Friday, August 28, 2015

OMG! She wants me to learn print! In defense of teaching body copy in a print illiterate world

Every term I meditate on what I teach, how, its relevance in today’s ever e-ing four-inch-screen world.  I teach writing print. Don’t call me Old School for it.

Why teach writing print/body copy when life is streaming, online, in video, ten second Snaps, #140 characters?

I know my demands for adherence to format, Copy Sins, Prospect Centricity, Creative Strategy and learning to write print my very low tech/high expectation way is called O so very last century. If that’s you think, you’ve been screen staring too long.

Yes, I teach writing print copy. Yes, I am painstakingly persnickety, talk about things that happened long before you (or I) were born, bring in strange music to torture you and make you take notes on paper with (gasp!) a pen. 
 
Here are smart reasons to indulge my lunacy.

Writing print is the basis of everything we do, even if all we do is digital, broadcast. Got a favorite band, rapper, hip hop, country, punk, dub step reggae death metal whatever artist? Their lyrics all start in print.

Like movies? Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and every TV/Radio/Streaming entertainment medium there is? How do you think actors learn their lines? You betcha. Print.

The Old School pen/paper note taking? Sends a mind/body connection, rearranges your brain synapses to process information in a more open, memorable and creative way. Touch screens, keypads, speech recognition can’t do that.

If you can’t write a great line, how are those banners, websites, pop-ups, videos, tweets working for you? 

If you don’t know proper grammar, how to invisibly manipulate it, how are those corporate site and trade show brochures coming? 

If you don’t know history, literature, old and world music, aren’t culturally literate - how are you going to put your ideas in conceptual context, understand the elements and appropriateness of writing in different styles. Find a piece of music so unusual and interruptive it stops Prospects and award show judges in their tracks. (Don’t get me started on old music – read Steal Like an Artist instead.)

If you knew enough about old, you’d hear it in every new sound your generation discovers.

If you can only write in one voice – yours – better stay 24 forever.  Pray you never get assigned a bank, Depends, credit card, hospitality, AARP, Get It Up or hormone replacement product. Pray your current agers find Peter Pan and the Lost Boys – it’s not enough to age along with them – you have to see life coming before they do.

No matter the concept, format. Being able to transition from one idea, product feature, benefit without changing tone, losing logic, lecturing or worse – boring the bejesus out of them – keeps you connected.  Gets it approved. Produced. 

Writing great print makes broadcast (radio, TV, web, video) easier. Without all those Copy Sins print teaches you to find and edit, you’ll have a harder time saying what needs to be said creatively in under ten seconds, under ten minutes.

Will print ever go away, replaced by e-everything? Not in my lifetime – or yours. As long as kids and their parents share Doctor Seuss; you can’t feel paper’s texture under the screen. As long as language keeps living, writers keep writing, print will survive as the basis for everything. You’d best know to read – and write – it well. 
  
Some of you will be much better creatives than I. Many of my former students already are. But right now, today, what I know about writing print, ways you’ve not conceived, let alone explored, played with, translated, keeps me ahead in all mediums required. 
 
Writing print is the foundation, the launch pad of history, music, popular culture past and present. All give entre to Prospects' heads, hearts, guts. Teach relevance of different values, beliefs, jokes, music, speech, feelings.

An app may work fine, but it can also cut you off from the very people you’re being paid to motivate.  Without intimate, one-on-one understanding. Without the ability to write your ideas in amazing print, then translate it into other mediums here now, around the corner in the next future. You’re building your house on sand for the lack of basics.

I teach writing print. Want you to take its every little detail seriously. What I commit skillfully, conceptually, stylistically, organically to printed page can grow into any media, any message I want. Any way I want. 

And the kicker - almost every CD I know bemoans the lack of writers who can actually write.
Why I know you need to learn it, too.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Just when I think I get it right, I get it wrong and other cautionary tales. Patience. Three posts in one.


