Good news for the Grip blog and its readers: We have a new editor.

Effective now-ish, the lovely and talented Leilah Ambrose will be taking over for me as Editor of Big Orange Slide. Leilah is a Senior Copywriter here at Grip. She has an infectious laugh, razor-sharp wit, and a pen that is mightier than any sword I know. We are in good hands. This transition also coincides with the blog’s first birthday (woot woot).

To mark the occasions, please allow me to ruminate on lessons learned in year one:

1) Start by failing.
This isn’t Grip’s first blog. You probably never heard of the first. It was called “Better Ideas.” And though it was originally slated to be an external blog, it never gained the momentum it needed to get off the ground. It did, however, provide a testing ground for what a Grip blog might be if it pulled up its socks. In the end, “Better Ideas” died to make way for an even better idea.

The lesson: Whether you’re throwing down bad ideas in a brainstorm or creating an ad campaign that’s doomed to mediocrity, failure is an important weigh station on the road to success.

2) Get some muscle.
Big ideas need support. Lots of it. For this blog, that support came in the form of one of Grip’s Partners, Dave Hamilton. He recognized the seed of a good idea. Got behind it. Assembled a team. And then gave it the muscle it needed to power through the rough patches of its inception.

The lesson: Teams are only as strong as their leader. Make sure you’ve got a good one.

3) Make it pretty.
There are more than 120 million blogs on the internet. And despite what the cynics say, a lot of them are good. So what makes this one extra-worth your time? For me, it’s the pictures. Grip’s Associate Partner, Creative, Colin Craig created its playful look and feel – and paired it with an arresting illustrative convention. Of this blog’s 197 posts to date, nearly all of them have been given their own wonderful little illustration. They add richness beyond measure.

The lesson: You can be as wicked smart as you want, but if you’re not presenting well you’ve already lost.

There are more lessons: Always write about StarCraft 2; Posts about Apple cause foaming at the mouth; Sometimes the people you least expect to be able to write are the best writers, and; Our industry is chock-full of witty, passionate, intelligent people.

For my part, I’m excited to see where this blog goes next. Upwards, no doubt. I’m also excited to have a bit more time in my schedule for writing on it. Stay tuned. And welcome Leilah.

Skinny jeans: slim through the thighs and knees, slimmer still through the calves and ankles. The uncontested hipster uniform. Let’s face it: if you’re a 20-something art director reading this, you’re probably wearing them right now. Skinny jeans are not for everyone and they require a bit of struggling to get into. Especially if you’re a baby.

So why are we marketing them to babies?

But there it is. Skinny jeans are this season’s latest trend: fresh off the change table and now in your local windows of Gap, American Eagle Outfitters, Levi’s and Old Navy. They’re the latest age-inappropriate item marketed to the six months to nine-year-old girl set. Naturally, this product has (and should) generate some controversy around using terms like “skinny” and “super skinny” in children’s clothing markets. The fear: that it will prematurely nudge them onto the never-ending diet train that plagues women for much of their lives. Not to mention the obvious hyper-sexualized subtext of tight pants – or, indeed, tight anything.

It may seem preposterous. They’re just tapered pants we’re talking about here. But maybe mini-adult clothes really do come with mini-adult problems. Maybe the conversation needs to be extended from the imagery and messages that kids encounter in the media and in advertising, to the perceived market for products of this kind. Products are created in response to demand. Have we come to the point where hot pants for two year-olds is a viable product space?

What do you think? Is marketing skinny jeans inappropriate to tots? Or is it just another pair of pants?

After another Buffalo Bills game in Toronto last Thursday (with more on the way), the National Football League (NFL) is continuing with its efforts to establish more of a presence for itself in Canada. However, the announced attendance at last week’s game was just 39,000 people, easily the lowest of the “Bills in Toronto Series” so far, and well short of the roughly 70,000 usually expected at a game in the U.S.

