Didn’t See This Coming: “2010 Phoenix Advertising Person of the Year”
No one was more surprised than I Saturday night when the American Advertising Federation – Metro Phoenix announced the Ad Person of the Year. I was a bit of a deer in the headlights during my acceptance speech, so I thought I’d take another shot at it from a chair lift in Telluride, CO.
My recognition is simply a reflection of all of the incredibly talented people that work with the Park&Co team, both in the office and as freelancers, as well as the remarkable clients that allow us to do meaningful work on their behalf. For example, the agency was recognized for two other campaigns: Metro Light Rail and INT Technologies.
The award has also come at an interesting time. March 1, 2010 marked the 15th anniversary of Park&Co, and we’ve launched our new website to celebrate the occasion. The site is unusual because we don’t want to just tell you our story, we want to hear yours.
All great marketers are storytellers. Yet, too often, we get tripped up over the science of branding and strategy, get ensnared in the numbers, and lose sight of the real power of advertising: Crafting and telling a great story about the product, person, service or cause we’re selling. That’s right, SELLING!
Thespians have been using that term for years. “Get out there on stage and SELL IT!”
The Selling is in the Telling.
I’ve been doing several workshops lately on the power of crafting better stories, and I need your help.
We created a simple one-page work sheet with this premise: Capture the pragmatics of left-brain intellectual thinking and migrate these strategic factoids to the romance of the right brain where your engaging story is created.
Test Drive our Sustainable Storytelling Worksheet
Do you have a story you’re dying to tell? Or is your brand story not resonating as well as you like? Want to give it a try?
Write your answers in the margins below each thought on the left side of the page.
Once completed, it’s recommended to go have a beer, glass of wine, or some other vice, and let your brain simmer for a while.
Return, unfold the page, now write your story in the red lines on the right side of the page. You don’t have to worry about writing “War & Peace” because you don’t have that much room. Please use focused, active and descriptive words to bring your black-and-white thinking into color.
Describe your “Hero” from your brand statement
Tell us your “Back story.”
Your challenges and opportunities create your “Inciting Incident” that has turned your world upside-down, for better or worse. Every great story has one. What’s yours?
Your communication goals are your “End game.” How do you want your story to end?
Finger your antagonists. Identify the competition, people, economic and environmental forces, finances, doubters, you name it, that stand in your way.
Now move into Act II, “The Love Story.” Write about the people/customers that you need to marshal to help you achieve your goals, what they care about, and how you help them achieve their goals.
Now pen your finale; how your character will arch from Hero to Victor, despite all of the ugly nastiness of market dynamics in between.
Please let me know how this exercise works for you. I believe you can use this worksheet for everything from creating your brand position strategy, to a creative brief for a comprehensive campaign, to messaging for individual ads, to internal communications. What do you think?
You’d think on a hallmark day like today that I’d I have tons to write about. But I’ve got bupkis. I didn’t want to write the expected stuff that simply applauds our sustainability through feast and famine. I’m not even going to thank the people – far too many to account for here – who have helped Park&Co become the sustainable marketing firm it is today. I’ll do that in person.
Instead, I thought I’d give YOU something on our anniversary.
It’s my secret weapon for remaining sustainable in this evolutionary market.
It’s THE killer App for sustainability.
Have you ever played, “Risk”?
Risk is the Parker Brothers’ game of world domination. If you’re an entrepreneur with an iPhone, the game is like having a cerebral dumbbell in your pocket at all times. Risk exercises your strategic decision making muscles, while your subconscious runs an obstacle course around the market dynamics of war. These dynamics at first appear random, yet have very logical outcomes you learn to expect and exploit.
Am I just passing off a game addiction for a business building device? Perhaps. But if you haven’t played the game, check it out.
Risk is all about developing resources and strategically deploying them to expand your market domination. The endgame is to own the world. But be careful. If your greed and impatience has you growing too fast, you’ll get spread too thin, become vulnerable and die. Remain too conservative, and you’ll get dominated. Find the balance and thrive.
Sound like green marketing? Sustainability? The ad biz?
You bet it does. Survival of the fittest.
Just play Risk on your iPhone during all of your boring downtime, and you too will learn to rule the world. That’s all there is to it.
Plus, it sure beats the hell out of the game of “Life.”
Damien Somerset has an odd way of telling his green stories. That’s what I like. His site, ShiftLogic.org, caught my attention (Ok, so he included my blog in his video, much to my surprise). I dig his unique approach to sustainable storytelling. So I asked Damien to frame his own story to see what we can derive from his madness.
