Why Skill Upgrades Are Not A Luxury

A wake-up article from Sean D'Souza at www.psychotactics.com.

I've seen so many people wasting away their talents, because they insist on avoiding the upgrade.

This reminds me of a designer I worked with a while ago. There she was doing layouts in this archaic version of InDesign. Which is fine, but the archaic versions are archaic because they slow you down.

They do stuff the inefficient way. They make your process drudgery. And then you wonder: Where did the time go?

The time doesn't go anywhere. You and I refuse to understand that we need to upgrade. Upgrade our tools. Upgrade our skills. And not just once in five years, but on a consistent basis.

When was the last time you went to a seminar? When was the last time you took three-four days off to learn a new program? When was the last time you took a nice big chunk of time to learn something, or get yourself the tools you need?

We're literally wasting our lives if it takes us two days to write a decent article. Or seven hours to do a waffly layout. Or eleventeen days to do a presentation that's mediocre at best.

You can't be the world's greatest rally driver in a crappy car. You can't be the world's greatest chef with crappy ingredients. You can't be the world's greatest computer whiz with Microsoft-DOS.

It's the equipment. A person that falls in love with the equipment falls in love with the process. They have to. There's little choice. Only a bad carpenter blames his tools. A good carpenter wakes up dreaming of using those magnificent tools to build a magnificent mansion.

And build it fast!

Read the full post here

Mo's Wakow!

Making commercials for the web

Here's a wonderful post from Seth Godin:

TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media.

The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.

Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.

1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.

2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground. Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.

3. Length doesn't matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?

4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching. Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.

Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content... anything for an eyeball.

Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can't. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.

The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there's very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we'll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.

Presentation Skills 'n' Some Thrills

This meeting must have been an eye opener for a few - the ones who thought that as a designer you only need to cook up colours and shapes to fit a mould.

The agenda was to get each one to present their best creative, like they were presenting it to the client. 'Present' was the operative word. Isn't that enough to shatter set notions or the lack of any notion about what lies ahead? To say the least, we saw tears. Actual tears, mind you.

But then we all learnt a few things this Friday too.

- Presentation is an acquired skill.

- It needs us to be prepared with work we can defend.

- 'Defend' does not mean fighting for a lame-duck creative.

- To defend successfully, your work must be well thought out and executed.

- For the above you need to understand the brief correctly.

- If the brief is vague, question it, till you get the objective clearly in mind.

When we were presenting, we were all pulp. And when we were the ones hearing the presentation, we were all teeth and dagger. Chills and thrills, so to speak.

5 things exceptional. And a laptop that wasn't.

This Friday, 17th April, we had all agreed to choose a website we think is exceptional, in our opinion and find 5 things that make it so.

Aruna chose: IRCTC

Suresh chose: The Matrix

Lavanya chose: Peter England

Sampath chose: Mercedes B-Class

Kavitha chose: LG

Ahila chose: Tropicana

Thanuja chose: M&M's

Jaideep chose: National Geographic Expeditions

(Click on the links to take you to the respective websites)

Between all this, our meeting got delayed over a stubborn old laptop. That there above is his offending self in person.

Revived!

Set for the meeting.

Jaideep tries to make the laptop behave.

The meeting in progress.

One of our work in progress. (Actually, we're trying to show off our new TV.)

After being in hibernation for many months - months that saw us piled high with work, that we couldn't take time off for meetings during working hours - the Friday Morning Meeting is back. We've suddenly found time! Time off work! We begin our meetings at 9:00 am now. A half hour before official working hours.

So we gathered at our new conference room on Friday, 10th April. The agenda included a debate on the pros and cons of a website - each of us had to spell out what we liked and disliked about the chosen website. That took a really long time. But we did learn a new trick or too. The first being that you cannot be too observant - you'd think that you've covered all, when you really haven't. The second is that it's better to have more views and opinion on a subject than one. Fly loose. You can always structure later.

71% of Internet users live in Non-metros

Internet research firm, JuxtConsult, has released the findings of its annual study, India Online 2009, which tracks the usage and preferences of Internet users in India.

• Total number of Internet users in India has gone down from 49 million in 2008 to 47 million in 2009.
• Of the 47 million users, 39 million stay in urban areas and 8 million reside in rural places.
• While 29% of the 47 million live in metros, 24% stay in tier II cities and 47% live in tier III cities and villages.
• About 5 million also surf the Internet on mobile phones.
• About 80% of the users are in the age group of 19-35 years.
• The most popular activity online among regular Internet users is searching for travel products.
• The second most popular activity is job search.
• Among the most used websites are Google and Yahoo – 35% and 25% respectively.
• Rediff and Indiatimes stand much lower and are used by 4% and 1% respectively.
• YouTube is used by only 0.5% of regular Internet users. Orkut is used by 7% of 38.5 million internet users.
• Yahoo is the preferred site for email (45% users), instant messaging, online news, net telephony and mobile content.
• Gmail is also among the most used sites for email (44% users).
• Google is the most used website for information search in English, search in local languages and cinema tickets.
• Orkut is the most used website for friendship and dating, sharing pictures, social networking, and professional networking.
• Of the regular users, 24 per cent also prefer to use LinkedIn for professional networking.
• Among the classified websites, Naukri is used by 44% of regular Internet surfers for job search.
• Makaan is the most used site for real estate search.
• Bharatmatrimony is the most used portal for matrimony search.
• YouTube is most used website for video sharing.
• Raaga is the most used website for listening or streaming music.
• IRCTC is the most used website for online travel purchases.
• Ebay.in is the most preferred site for non-travel purchases.
• ICICI Bank’s website is the most used site for Net banking.
• ICICI Direct is used by 28% users for online share trading.
• Moneycontrol.com is the most preferred site for financial news and information.

India Online 2009 is based on a land survey conducted between December 2008 and January 2009. The respondents comprised 135,000 individuals from 16,000 households in 40 cities and over 12,000 households in 480 villages, spread across the country. The Internet usage dynamics, such as the time spent on the Internet, frequency of usage, and how consumers access the Internet are based on a sample of over 50,000 active online panel members with JuxtConsult. Findings on popular online activities and website preferences are based on an online survey conducted in February and March 2009, among more than 12,500 respondents of the 50,000 active online panel members of JuxtConsult.

GoaFest 09 - A Win By Proxy!

To us in the ad fraternity, Goa takes on a more alluring, if temperamental, sheen around March each year. It's suddenly about awards and not just about beaches and wicked cocktails. This year, Rage had reason to celebrate too, albeit by proxy. It was a gold win for jallikatu.com in the Interactive Digital Advertising and Website category at the GoaFest '09 that brought smiles all around. Jallikattu.com is an initiative of Times of India, India's premier newspaper.

The concept and design for this gold-winning website that debates the pros and cons of jallikattu, the age old bull fight that rivals the one in Spain for it's sheer energy, was executed by JWT. Rage handled the tech bit to get it up and running. Congratulations JWT!

What's your take on jallikattu? Are you for it or against it? To vote, logon.