Here's one way to save a failing business.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 08/13/16)

The last time I posted to this blog was last July and I thought at the time that I'd start a series on epic client fails. Well, that sort of fell by the wayside. I still have plenty of material on the subect, and I hope I can circle back on that idea and post more Stupid Client Tricks.

Instead, I'm going to turn to developments in my business. It's been a pretty wild ride for the past year, hence the title of this post.

Around August of 2015 I felt like I'd done all I could do to keep my small design company afloat. The work we were being assigned wasn't very interesting or challenging, and was just a lot of low level, bottom of the barrel stuff that I hesitate to even call design work. It hardly felt like the kind of work a 15 year-old company should be getting. On top of that, during 2015, a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and business reorgs signaled the impending loss of nearly all of our top clients. And we hardly got any warning.

American Express Publishing (Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and related affinity clubs) and its consumer marketing group got sold to Time Inc. Shortly after that, Time Inc. was spun off into its own company, separate from Time Warner. Then Time Inc. laid off all its creative and production staff within the consumer marketing department. They outsourced it all to Tag Worldwide. Some people went to Tag and some got severance packages. It's a familiar story in the world of business.

By the end of 2015 the RFPs and ongoing client creative needs had trickled to zero. This is a common situation with small companies like ours, but that didn't make it any easier to accept. Over the course of the year, the marketing managers with whom we'd worked for so many years had either moved on or they'd survived the layoffs, but their hands were tied due to outsourcing contracts. The business landscape had changed dramatically — and for us, for the worst.

So, I thought, OK, maybe it's time to stage a career reinvention. Many people do this in their 40s and 50s. While I was down in Florida in September 2015 helping my mom through double-bypass heart surgery, I pondered the possibility of going back to school and getting my Master's Degree in design. I discussed this with my business partner one night, and I think it shocked him a little. It kind of shocked me too. We'd started our company in 2000, and we'd managed to grow it from a handful of referrals to a company averaging annual gross revenue of $500,000. I explained how I felt like I was done with the magazine publishing industry and all its turmoil and disruption. I thought we should get a valuation on our company and explore a sale, or merge our book of business with another company. At the end of the phone call he understood where I was coming from, and we agreed to start shopping our company around.

On the Master's Degree front, I reached out to a former professor of mine who was still teaching at University of Florida, my alma mater, and we talked about the implications of my going back to school. I was 52, but I felt I was still sharp and in step with design and media trends. I thought I could really offer a lot to a university design department. He thought it was a great idea and suggested I pursue it. UF was in a state of transition between department directors, so maybe there was an opportunity for me down the road if I got accepted into the program. So I went ahead with the idea. I started the ground work of requesting transcripts, logging into university sites and setting up profiles, collecting images of my work for online portfolio submissions, etc. It was a part-time job for a couple months. By the time I'd hit application deadlines, I'd managed to submit to School of Visual Arts, UF, and Virginia Commonwealth University. I should have sent out more apps to other schools, but I did what I could with the time I had.

On the business sale front, I started writing emails to industry contacts and companies that may have a need or interest in a small creative shop. I started my efforts in early October, and after a few non-reply emails, we found an interested party. A salesperson for a large printing company in Maryland put us in touch with his company's CEO. They just happened to have begun the process of spinning off their in-house marketing and creative agency. They had a nice stable of nonprofit accounts, for whom they produce direct mail and direct response emails. They were lacking depth on the creative bench, and they needed creative strategy and ideation. Our timing was excellent.

By the end of October, we had our first meeting with the business developers, as well as the venture capital group behind it all. We began to hammer out terms for a joint venture, to build a new agency that would pull together 8 different small companies, including ours.

Cut to February of 2016 and we have our first summit of the new agency team members down in Rockville, MD, at the site of the huge printing facility. We all give a short presentation of our respective small businesses and expertise, and we all seem to get along quite well.

Months pass. We agree to the joint venture terms, we develop a new company brand, build out the identity and collateral materials, rent new office space on Madison and 32nd street, and off we go. We moved in on June 1, 2016 and continued to develop the future marketing plans and positioning of our company, called Katalyst Partners, Inc. (KPI).

By the end of June, 2 of the legacy in-house team members in Rockville quit. They had been there a long time and we assume they simply got too riled up by the changes afoot. My copywriter/creative partner and I were immediately pressed into duty as full-time VP/Creative Directors within the marketing and creative services group, in addition to managing our own small business unit that provides creative services to the magazine publishing industry. Several trips to Rockville, and many, many 12- to 15-hour days later, we made the transition and adapted to the culture of a new company. I think it's one of the hardest things I've ever done.

