Good design does not always equal good business. But good business outcomes—especially when the goal is to create new sources of value in the world—are most often achieved through a well-structured design process that is more holistic and inclusive than the notion of good design.

All of the energy fed into the debate about the value of good design to the world of commerce would be better spent building ways to make holistic design a routine activity in business—and society. Here are three ways to get us there:

Stop Treating Design as A Noun

When we talk about it as such, the world stops listening and starts wondering which color the designers are going to pick for the drapes. Unfortunately, good design has come to stand for something akin to “style,” largely a relativistic judgment of aesthetics and semiotics informed by a constantly shifting zeitgeist. I’m as much a fan and consumer of aesthetically pleasing things as the next guy, but I fear that much of what passes for good design is actually a class of shallow luxury goods aimed at a specific set of market demographics and psychographics. And these goods don’t represent the creation of lasting value in the world: In the parlance of soul group Tower of Power, what is hip today quickly becomes passé.

Instead, we would all be better off treating design as a verb, a process, a way of approaching challenges which designers and nondesigners alike can learn to use to create positive change in the world. Throughout history design as a verb, also known these days as design Thinking, has created things of enormous value to humanity. The Bill of Rights, the Aravind Eye Care System, Medecins Sans Frontières, and the Marshall Plan will never show up in a Design Within Reach catalog. And yet each of these amazing achievements of humanity was designed.

Rethink the Relationship between Design and Market Success

Success in the marketplace is a complex endeavor which requires methods of creation that go beyond the limited scope of good design. Apple (AAPL), a company justifiably known for its design, must be applauded for the way it lets its designers and engineers design things to the hilt. But how Apple has created and captured shocking amounts of market value in the music (iTunes + iPod) and telecommunication (iPhone) industries is due as much to skillful systems engineering and infrastructure development as it is to compelling aesthetics. Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them. For every success like the iPod, there are scores of beautiful market offerings that failed because no one bothered to think about how to manufacture, deliver, sell, support, and retire them in ways that met people’s needs. Since market success depends on the complex interaction of so many variables, it is silly—even naive—to try to pin it all back to just good design.

Use Business Constraints as Inspiration

Potential market value creation should be treated as a generative part of the design process, not as a post-rationalized output with suspect causality. At any given time, a team using design thinking should be able to give a sense of how strong a business they are creating. Let’s take the essay about the U.K’s National Health Service that prompted this Bloomberg/BusinessWeek special report. Before blowing cash on a logo redesign, a team using design thinking would quickly test the relationship between brand recognition and the ability of the service to help individuals reach healthy outcomes. They would run a series of quick experiments to generate evidence, and only then embark on a full rebranding initiative—if that turned out to be the way to create the most value from scarce resources.

This approach fundamentally shifts the dialog away from a reactive posture of “how much value did design create?” to an expansive notion of “how much value can we create?” as well as “how might we maximize the odds of that potential value coming to fruition?” This systemic view of the creative challenge is the signature characteristic of design thinking. When we use design thinking to balance desirability, feasibility, and viability, we unlock the measures of value creation so desperately sought after by the world of good design. Impact in the world becomes the focus of designing.

Whether or not you call yourself a designer, when you work to relate people’s needs to broader webs of individual, social, and economic factors, and pour your energy into creating better outcomes via an evidence-driven process, you’re using design thinking to increase your odds of success in the world. That sounds like good business to me.

site: http://www.businessweek.com

In Renaissance Europe, the servants of aristocrats would present “visiting cards” to the servants of other aristocrats, the first step in any formal social interaction between the wealthy and powerful.

