The Engel Journal

Open Ended Problem Solving with the Brain Organizer

David Eisaiah Engel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:19:49 +0000

A powerful technique for open ended, creative problem solving involves representing your goal as an object. Surround it with questions. Attach actions to the questions. You can also put a “delta” symbol in front of the questions, to stimulate change actions.

I recommend using the Brain Organizer notebook for this type of creative problem solving. There is no other framework like it for chunking down problems into their essential elements: questions, actions and visualizations. Chunking down the problem is more than half the battle. The solution is usually hiding on the back of the elements, and becomes obvious when you flip them over.

Nail the first draft, you creative director… you

David Eisaiah Engel — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:43:43 +0000

Creative people don’t like being told what to do. They don’t like their work criticized. They’re typically iconoclasts, which is why they sought a career as a designer (copywriter, or whatever) in the first place.

That said, it’s still possible to nail the first draft without making them totally hate you.

When I see a first draft, my first thought usually, “Oh my god. How are we ever going to do this.” It’s hard to do, but the first thing the creative director must do is put all aside all the effects, fonts, textures, and colors that creatives are so eager to pile on and focus on the essence of the work.

When all you’re doing is managing the essence of the work, not their taste, they’ll get over it when you ask them to remove an effect, change a font or color scheme. The criticism isn’t about their taste. It’s about a deeper issue… which is…

The essence of an advertisement

Let’s first define essence. Nicholas MacConnell has a definition that applies well here. Nicholas says essence is three things:

Questions
Actions or Statements
Visualizations

For the first draft of the project, the first evaluations you need to make is:

What are the questions my audience is asking?
What is the 1 thing I am going to convince my audience to do?
What imagery best serves #1 and #2?

I wish that I had never written this blog post because there is so much to be said about the essence of advertising, and I’m out of time. If want this intellectual journey to continue, please click on the picture of Plato to read about his idea of essence or post your spam-free comments below.

"Plato thought what we see...is a dim reflection of the true ideal thing."

Beginning

David Eisaiah Engel — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:33:37 +0000

Two weekends ago, I woke up from a nap, switched on my iPad and started browsing through the work that I did at the beginning of this blog in 2009.

Then, a couple nights ago, I’m searching through Kinetic Typography portfolios on Vimeo and I run into this story from Ira Glass on “what nobody tells beginners.”

Painfully true! I wish I was the exception

CSV List of SIC Codes

David Eisaiah Engel — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 07:09:58 +0000

For those of you needing a comma separated list of SIC codes in a csv file, here you go!

ABOUT SIC Codes

SIC (pronounced sick) stands for the Standard Industrial Classification System. It’s a series of codes that identify industries. The government as well as data service providers use SIC codes to categorize companies by the type of work they do. SIC codes were supposed to be replaced by NAICS codes. However, many companies–especially data service providers–have not yet switched over to NAICS.

OpenAPIMasher Spec

David Eisaiah Engel — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:38:58 +0000

There’s got to be a way to easily mash data from an API with an external list without too much programming. This video explains an idea for a product called OpenAPIMasher, which allows a user to mash a CSV file with data from an API. It uses a client-side HTML5 database for confidentiality. And to make the application more secure, it deletes that data store when the user confirms the mash is complete.

If you would like to contribute to the project or use the project, please leave a comment.

License the Mobile Intelligence Report

David Eisaiah Engel — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:28:03 +0000

I want to find someone who will correct the business mistakes I made on the Mobile Intelligence Report, and turn this into a viable product. It can be a very powerful sales tool for advertising agencies.

Examples of Mobile Intelligence Reports (taken mid 2010)

Business History

I designed this report thinking that agencies would order a lot of them for prospecting. The reports reveal what a website looks like on 3 mobile devices, which is usually quite bad, especially if there’s Flash. While the report did show clients why they should invest in a mobile website, ad agencies did not order them in bulk. The reason is that ad agencies are setup to take on a few clients at a time. They do not “turn and burn” cold calls like software businesses because they’re not setup to handle thousands of clients.

