I ran across this video a while ago and have been meaning to repost it. I have a few minutes today, so here goes. It’s a video by Cincinnati-based designer Adam Ladd. Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos from some of the biggest companies in the world and recorded her responses. It’s surprising at how many she actually gets right…apparently all of those people warning us of the dangers of exposing kids to too much advertising is well warranted. Watch the video and I have a couple of comments after.

Fresh Impressions on Brandmarks (from my 5-year-old)

I think it’s really interesting that his daughter hits not only on the brands that she (presumably) has direct experience with (e.g., Disney and Pepsi, which she refers to as the ‘pop from the pizza place’), but also products that she isn’t a direct consumer of (e.g., Starbucks and BP). It really is impressive that more often than not she either knows the brand name or the category it falls in. It seems to me that the ones that really stick in her mind the most are the simplest, which goes along with what I’ve always believed—simpler is often better. On some of the more complex logos (Boeing, for example), she doesn’t really know what it’s for (I’ll admit that I didn’t know what it was, either), but she just kind of says what she thinks it is.

I appreciated that when she sees the McDonald’s logo, she knows what it is right away, but she also adds something in that I never considered. She says that McDonald’s ‘M’ looks like it’s made up of french fries, which is a connection that I am sure I would have never made. It’s really amazing to see how young minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

My favorite part of the video, hands down, is when she IDs the Greyhound, Jaguar and PUMA logos each as ‘a cheetah,’ one right after the other. I never really thought about how much alike all of those logos looked.

Fun video…hope you liked it.

It’s awards season. In the past month or two we’ve seen the Grammys, Independent Spirit and Academy Awards shows all come and go. I didn’t win anything.

Awards aren’t limited to the entertainment industry, though. There is also a local award called the Ruby Award. It goes out to like a dozen or so local people who are all making significant contributions to the community. I didn’t get one of those, either. And I never will because it’s only for people under 40 and since I am turning 43 in a few weeks, I am ineligible. Forever. I’m 0-for-always in Ruby Awards. Was it because I don’t make a significant enough contribution or did I just not have enough under-40 years in Bay City? For the record, the award givers weren’t exactly knocking down my door in Denver, either.

On top of all of these awards which I will definitely not be winning, there are numerous graphic design and advertising awards—hundreds of them, maybe even thousands—and I won’t be winning any of them, either.

Do I feel bad about it? No, not really. I just got thinking about it because almost every day I get another mailer from another organization reminding me of the deadline to enter a design in this contest or that. Some of the awards are legit—I’m looking at you Clio, Addy and Communication Arts—but some are not. Well, it isn’t that they aren’t legit, but many of them come from organizations you have never heard of before. And every year there are more and more of them.

It’s not that I have a problem with recognizing great work, I really don’t. I look over the design annuals to see what other designers and artists are doing, both as a source of inspiration and self-loathing (there are some fantastically talented artists out there…and I hate them). What bothers me, especially with the flavor-of-the-week awards is that the business of charging people to enter design competitions in return for an award is becoming a very big business. It’s starting to remind me of the Who’s Who scam…you get a free listing in Who’s Who in Animal Husbandry or whatever. And for just $15 you can include a photo. $25 more and you get a copy of the book. It’s the pay-to-play aspect that I don’t care for.

If you go to many designers’ sites, you will to see them trotting out their awards. And I don’t blame them, they’ve earned the awards. Moreover, they paid for them. With entry fees running anywhere from $35/piece to $85 and sometimes more, it gets expensive pretty quickly. That’s part of why you see the bigger agencies winning more awards—they can absorb that cost in their overhead because it’s a much smaller percentage of their budget. Even a couple of entries a month would be a big chunk for me—realistically the $150 covers my electric and internet bills for a month.

Let’s just say, for example, that I decide to start the Midwestern Advertising League Design Awards competition. I’m an upstart organization, so first-year entry fees are reduced to $50/piece. I submit my competition to trade magazines and websites, maybe put together a nice flyer and send it out. Let’s say that I get 1,000 entries. Do the math…that’s $50,000 with very little overhead. A couple of nice prizes, some plaques, some certificates and SWAG and you’re still way, way ahead of the game.

Don’t get me wrong, trophies are nice to look at, but does anybody really pay attention? If you go to a large ad agency, one of the first things you see when you walk in the front door is the trophy case. At Integer we had a big case filled with Addys and Clios and so forth. It makes for a nice show if you’re doing the dog-and-pony thing, but does anybody really know what these trophies are? Maybe I should just go to the thrift store and buy a bunch of old bowling trophies and just put them up on display in the studio.

