Do you still want a paper phone book?

83.3% NO
10% MAYBE
6.7% YES

Some of you have heard me in the past talk about how wasteful the Yellow Pages is in terms of consumption of resource.  You’ve seen pictures we’ve taken of stacks of un-claimed Yellow Pages in building lobbies, books never picked up by building tenant.  You’ve even heard us question the tactics of Yellow Pages Advertising Consultants who now, having seen the writing on the wall, claim themselves to be “web advertising experts.”

The reality is at hand.  In this economic environment, where every advertising dollar has to be spent efficiently and carefully, we all need to spend so that each dollar spent can return even more on our investment than before. In this poll of consumers who are right in the “sweet spot” of many of our target demographics; less than one in ten people even want a paper phone book of any kind.

Not only are these consumers not paying attention to the ads your business is paying good money to place, but they don’t even want your ad in their home.  Your ad is one of thousands that they consider “no longer necessary” or “handy for helping start the charcoal grill up.”

We don’t all share the same audience demographic. But for those of us who’s audience is increasingly mobile, internet focused and using PDAs, our advertising dollars can be put to better use elsewhere. There are all kinds of media that people actually want to consume. Those media purveyors actively work on ways to increase their appeal to their audience.

Besides exit polling, Edison provides strategic polling data for radio stations all over North America. Given that their listener base can be jeopardized by Podcasting, you can understand why radio stations are keen to understanding who’s listening to Podcasts, and why they are listening to them.

Here are some of the highlights from the Edison report:

• 43% of Americans have an awareness of podcasting.

• One in four Americans indicated that they have downloaded and watched/listened to an audio or video podcast.

• The number one reason given for podcast consumption was time-shifting — the ability to consume content whenever the consumer desires.

• Podcast consumers continue to be attractive advertising targets; yet are increasingly unreachable through traditional, interrupt advertising.

The upshot?

As a business, if you’re not podcasting you’re missing out on a tremendous targeted advertising medium. The fact is, traditional advertising is becoming less effective at reaching a burgeoning consumer base; busy people. People working 50, 60, or 70 hours a week (read: people who are making more disposable income) have fewer and fewer opportunities to listen and watch traditional, interruptible media like radio shows, television programming, etc..

Even if you have “traditional” advertising methods like broadcast radio, television, or print, podcasting is a lower-cost medium that is definitely worth looking at. The cost of production is lower because traditional broadcast standards (dimensions, time, duplication, etc.) do not apply. The cost of media placement is almost non-existent. The most important and often challenging aspect of podcasting is promotion. However, if your business has a website and takes advantage of social networking sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. you have a built-in promotional base.

Podcasting, much like this email, eliminates the distribution and speed limitations of traditional media. You can be “on the air” after a brief editing session and your content is easily consumed all over the world. Broadcast radio or print media cannot offer you that.

More importantly to your busy potential customer, podcasting is something they can consume on their schedule. Your sales message is not languishing just because the target audience is not seated in front of the TV set or listening to the radio exactly when you ad airs.

Applicability.

Finally and most importantly is what we’ve come to term, “applicability.” Applicability refers to an ad’s ability to apply to the people that see or hear it. I’ve been monitoring applicability lately. While watching TV I’ve been counting the number of ads I see for products or services I’ve actually bought or consumed in the past 12 months.

What percentage of TV and radio ads do you think I’ve consumed in the past year? 50%? 80%? 85%?

Try less than 12%. That’s right, less than 1 in 8 ads.

Am I typical? Maybe not, but I may be typical, and for your business, that would be wastefully typical. In either event, the ads on TV simply are not that applicable to me, and I’m right-smack in the middle of the target audience most TV advertisers are going for.

Now, with podcasting – where the audience is generated by sharing the link among people who are part of your social network and current referral network – you have a much greater rate of applicability. Also, as the content is spread, it’s preserved in a digital format so the audience can go back and listen to it repeatedly, they can pause it, re-play it, save it, email it, and your audience can distribute your message for you all over the world at no cost to you.

How do we start podcasting?

If you’re interested in producing a podcast, August Hour has several options available including audio-only, video and audio podcasts, or podcasts featuring music and talk programming. In addition to our professional recording studio – Guttersnipe Recording Co. -, we have a solid group of professional voice-over and on-camera talent available to really bring that polish to your podcast.

Good thing for us, boredom isn’t a problem right now. Between scoring the documentary and portrait photography we’ve been busy these few months.

We’re amid a re-branding effort for a cycle retailer and are about to begin the re-branding process for an industrial HVAC company here in Kansas City.

Along with that work we’re in pre-production for a promotional video for our friends at Winntech. The variety is different than this time last year, and it’s certainly better than the alternative.

The Next American Dream - poster

The film is set to air nationwide in April 2009 . We’re honored to be working on this project with the great folks at Inland Sea Productions and Take 2 in Kansas City. The topic, urban planning and development, sustainability, and human scale architecture is very important to us.