Someone’s listening

After several terms of students unable/unwilling to connect with anyone but each other, I announced I would no longer be teaching Kamikaze Creative Strategy™. 

The entire point of Prospect Centered Kamikaze Creative Strategy is turning your prospect beyond demographics into a trusted friend.  

Two and half terms, I was unable to move students out of networks, circles, friends, friends of friends, friends they have never have met but one of their friends' friends has, followers, followings and follower followers. 

Unable to move them into the real world of people unlike them in every way, it was either give up teaching the KCWP™ or give up teaching.

I gave myself one more term.  Started this group with a lengthy session on the Kamikaze Copy Sins™ instead.  

I felt a fraud.  As important as the Copy Sins are, not teaching the Prospect Centric KCWP™ meant I wasn’t teaching the most important thing I have ever/can ever share with students.

The shock - as soon as I stopped teaching it, half this term’s group asked me for a special session on Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ and The Kamikaze Creative Work Plan™.  

The plan is an extra Skype conference.  Interested students can participate, as per desire and drive.  Include their lessons in Skype one-on-ones as we move through writing body copy.

Looking at the individual students who asked for it, it makes perfect sense.  

Most are smarter than the average bear (you figure out the reference). Writing great copy isn’t enough for them.  They want to lead.  To strategize, conceptualize things no one has yet done.

I’m investing my time in them.

I'm hoping it results in paradigm changing careers.  Smarter, sharper, more creative, more prospect driven strategies - and work - than I’ve seen in a while.

 Constituents and other verbal horrors

Half my class – college grads – misused “constituent” in their first assignment.  They heard Jon Stewart and assumed it meant what it didn’t.

Have I told you about my old library dictionaries? 

We (hubby and I) have several, the oldest going back to the 20s – beautiful, leather bound, 2-3 feet deep, full color illustrated plates edged in real gold.  Each word has its root, its history, many applications, meaningful examples.

Juicy words may take up an entire column+.  With pictures.  Average words, at least three times what you'd expect.  

What's in the book from the 20s may not be in the one from the 40s.  What's in the 60s may not be in the 90s, etc.  Not only interesting, together they're a great lesson in living American English.

I start with the most current, go back dictionary by dictionary.  I know what the word means now.  I know what it meant fifty years ago.  When and how the meaning changed. 

Can split its semantic hairs, apply the right sentiment, understand who'll respond to it, who won't.  What style it suits.  When it'll stop a reader in his tracks.  For good.  For bad.  For why can’t I get that stupid word out of my head.

Why go there before I hit Thesaurus or Dictionary.com?  My beautiful, thoroughly outdated twenty pounders take us to the root of the word, its historical evolution from past to present use (if you start w/oldest and keep looking it up to the newest).  From meanings to shades, emotions of meanings.  Its de-evolution from present to past (if you reverse the order).  When it first appears.  When it died in the popular vernacular.

Extremely useful for writers who want their words read - and remembered - by people of any and every product/prospect pool.  

Doing so takes me beyond misunderstanding its current meaning.  Makes it almost impossible to do so (alas, Mercury does go Retrograde and all writers do not read with the same backgrounds and sensitivities). 

Once upon a time, I played anagrams (if you're a writer and have never played, shame!) with Richard Wilbur (past US Poet Laureate, two Pulitzers) and Leonard Baskin (sculptor, printmaker, Guggenheim Fellowship, Gold Medalist, American Academy of Arts & Letters - find a good museum, his work will be in there somewhere).  It's a simple game, forming words from words from words, doing anagrams few people see.  (Look it up.)

Up until then, I thought I had a better than decent vocabulary.  Only their kindness (and, I suspect, my awe at being in the same room with them) allowed me to "play" when I dared.  

My acknowledged ignorance kept me mostly watching over their shoulders, trying to figure out how they thought, where all those amazing words came from. 

That's when I bought my first "out of date" library dictionary.  Amazing what getting caught stupid by people you respect beyond admiration does for the soul.

