You might not expect a graphic designer working as part of a program support center housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to say, "The majority of work I do gives me creative freedom," but that's exactly what Chris Spangler, who is represented by Aquent's Baltimore office, told me when I spoke with him last week.
I gave Chris a call because a poster he had designed on assignment won first prize in the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area (CFCNCA) Communications Contest. (To see his winning entry, you can click here.) As it turns out, designing posters, which he has done for everything from promoting IT security within the agency to celebrating Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, is just part of his job at HHS (or, more accurately, SAMHSA/PSC). He has also designed and illustrated annual reports, brochures, and info-packs, he's designed logos and updated brand identities for various governmental programs, and he's even had the chance to serve as photographer at meetings with ambassadors and other functions.
"Working for the government is great job security," Chris says, but what really appeals to him is "... feeling like your making a difference by helping people with the stuff you're creating. I've designed a book on preventing bullying, I worked for a year and half on materials related to 9/11, and I put together a publication on responding to bio-terrorism attacks. You've got to look for different ways to find satisfaction in your work and these types of projects help do that for me."
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In this third and final installment of our podcast mini-series, we speak with Carol Burke, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at AMN Healthcare. Carol discusses how she makes sure that her team is using the marketing channels most preferred by AMN's constituents and what she does to create marketing content with a life beyond marketing.
You may listen to Episode 3 here:
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Image courtesy of pingnews.
In this episode, I speak with Jim Hauptman, Creative Director and Managing Editor at LL Bean. Jim addresses the complexities of "multi-channel" marketing, an approach that seeks to leverage the specific advantages of diverse channels, as opposed to "multiple channel" marketing, which tends to push the same message or content through many channels. He also reveals how winter camping off-sites can lead to great marketing insights.
Listen to Episode 2 here:
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Image courtesy of davelanders..
In conjunction with the webcast we're presenting today, I interviewed a few folks we work with and asked them how they coordinate their marketing messages and programs across a variety of media from print to web and beyond. I then created a three episode podcast mini-series of these interviews.
In this episode Dave Harrell, the Director of Advertising at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, talks about some of the grassroots, infotainment marketing efforts that his group has undertaken recently. In doing so, he also discusses the processes they follow to keep messages and branding consistent from channel to channel and audience to audience.
You can listen to Episode 1 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 1 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of jimbowen0306.
Following last week's AMA webcast, Successful Creative Briefs: Linking Business Objectives and Creative Strategies, sponsored by Aquent, we convened a virtual roundtable to continue the discussion of best practices in producing effective creative briefs. Our panelists were:
Andy Epstein - Director of Graphic Design and Print Production at BMS Studio, the in-house design agency at Bristol-Myers Squibb
David Haskell - Senior Writer at Digitas, a leading interactive and direct marketing agency
Michael Hunter - Marketing Director for Whirlpool's KitchenAid brand
Sheri L. Koetting - Principal/co-founder of MSLK, an award-winning graphic design agency
I moderated the discussion, which lasted a little over half an hour. For your listening convenience, I split the entire thing into three parts as noted below.
Part 1 - Best Practices: Thoughts on Putting Together Great Creative Briefs
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Part 2 - What Creative Briefs Can (and Can't) Do
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Part 3: Using Creative Briefs to Manage the Creative Development Process
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Thanks for listening. Please feel free to share all comments and criticisms with me, Matthew Grant!
"How do you like me now?"
John Moore of TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE fame led a breakout session called, Growing a Brand. Growing a Team,
at the 2006 In-HOWse Designer Conference mentioned in a previous post. During this session, the participants discussed how to spot what I'll call, people you really don't want to work with
(they had a much more colorful and evocative name for them), during interviews.
The session came up with something dubbed, "The 'I' Exam," the underlying principle of which is that people who are not "likeable" will tend to take undue credit for work they did on projects or as part of teams by claiming, "I did this" or "I did that." "Likeables," or "people you really want to work with," will stress the "we" of what they've done even when describing their experiences as team or project leaders.
While the reliability of this "exam" is debatable, it does highlight something very important about job interviews. Interviewers are not only curious about your credentials and the skills you will bring to the job. They also want to figure out if it will drive them crazy to be around you for an extended period of time! In other words, whether they admit it or not, interviewers are deciding whether or not they "like" you.
The obvious recommendation that you should use "we" when talking about work you have accomplished with others is irrelevant here. Indeed, there is very little you can do to make yourself more "likeable" (apparently, human beings make that sort of decision within the first seconds of meeting someone). This human tendency to evaluate others based primarily on first impressions leads many companies, and even government agencies, to institute explicitly structured methods of interviewing, which work to decrease the emphasis on "likeablity" and increase focus on competencies essential to success in a particular role. [More on preparing for structured and behavior-based interviewing in a future post. If you want to read what the United States General Accounting Office says on this subject, go here - Matt]
There is at least one lesson to be drawn from this. In the interest of taking a more active approach to interviewing, it's critical that you use the interview as an opportunity to consider whether or not you like the people you'll be working with, the role itself, and the overall work environment. Considering whether the position you are interviewing for fits into your career goals and meets your personal ambitions constitutes a different sort of "I" Exam along the lines of, "Do I see myself professionally satisfied in this place with these colleagues working on these projects for the foreseeable future?" Though that might come-off as "egocentric" and borderline "unlikeable," it is the mindframe that separates the active Job Seeker from the relatively passive Job Applicant.
In-House is IN!
Nov 7, 2006 @ 5:11 PM · Matthew Grant
In-house creative studios have a mixed reputation. Detractors discount them based on the assumption that agencies have cornered the market on high-end design (and believe that in-house just can't do it). Champions extol their unparalleled familiarity with the brand and the significant cost-savings they often provide. Some designers shy away from jobs on in-house teams for fear that it will limit the type and range of projects they encounter. Other designers appreciate the work-life balance that an in-house career can afford, and come to realize that the variety of work they are exposed to has more to do with the business and design philosophy of the parent company, than it does with the designation "in-house."
Whether it's true that at an agency you'll always work on the coolest things, or that "in-house" you'll go to seed creatively (which I don't believe is true, btw), is beside the point. The fact is that more and more marketing organizations are turning to in-house groups to design and execute a wide variety of marketing programs. They have a growing professional association, InSource, and the folks at HOW Magazine just hosted a sold-out conference built around the issues faced by In-House Creative Managers.
As it turns out, the consulting group at the company I work for has an idea or two about how marketing organizations can increase their own effectiveness by leveraging the capabilities of in-house creative groups. The president of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman, presented these ideas during an AMA webcast entitled, aptly enough, How to Maximize Marketing Spend by Increasing the Role of Internal Creative Services,
on Thursday, November 9, 2006. To view this webcast, go here.
If you are a marketer and want to know what in-house can accomplish for you, or if you are a designer working for or managing an in-house group and would like to know how to improve its performance (and even it grow it), then you should definitely check this out.