Every scoring project poses new creative challenges. For this one it’s conveying the sense of humanity while thinking about the sound of America’s future development.

The most exciting part of this project is that it’s part of a program of community planning throughout the nation sponsored by several organizations. The film marks the starting point to exploring how we live in our country in the future. To be a part of the dialog that may prime a discussion of how we live in our built environment is humbling and exciting at the same time.

As more information comes available we’ll be sure to keep you updated. For now, you can click the link above to view the trailer for the film.

Here are a couple of links to the video:

For High-quality Quicktime Video (36meg) click here.
For a slightly lesser quality, FLASH video (18meg) click here.

To the inevitable questions:

What’s it all about?
Often in this business of creative work, people will overlook quality for expense. And by that I don’t mean they’ll take lower quality for less money. Quite the contrary; people will often settle for lower quality as long as it costs more. I used to say, “yeah, they don’t really do good work, but they have a really expensive coffee maker in the lobby.”

Well, the coffee maker doesn’t shoot in HD, it doesn’t score your film, it doesn’t design your brochure, and while a San Marco in the hands of a competent barista may spit out wonderful crema, it sure isn’t going to spit out great ideas.

We’ve always had this little coffee maker around the studio. You see them a lot in vietnamese restaurants. They make really good coffee and they only cost about five bucks. But they only work if you are patient and if you expect something different than you get with the million-dollar coffee maker.

Who did that amazing drawing?
The drawing was done by the lead actress, juj. Our chief designer and associate configuration coordinator.

Do you really use coffee for paint?
All the time. And barbecue sauce, and berries, and mushrooms, and actual paints too.

Who did the music?
I (John) wrote and performed the score. It was recorded here in the studio.

Why is it in 6/8? (IS it in 6/8?)
The music is composed and played for 6/8 because the coffee drops fall into the glass in 6/8. Some have said the song is in 3/4 or a classic waltz. It’s actually a slow 6/8. It’s not just about the beat and tempo as some might think. The time signature is also about the bar phrasing of the melody. And isn’t the point that there are no rules?

http://www.changethemargins.com

One day last summer I was invited to one a advertising luncheon. It was for small businesses who use postcard decks and direct mail advertising. There was an advertising expert there, we’ll call him Bob. Bob asked the audience to critique a piece of a participants print advertising, no one really offered anything. So, he called on me. I told Bob that I thought the design was a little confusing and there were a lot of competing ideas. The headline wasn’t really clear and it might be more clear if there was a little less going on visually. Bob, wearing his blue gabardine blazer with gold buttons, tossled loafers, and pleated khaki pants said, “You’re one of those ‘white space guys’ aren’t you?” I said, “I guess it depends. I definitely like clean design. When it works our clients do well by white space.” He said, “Well, I’ll get to why you’re wrong in a minute.”

Bob explained that white space isn’t interesting to people. That if businesses want to succeed and generate lots of leads from direct mail they need designs with pictures and lots of visual stimulation to stand out. “Okay,” I thought. “That or maybe they just need this six-pound sack of crap stuffed into his three-pound blazer telling them how things are supposed to look.”

Today, I wonder, if maybe Bob wasn’t on to something.

Tamara Krinsky has perhaps the most elegant idea to help reduce your consumption of natural resources: set your word document’s margin settings as narrow as possible before you send it to the printer. The goal here is to save the planet we all live on.

According to Tamara’s site, the mission of Change the Margins is pretty simple: encourage adoption of wider printing margins on a grand scale. To accomplish this, the campaign currently has three goals:

1. Convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 on all sides. The more convenient it is for people to change their habits, the better chance there is that they will actually do so.

2. Persuade five corporations to officially sanction wider margins for all company documents. In this way, people will get used to seeing documents with this formatting as the standard, as opposed to the exception. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

3. Challenge five universities to adopt wider margin settings as the standard for their students and faculty, and include this information in their course guidelines.

At Penn State University’s Park campus the “Mueller Policy Paper #1: Reduce Standard Margin Settings” showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.

On a national scale, that’s estimated to be about $400,000,000 per year.

You’re probably looking at this page and wondering, “what the hell are these guys doing advocating for less white space and narrower margins?”

First, you’re not reading a printed document, these virtual margins don’t waste paper. Second, we’re huge fans of saving our clients money, and we’re even bigger fans of elegance. A designer should be able to create an effective design in the pursuit of creating he most economical and efficient outcome possible.

There are some clients who convey a sense of affluence through abundant use of whitespace. How else can you as a designer convey that idea without being wasteful? Elegance is defined as nothing missing and nothing extraneous. Can’t too much whitespace be just as extraneous as too much type?

Also, isn’t this idea that prestige is found in massive amounts of whitespace becoming trite? Can’t we as designers find inventive ways to communicate our clients’ ideology? Can’t we do it and use less paper?

Maybe I’m not such a “white space guy” where the planet is concerned. Either way, it’s time to narrow the margins . . . and definitely avoid advertising experts.