You can now understand my dismay when 50% of the college graduate "writers" in my care misused a very popular (if heavily lettered) word. 

One misuse I might blow off (after a properly pithy remark).  But every student who used it got it wrong.  Now I’m left to figure out if I’m not as scary as I used to be or if real dictionaries, too, have gone the way of the dodo.

Here's Doreen's Rule:  Hearing it in context does not mean you know it.  Doesn't even mean you heard it in the right context.  Look it up.

Voting Rights (yours)
 (I promise I won’t mention it again)

One of my students told me he was going to vote in the upcoming Presidential Primary.  I have voted in every election – local, national, primary, presidential or not – since I turned twenty-one.  I grew up at a time when Civics was taught with the same weight as Math and English.  Voting is the price you pay for living in America.

Not the point. 

My point is since Citizens United, PACs and Super PACs have been playing with our Right to Vote through the state legislatures.

I don’t care if your vote cancels out mine.  I want you to vote.  

Before you assume you’ll be able to walk down the street from your classroom and cast your ballot, I urge you to look into the local voting laws where your car is registered, your Income Tax is filed and where you live while at school.  Some states have made it impossible for students (attending schools in different states/even different counties than their “parents'/home” address) to vote where they live while at school.

Do not assume since you voted a Presidential Primary or two ago from your school - or any - address you will be able to do so this time.

Primaries give you the chance to influence your future.  However you see it.  They’re at least as important as the General Election.  Don’t blow them off, even if you have to go "home" to exercise your Right to Vote. 

Along with state voter picture ID cards, “Party” registration and dozens of other smarmy sneaky ways to keep students and minorities from voting, you may have lost your right to vote without stopping in for dinner w/the folks. 

Check your general eligibility requirements before you assume.  States have been playing with those.  Congress is scraping the cojones off the Voting Rights Act.  Early and absentee voting, lawsuits for and against, more PAC money, more special interests all mean you need to check now. And every month or two up until Primary Day. Motor Voter may be dead in your state.  You may have renewed your driver's license, lost your voter registration.  Moved a block away, lost it that way.

You won’t get a reminder.  Special Interests don’t want you to vote unless you’re w/them 100%.  Not in Presidential (or any other) Primaries, Senatorial/ Congressional contests right down to who’s “representing” you in the state legislature.

Please, look into this.  Everyone who knows me knows my stance (if I leaned any further left, I’d fall off), but my views and whether or not you agree with them have nothing to do with this.

You must exercise your Right to Vote before you lose it. 

Check the state you came from.  Check the state you go to school in.  Make sure you do whatever you must to cast your vote soon, even if it cancels mine.

As women, we had to fight for that Right.  

As minorities, we're still fighting for it.  

As young adults, we had to fight to lower the voting age to 18 (the same age we could die in old men’s wars).

Be casual about it, you may find yourself disenfranchised before you know it (look it up).

Exercise your Right.  Those people trying to steal it from you are Wrong.

Now a sacred promise.  Not more politics.  The occasional civics lesson as it may apply to the business of advertising, but no politics before, between or to come.

Henceforth, this blog will return to the subject at hand:  Creative Strategy, Copywriting, Prospect Centered Concepts, freelancing, innovation, professional concerns and ad stuff even I haven’t thought up yet. 

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Andy'll only be in Columbia through Sept. 13th

Sorry, I thought it was through 23rd.

Columbia Museum of Art (SC)
1515 Main Street downtown Columbia
803-799-2810
columbiamuseum.org

Look closely, definitely worth the trip.


Tuesday, June 30, 2015

IN WHICH DOREEN ASKS: Anyone going to/through South Carolina?



Lots of travel this week – if you’re not on a deadline, please take a detour to Columbia, SC.  Their state Art Museum was gifted a complete set (ten) of Andy Warhol’s Chairman Mao (look up The Chairman and his Little Red Book).  To celebrate they have a small (fifty pieces) but juicy exhibit of Warhol’s portraits exploring America’s obsession with the World Famous.  