Victorian England, the “calling card” was absolutely essential in polite society. When calling on someone, even a close friend, the visitor provided a card printed with their name. People collected these cards as a way of keeping track of friends who visited, so they would know to whom they were socially required to pay a return visit. It was also a way of screening out unwanted visitors — once presented with a card, the host could simply refuse to admit the person, without having to deal with them face-to-face. (When the telephone was first introduced in England, there was an uproar because now anyone could talk to you without providing a card, or without following any of the other countless rules.)

read more

Don’t be fooled by thinking that when a client calls you about something, they are actually in a hurry to get a task done. They’ll understand how important it is that you fix that flat tire on your motorcycle, go for a quick ride, and then finish that movie you started a few days ago. When you do finally call them back be sure to remind them they need to follow your example and prioritize their life.

2. Finish their projects at least a day late

Clients always give you deadlines that are a few days early because they know you will give it to them late anyway. Three or four days late may be pushing it, but finishing a project a day late isn’t really that big of deal. (Do you have a client who’s really pushy and demands their projects be finished on time? Tell them they don’t know anything about the design industry and you have more important things to do.)

3. Tell them you hate their current logo or identity

Clients always appreciate your professional input when it comes to decisions they have made about their current identity. Make sure you tell them every little thing that might be wrong with their company’s identity, logo, and design. This works especially well with new clients whose trust you have yet to gain.

4. Choose only a few hours a day to be available

Your clients will understand that you are a freelancer and therefore, you choose your hours. Let them know that if they have a problem at any time of the day other than from 1-4 pm, they’ll just have to wait until the next day (or Monday if it’s a weekend) to tell you their problems.

5. Follow the one-week-old email rule

Every good designer looking to get rid of their clients knows the “one-week-old” email rule. No client expects their emails to be returned sooner than within one week’s time. Explain to them that if we were still using the pony express, they would have to wait even longer. They should thank you for a quick response when you follow the one-week-old rule.

6. Bill your clients for time you spend on twitter or other social media

In today’s busy lifestyle of twitter, facebook, digg, and other social media sites, clients have come to accept that, as a designer, you will be spending countless hours a day doing, well, nothing online. Be sure to bill the client for what has come to be known as “cyberslacking”. It’s just part of the job. If you would like to include these details on your invoice, it will help with a more rapid loss of clientele.

7. Let them know you work in your pajamas and at your kitchen table

Be sure to let your clients (especially the new ones) know that you don’t even bother to change out of your pajamas in the morning before you get going on their projects. In fact, to be more effective, you may want to let them know that sometimes you sleep in, do your work from bed, or while watching your favorite movie. This will assure them they are getting the least possible out of their freelance designer. They’re sure to drop you! (If that doesn’t work, start up charging them for your morning coffee.)

8. Tell them their ideas are worthless

When a client approaches you with an idea on how to make something better, explain to them that you went to school (or at least took a few community classes) and know way more than they ever could about how their company should look. Design is the only business where the customer is never right.

9. Let them know “that’s just not your job”

It’s possible your client may ask your opinion on the best internet hosting service or printer around. Be sure to give them a detailed explanation outlining why it is not your responsibility as a designer to help them with other aspects of the project. Let them know you are simply a designer and “that’s just not your job”. (Be sure to spend lots of time explaining over the phone so you can bill them for it later too.)

10. Ask them not to call too early because you’ll be sleeping in (oh and not on the weekend either)

Make sure your clients don’t inconvenience you by calling during the early hours of the day, on the weekend, national and state holidays, your birthday, mother’s day, april fool’s day, Ash Wednesday, and any day you just don’t feel like working. They will admire you for your boldness.

website: http://graphicdesignblender.com
by: Preston Lee

2. Design
Christmas gives you the opportunity to be really creative with your design so that your email stands out and supports the point of the email, rather than getting in the way of your message. Be careful with html design – it looks good, but use the wrong code in your template and it will get caught in spam filters, resulting in the email not being delivered. Always make sure your design works! If in doubt, seek help from a professional that specialises in designing email templates.

3. Renderability
An email that fails to render makes a brand look amateurish and inexperienced, so test your email design in different email clients. Some email marketing providers allow you generate an ‘inbox preview’ which can give you a quick and easy snapshot of how the email will look across a range of inboxes.