I only mention any of this because if you are looking to hire an award-winning designer, I’m not your guy. 989 Design is a small studio and while shelling out for a few entries isn’t going to break the bank, but I don’t see that the benefit outweighs the cost. I’d rather just keep doing good work and doing our best to keep our overhead low. Our goal isn’t to be a cheap design studio because that isn’t what we are, but keeping our overhead low gives us a little flexibility when it comes to pricing our projects. And I suppose that if someone were hiring a designer based on how many awards they’ve won, they probably aren’t the right fit for 989 Design, either. Seems a little uptight and that’s just not my style.

If a no-cost competition comes along, maybe I will send something in. Until then, I’m sticking with George C. Scott. Keep your damn awards, I’ll just keep doing great work.

A few months ago I met with a potential new client, Dr. Christian Allan, a Mt. Pleasant physician who was looking to get more information out about his laser surgery practice. One of the first things I do when meeting with a new client is discuss what it is that they do and what they hope to get out of the marketing program. In the case of Dr. Allan, he does cosmetic laser surgery which includes tattoo removal (a surprisingly big business until you see something like this or this, then you realize why the business is growing—some tattoos are not always going to seem as cool or as funny as you think), scar revisions, skin tightening and many other services. And here I thought the only thing lasers were good for was blasting bounty hunters in faraway cantinas.

After several meetings and a little bit of research, I am very happy to announce that his new website, MidMichiganLaser.com, is up and running. Please take a minute to look it over. It’s pretty brand new, so we are working on developing more content, but the basic information is all there.

And if you are anywhere in central/mid-Michigan and are considering laser surgery, making the drive to Mt. Pleasant is worth your time because MidMichigan Laser uses state-of-the-art equipment and procedures. Dr. Allan runs a medical practice, not a spa, and will consult with you about realistic expectations and results of various treatment options.

If you have questions about Botox, treatment of acne scars or wrinkles, hair removal and more, give Dr. Allan’s office a call at 989-772-1213 and one of the members of his staff will be happy to answer questions for you.

I know it’s a couple of weeks after the fact, but I just realized that I never took a minute to thank Rob Clark of the Bay City Times and John Gonzalez of the MLive Media Group to thank them for including me in the group of advertising people asked to comment on 2012′s largely mediocre crop of ads. There were actually a couple of people who truly are experts on the panel and it was nice to be included among them. About the only complaint I have is that they managed to spell my name wrong something like seven times on one page. Ouch. Oh well, I guess I’m used to it by now. At least they spelled the business name right, right? Anyway, for anyone who didn’t see it, here is a link to the article which appeared on the MLive site as well as in the print editions of all of their papers in the state (Bay City, Saginaw, Grand Rapids and a couple of others, I think).

MLive.com Super Bowl Ad Panel

They used a handful of my comments in the piece, but I thought that I’d go ahead and include my full commentary on the ads below.

The game is done, the Giants and won and I have watched a lot of commercials. After watching all of the ads—some of them 2-3 times—and I come away feeling like a lot of advertisers just phoned it in this year. There were a couple ads that really worked, I think, but none of them really blew me away. You’d think that when you’re spending $3.5 million (not including the cost of celebrity endorsers, ad production), you’d really want to swing for the fences.

Best Ads:

Chevy apocalypse – 1st Quarter
Finally! I was beginning to lose hope on this year’s crop of ads. Not a home run, but it was fun and they managed to get their jab in at Ford. I also noticed the two conspicuous product placements (Big Boy and the Twinkie at the end). A new trend, maybe? It happened again later when the GE Turbine ad included Budweiser.

Lexus GS – 2nd Quarter
The ad didn’t blow me away, but I felt like they were at least going for something here. Not necessarily to copy Apple’s 1984 ad, but going for that sort of feeling. Plus, it’s a Has a very nice looking car

VW Beetle – 2nd Quarter
After the success of last year’s “Force” commercial, VW wanted to come up with another ad people would be sharing on Facebook for the rest of the week. I thought the ad was cute for the first 40 seconds or so, but it seemed pretty tame. And that’s when they cut to the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars with another appearance by the Dark Lord of the Sith. Very funny ending to the commercial, will probably be the favorite of most people.