It makes you wonder, would the NFL in Canada work?

After all, we do already have a little something called the CFL — the Canadian Football League. And despite the league being the butt of the occasional joke south of the border, it’s a very strong brand on its home turf. (Especially in the prairies.)

Canadians are pretty loyal to the CFL, and an NFL team in Toronto could mean the end of our style of football. The fear is that the team would take a lot of the attention away from the CFL, as people would become more interested in seeing a bigger and (arguably) better brand on the field. But would anyone outside of Toronto even root for an NFL team?

The Blue Jays in the MLB and the Raptors in the NBA aren’t exactly thriving, and that’s without competition from other professional baseball and basketball leagues. And let’s not forget the hesitation of American athletes to join a Canadian team, what with our multi-coloured money and colder temperatures.

With a brand allegiance as strong as the CFL’s (seriously, have you ever been to Saskatchewan?), an NFL team in Toronto could be doomed. Not only would it give the rest of Canada yet another reason to despise  — and be jealous of — Toronto, but simply being competition to the CFL would be added incentive for football fans to avoid it.

The lower attendance numbers suggest that interest in seeing the Bills play here is already waning. Maybe the NFL has overestimated the appeal of their product outside of the States. Or maybe the NFL and the CFL simply can’t coexist in Canada.

My bet is our brand of football comes out on top, rouges and all.

Grip strives to embody the principle of “the tighter the agency, the tighter the work.” It encourages all employees to engineer new ways to enhance company culture, and blow off a little steam. Recently, we were on the hunt for a team-building activity that was fairly non-competitive, has simple rules and could work co-ed, recognizing also that in our line of business sometimes it helps to run and throw things.

Ultimate Frisbee was a natural choice.

Given that our daily bread is creativity and strategy, we got pretty methodical about how we would execute our fun. On reflection, our experience contains some pretty decent insights into how to strategize engagement play of all kinds.

Step One: Draw them in.

Whether you’re playing Ultimate Frisbee or piecing together a brand strategy, the first thing you see is how hard it is to put teams together with dedicated players. In the case of our beginners’ Ultimate team, the initial all-staff email recruited enough men but we were lacking in female participation.

Engagement tactic: Get personal and reward participation.

We set up an invite to play on the team, and sent it exclusively to Grip women (there’s no easy email list for this, so they had to be added separately).  The subject line was, “Hey Ladies…need your help.”

From there, we tried to draw our targets in by proving the value of their participation on the team. Making your prospective team/brand participants feel like they fill a valuable role keeps them engaged. Also, we gave them t-shirts.

Let’s face it – free stuff never hurts.

Step Two: Navigate the barriers to participation.
Now that we had enough players for the team, we needed to make sure each game looked appealing and got full participation. This wasn’t always an easy task considering that on Thursdays our agency gathers for “beer o’clock”. Our barrier was chips and beer. That’s a tough one.

Engagement tactic: Give members a stake in the brand.

Our first move was to involve the team in naming themselves. Dialoguing bred familiarity right off the bat. “Ultimate Grip” may not have been the perfect naming solution in the end, but it democratized the team.

When the studio came up with a t-shirt design that was the envy of the rest of the company, we knew we’d hit our stride. Since they were strictly for team members, it created an exclusive team feeling that only Ultimate Grip could own.

Step Three: Get them to buy into your tone and manner.
In the end, if Ultimate Grip were featured in one of those sports drama movies as the underdog, we still would have lost after the coach’s stirring monologue. But we were so cohesive we never flinched. Our team brand had an upbeat attitude, and united people from different (and often divided) corners of the company.

Engagement tactic: Give them something to lose themselves in.

We were runners and screamers and hooters and hollerers. We made it an outlet of epic proportions. And, yes, we’d lose – but inevitably we’d walk off that field in a zen-like state of calm. The broken nose for the opposing team was an accident. Promise.

