Whatever

Eos interiors website, designed by none other than Spark Creative, has been chosen as a favourite site on the Softpress Freeway featured sites gallery. That’s nice isn’t it?

Yet more on the impact, or not, of social media.

A few months back I posted that I thought social media wasn’t quite as special as those selling it to you would have you believe. And recently I read an article by the Ad Contrarian which appears to back this up. Basically, Pepsi pulled all their budget out of traditional mass media and put it all into social media. Bad move. Surprise surprise, their market share plummeted. They’re now, for the first time in history, number 3 in America, behind Coke and Diet Coke. By all accounts, the social media campaign was great, it ticked all the boxes. What it failed dismally to do it sell more product.

I personally think because it was used in isolation, without the backup of a big, visible, old fashioned ad campaign. Any social media expert will quote you lots of instances where it’s worked brilliantly. But I’d put money on the fact that those campaigns only worked because social media wasn’t used in isolation without any support from the more traditional media the social media guys were telling us were dead and no longer relevant.

So, business as usual till the next ‘big thing’ comes along…

I can’t get enough of these. Brilliant.

Spec work, crowdsourcing, free pitching, whatever you call it, it’s big news at the moment. In one particularly ironic example, the UK government have just launched a site called Startup Britain. I’m not going to give it any traffic by linking to it here – it’s basically a load of big companies offering 10% off if you use them to startup your business. The idea has it’s heart in the right place I guess, but it’s turned out to be a massive own goal for the Government, who evidently didn’t count on the power of bad internet PR. I’ll give it a month till it’s taken down or at least radically altered. Anyway, part of it that’s got the design company fuming is the bit where it says you should get  a logo designed for your business (true) and  - here’s where it gets good – that you should go to the short list of crowdsourcing sites they’ve decided to include, at least one of which is based in America to get it done. I’m so appalled by that I can’t even begin to put it into words of more than four letters. The reasons crowdsourcing is bad news for both designers and clients are myriad, and if you don’t know what they are, you bloody should. Nospec.com is probably the best site for bringing all the information together about why crowdsourcing your design is a Bad Thing.

So if you’re a client, or a designer, please don’t. Thankyou.

Some more links on the subject…

Leighton Hubbell Logos

Graphic Design Forums

Logodesign Love

12ft Interactive – Why spec work is bad for the client

Monkeyshine media – it’s bad for business

And many many more…

Now the comment doesn’t particularly offend me, although I can see how it might offend some. But this stupid idea of public apologies does. Seems like if you’re a celeb, and you do something that makes the news ‘cos it’s offended a few people, you are then forced to ‘officially apologise’. And that makes everything all right again. And that’s obviously ridiculous. It also seems to say “It’s ok to do what you want so long as you officially apologise to everyone in the world” (as oppose to the few you might actually have hurt or offended.) Whether it’s an offensive comment, or shagging around. Which is not really a great message is it? Wouldn’t it be better to encourage people to think before they act, to not do these things in the first place? It seems to me that the ‘public apology’ does exactly the opposite.

On the flip side, once they’ve done their offensive doings, I think it would be nice if one day a celeb stuck to their guns and went “Actually, I meant what I said and if you’re offended you can piss right off*” Anything but these transparent piecemeal nonsense apologies.

*If you’re offended by the swearing I would like to take this opportunity to officially apologise.