4. Target your emails
‘Tis the season to invest in targeting. Jupiter Research published findings earlier this year showing that targeted email can produce a 500% increase in revenue, so get the most out of your Christmas campaign by segmenting customers into groups and tailoring email content to suit.

5. Seasonal offers
Everyone loves a bargain, so try offering discounts like ‘10% off orders over £60′ or free delivery between certain dates - make the offers appropriate to the season and bear this in mind when planning the timing of the campaign.

6. Do some split testing
Send variations of your email to different customer groups and compare the results - try sending different gift ideas to male and female customers. The information you build up will prove valuable for future campaigns, allowing you to identify what content garnered the best results and from which groups of customers. Experiment with every email you send so positive results increase with each email sent throughout the Christmas season.

7. Subject line
Keep it short and sweet, and ensure it stands out so that your customers will be dying to open the email and find out more. Aid deliverability by avoiding the use of CAPS, exclamation marks or words like ‘free’, ‘enormous’ and ‘exclusive’. Include a call to action. Try a selection and see what works best for your customers.

8. Call to action
This is one of the key elements of every email you send. Make it as easy as you can for the customer to know what the message is and what you want them to do - if you want them to buy something, display relevant information, images and pricing for the product with links to a page where they can purchase it. Always drive customers to your website as this is where they will spend their money.

9. Microsite
If you’re planning a particular seasonal campaign focus, consider building a microsite for the additional level of integration that it offers. A microsite allows you to complement the seasonal design of the email without changing the style of your main website. The seasonal messaging of your campaign can be the focus of the microsite, whilst your regular website runs alongside it.

10. Deliverability
Believe it or not, the main obstacle you will face is getting your email into your customer’s inbox. Industry figures show that 96% of emails sent
in October were spam, and ISPs delete billions of emails each day, so make sure you choose an Email Service Provider with good deliverability rates.

11. Go viral
There is no greater marketing tool than word of mouth. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to pass information on by adding a forward to a friend option that allows them to contact several friends in one go. And, of course, make sure there’s something in the email that’s worth shouting about!

12. Is your website ready?
Driving customers to a website is pointless if they can’t fulfil the promises in the email. The landing page must be relevant to the offer or call to action in the email and should complement the design of the email to reinforce brand identity - if you’ve gone for a dancing Father Christmas and holly leaves in your email then your landing page needs to match!

They help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.

Standards Support in Popular Clients

When it comes to selecting an email program, there is no shortage of choice. They picked out the major desktop and web clients, and sent them their email acid test message. Pick a client to see a screen shot of the results, details of what is and is not supported, and some recommendations for future improvement.

Solid Support
* AOL Webmail
* Apple Mail
* Apple MobileMe
* Eudora (Penelope)
* Microsoft Entourage
* Mozilla Thunderbird
* Windows Live Mail
* Windows Mail
* Yahoo! Mail
* Yahoo! Mail (Classic)

Improvement Recommended

* Google Gmail
* Lotus Notes 8
* Microsoft Outlook 2007
* Windows Live Hotmail

When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things we should be doing specifically for email that don’t make sense on a website? In this article we’ll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.
The quick and dirty guidelines

If you want to dive right in and just need some direction, here’s the outline:

* Don’t waste your readers’ time — An email inbox is a busy place, you won’t get much attention.
* Permission matters — Not only do you need to have permission to email people, but it helps to remind them of how they gave you permission, as specifically as you can.
* Relevance trumps permission — Just having permission is not enough, the content you are sending must also be relevant.
* Make unsubscribing easy — There’s no point emailing people who are not interested.
* Image blocking is common — You can’t rely on people actually seeing your images.
* Bring back tables — Structural tables are still often necessary for creating columns.
* Add inline styles — Gmail removes anything else.
* Don’t forget your plain text version — You can make blocks of text more readable.
* Meet your legal obligations — For example, CAN-SPAM for US senders.
* Test, test, test — It’s the only way to be confident about your design working.

