A woman is not a hamburger

The overarching role of marketing is to create in the customer the imperative to take a desired action, hopefully while doing no evil.

Today, children, we will talk about really evil people.

In my hometown of Tel Aviv, Israel, there’s a restaurant called Agadir which prides itself on its excellent hamburgers. It also prides itself on the attractiveness of its female servers, so much so that for the Jewish new year they issued a calendar featuring wholesome photos of the girls in action.

Here are a few samples:

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The man behind the campaign is actually a woman, one Keren Arnaldes, creative director for the Mu-Ar ad agency. Here are excerpts from an interview with her published in The Marker Online magazine (translated by me from Hebrew):

“You can choose to see them as humiliated and abused, but nothing there was staged…”

“Q: Does this mean that the waitresses chose to be photographed on all fours?… A: Totally… it reflects the kind of reality these girls live in… [these girls] are women, not little girls.”

“There’s nothing grotesque or pornographic about it…”

“Not every girl shown on all fours is submissive. Could be that she just wants to [bend over] that way. It comes from a place of strength. You shouldn’t take it to a sexist place…”

“They all do it out of loyalty to Agadir” (duh…)

Listen. I know sex sells, and I’m no prude, and bla bla bla. I have no problem with erotica or pornography or whatever. But there’s a big difference – from Maxim to Hustler to any amateur porn site, the models and actors are self-aware adult entertainers. This is not the case. Encouraging the servers to pose in compromising positions (the photos will haunt these girls for years to come), and taking advantage of their loyalty to the workplace, crosses a big, fat line.

From the creative director to the restaurant’s owner, you are nothing but self-righteous smut peddlers. And that’s evil.

working with a graphic designer

Practically all graphic designers I know have mounds of horror stories about clients who have driven them crazy.

This is where we, the clients, get our revenge at designers who sometimes forget who they work for and why they were hired (or maybe you should never work with a designer who doesn’t like cats?)

Here’s the full story.

Bullshit Bingo

You’ve seen it before, but in never gets old. Thanks, Dominic Gurrera.

My colleague Yitz commented:

“Thinking out of the box to be proactive I recommend it become a best practice to leverage this for all our meetings going forward, as it is a perfect strategic fit based on our gap analysis. The bottom line is this is a value add, win-win for our team as it will drive our synergies and create more bandwidth. I know this will be a team challenge, but please touch base with me and send over any comments as I do not want to be kept out of the loop.”

Aaahh!!!! Comic Sans!!!!!!

The best approach to choosing the right font for the job, in my very humble opinion, is just throw the science out of the window and go with your gut feeling.

Kinda like matching wine with food – I like red with my fish, ok? So shoot me.

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture by a very prestigious Israeli scientist, a leader in his field of research. His ideas were groundbreaking, his arguments sound, and his presentation… run for the hills!

Every slide used a different typeface, often mixing different fonts in the same slides. Mismatched sizes. Misuse of color. And just when you thought you’ve seen it all — Comic Sans.

At once, everything the scientist said was tainted with cuteness. This went on for a few slides, until we landed on a Garamond page, and seriousness resumed.

But then again, Comic Sans is a common Blackberry interface font, and it works, because it’s one of the most legible fonts available.

And would it be treated differently if it weren’t called Comic Sans, but some highbrow Latin name?

In the documentary Helvetica there’s a part where one of the designers interviewed says she’ll always associate the Helvetica font with war and therefore never use it, because it was popular among Vietnam-era military suppliers who wanted to improve their image (if you don’t know what Helvetica looks like, it’s the font used by the New York City subway system, Target stores, Bloomingdales and many, many others).

Back to the wine analogy, there is no right and wrong, only convention. If tomorrow a brilliant, serious ad campaign will feature Comic Sans — hell, the Porky’s font — the designer would be praised for her genius. Yesterday’s cutting edge in design will be old fashioned tomorrow. And we’ll keep on doubting our choices.

We’ve just started to learn how to communicate via digital text. On the phone, you can convey emotion through your cadence and tone of voice. In hand-written letters, through your minute, personal graphical cues. But in digital text? That’s why we need proxies – emoticons, LOLs, LMAOs, XOXOs, handwriting-style fonts, and yes, the cheeriest of all typefaces, Comic Sans.

If this is so, future generations of writers, for whom digital text is the default form of communication (replacing handwriting; just ask my 13-year old niece), would be free of the need to simulate something they no longer use.

Maybe then we’d be able to put Comic Sans to rest.

Here’s a little Rorschach test for who you are based on the fonts you choose (courtesy of www.cracked.com):

yourname.com

I own my name as a URL. If you haven’t visited my website already, go to www.eyalsolomon.com.

Living in the U.S. with the first name Eyal is not easy. Most people are unable of pronouncing it correctly — not as a variation of a southern Hey Y’all, but with an accent on the second syllable and a soft, tip-of-the-tongue L.

The only advantage of having a relatively rare name is that I got my own URL (no luck if your name is Tom Solomon or David Solomon). I also have reason to believe that had I not purchased the URL back in 2004, it would have been taken by one of the other Eyal Solomons I know of.

I strongly believe that everyone should invest in a URL that is easily associable to their name. I’ve even harassed parents into buying the URL of their child’s name. It is the equivalent to the pioneers who took stake in the western territories in the 19th century. Cyberspace is still the new frontier. We’re witnessing its constant morphing — from academic to commercial, from static pages to dynamic to user-driven. And it’s still in its infancy. Even if you leave your URL parked for years, one day you’ll find use for it, either as a personal website (like mine) or for a business endeavor.