When all the dust settles — maybe by the end of the 2016 — we'll be able to assess what happened with a little more clarity. For now, we've managed to think our way out of a difficult situation with regards to our evaporating client roster at my original company. While our core magazine publishing clients seem to be fading away, they are still sending projects to us. Only time will tell if that's going to continue or if publishing is going to pivot away from us completely.

As it turned out, SVA and VCU declined my Master's applications. UF had accepted me as an "alternate," but once the new company venture showed promise, I declined the candidacy.

So that's my story as of today. The tornado inside the hurricane is still swirling, but I think the sky is clearing. Or are we just in the eye?

Epic client fail #1: legal interference.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 07/18/15)

Over the past year or so I've been wanting to post a new blog -- since I only manage to sit down long enough to write about 1 a year -- and post something that's dear to every creative person's heart: the client fails. The bloopers, the miscues, the oversights and poor decision-making.

I've tried to jot down some of these mistakes when they pop into my head. I'm sure there are more, but here's one to kick things off. I'll start with the most recent one and work backwards in the next few blog posts.

Last year my design firm was awarded an assignment to produce some cover wraps and direct mail efforts for a popular entertainment magazine. One of the DM efforts featured a portion of a $10 bill on the envelope's face, and a matching $10 bill on the top panel of the letter/order form inside. Since they were offering $10 off a subscription renewal, it was a no-brainer to lead with $10 bill on the creative. We presented the concept to the marketing team and they green-lighted it.

Then the lawyers got involved.

Their legal department said we couldn't show the $10 bill actual size (which is what we'd done because we were showing less than 1/2 of it). We countered with: the portion of the $10 bill being displayed is less than 1/2, and we aren't showing the back. There would be no confusion or misrepresentation to the consumer that it's legal tender. The lawyer was still nervous. I took matters into my own hands. I called the federal government. Seriously. I called the branch that oversees and approves the use of US currency in advertising and promotions. After being bounced around to several different departments, got disconnected, re-routed and forwarded to half a dozen different phone numbers, I wound up talking to a guy in a government office in Brooklyn about it. He assured me that our approach was within the legal guidelines of displaying US currency. Great I said, we're legally compliant, done deal, I hang up.

I took this back to my client's legal team and still they sharted in their pants. Even after the visual was approved by the goddamn federal government, the publisher's consumer marketing lawyers still said no. They said the $10 bill has to be scaled to 150% or 75% of actual size. I said "Those are the legally approved specs for representing an entire bill, not a portion. The portion we're showing is less than the 5/8 required of banks and merchants for accepting or exchanging a bill, plus we're not showing the back. There is no way a consumer is going to mistake the printed envelope and order form artwork for an actual $10 bill." Still they balked. "Make it 150% and we'll approve it" legal said. Sighs and mumbles of frustration filled the office. We being the dutiful little design firm, we obliged.

We got our concept printed by caving in to a legal department's (or one lawyer's) ignorance of the facts. This is often how smart creative gets turned into dumb creative. It can be the difference between a getting a control and not getting a control. The $10 bill at 150% looked hokey. We never did get the response data on the mailing.

You know the old joke: What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of a lake? A good start.

As they say, humor always has an element of truth in it.

Embracing responsive design in email marketing.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 05/17/14)

One of the items that suddenly appeared on every senior marketers "action items" list this year is Responsive Design. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's a relatively recent change in the way digital content is displayed on your device. In the old days (as in, mid-2000s), one size/format fit all, sort of. Then came adaptive design, which reflowed the content of a site or banner ad depending on the size of the device on which it was viewed. Now, we're moving into a yet another new phase: Responsive Design. Meaning, digital content will query your device and respond to its screen display dimensions. If you'd prefer to watch a video on this topic rather than read through this blog, please visit STYLECampaign's brilliant tutorial on responsive email design. It's about 2 hours long, but worth every minute.

Back to the story. Some of our clients aren't bothering to address this Responsive Design issue and others are. The steady rise in the use of smartphones and tablets suggests that marketers (and their agencies and design firms) need to promote to these devices in a new way. And because there are so many different screen sizes and resolutions now available to professionals and consumers, deploying ads and emails to those devices has required a new approach. And when I say "new", I mean using technology that's been around for 3-4 years. Plus, marketers are becoming aware that you have a very narrow window of opportunity with consumers. So if they see your ad or email, they should be able to read it clearly, see the offer and calls-to-action, and then tap to a point of sale.