It’s 2008: What’s changed?

If you’ve seen our earlier guidelines, you’ll notice this years are quite similar. It’s certainly true that support for XHTML and CSS in email clients has not seen big improvements since our last review of email design.

However, through the work we’ve been doing with the Email Standards Project we’re hoping to see some changes soon. This last year has also seen a push by ISPs and email providers to consider relevance as key part of defining spam, which will impact on the kind of content you should send.

For the rest of 2008, mobile email will continue to grow in importance, and that too will affect the design and content of your emails. Your message to someone who is on the move might be designed quite differently than for someone behind a 24” monitor.

The final element making up the 2008 email environment is the continuing focus on ‘information overload’ and the struggles people have dealing with overflowing email inboxes. If you want your emails to get delivered and actually be read, you need more than ever to make sure they are really valuable, as well as super easy to read and act on.

Use these guidelines to work with your clients and marketing teams to craft emails that your readers will really want to read, as well as ones which render reliably and are easily understood.

Don’t waste your readers’ time

An email inbox is a very noisy environment, with calendars, notes and folders all competing with the actual emails for space. Given that a reader may only ever see your subject line before deciding whether to read your email, you can’t afford to waste time.

Make sure that your emails show right away why they are worth reading. Consider starting with a succinct table of contents to help decide whether they should read on.

This is particularly important when you consider preview panes, which may only show the first few lines of your message. You might even be able to get your key point into your subject line.

Permission matters

There are many different laws that apply to commercial email in different locations. One rule that applies almost everywhere is that you absolutely must have permission to send people bulk email. In most cases, it also makes sense to remind people about how they gave you that permission.

Particularly if you don’t send emails very often, or the signup was for a competition (for example) people can forget that they actually asked to receive email. A short message at the top of your email can help people remember, and make them more likely to read on.

You can also use custom fields to personalize your permission reminder. If you have multiple sources of permission, be explicit. Don’t just say “your address was subscribed to our list” tell them why their address was subscribed to your list. Let them know where they signed up and how they can opt-out. This can go a long way towards reducing potential spam complaints.

Here’s an example of a simple, contextual reminder that people gave their permission when visiting a trade show booth:

An Email Consumer Survey in late 2006 by Return Path showed that “knowing and trusting the sender” was the biggest influence on whether emails are opened, narrowly beating out “previously opened and thought valuable”.

So consistently reminding your readers who you are, and why they should trust you can make a big difference to your open rate.

Relevance trumps permission

Even more than having permission, it is vital that you are sending valuable, relevant information to your subscribers. That means not sending information to everyone on your list just because you can. Consider carefully whether the information is both useful to them, and what they are expecting from you.

Find out more about how ISPs and email providers are making relevance a part of the definition of spam.

Make unsubscribing easy

There’s no point emailing people who are not interested in your content any more. If it is no longer relevant to them, let them just unsubscribe easily. Forcing people to play ‘hunt the unsubscribe link’ will only irritate them, and is likely to end up with spam complaints.

This is unfortunately a common approach to permission reminders and unsubscribe links. Much better to make it clear and prominent; that way if they do decide in the future they need the information you offer, they will have confidence in signing up again.

Sometimes your readers may not want to fully unsubscribe, but just update their email address or change their list of interests you store. That’s when our preference center tag comes in handy. It gives your readers more control over what they receive and when.

Image blocking is common

In many of the major email clients, including Outlook, AOL and Gmail, your images will not be shown by default. Your readers will have to click another link or button to make them download and display. Your readers will initally see the email on the left below displayed as shown on the right.

So no matter how perfectly you choose your imagery, it may have no impact, or a negative impact on the success of your email. As you can see above, your email can appear totally empty, so never design an email using all images. Always ensure that you have copy available in your HTML part, as well as the plain text.