As a social branding exercise, Ultimate Grip hit all the sweet spots: it gave members something to invest in, it felt inclusive and it encouraged dialogue. It brought people together over a cause they didn’t expect to stand for.

That is, until the playoffs, when no one showed up.

Don’t hate me for quoting Marshall McLuhan before noon. I know it’s one of those unspoken rules, like “don’t call before 9 a.m. on a Saturday,” or “don’t microwave fish at work.”

I was thinking about Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man the other day, the seminal McLuhan work that has driven cultural theory students to Advil for decades. When McLuhan said “the medium is the message,” he was defining how the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

Getting nightmare flashbacks of those college electives yet? I’ll get to my point now.

I work in the interactive industry, a playground of tools, web apps and devices that frame our relationship with the rest of the world. Every hour, we are introduced to more. These applications act as the medium by which we voluntarily inundate ourselves with messages. We shape them to optimize how much we can get, how quickly, and from where. We are not simply receiving messages through the medium – we are customizing our capacity for receiving as many as possible.

This is especially true with social networking. If 500 million Facebook users are any indication, we’re building our media to indulge our need for messages about ourselves. I’d argue that Facebook isn’t the medium anymore, it’s the people that drive the Facebook ship forward. In some ways, we’re the medium that was so famously described by Marshall McLuhan.

How much more can we push the mechanisms to drive content into people’s minds and actions? McLuhan also said “invention is the mother of necessities.” If that’s the case, then we’re piloting ourselves into an age where constant access to information – and to each other – is a psychological necessity. How many other avenues are available to us to learn from each other, sell each other, or stalk each other?

If “each other” is the medium and the message, how much more can we interact with each other without impacting how we interact with each other offline?

Now where’s my iPhone? I have to condense this post into 140 characters.

Proofreading at an advertising agency is a lot like re-enacting the civil war with live ammunition. We’re among friends: we’ve watched each other marry and have children, and together we’ve experienced some of our most memorable times. Regardless, we can’t ignore the sinking feeling that one day we’ll kill each other. Thus, in case the worst should happen, consider this my final memoir.

Writing this is hard for me, you must understand, just as it is hard for anyone to boil down their craft into the thick balsamic reduction of a blog entry. At the beginning of my journey so many years ago, I pulled my red pen from the sacred stone and took up arms against typographic demons much for the same reasons other proofreaders do, not for this obvious fame and wealth, but rather for the love of the hunt itself. But the public is a ravenous, bloodthirsty mistress, and she wants to read about the dangers of proofreading.

You see, there’s a tremendous back-and-forth between proofreaders and studio artists, and proofreaders and producers, and proofreaders and art directors, and proofreaders and proofreaders. Really, we’re everyone’s worst nightmare, because no matter what we do, we’ve already made an enemy. A proof with too many mark-ups causes headaches because it delays production and affects the client’s bottom line. One with too few mark-ups causes headaches because everything has gone to hell and our superiors have to argue about whether or not waterboarding us would be in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Ultimately, it’s less painful to err on the side of caution.

That doesn’t make it easier. Ask any normal person what an advertisement is made of and they might give the obvious answer: black ink, aged moon dust and four glorious colours of powdered and rendered unicorn. But to a proofreader, those basic ingredients form complex elements to be examined. We see copy, images, a headline, and a line of legal so long that few have reached its end without descending into madness. Some say you’d have to be mad to try.

These complicated ads are a proofreader’s bread and butter. When we’re not toasting and eating them, we’re meticulously filtering out spelling and grammatical errors, checking sizes and bleeds and signing document after document in search of the fabled “perfect proof.” If we could stare at the same half-page ad all day, every day for weeks, poring over each character of every word and each pixel of every image until we were certain that there could not possibly be anything wrong with it, we would. But very few agencies are willing to hire a live-in proofreader. And those that are willing don’t have very comfortable beds.

