How many company have customers creating and sharing their own videos about an initial experience with a new product?

Here’s one from YouTube. It’s 1:20 minutes of a guy powering up his MacBook for the first time. Thanks to Johnny for the tip.

My sunglass dudes would appreciate Miss Helga’s profile. Courtesy of MIT’s Ad Tech Lab.

BTW, Miss Helga is the dominatrix from VW’s new ad campaign. I love the section on “Mein Travels.” Very funny.

Today I bought a pair of sunglasses from a slim-hipped teenager and his shaggy blonde cohort. The store was slow. While I tried on different shades, these two talked, and made a lot of personal phone calls.

“Hey. Yeah. I know. Did you know that Felisha’s working at Banana now? I thought you’d want to know.”

The blonde was configuring ring tones for his friend. I asked why he was doing that.

“Oh, he just bought this phone and can’t figure out how to work it.”

I looked at the phone, one with Blackberry functionality included.

“You bought a Blackberry?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you IM with it?”

He looks at me like I’ve got a hunk of broccoli stuck between my front teeth. “Of course.”

“What else do you do with it?”

“Talk.”

“That’s an expensive piece of technology for talking. It’s not like you need it for business purposes.”

At which point Shaggy nonchalantly remarks, “Oh, we do use them for business. We’re in DECA. And I just organized an anti-drunk driving program for my school. My advisor’s trying to get funding to take it regional. Besides, my phone cost $600.”

Trying to not appear the lame thirtysomething that I really am, I swallowed the “$600?!?” that wanted to erupt from my gut. These kids work at Sunglass Hut and apparently spend their entire paycheck on a cell phone.

“So, do you guys have a MySpace page?”

They look at each other. Shaggy rolls his eyes and says, “I can’t believe he doesn’t have one.”

Fresh off of listening to a kick-ass KEXP streaming archive of my recent crush band, Ghostland Observatory, I decide to act age inappropriate.

“So, have you heard of the band Ghostland Observatory?”

“Nope. Are they cool?”

“Check them out. They’ve got a MySpace page. Or you can go to KEXP and check out a streaming archive of a live performance.”

They knew neither about KEXP nor the term “streaming.”

“What do they sound like?”

“Danceable 80s-style synth rock. Totally different from anything you’ve heard, though.”

I know, I’m totally dating myself. But they seemed to grasp the concept, and that it was different from anything their peers might have heard of, so therefore it would make them cool if they were to “discover” it for themselves.

“Cool. Cool. Gotta write that down. How do you spell it?”

I’m sure they rolled their eyes and laughed at me when I left the store, but this exchange fascinated me from a marketing perspective. I’ve been listening to a lot of indie bands (and some not so indie) with MySpace pages, and a couple of my clients are dabbling in social network marketing. There’s something pure and democratizing going on in our culture that should be on the radar of every marketing exec.

Does saying that make me un-pure?

Today I met with the Designers to map out pagination for the brochure. This is the blueprint stage. I brought a rough content outline. We worked through each section, talking about ideas best represented visually and how to structure the copy and requisite graphical elements to maintain interest. There’s also the over-arching concept of the piece and how that builds from page to page. We need 12 pages to tell this story.

The meeting took 1 1/2 hours. Now I write a first draft of copy. The Designers will take that content and flow it into the layouts they’re developing. We’ll spend the better part of a week refining the piece before the client sees a complete first look at the brochure. And then the copy revisions begin.

Another character in this chronicle is the CEO, one of the more hip and perspicacious leaders I’ve had the pleasure to work with. And he blogs. Alot. About his company, the industry, food and music. I enjoy reading his food posts the most, since I don’t get to travel around the world pitching my company and dining on the expense account in the best restaurants a cosmopolitan city has to offer.

Yesterday the Designer met with the client again to present two new conceptual design refinements. As he was taking the team (same client-side attendees plus the CEO) through the revisions, the CEO asked to see the initial design presentation. He immediately gravitated toward the angle that yanks their brand into new visual territory. Same terrain, much better view.

It’s rare to work with a company led by a ballsy CEO. And this isn’t just about balls for balls sake, it’s about having a clear vision of where you want to take your company and making quick, instinctual decisions that further that goal. I don’t work with him everyday, but that’s my outsider impression of this CEO.

I was not at this meeting. But my meeting with the CEO about their tagline followed a similar script. We presented 10 taglines. He quickly threw out 7 of them. We discussed the other 3 for 45 minutes. The Marketing Director gravitated toward one idea, while the CEO homed in on the most abstract and aggressive idea. Despite a tagline that resonated, at one point he asked if that was all we came up with. That’s code for, gimme another round. We didn’t nail it, and he knew it.