Of course, as many as 30% of your subscribers might not even realize they can choose to show images. An unknown percentage just won’t bother. So you can’t rely on people actually seeing your images at all. For the full run down on what the default settings are, check out current conditions in image blocking.

To ensure your emails still work even without the images showing, you can make a few simple improvements:

* Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
* Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
* Get added to your recipient’s address book or whitelist.
* Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail.
* Always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
* Test your design with images turned off before you send it.

Bring back tables

As much as we all hate it the reality is that email standards have taken a giant leap backwards in recent years. While we can all work to increase email standards support it’s not going to be an overnight process.

So if you need to do anything more complex than a single column, you will find you need to use structural tables. Outlook 2007, for example, has little support for floats. A simple table will keep everything together…how very 1998!

Add inline styles

Some email clients will strip CSS out of the head, but leave it if the style block is (invalidly) in the body. Gmail goes further and will strip out all CSS from the head or body, except for inline styles.

So once you’ve completed your design, you will need to go through and add inline styles to your elements. Campaign Monitor has an automatic inline CSS tool built in which can save you a lot of time.

Don’t forget your plain text version

By the time you have fought your way through the endless incompatibilities of email client rendering you’re probably exhausted, so it can be hard work getting yourself excited about a well formatted text version.

However, although that shiny happy HTML version may be beautiful, not everyone can view HTML emails, or wants to. Blackberry users,for example, will mostly see your plain text version. We’ve made it easy for you by providing a quick start to your plain text version. With just the click of a link the text from your HTML email will be carried over to the plain text version.

Don’t stop there though. Make sure you review your plain text version. Although our import is pretty slick it’s not perfect. Your plain text version needs a human set of eyes on it to make sure the formatting is perfect and all the content you want to include is included.

Don’t forget to checkout our plain text templates and tips for more ways to make your plain text more effective.

Meet your legal obligations

Make sure you know about any specific commercial email regulations in your own country. The most well known of course are the US CAN-SPAM laws. To meet those requirements:

* Use double opt-in subscriber lists
* Process all unsubscribe requests within one week (Campaign Monitor does it instantly!)
* Use a legitimate from name and from email address
* Use accurate and descriptive subject headings
* Use a valid reply-to address that can function as an unsubscribe mechanism if required
* Always include the street address of you or your clients

Check with your own government department websites for rules which apply to you and your clients.

Test, test, test

This one can’t be emphasized enough. Every email client has different levels of standards support and most are going to display your campaign ever so slightly different. While reviewing the current email client standards is a great start, nothing is going to beat actually testing your campaign in as many clients as possible. The last thing you want is to have your beautiful creation horribly broken for a large percentage of your subscribers and for you to be completely unaware of it until the CEO starts shouting!

author: Mathew Patterson
website: http://www.campaignmonitor.com

Median Annual Salary
$68,100

Educational Requirements
Art directors usually begin as entry-level artists in advertising, publishing, design, and motion picture production firms. Artists are promoted to art director after demonstrating artistic and leadership abilities. Some art schools offer coursework in art direction as part of their curricula. Depending on the scope of their responsibilities, some art directors also may pursue a degree in art administration, which teaches non-artistic skills such as project management and finance.

Job Outlook
Despite an expanding number of opportunities, art directors should experience keen competition for the available openings.

site: Artbistro

• Nine Steps to Become a Designer Read now.
• Are You Looking for a Job? Look here.
• Do you want to become a designer? Search for a design program here.

Table of Contents

Please click on the links below to access a comprehensive description for each step.

Step One: Recognize Your Design Abilities

Step Two: Research Design Careers

Step Three: Narrow Your Interests in Design

Step Four: Identify Lacking Design Skills

Step Five: Choose a Design School

Step Six: Networking for Designers

Step Seven: Internship

Step Eight: Interviewing

Step Nine: Follow Up and Do Not Give Up

“I have always known that the only way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise. I never managed. Selecting a CD to exercise to often took so long, I only had a few minutes left to get ready for work. Or I would listen to the same CD over and over again until I was no longer motivated during my run. Then my iPod arrived. Now, with a full selection of 5,000 songs and the ability to download new music, I never get bored. I lost nearly 30 pounds and feel great.”