So, eventually, we have to admit that even for divinely appointed proofreaders, perfection is unattainable, and we must hand off the ad for approval. We’ve done what we can to please the client, flirted with perfection and rode the razor’s edge between man-like passion and machine-like precision.

But we must beware; all is not well, because from that point on, we are stained with it. Like Lady Macbeth, nothing will cleanse us of what we have seen and done. Errors will occasionally happen. And we are responsible.

Short of ritual suicide, there really is nothing we can do to pay penance. As tempting as hemlock might be, the best we can do is learn from our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. We’ll continue in this way until, inevitably, we will learn everything there is to know about everything, and then we’ll simply disappear into a cloud of particulate matter that nobody really feels comfortable inhaling.

It’s a long journey, a trial-by-fire, but that is the nature of proofreading — the art of tracking and trapping and executing errors. Some people say they’ve never seen an error in the wild; others argue that they may not even exist. Trust me, my friends, the errors are out there. I’ve seen them. Waiting.

And we can’t let the errors win.

How to get ahead in advertising: Part 2 – Q&A with Harvey Carroll
Grip’s President answers 11 questions on career, client presentations, schmoozing and success.

Photoshop til you drop – by Warren Haas
Are we retouching our brands into oblivion? Haas makes the case for a return to more naturalistic campaign photography.

The death of movie posters – by Jacoub Bondre
The always incendiary Jacoub Bondre on the prevalence of floating head movie posters.

Are we interacting with our interactive media? – by Jacob Karsemeyer
What can interactive advertising learn from toys and video games? Plenty, including the ability to hold users’ attentions over long periods of time.

Remember to smile – by Vlad Dascalu
Three rules for making the most of your advertising internship, with some surprising insights about who might be in the room at your next brainstorm.

Population: You – by Michelle Davey
What makes London, Ontario the de facto testing ground for new brands? Native Londoner Michelle Davey digs in to the data.

My name is Wes Dean, and I am an Account Coordinator. Recently, I have been inspired to speak on behalf of all Account Services people, in particular Coordinators, due to some playful barbs thrown my way by a couple nameless creative co-workers.

“You’re so busy all the time, but I still don’t understand what your job actually is.”

“Couldn’t the clients just deal directly with the creatives?”

Yes, I hope all Account people reading this just shared a collective shudder. Now, I apologize if the following recap of a day in my shoes doesn’t completely encapsulate your average day, fellow Account people, but I believe it does shed some light on our extremely important, fast-paced, and sometimes thankless job. Account Services people of the world, unite!

July 9, 2010 (Date is irrelevant – can be any day)
I wake up around 7 a.m. and roll into the shower. By the time I get out, there is a red light flashing on my phone indicating a work email from one of my Account team members. There is a pressing client request that needs to be looked after this morning–and so the day begins.

Arriving at work at 8:19 a.m., I am the 4th person to arrive in the office out of a total of approximately 150 employees. As I pour myself a cup of steaming jet fuel, I am prioritizing an extensive to-do list in my mind by instantaneously factoring deadlines, client expectations, and internal responsibilities.

Sitting down now, I have two desktops that need tidying up. The one where my computer sits, and the one on my computer screen. First, to find space to put my laptop down, I need to move laser proofs that have been placed on my desk to be signed off on. Next to those papers are bills from a film storage company placed on my desk by accounting for me to reconcile and file. Second, I need to go through my computer desktop to sort through and tidy up the countless files and assets I have sourced for co-workers and clients the previous day.

It is now around 9 a.m. and Grip employees are filing in. This is when I must send out my dozens of morning emails. Account people are always under pressure to “keep it moving,” so I take this portion of my day to ensure I have resources allocated to completing my projects, and that clients are reminded of approvals needed.

Now, instead of going into details, which is exactly what Account people are born to do, I will simply list the tasks that occur in the next few hours of the day: filing estimates, writing a creative brief, miscellaneous requests (“Wes, drop everything you’re doing. I need help.”), and of course scheduling and attending meetings and presentations.