I designed this report both economically and technologically to be generated in bulk and uploaded to a server. The better way to do it would be to create a self-service website, where reports are generated on the fly and customers are billed somewhere between $10-50 per report.

As of now, I am busy building Company Data Trees. I have no time to pursue this business opportunity, yet it pains me to have all this cool IP just sitting there. If you have some time on your hands, and you want to give this a try, please call me (do not email) at +1 (760) 542-8027.

Development Goals

Make a web 2.0 wrapper for ordering the report
Design a database with a key system for clients to access the report via HTTP GET
- m.com?url=http://tide.com&accesskey=12345678910
- Without the access key, you can’t see the report
Design a way to create the report in real time on the server
- Designed for 1-at-a-time creation. Batch create up to 300, processed sequentially
- Most components for are already programmed. You’d need to make the following changes
  - Reprogram the resize & cropping mechanisms (currently done via Photoshop Droplet)
  - Create storage logic. XML files and Images are stored in multiple directories and mashed in real-time. You would need to store the files in a way that:
    - Intelligently assigns which folders on the hard drive are used for which images, perhaps via date or a month system
    - You don’t want to put all the data in a single directory
  - Tweak the logic for the SEO data calculations. Those calculations are 2010 based. So, make the program read the year and dynamically shift on the existing calculation table.
  - Customer can enter their Google Analytics ID
- Design access code parameter, which is unique to a customer
- m.com?url=http://tide.com&accesskey=12345678910&accesscode=abcde
  - customer billed $25 or so for submitting the request
  - system will not double-bill if they have already created a report on the same URL in the past

What’s in it for me?

I’ll take a tiny royalty over the lifetime of the product
Will require a subscription to our Mobile API (they’ll need to check if a URL is mobile or not for the cropping / image processing purposes)

Negligible fixed & variable costs

Will require a subscription to SEMRush for appx $50 / mo for the SEO data
On demand billing for the Mobile API – $0.50 per hit. (You should only need 1 hit per report.)
A web host of your choice that will not get mad at your CPU usage. Rackspace is a good VPS or a dedicated server on any host will do.

What I will provide at no cost

Source code, documentation and 2 hours of consulting to go over it all
Direct email campaign to all the ad agency contacts in my data base

It’s currently programmed in PHP, Visual Basic and the screen shot software is programmed in C++. You won’t need to modify the screen shot software. The application will work on Windows or Linux OS, since the Visual Basic component will be replaced if you follow the development goals I recommend above.

Watch a Video Overview of the Report

B2B Marketing Blunder #2

David Eisaiah Engel — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:47:06 +0000

A stock & custom promotional display catalog arrives in David’s mailbox. But, David’s in interactive advertising and will never need to buy those products. They could have figured that out by crawling engeljournal.com, which they already had on file.

Now, David will have to discard that catalog. It’s sad to see a tree die in vain.

B2B Marketing Blunder #1

David Eisaiah Engel — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:36:04 +0000

I’ve decided to start compiling all the stupid mistakes that B2B marketers/sales people make because of bad data. Here’s #1:

News from the Tree

David Eisaiah Engel — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:10:36 +0000

As always, things are swinging at the Tree. We’re about to release some super cool APIs, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out our new logo:

List of 5,000 Random Domains

David Eisaiah Engel — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:54:22 +0000

Here is a list of 5,000 random domains. You can use this if you’re doing any sort of research where you need a random sample of domains. At this time, there are approximately 119,832,805 domains with extensions on in this list (“the population”). If I calculated the margin of error (“confidence interval”) correctly, this sample size represents a 1.819% margin of error for the given population.

The reason I generated this list was to do some random sampling of parked domains for Company Data Trees’ parked domain API.

Download the List of 5000 Random-Domains

The list includes the following domain extensions:

biz
com
net
org
us
mobi