You’ll find many techniques and subject matter Andy first showed us deeply embedded today's popular world culture..

I ran hot and cold on Warhol, but this exhibit (especially a series of Mohammed Ali) greatly raised my esteem of Andy as both artist and print maker.

It’s $12 (probably student discount), parking’s on the street.  Beautiful reviving Main Street with a few fun stores and a place called Mike’s great for food runs alongside .  If you have time, Columbia’s a great little city detour.  Fun little zoo, botanical gardens along the river walk w/zip lines and (if you’re a fan), The original Piggy Park with Maurice’s mustard style bbq.  (Don't bother with the satellite stores all over town - Piggy Park's the deal.)

The Warhol exhibit is the draw – you see so much of his innovation imitated (badly) in consumer work – and some B2B.  As Kleon says, Steal Like an Artist.  Study the original – Get the inspiration to concept your version of Andy, not an imitator of a trend of imitators.  Look closely – the magic is in the details.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

How a former student reminded me I often say little things with huge implications.

Yesterday I was asked if I’d seen my “Tribute Poster” hanging in the Creative Circus corridor.  I had to admit I hadn’t, had to ask what a Tribute Poster was, then who did it.

Seems a former student, Ashley Milhoullin (now at Deutsch/LA), started a movement among Circus students when she first posted mine in a group of six.  Each has a quote that means something to her.  Reminders she goes back to in those infamous ad industry moments when we’re blind-sided, put off base, question our worth and ability to do the work.  Here’s the one she did for me, along with a blow- up that completes the quote.



I thought about what I meant, then looked through my files to be sure I had it right.

Here’s some of what I wrote on her grade sheet:
“...remember you get “worse” as a result of aiming higher…take creative risks, play with (concept/copy) style – this creates new problems you haven’t worked (out) yet.  But that’s GOOD – says you’re not sticking to what you know…It’s good how you pull it all up to where it needs to be...you give anything/everything a chance – (the) sign of great writing, learning by taking risks, not keeping it safe.”

The only way to grow is to keep it Kamikaze.  Step outside your personal and creative comfort zone. Challenge yourself to reach for less expected creative strategies, KKFs, solutions and the styles.

Growth can be a learning nightmare.  Just when you think you’ve reached your zenith, you’re hit with a challenge to move in a totally different direction.  One that expands your abilities, makes your work more versatile, freer than before.  One that includes insecurity and failure in its success formula.  

You were good.  Now you’re bad.  Until you finally grok a new solution you’ve not tried before.  As long as you keep it up, there's nothing you can't conquer.

Up and down, up and down.  The only way to find our best is to push ourselves from the safety of what we know into the scary, painful arena of doing what we’ve never done before.  May not work the first time.  Or the second.  Each try, every “failure,” we learn something else about what we’re trying to do, how high we must reach.

Then we get it right.  Boy am I good again.  The rub: too many creatives stop there, with a slightly bigger, better creative comfort zone.  Great creatives risk more, keep trying newer, smarter, less expected trips outside it.

For a while¸ the failures add up and we’re “bad” again.  It’s a continuous cycle of reaching¸ “failing.”  Getting better better better with each try.

That's the thing with ad creative.  You’re only as good as you are willing to risk being bad.  

Poster (c) 2015, Ashley Milhollon
Blog Post (c) 2015, Doreen Dvorin/Kamikaze Creative(TM)


Tuesday, June 23, 2015

But Wait! There's more! Perhaps there are a few Prospect Centric wannabe Copywriters out there.

This morning I received an email in response to my last post.  A student who attended one of Kamikaze Creative Strategy workshops a few terms ago.  Asking if I would consider teaching it again so he could further grasp it's intricacies.

One student out of over 700 hits/post isn't much (granted, I just posted yesterday).  But even if I have to tutor just this young man out of class/on my own time, I will.  Anyone else who feels the same, get in touch.  Perhaps there's hope after all.