Here’s Damien.
Tell us about the protagonist Well, I am Shift Logic. I do everything. From the writing, production, web page building, catering, to the dog washing, I do it all. The basic concept behind SL is to make environmentalism fun. No doom, no gloom, just jokes while hopefully deepening the viewers understanding of an issue. I’ve worked for a number of environmental websites like Treehugger, Ecorazzi, & my last show ZapRoot, which all have one thing in common and that is they don’t take themselves too seriously. I just want to make green focused media that reflects the way I see the environmental movement & speaks to smart modern environmentalists.
Write the end of your story
I’d love for the show to get picked up by a large green website or something, but I’m just gonna make the show and let the chips fall where they may. Success would be great, but I learned a long time ago that making something based on if it will be financially successful or not, means you’ll definitely fail.
Villains
Time. Having enough time to do it. Right now I’m the Project Manager at the AFI Digital Content Lab & I also work as a social media consultant, and I have a girlfriend, and a dog, so finding time to do it is the major problem. The show is deceptively time consuming.
What the hell just happened? (The inciting incident)
My last few project have been team efforts and I kind of got tired of the team process. So I just wanted to do everything myself and do the kind of show that I felt like doing. So if I wanna make a joke about eating disorders and ballet classes, I just go ahead and do that.
Act Two.
Well, I kinda feel like time is kinda kicking my ass. I’d like to put up more shows regularly, but this thing is a marathon not a sprint. So I’ll just keep making the show and whatever happens will have to be good enough.
All is Lost…
Self doubt, in this digital age, is just about the biggest obstacle you have. Sometimes I throw my hands up and say this isn’t funny, nobody cares about this crap, I suck, everything sucks. That’s when I start drinking… heavily….
Act Three.
Of course I would like to get tons of views, but I’m just happy when anyone says they like what I do. I try not to forget that that person just spent their own time to watch the thing I made, then tell me they like it. That’s a serious thing.
Finale.
I don’t really have a destination in mind, so I guess I won’t know when I get there…. man your giving me an existential crisis here.
Damien Somerset writes, hosts, & produces Shift Logic He also produced the green web video series ZapRoot, was the editor of Ask a Ninja, and has been the Project Manager for the AFI Digital Content Lab. His diverse credits include, Executive Producer of TreehuggerTV and Producer for Ecorazzi, Writer for Whole Life Times and Worldchanging Los Angeles, Curator for Pixelodeon, and a Web Video Consultant for GOOD Magazine. Damien is very active in both online media and environmental advocacy, and hopes to use both to help reshape the face of modern environmentalism. More info can be found at DamienSomerset.com.
Dale Begg-Smith photo by Mike Ridewood/Canadian Freestyle Ski Association
I’ve been in a battle of Olympic proportions lately. And the Canadians are kicking my ass.
That’s the Canadian Online Pharmacy, to be exact. It is spamming the bejesus out of my humble little Ning network. And I might add that Ning has offered about as much assistance in combating this menace as a rogue Zamboni carving ruts in the speed skating fast track.
Then Bob Costas introduces me to Canadian-turned-Australian mogul phenom, Dale Begg-Smith, who bounced his way to a silver medal the other night in Vancouver. Turns out the turncoat made his fortune, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, in the “malicious software” spam business as an internet prodigy in the same foothills where he’s now competing for gold.
Coincidence? I think not.
It’s quite a commentary about these over-packaged Olympic games when the human interest story behind the guy standing in the starting gate focuses on how he helped proliferate the Wide World of Spam. “Spam Man Wins Gold in Olympic Moguls,” was the title in an article following the Turin Olympics.
So is it the digital DNA of “Spam Boy” behind Darrel, Samantha, Laurence, Seymour and the seeming cast of a thousand vacuous names propagating the Great White North Online Pharmacy on my Water Conservation and Social Media Ning network? Am I bitter at Dale? Well, not really. Just disgusted at what he stands for, especially as he’s prepping for his conquest of the mogul run that’s supposed to be as Olympic-pure as the driven snow.
So back to Ning. Does anyone out there know how to shut down the attack? Ning apparently doesn’t. Is that a particular weakness in the platform?
I want to be like Alexander Bilodeau, who bested Begg-Smith for Canada’s first gold as the host of the Winter Olympics. Only my triumph will come in a much colder environment: On the web.