Being being ballsy also means getting your money’s worth. There’s an unwritten code that you always push your creative team for a second round. Being on the receiving end of that directive can be frustrating, and I’ll be honest, more than once I’ve deliberately held a great idea for round two just to spare myself the extra work.

So. Ballsy. We’ll see how far that goes.

Since this is a sales piece, I asked the Marketing Director if I could interview a few of their salespeople. I wanted to ask two questions:

How do you pitch your service?
Are their any words you’d like to see included in the marketing messaging that would make your job easier?

I didn’t have any expectations for these interviews. But I learned a valuable lesson.

I helped to write the company’s external facing messaging. It was written to be direct and simple. Yet not one of the 3 sales people I interviewed used the appropriate verbiage. They all spoke of the primary benefit of the service in roughly the same way, but picked their own words to express its meaning.

I find that startling. It’s painful for marketing execs to distill a voluptous product or service into a bare-bones summary. What I did not realize is how hard it is to get an entire company to use that messaging consistently. I waltz in to a company, help them spin their words and waltz out. The real work begins when I leave.

I know that the Marketing Manager has been prepping the sales team, but there’s much work to do. Just another reminder that re-branding takes patience and constant repetition. Kinda like raising a toddler.

We presented initial brochure creative late last week.

For those of you who don’t know how creative is developed, let me explain. Typically the creative team (in this case, designers and a writer) convene in a meeting room, huddled around a creative brief. Brainstorming ensues.

A brainstorm is basically a long conversation about the client. We throw out a lot of ideas and see what sticks. I’m a vocal participant in the process, punctuating important points with wild gestures. I also tend to bring pages of ideas to a brainstorm, and maybe 3 of those ideas will actually end up getting used.

Brainstorming is my favorite part of the process. I love the serendipity and the surprise of metaphorical sharp turns down alleys that eventually open up on leafy courtyards with people sitting at bistro tables, talking, eating and drinking. On a project of this scope, I normally spend at least 4 hours “thinking” about the themes that are important to capture. I often research competitors to see how they’re talking about themselves. Sometimes I write rough headlines and bring them to the brainstorm.

This time, I came to the meeting cold. I figured I could skate by on team chemistry and catch up on the writing in the first copy draft. The team on this project has excellent chemistry. I’ve worked with the Design Director for years, and both Designers are familiar to me. They are all people with diverse interests who are extremely good at what they do. That makes for lively conversation and a level of trust that the work will not suck. Despite my lack of preparation, I walked out of our initial brainstorm feeling positive that this project was in good hands.

That’s not always the case. I’ve worked with designers who are never happy with what I bring to the brainstorming table or the copy I write. I’m pretty sure that I don’t suck that bad or I wouldn’t be doing what I do for the length of time that I’ve done it. So it really is about chemistry. This applies to clients as well. It takes time to build that chemistry. If I was a marketing exec looking to hire a creative team, I would inquire about the chemistry. I’d want to know upfront who my team was, and how long they worked together. In some ways, this is more important than experience.

In our creative presentation, we showed 3 design directions to the Marketing Director and 3 of their user interface designers. Everything we do has to play out on the web, so it’s important to have the UI people involved. We went in with 3 very different approaches, ranging from a safe, expected evolution to a far out, make you twitchy treatment.

The reaction to the presentation was positive. They did not choose a direction in the meeting, prefering to shop it around and think about over the weekend. This is common. I suspect that they’ll want to merge elements of each concept, or go with the middle ground.

In the interest of paying more attention to this blog, I am going to report about a dot-com branding project. I am not a reporter, so the facts will be spotty and tainted with my writely inclination to embellish. Remember that.

The client would cringe at the thought of being a “dot-com.” It’s true, though. Some would call them a Web 2.0 company. They have two audiences: businesses and consumers. B2B and B2C. Ah, acronyms, how I’ve missed you.

I’m about one-third into their brand evolution. They are paying me to tell them how to write about their product. I’m collaborating with a design firm, which is responsible for the new “look” of the company.

I’ve written this company’s tagline and a brochure.

I like the client. They’re smart and ask tough questions. They are motivated to change and are relying on this brand evolution to generate revenue. They’re getting feedback from their base that people don’t understand what exactly it is that they do. A good problem for brand work to solve. They need to be real, and offer real benefits, to be successful.

The players:

Design Director
Designers
CEO
Marketing Director
Brand Strategist

I will fill in back story when action is slow. I suck at pictures, and it would be rather odd to see a writer snapping photos in a creative presentation, so this will mostly be prose.