NOTE:  My ebook on Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy is going slowly - am in third edit and keep finding things I left out and worse - things I've repeated too many times.  Will do my best to get it out by fall, will announce when it's available.  D.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

PROSPECT CENTRICITY VS. THE FOUR INCH SCREEN: Why I won’t be teaching Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ in my Open Seminar July 10th. Learn the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ instead.

The first Friday of every Circus term, I do an Open Seminar on Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy.  Open to All – students of any school (ad, high schools, college/ university, Circus or not), professionals or anyone else with an interest. 

This term’s Open Workshop will be Friday, July 10th, 9:30 a.m. to noonish (with break).  The subject, however, will not be Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy™. 

I’ll be doing an interactive examination of The Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ instead.

The Kamikaze Creative Work Plan™ and Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ are the most important things I teach.  They’ve spread throughout the industry.  I’m still editing their e-book, still represent the Prospect in creative, still use the KCWP™ for Copy/Concept/Content assignments (media regardless), strategic consultations with Start-Ups, businesses huge to small. 

The switch?  I am tired of beating my head against a wall so thick, the only evidence is the pain where I sit. 

Prospect Centricity is the basis of everything we do.  B2B, B2C, Direct, Old, New, Social, Video, Emerging, Apps, e-anything, Promotional, Editorial – what we write must be an honest, intimate, meaningful conversation with the person we’re trying to reach/motivate. 

We must grok our Prospect on every level.  Recognize and understand them by common analytics.  Learn their differences.  Gut the common emotional threads holding together huge, demographically similar groups of people. Prospects so close, at the same time so far apart.  

Blame it on helicopter parenting, on addiction to constant babbling contact, on everyone-gets-a-trophy.  Blame it on a generation’s total focus on self, life lived through the four inch screen.  Whatever it is, I’ve not been able penetrate.

Years ago I had a student – now a famous, internationally recognized ECD (you’d know him if you saw his picture) – live that “you never really know a man until you have walked in his shoes” truism.  I bade him spend a day wearing someone else’s shoes.

Prospect Centricity – empathizing with the Prospect.  Today, he tells me it’s one of his work’s guiding principles.  The shoes did it.

Unless you’re Counselor Troy (ST Next Gen), empathy is something most must grow into.  A few are born with it.  Some learn in church, at home, in books, life, the streets.  Without an empathic connection, the complete Prospect grok, you may be able to manipulate a Prospect (Blog 3/21/15) but Motivate?  Doubtful.

It’s been growing.  The more I get in front of the Me and My Screen generation, the more I fail.  Being able to speak only to each other is no way to succeed in advertising.  Or life.  Yet that’s all most seem to want – or be able – to do.

This past term, I gave students a modified version of the “shoe walk”  my ECD friend found so important.  Handed out an assortment of thrift store finery to wear, take selfies of themselves with people outside their experience they came into contact with.  Study how people’s perceptions changed based upon their dress.

A Hail Mary assignment after a near complete failure of my “Go somewhere you’d never go” assignment.  (It's in the blog, too), I hoped this second excursion outside their comfort zone would spark emphatic beginnings, understanding, caring, realizing theirs was not the only world people live in.

Of all the selfies/photos I got, only one included a stranger, looking.  

The rest, pure selfies, showing their embarrassment at the thrift store items I required they wear.

Enough.  I stopped working on Creative Strategy, only on copy.  I offered outside sessions on the KCWP™ and Prospect Centricity.  One taker.  The same student who took the picture of someone beside himself responding to his glittered plastic-alligator American Gucci handbag.  He was also Number Fourteen on the “A” shirt list.

This coming term, on Friday, July 10th at 9:30 a.m., I will be holding an Open to All workshop on the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™.  I get many letters re: the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ – check my LinkedIn recommendations, you’ll find plenty of support of their continuing relevance, importance. 