There's a longer historical narrative here in terms of email apps and how they evolved over time, but don't worry, I won't bore you with all that minutia. Suffice it to say that over the past 20 years or so, email apps have been able to grow and mature. They went from being able to display text only, to the full display capabilities of a Web browser. This evolution in growth and functionality has carried forward into the mobile device world as well, and apps like Apple Mail (which I use every day on my Mac, iPhone and iPad) and Android devices' native mail apps are requiring us designers to up our game. Add to that the higher resolution of devices and tablets that have hit stores in the past 2-3 years, and we have a bit of a problem: ad banners, emails and other graphical content looked like crap on high-def devices. This is because most graphics are optimized for lower-res (72 pip) desktop monitors.

When it comes to email design for example, the workflow in our shop had been relatively simple for many years. The rule of thumb was to limit the fixed width of your email design to something like 540 to 600 pixels, and use graphics that were 72 ppi. Body copy fonts could be 10pt or 12pt, and that would look fine on desktop mail. But the high-def displays that began with the release of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 (and subsequently on the iPad, MacBook Pro, and then a lot of other manufacturers' devices), 72 ppi graphics looked blurry. And 10pt or 12pt text was way too small to read.

So now we have two interconnected issues: we have emails whose graphics looked poor/blurry on a smartphone and/or tablet, text that's now too small to read, and email formats that aren't fluid across all devices. If more and more consumers are reading emails on their computers during working hours, on smart phones in between destinations, and on tablets at night, then marketers are risking losing that consumer if their email promotion is impossible to read or view. Enter the role of responsive design.

What responsive design can offer marketers is the ability to "sniff out" the device you're on with a media query. I'm not a coder so I can't tell you exactly what the CSS code is, but basically the CSS that's embedded inline in the code will perform a media query. It's a series of "if, then" statements that determine your device's platform and screen size, and then adjusts the content accordingly. This allows marketers to tailor the experience to your device, and make it easier to read. For example, an email with a 2-column layout on your desktop can reflow/reformat itself into a single column when viewed on your mobile phone. Given the smaller screen size of your phone, a responsive design approach can serve larger headlines, body text, buttons and navigational elements, as well as branding elements. And this is all done in 1 single email creative. It's a win-win.

However, designers have to be aware that their graphics can't be 72ppi anymore. We've begun implementing a workflow that requires graphic assets of an email become 2x larger than what's shown in our Photoshop layouts. That will guarantee they'll be crisp on a high-res device. Another recommendation is to use as much HTML-generated content as you can, since it's device independent, and will be high-res not matter what it's viewed on.

You may be wondering how we QA test across the dizzying array of devices out there. The first level of testing is to simply deploy the email through a service like MailChimp, and view it on as many devices you can get your hands on, literally. We can test iPhones and Android (between our shop and our coding group), and their related native mail apps. We can also test standalone apps like Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL Mail. We use Litmus, which is a browser-based service that will emulate many of the available email apps, and it even displays your email on a simulated picture of the device it's on. Once you subscribe to Litmus, you deploy your email (from say MailChimp) directly to a Litmus email address that's provided for testing, and it will show you how your creative holds up onscreen in a series of contact sheets. Litmus doesn't emulate every single app on the market, but it's way easier and faster than trying to view your creative by hand on a bunch of different devices, and via 4 or 5 different email apps on each device.

The only perceived negative side to the Responsive Design approach is the price tag. Responsive Design requires a lot more coding up front than a typical fixed-width email design. Marketers will have to weigh the extra cost of Responsive Design and potentially higher consumer response rates vs. the lower cost of fixed-width design and poorer response rates. And as direct mail becomes more expensive (and as the future of the USPS becomes more tenuous and uncertain), marketers are most likely going to increase spending on direct response emails. Responsive Design is probably going to play a more prominent role in the future of email marketing. And if my creative efforts look great no matter which device is on, I'm a happy creative director.

So be sure to view that tutorial video I mentioned at the beginning. It's super informative, and the lab environment they've built at STYLECampaign to do the hands-on device testing is really impressive. I hope this has helped someone out there do better work. Good luck!