Like Michael, 89 percent of the 12,683 participants in a recent CNN International web poll claim that technology has changed their life for the better. The survey is full of examples of how digital media have allowed people to stay in touch with faraway friends, share everyday moments in words and images with their families, save marriages, make long trips so much more fun, keep track of their children, manage bank accounts, book dream trips, get new jobs, develop new business ideas and connections, find love, develop new hobbies and go shopping-crazy.

IT’S A DIGITAL ROLLER COASTER

So, all you digital immigrants, stop marveling at the digital future! The tools of the digital natives - the earlyadopting, hyperconnected, “all-ways on” teens and tweens who crawled alongside the PC and came of age with the internet - have now taken over and transformed our adult world. In the last three years, the pace at which people have been embracing digital ware - hard and soft - in every aspect of their lives has dramatically increased. While five years ago nearly 40 percent of Brits were apprehensive about technology, 81 percent are now enthusiastic about new innovations and are eager to surround themselves with them. In 2002, 10 million new pages were added to the internet every day. With a new blog now being created every second, we’ve simply lost track of how big the internet really is. Not so long ago, Apple iTunes was predicting sales of one million songs every month. Only 30 months after its launch, two million songs get downloaded not every month, but every day.

Skype, in its two-and-a-half year existence, has attracted over 60 million users, with voice over internet protocol (VoIP) minutes in Denmark now exceeding landline voice minutes. Hold on tight! It’s a digital roller coaster!

What really sets today’s youth apart is the expectation that they can customize and personalize everything in their world. Yahoo! has baptized them the “My Media Generation,” for whom everything should simply be on demand. Through podcasts, blogs, wikis and tags, they craft their own personal viewpoints, products, services and media, inventing from scratch or remixing public domain assets. Considering their peers’ online voices to be the most trusted source of imagination and information, they socialize digitally and seek out like-minded individuals to share their fabrications with. Sweden’s online community, Lunarstorm, claims to have a youth audience three times larger than MTV’s in Sweden, twice the readership of all Swedish evening newspapers combined and with more members logging on daily than the total number of young Swedes watching TV. It’s the country’s new media titan.

WATCH THE MEDIA GIANTS…AND LEARN

But the old media giants are catching on. They are, in fact, showing us the path from company- to consumer-led marketing, yielding carefully crafted marketing spin and control for real consumer participation. They are putting the consumer community at the heart of their marketing strategy, offering tools for consumers to engage in and share their brand experiences.

TV networks around the world have been tuning up their digital strategies with internet awareness campaigns that use video promotion, online and mobile voting and discussion, and digital merchandising in the shape of program ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers. Their interactive TV channels, sites, email and text messages offer bonus content to keep media-meshing viewers engaged during and between episodes. Deals are closed with their new media partners, the top portals, to have them host the official program site in an exchange of entertainment content for reach. Yahoo! in the U.S. was able to offer its members an Apprentice-branded IMvironment where fans could interact with a virtual Donald Trump.

TV networks also now often make existing and even exclusive programming available on mobile phones or for broadband. Since its launch in April 2005, MTV Overdrive - where visitors can pick their favorite clips out of a large gallery of short videos - has generated more than 125 million streams of unique MTV content.

The U.K.’s Channel 4 is determined to become truly multichannel and multiplatform. According to CEO Andy Duncan, Channel 4 is “moving away from a push system, where the content producers decided what you could watch and when, to a pull system, where viewers choose what to view, how, where and when.” Its latest initiative, a broadband documentary channel, invites anyone to make and contribute a “FourDoc,” a fourminute film. The site includes guides that offer directing, planning, shooting and editing tips, and a rushes library of free, cleared material to be reused.

