeyHis blog details the story of Useless Account, and pretty much makes everything I said, well useless.  He wasn’t trying to create buzz for his agency in the way I imagined, but it certainly worked out that way. 

  • The Search for Jim Gray Continues

    This story is about a week old now, but the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray sparked a remarkable social collaboration led by Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch details the story here, so I don’t want to rob them of their deserved readers.

    But the side commentary concerns the power a globally connected network can have.  It’s unlikely we’ll be able to find Mr. Gray, even with everyone looking at 5-10 satellite photos.  But this kind of application can be taken national for missing chlildren, or down to the neighborhood level for lost dogs. Using this technology, it’s really not hard to forsee us using our 5-10 minutes of goof off time to work on a complex problem with 100,000 other people.

    But on this project, we hope someone finds something of note in the photographs, and Mr. Gray can be found. 

  • Screeniac and Screencasts

    Well, it had to happen someday.  Sure HTML and Flash had gotten pretty easy.  But us Marketing folks still didn’t have a way of producing really slick multimedia shows without the help of someone creative.

    Part of the design hurdle may have been cleared with Camtasia Studio from Tech Smith. I could try to explain it in a lot of words, but the keyword is "Screencast."  If you need to explain what your Web site does, or how to use anything online, or even just record a visual list of all the gifts you want someone to buy you, this piece of software does the trick. 

    Best thing to do is check out an example on Screeniac.com and click on any of her links for "Flash Demo."  She may be doing free Screencasts on products she likes as a way to market herself to companies she wants to do some work for (which would be quite ingenious).  Or she may be getting paid to do the screencasts.  Either way, look for bloggers to start using this kind of visual/audio mix as a way to bring their news to life.