I will not stop writing, talking about, practicing Prospect Centric Creative Strategy.  The bedrock of hundreds, possibly thousands of CCOs, ECDs, CDs, shop owners and other creatives who passed through my classrooms.  I’ll just not be teaching it formally, as part of my curriculum.
I cannot fight the narcissism of the four inch screen.  I will restrict my teaching to strictly writing copy.   

So (a Kamikaze Copy Sin, did you know?), please attend the July 10th Open Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ workshop.  9:30 a.m.-noonish, with break.  Handouts end of the session.  Tell the security person at the Creative Circus student entrance you’re there to see me, you’ll be directed to the auditorium.  Attend, I promise you will never write – or read – anything the same way again.

FOR MY CURRENT STUDENTS AND OTHERS:  Bring magazines w/print ads – Motor Trend, House Beautiful, Forbes, Wired, Esquire, Rolling Stone - anything with ads in it.


Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Quarterly Free Creative Strategy Workshop Again - will I see you Friday?

As is my custom, the first Friday of every new Creative Circus term I do an Open (as in Free, Everyone's invited) Workshop on Kamikaze Creative Strategy(TM).  This term it's this Friday, April 10th, 9:30 a.m. - noonish.

You do not need to be in my class this term to attend (although if you are, it is required).
You do not need to be in any Circus class to attend.
You do not need to be in an ad school, ad program or even a student to attend.  I frequently get professionals, friends of friends, freelance clients (mine and those working with others) and those poor disappointed souls in search of free coffee and donuts (not offered).

You will be asked to leave your name and email address (optional) so I can send you free material.  You will be given a free handout at the end of the session.

To attend, turn off all electronics, be prepared to take notes w/pen/pencil/paper (I will explain), enter the school through the student entrance (the 2nd entrance, with the ramp leading up to it), tell the desk person you're here to see me and you will be escorted to the auditorium (where it usually happens).

You will not be sold anything, need not say a word to anyone (although questions are encouraged).  It's something I believe in.  Something I know will help every creative out there solve their creative problems in an easier, more intuitive manner.

For those of you in my class this term, attendance to workshop (and Thursday afternoon's first class) is required.  If you have any questions, you can reach me @kamikazecreative@gmail.com.

Welcome to my world.  Doreen

Saturday, March 7, 2015

You can’t find the Prospect in a four inch screen and other thoughts about everybody-gets-a-trophy

I preach a great deal, push a great deal about The Prospect as the heart of everything we do.  It seems there are some – what I thought were fully explained – confusions about what I mean when I say this. 

Creating a smart, insightful Kamikaze Prospect Definition isn’t mere intellectual exercise.  It’s not descriptors – education, sex, age, marital/parenthood status, income, geography.  They can’t give you the gut feel needed to strike a previously unexplored balance between who the Prospect is, what they may think about your client’s product/service.  Let alone how to meld the two into one universal Prospect centric concept carrying a can’t miss message in a Hey that’s me! Language of Concept.

It’s not how they dress.  It’s how they feel about how they dress.  Not who they vote for.  It’s how they feel about the act of voting 

We frequently work with huge, seemingly disparate Prospect Pools.  Not everyone is like everyone else, but they do fall into marketing maven determined classifications based upon general societal commonalities.  There will also be something – some universal truth, emotional thread, actionable attitude – which holds them together beyond the classifications, descriptors, categories.  Find it.  Push behind it, under it, through it.

Strip it down.  See, feel, intuit what’s behind its every shadow
.   
Working moms with corporate management positions suffer the time/balance crunch between kids, home, job, self and hubby.  But how can you use that conceptually for any product with nothing – zip, nada – to do with the time/life balance crunch? 

Push what’s behind, through, under the commonality.  Find new ways to express it, interpret it for both Prospect and client. 

Okay, we know all Prospects in the Prospect Pool struggle to find and maintain a healthy life/work/family balance.

What came before it?  Will having kids/family keep me from fulfilling my professional goals?  What’s before that?  What are the accompanying/often conflicting questions – and all possible answers – leading up to the time/life crunch we’ve been given?  Push. Push.  Strip it down to what’s before that.  And that.  And that.