Korea’s digital newspaper OhmyNews also makes this unique formula of “consumer participation with professional support” work. Only 10 percent of the articles are written by an editorial staff. The remaining 90 percent are contributed by 41,000 citizen reporters. Submit your story and you receive $20 and your name in print, but not before OhmyNews journalists have screened and edited it. Once it’s accepted, you can follow the status of your words in real time, observing the number of reader clicks and comments. Some diligent authors have contributed over 500 articles, and the difference in quality between their first and more recent writing is remarkable. Nearly 70 OhmyNews citizen reporters now have contracts to write books. In just four years, OhmyNews has become the sixth most important medium in Korea and a quite profitable one, thanks to online advertising, sales of news content to partners and a commission on the tipping service that allows readers to reward their favorite writers.

THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Over the past few months, more European marketers have been announcing reorganizations of their advertising budgets in favor of new media. The question remains, though, whether the advertising industry is ready to meet the full challenge of connecting with today’s consumer in today’s world. With media companies showing how to move beyond the tried and true, embracing digital opportunities to their advantage, it’s clear that the rules of engagement should change. Here are some essential ingredients used to screen our engagement or “in touch” ideas:

THE TEN INGREDIENTS OF “IN TOUCH”

Insight: Have we captured the single most important consumer insight that can truly engage our target audience with our brand?

Innovation: Are we using new media - email, web, mobile, instant messaging, blog, podcasts, games, interactive TV, widgets, etc. - at the heart of or to reinforce our approach? Have we used technology to increase our impact?

Interest: Are we offering our target audience value that matches their interests, through entertainment, informative content or utilities that capture their attention?

Involvement: Have we built interaction into the campaign, a way for our target audience not only to respond and give feedback, but to enjoy real dialogue? Have we explored all solutions that enable them to truly contribute or participate?

Influence: Are we stimulating word-of-mouth by giving our target audience a reason to talk about us to their network, and are we making it easy to share? Are we thinking about how to reach the community and its mavens, and influence connections?

Immediacy: Are we leveraging the opportunities of search, contextual and behavioral advertising to instantaneously reach consumers who demonstrate interest or potential?

Integration: Are we playing into our target audience’s multichannel, multitasking behavior, assuring campaign presence across all customer touchpoints? Are we assuring that we continue talking beyond the campaign to consumers we have engaged, especially the high-value ones?

Intelligence: Have we put tools in place - for example, testing - to gather consumer intelligence, as well as understanding about what works and what doesn’t?

Idea: “Unless your advertising is built on a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night.” -David Ogilvy

Investment:Recognizing the complexities and cost implications of engaging the “all-ways on” consumer, have we made sure our campaign has superior economics at heart? Are we measuring brand results, sales impact and ROI?

EUROPE’S DIGITAL FACTS

• Europe is the fastest-growing broadband market in the world, with the Netherlands and Denmark following Korea as the world’s most connected markets.
• By 2010, broadband household penetration in Western Europe will reach 63%; 93% of online households will use broadband to access the internet.
• The European blogosphere is growing rapidly. France leads the pack with at least 3.5 million blogs, followed by the U.K., Spain and Poland with 1.5 million blogs each.
• Of the 300 online music sites worldwide, 190 are in Europe. 52% of youth listens to music online instead of elsewhere.
• Europe is ahead of the curve when it comes to transitioning to digital TV. About 18% of households already have some form of DTV, expected to grow to 65% by 2010. The U.K. is the only true digital interactive TV market; 69% of U.K. adults are able to watch DTV at home and half of them have interacted with a program.
• DVRs are expected to be in 25% of the top European countries’ homes by 2007 and are already changing behavior: 90% of U.K. DVR owners fast-forward through ad breaks.
• Of European mobile phones in use today, 59% are enabled with GPRS (2.5G) and 3% are enabled with UMTS (3G), increasing respectively to 70% and 21% by 2008.

author: Patou Nuytemans ( Ogilvy & Mather EAME - London )
site: Ogilvy