Parents, treat your children well. Buy TheirName.com.

(Note to parents-to-be: check URL availability before naming your child. She’ll thank you.)

can you operate a pen?

The cybersphere is abuzz following the news that BP Photoshopped (note to my spellchecker: it’s a legitimate word!) a photo of their Houston command center, which appeared on the company’s official crisis response website. In the original photo a few of the video wall screens were blank. BP filled the blank screens with ‘live’ images from the hemorrhaging well.

To add insult to injury, the doctoring job was so sloppy, that anyone could easily see the telltale artifacts:

And wait, that’s not all – the photo is from 1991 (as apparent from the image metadata tag, which the geniuses at BP forgot to edit), but was presented as a current image.

I can’t help but imagine the decision-making process: someone in media relations calls the web department, asking them to post an image of the command center, to show BP’s dedication, bla bla bla. The webmaster calls the Houston command center for a photo, and they send one from 1991 with blank screens, and that’s the only one they have, and they’re too busy to shoot another, because they’re dealing with the oil spill, so please don’t call us again. The webmaster sends the photo to media relations, they don’t like it, so they decide to fix it, but they have to do it ‘quietly’, so one of the guys says no problem, I’ve got Photoshop, let me fix it. And the rest is history.

Actually, I made up that scenario as an easy segue to what I really want to write about–let’s call it the Photoshop imperative.

I can still remember the pre-computer era, when advanced office skills consisted of typing with all ten fingers (on an IBM ball typewriter) and operating a Rolodex. Managers, needless to say, were exempt from learning these skills; that’s what secretaries were for.

Fast forward to the present. Would you hire a candidate for an office job who can’t type well, or doesn’t know how to surf the web?

Where we set the baseline skill set for administrative employees defines the weakest link in the company. That employee would be limited to operations that require the tools he or she already possesses, since most companies do not offer real computer literacy education.

Simply knowing a software, for instance, Photoshop, gives employees exposure to the activities of other departments in the company and other activities that are often beyond their official job description, which in turn gives them a broader insight about how the company works and the industry it works in.

So is it unreasonable to expect that an office employee, at any level, would have mastery of Excel (and not just for tabulating information, but actually making calculations) and the entire basic Office suite? How about Photoshop or InDesign? HTML editing?

We can only speculate what the minimum toolbox expected from high school graduates will be in the very near future. The ability to type, design and publish an e-book. Create a compelling presentation, with audio narration and 3-D animation. Edit video. Build a website from scratch. Build an iPhone app.

Because operating a pen just won’t cut it.

Why we buy cars

Couldn’t stop thinking today about the new Buick Lacrosse commercial:

Apparently, with the 2010 Lacrosse you can pause and resume live radio, just like a DVR.

I don’t even know if this is an important feature, and who is supposed to be impressed by it. That’s a separate discussion. Would anyone pay an additional $100 for this feature? Even $50? I doubt it.

I can, though, appreciate the projected ‘futurism’ that a radio-DVR might have. A car that can pause live radio – making the temporal a-temporal, magically stopping time! – has to be technologically superior to everything else. Especially when you think about who in their right mind would buy a Buick Lacrosse.

I think that what fascinated me most about this commercial was the record distance between the core value proposition of the car (safety, horsepower, size, fuel consumption, design, etc.) and the very extrinsic single feature of an accessory.

I would even go as far as saying that this commercial might backfire, when people start asking themselves “Is this the best thing they could say about the car?”

Tell me what you think.

Going Paperless

At my company we’ve decided to go paperless.

Well, not entirely. You can still find our printed material at tradeshows and other events. But we’ve become much more aware not only of the cost but also, and perhaps no less important, the inefficiency of printed material.

The green quasi-revolution of actually preferring digital content, epitomized by the Kindle/iPad/Nook, has not yet permeated all the way across our industry. But the tide is turning. With every tradeshow we participate in, fewer and fewer visitors bother to pick up our printed material (much of which ends up in the nearest trash can). Many prefer to get the content they need on digital media, and a growing number of interested parties actually tell us they will visit our website for content, and leave the booth empty-handed.

I wonder when (not if) we will see the end of paper-based marketing collateral. I’m confident it’s right around the corner.

And I couldn’t be happier.

(I wanted to add an illustration, and this one is all over the web. Excuse my un-originality. It’s late.)

false advertising or just wishful thinking?

My friend Morten Nielsen of Prescienta found this, an example of the old marketing adage “don’t sell a product, sell a solution for the customer’s problem”.

Text-to-movie by xtranormal.com

Like everyone else I know, I was amused, delighted, amazed and awe-struck by the viral HTC vs. iPhone animation, based on the xtranormal.com platform.

Beyond the content, which is brilliant, I was taken by the the ease of creating the animation. I tried out xtranormal’s text-to-movie platform – everyone should – and it’s really that simple. Within minutes, I created a dialog scene complete with camera angles, close ups and long shots, hand and facial gestures, and background music.  The system has its quirks, like the inability to correctly pronounce names and non-words (that said, I didn’t really take the time to check the option for inputing pronunciation, so I’m giving the developers the benefit of the doubt that such a method of inputing text exists.)

What’s more is that just last year, creating such an elaborate animation would have required a significant investment of time and money. I was tasked with producing a narrated animation for my company, and while the result was beyond the current capabilities of the xtranormal platform, it’s almost certain that a simple web-service or desktop animation application will be available shortly. Something to look forward to.