Category: Contentions
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Tell people what you want to do, and it just might happen
Tom Critchlow recently published his list of dream clients, and how he believed he could add value to them. (The post started as a thread, which itself was a response to this prompt.) It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of these came to fruition. (In fact, I’m expecting that to happen.) Tom’s thoughtfulness,…
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The curse of knowledge
“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” — Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Via Asimov Press
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An editor’s retrospective
In the 10th anniversary issue of Port (published a couple of years back), editor-in-chief Dan Crowe looks back on the launch issue and original format. It’s a fun, light, and very visual retrospective into some of the sections that worked for the magazine from: There are lots of great details here—particularly the bottom left corner,…
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Writing is transference of energy
When you’re editing, consider how the order of information can shift the energy of the work. You can do this starting at the most zoomed out: at a section level, then paragraph level, then sentence level, then individual word level. Some sections will need more love than others. You’ll need to cut some turns of…
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Finding echoes of other people in yourself
So I’d say, to the extent I can, that the image came in parts, and congealed when I started writing. For me, creating a character is like acting. I have to imagine being them. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. And when I imagined being the boy in this story, these…
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The copycat brand litmus test
While you can’t fully graph out the effects of branding, you can certainly show its effects. In other words, there are litmus tests. I’ve previously already covered two—the negative press brand litmus test, and the hotel lobby brand litmus test. I recently came across a third, which I’ll call the copycat brand litmus test. If…
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Celebrate the occasion, the offer is an afterthought
Every year, near the first day of December, Aesop sends an email out to its millions of customers. Its subject line is something along the lines of, “A rare reduction,” “A gift from us,” or “A gesture of gratitude.” It looks something like this: Notice the virtues—thoughtfulness, generosity, rarity—all highlighted. The 15% reduction offer is…
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Sales vs. marketing
My friend Kinan included this ad in the latest issue of his newsletter, MBRK: The different element is the story, of course. The best story will win. A few days ago, I wrote about another great advertisement from Chiat/Day and how the agency flipped the loss of their biggest client into a story. This format…
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Dealing with failure
What do you do when you’re helming a blossoming ad agency and you lose an account that’s half your billings and three-quarters of your income? You keep advertising. Chiat/Day partner and co-founder Guy Day wrote this one. His son Cameron Day writes, “It was uncharacteristic of my father to revert to low-brow language. That was…
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On businesses publishing books
If you’re a business targeting the small group of people who still read—maybe 2% of the American population (a number from Seth Godin (17:00))—you are deciding to target one of the oldest fandoms in the world. For example, you may be inherently selecting people who are interested in intellectual matters. Or, they’re ambitious enough to…