It is now closing in on 3 p.m. and you can see the home stretch of the day has arrived, BUT WAIT! Your client has been given a free page in a national publication and wants to know if it’s possible to re-adapt an existing piece of creative for this magazine . . . but with a completely new headline and body copy paragraph . . . and material is due to the publication tomorrow. Mayhem ensues.

In the end, it all is under control. It’s 5:45 p.m. and I’m tying up a few loose ends and going over all the emails from the day (there have been 86), so I can go home in peace without fearing that I missed anything.

1) Writing – even as a duo – is introspective work. Do you find it difficult to go from that directly into something where you’re so exposed, like self-promotion?
C: Not really. Maybe it’s because we don’t write physically together so we really aren’t in a “bubble.” You write, you send it to the other guy, and then you meet or have a call. And on those we’re always either defending our choices or brainstorming new ideas when we both know the original ones we wrote don’t work as well as they need to. So I don’t find that I get that introspective.

A: Conor and I are natural marketers and realize that the marketing of the creators is sometimes just as important as the actual product. In today’s media world it’s so crucial to build your personal brand. We probably spend just as much time strategizing and implementing marketing plans as doing the creative writing for the scripts.

2) How involved in the advertising and marketing of Kill Shakespeare is your publisher, IDW?
A: We’ve discovered that there isn’t a great deal of advertising done in the comic book industry. Most publishers focus on word-of-mouth. IDW has done some good work for us but Conor and I have taken it upon ourselves to do a lot of the promotion and outreach for our series.

C: Comics have small marketing budgets, so there’s only so much money that a publisher feels it can spend on promo. Usually you need to be a hit before you get much of a marketing push, which sometimes feels a bit perverse. But IDW has supported us as if we’re one of their licensed properties and have landed us exclusive coverage on some of the top comics websites, and have put us on con panels, so we’re definitely getting help.

3) I understand that you’ve hired two PR firms (MDG & Associates in Canada and Smith Publicity internationally). At what point did you decide to do that, and why?
A: I would argue that Public Relations is the most important part of any brand’s marketing plan. If implemented correctly, PR can be the most efficient (cost- and time-wise) method of getting your brand’s message into the minds of potential customers. We knew at the very beginning that it was crucial for the brand and met with a number of firms to make sure that we found the right fits.

C: We knew going in that comic companies don’t do a ton of marketing, so we built into our budget cash to have P.R. firms on board. It’s an easier decision to make when you think of our goal – we want to build the next Lord of the Rings, so for us, the comic is important from a creative angle, but not so much from the profit side of things. If we lose money on the comic but end up gaining a large fan-base, that’s a win for us.

4) How involved are the firms in how you self-promote?
C: They definitely provide us guidance and media training. Through my work at Business News Network I had some concept of the “on-air persona” but MDG and Dan Smith really brought that to a higher level. And while they don’t “stage manage” us, we’re very aware of the sort of message we want to get out there.

A: We work closely with the companies to develop the messages that we want to communicate. Both have been fantastic – we all exchange ideas on what we can and should do at every step. Conor and I are both outgoing individuals that are willing to talk to anyone – even strangers on the street – about our product.

5) You’ve both been involved in creative, production and management over a wide range of media. What kind of things specifically have you two worked on in the past?

A: My first real marketing campaign was for a feature film I produced in university (Wilfrid Laurier), for which I oversaw the entire campaign – from basic positioning to designing posters, t-shirts, a soundtrack, concerts, and which led to multiple sold-out events. The other major marketing experience I’ve encountered was working with music manager Chris Smith, who manages artists such as Nelly Furtado, Fefe Dobson and k-os. I was there when Chris oversaw the entire marketing of Nelly’s “Loose” album and I learned a great deal about positioning and branding while there.

