Nerds
Small, but important leftover thoughts.
Reading is a memory device. Scrolling is a forgetting device.
I've noticed this when I'm reading or looking at something in a more thoughtful way – could be on a screen or physical media, that part doesn't matter – I make connections to other things or it might even trigger an idea. But when I'm scrolling on a platform, that happens a lot less. And when something does trigger an idea, I find that I forget it as soon as I scroll to the next thing. You can use both of these things to your advantage, depending on whether you want to remember or forget.
Small Business 101
Sometimes I see small businesses forgetting to do really small, simple and even totally free things like update their hours or list their hours or address at all. This post (and comments) should serve as proof that your consumers are irritated by this and will move on. It is restaurant-focused, but I think it goes for anyone.
Soapbox
Lately a lot of articles about AI use the word "creativity" when referencing its specific ability to put together elements from a brand kit or resize existing elements. It usually has to do with the grunt work of making the thousand and one sizes digital advertising requires these days, and I think most designers are fine having help with that aspect of the job. But we need to stop using creativity to describe this because it's not that. AI is not being creative, it is using parts you gave it to return to you an average response to your query. And it doesn't matter if the query/response is words or pictures. You can be sure that using the word creativity in most talk about AI is a marketing tactic.
Why Advertising is Therapy for Businesses
I have said this for a while having worked on a lot of brand discovery projects. It often feels like a therapy session. A lot of hard facts come out, but also plenty of feelings. Sometimes it's the first time all the people in the room have come together and been asked hard questions.
"Similarly, the valuable part of advertising is, to some extent, the process of producing it, not the advertising itself. Because it forces you to ask questions about a business which people mostly never get around to asking: What do we stand for? What’s our function? Who do we appeal to? Who’s our target audience? How do we present ourselves? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we make ourselves look different and feel valuable to the people who encounter us?" – Alex Morris
*Nerds
And by Nerds I mean the candy. They were originally the sugary crud leftover from making Gobstoppers.