What comes after?  Do kids/family give me the grounded support I need to remember what I’m working for?  Push. Push.  Work through all the accompanying/often conflicting questions, all possible answers.  Then push some more, even when the answers you find lead to – of course – yet more questions.

How do you pass through it?  Better hire a nanny, cook, tutor, babysitter, house keeper.  If only.  Ditto the questions, ditto the answers.  Push. Push.

What about what’s under it?  Is this all there is?  What was I thinking?  Is it even possible?  You know what comes next.  Push. Push.

One universal truth.  At least four threads – each leading to at least four more threads + four threads behind those.  Each expresses a single, different commonality/emotional thread.  All could lead your Prospect to your client in unexpected, conceptual ways.  On message and in Language of Concept (tone/voice you use to speak to the Prospect).

Yet too many students, beginners, even professionals – still see that working mother within the single dimension of one convenient label.  No matter they've found all the disparities, all the intellectual details, may have spent hours mining hard data.
 
What they don’t do is apply their gut.  Not their imagination.  Not what they see as probabilities.  Their gut.  That sense of coming trends, individual insight, recognition between seemingly vastly different people across rooms, miles, countries, lifetimes.

Can you do motivational, Prospect Centric work on gut alone?  I don’t know about you, but I can’t.  And I have one heck of a “gut” developed over decades of growing up always “the new kid,” living as a local in places I obviously didn’t belong.  Listening.  Watching.  Most importantly, talking, asking, exploring, caring.  Without judgment.  Without reservation.
 
In other words, being one with the world.  Whether it’s my world or not.

With apologies to Salt-N-Peppa, Herbie Mann, Push. Push.

I’ve been seeing some pretty strange, confused and confusing interpretations of this lately.
If you consider your prospect pool a single person, give that person a name, a specific job, number of kids, pets, a certain family unit and geography, your correspondingly narrow creative strategy and solution can eliminate the rest of the group.

Consider your Prospect Pool too broadly, your creative will be everywhere but where your Prospect will find it motivating.  All you’ll have to build on will be clichés, generalizations, product information.  Regardless how huge the group, how general you think you have to be to address them, there are always at least four more ways to express, dissect, examine, push your gut and intellectual universal truths into less expected, surprising concepts.  Before, after, through – push.  Push.

I realize this may be difficult for those living life in a four inch screen to grasp.  This bigger picture/universal truth aspect of Prospect Definition’s far too big.  The screen, barely the size of a decent selfie.  The creative possibilities, impossible to divide into neat little touch screen compartments.
 
Your universal truth – your Kamikaze Key Fact – is at once common within the group, even as it barely skirts the boundaries of what makes everyone in your Prospect pool different. 
We may all see a different culprit in the time/family/work balance formula – traffic, non-stop after school activities, travel for work, eating meals standing up/on the go – but we must expose what’s behind the obvious to speak differently.  To cut through the clutter surrounding a prospect pool constantly bombarded with the obvious: how little time they have.

A few more Prospect Centric thoughts spinning my head of late:

Q:  How can you expect ten dollar words to motivate someone with the (sad but true) American average Seventh Grade Reading Level.  What’s the solution?  Dumbing down your copy?  Or helping to raise the reading average?

Q:  Who is it I’m supposed to know?  How do I get behind, under, through, before?  Go Zen.  Be the prospect.  Be the Tree.  Learn to see through descriptors from the inside, out.  Live the Prospect, don’t just observe.  Observation only creates pack imitation.  Be the Prospect.  Be the tree.

Q:  If every kid gets a trophy, must we stop group sports and other non-competitive competitive activities before no one’s left who understands the difference between genius and mediocrity?

Q:  It’s about time to stop this post, don’t you think?


As with everything posted on kamikazecreative.blogspot.com, this entry ©2015, Doreen Dvorin/Kamikaze Creative™ unless otherwise noted, dated.