C: Well, beyond pushing the various shows or film scripts that we’ve had in development or received funding for, a lot of what I learned about promo came from working as a Producer at Business News Network. Every five minutes you have this challenge to keep the viewer tuned in to the channel. With the exception of maybe CP24 or Newsnet, nobody else has that issue. So you always have to have a new tease for the host, a new “coming up” banner in the hopper that is informative, witty, intriguing… It’s quite a challenge to do it right, and when I watch the news, or other financial channels, it really annoys me when you get lazy throws that ask questions, or are boring. The live newsroom experience really demands a lot from you. And it also teaches you that you have to keep your promotional promises, as well as how to keep someone on the hook for a while.

6) How has marketing a comic book differed?
C: Well, one of the first challenges is that comics are a niche product. There are set places where comic fans gather. That’s great when you want to reach the converted. But for a comic like Kill Shakespeare, which we want to push past the tights-and-capes set (though we love that genre too), it’s tricky to know where to fish. Especially when you may have an audience that would be very interested by the story, but will check-out as soon as the word “comic” is mentioned because they have a pre-existing judgment of what that word means.

A: Marketing a comic book product has been great because it’s a relatively small industry and thus it’s quite easy for us to identify the “influencers” that we could initially target. We can then build upon that by growing our marketing into other segments, such as theatre groups, Shakespeare organizations, fans of literature, etc. It’s also a product that leads to a vocal readership that can also allow us to tune our product as it goes along.

7) How do you respond to the praise and criticism that comes from putting your work out there?
C: Read it all. Take it in. Be honest enough with yourself to know when the criticism is valid. And then I keep to this little maxim: “They ain’t right when they think you’re great, and they ain’t right when they tell you you’re a bum.”

A: This is what makes the comic industry such a great market for storytelling. It’s almost an interactive environment that allows us to tinker with our story and characters as we move forward. We especially know that by dealing with Shakespeare we will have some that will love us, while others will hate us. We’re just glad that they’re talking about us.

8) How important is your level of interaction with your fans in making Kill Shakespeare a success?
A: With the rise of social media, all brands need to become more interactive with their customers/fans. The industry is changing from that of a loudspeaker to a one-on-one conversation. And we’re happy to have this sort of interaction and allow us to build the brand and create great word-of-mouth discussion about Kill Shakespeare.

C: It’s critical. We want to build a true community like Star Wars has, or Harry Potter has. We LOVE this subject matter, so it’s great for us to get to chat with fans, to answer e-mails, to meet them at conventions or in stores. One day we’d love for the fans themselves to create and moderate the community. When that happens, you know your little baby is all grown up and that people actually care about what you’ve put out there.

9) I’ve noticed a recent trend of creating trailers for comic books – you guys have one, too. What do you think this adds to the process of building buzz around a new release?
A: This is a trend not only for comics but for all published books. With the rise of social media, it’s important to be able to target potential customers in as many media as possible. A good trailer can be put on YouTube and other sites and capture the proper mood and tone for any story. I also think that we have become a culture raised on movie trailers and commercials, so this allows comic book publishers/creators to create an ad that adheres to accepted formats.

C: A good trailer gives comics even more kinetic energy. A bad one looks like a crappy movie spot. So it’s a double-edged sword. I think they are neat tools, but ultimately not as useful as for a film, since a film is a wholly visual medium, and a comic is still more of a solitary literary experience.

10) What are some of the other unique ways you can get the word out there?
C: Well we have a few plans, but we can’t say too much yet. But journalists – watch out – some unsavoury Shakespearean types have been watching you…

A: [Muzzled.]

11) Seriously: how awesome is the con circuit?
C: Very awesome. A male Princess Leia in a bikini – ’nuff said.

A: From a marketing perspective, it’s great because you have whole convention centres of captive audiences. From a media creator’s perspective, it’s great because it allows you to get the pulse of where the pop culture industry is going. From a fan’s perspective, well, the costumes ARE pretty cool!