Ram/Dodge/Jeep/Chrysler – Halftime
In this follow up to last year’s successful Eminem/Imported From Detroit, we have Clint Eastwood giving America a pep talk, using Detroit of an example of how things can get better. Outside of Michigan folks, I don’t think it will have quite the same appeal as last year’s (not because it’s not a great ad, but it’s so similar in theme to last year’s ad that the familiarity softens the impact a bit).

Budweiser through the years – 3rd Quarter
I think this was the most visually interesting ad (with the NFL evolution ad being a VERY close second). Bonus points for including the Al Michaels 1980 sound byte and the Cult guitar riff from “She Sells Sanctuary.”

Honda CRV – 3rd Quarter
After everthing Ferris was able to accomplish in his day off, I really thought he’d drive a cooler car. Nevertheless, this ad which was the worst-kept secret in advertising lived up to the hype, delivering something like two dozen visual and verbal references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

MetLife – 3rd Quarter
Fun ad with a TON of cartoon characters from days gone by. It was cool to see characters from so many different studios in one piece. Forget the animation, the licensing must have taken forever! The big surprise, though, is that apparently Daphne finally got tired of waiting for Fred to get a real job and she showed up in the back of Richie Rich’s limo. I went back and watched it again and, sure enough, Velma is riding shotgun in the Mystery Machine with Fred (and he’s still wearing that stupid neckerchief).

Worst Ads:

All of the ads for GoDaddy.com, etrade.com, careerbuilder.com (notice a trend here?). I don’t know why the dot-coms seem determined to just keep trotting out the same ad over and over and over again. The etrade and careerbuilder ads weren’t terrible, but the GoDaddy ads are awful.

Bud Light Platinum – 1st Quarter
Bud Light spent a lot of money to run two ads that only serve as a reminder that the Bud Light you’ve been enjoying for the past 20 should have been much better.

H&M David Beckham – 2nd Quarter
Awful for the same reasons as the GoDaddy ads. The only difference is that it was at least on point, I just don’t know that we needed to watch 30 seconds of David Beckham in his underwear.

Sketchers – 2nd Quarter
An ad that combines two things everybody loves—dog racing and Ton Loc. Oh wait…those are two things that almost nobody loves. People do like anthropomorphic animals, I guess, but a moonwalking dog? Terrible.

Century 21 Realty – 3rd Quarter
The combined power of Donald Trump, Deion Sanders and Apollo Ohno aren’t enough to save this ad from being just another ad with celebrities jammed in there to garner attention. Completely forgettable.

I saw it posted on Facebook earlier today that Qdoba Mexican Grill is celebrating the grand opening of their 600th restaurant. As I have mentioned previously, Qdoba was one of my clients when first went out on my own. It was probably right around a decade ago when they were still operating as Z-TECA (interestingly, I just realized that there are still a handful of restaurants operating as Z-TECA in Ontario). At the time, they were a small chain with just a handful of stores in Denver and Colorado Springs (I think the first menu I worked on was when they were first moving into the Springs when there were around 6 or 7 total restaurants). Because I worked with them so early in my freelance career, I will forever feel grateful to them as well as connected to them.

I used to love working with them. I’d either drive or ride my bike into downtown Denver…their offices were on Blake Street, if I remember correctly. Above what was something like their third store. I’d meet with their IT & Marketing guy, his name was Oscar and he was a very nice guy. And whenever I’d leave the meeting, Oscar would be sure to slip me a couple of coupons for free burritos. I would have ridden my bike for a meeting every single day as long as Oscar kept giving me free coupons.

Qdoba is one of my favorite restaurants and the day they opened one in Saginaw was a very happy day, although if I ate there as often as I’d like to eat there, I’d probably weigh 300 pounds. Qdoba Mexican Grill is  a great example of building a brand through the consistency and high quality of your product. The interesting thing is that all the while they were building their brand, they didn’t even know what their brand was going to be.

When I first started eating there, they were still called Zuma. After a few years—around the time I started working with them—they had changed their name to Z-TECA. Around five years after that, they settled on Qdoba. So even though their brand name kept changing, they kept delivering on the promise of great food and trusted that if they made the food the focus of the brand, that they wouldn’t have to worry about the name. And here we are, however many years later and their strategy worked great obviously, because they’ve got 600 stores!

Congratulations, Qdoba! I look forward to copy and pasting this entry when you get your 700th, 800th, 900th and 1000th stores open.