The writer in a café is a classic stereotype, but for good reason. Several studies have shown that a moderate level of noise (70–80 decibels, to be specific) is actually really helpful for getting in the creative zone.
If you can’t get to a café, try listening to white noise or music without lyrics.
2.Ignore the little voice that keeps telling you you’re not a true creative, and fake it ’til you make it.
If you feel like you’re too left-brained or logical to be creative, you’re selling yourself short and shooting yourself in the foot. The stereotype you embrace is the one you embody: the educational psychologists that tested out this idea call it the creative stereotype effect. So, if you walk around acting like you’re the next Picasso or Sylvia Plath, you may find that you had more ideas than you originally thought. On the other hand, if you try to write a short story thinking like the Type A mathlete you always thought you were, you’re probably going to have a tough time.
3.Give your mind permission to wander, because you’ll burn out really quickly if you push yourself to focus for hours at a time.
When you’re trying really really hard to make yourself focus (like when you plan an eight-hour block of time to spend at the library), you’re going to burn yourself out really quickly. It’s important to take active periods of unfocus, and deliberately disconnect from the task at hand. Try doing something you find relaxing like taking a walk, doing a puzzle, or doodling. Doing so will allow your mind to wander and might actually spark that creativity that you’ve been pushing so hard for.
4.When creating, dig deeper into your own experiences so you aren’t leaning on cliché, overused tropes.
Let’s say you’re trying to write a comedy set about a plane trip. You could talk about how ridiculous the security line in the airport is or you could talk about how tiny the seats are, but you won’t be telling the audience something they’ve already heard. Look past that, and think about your specific experience the last time you flew. Maybe you had a really strange conversation you had with your seat mate. Maybe you felt so freakin’ awkward trying to get in line for the bathroom because you kept on getting in the way of the flight attendants. (Hey, I’m not a comedian, it’s your job to make it funny.) Those are the things that everyone knows are true without realizing it. It’s your job to make them pay attention.
5.Write all of your ideas down…and then get them out of your sight so they aren’t distracting you.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s getting yourself to focus on them. Keep a list somewhere — on a sticky note, a page in your journal, the draft of an email — of all of the ideas that you’re so excited about. In a couple of days or weeks, when you’ve “run out” of ideas, consult it. Find the one that actually still makes sense and has some potential, and get rid of the others. Rest assured: if the ideas are really good, they’ll come back to you.
6.Write a few pages every morning to clear out the cobwebs, and establish a habit of actually getting some writing done.
Morning pages is an old-school trick for clearing out the cobwebs that writers still swear by. It’s super simple: just write three pages every morning. Period. That may seem daunting, but you can write literally anything. It doesn’t matter. You could write a hundred lines of “I will write my morning pages every day” and it will still count. Eventually, something good will come out. You’re creating a routine, an expectation for yourself that you will write every morning when your brain is fresh and the day has just begun.
7.Or do it at the end of the day when you’re totally exhausted.
Weirdly enough, we’re more creative when we’re tired. Your brain isn’t as good at filtering out distractions, so you’re more likely to have a crazy idea. Work some time into your evening routine (maybe an hour or so) to unpack all of those ideas onto a page. Not a screen — actual paper, please. Putting all of your thoughts down instead of letting them race through your head may actually help you get more sleep.
8.Let yourself get totally bored because that’s when your mind starts to wander into something awesome.
Those five minutes it takes you to walk to the bathroom, ten minutes it takes to grab a cup of coffee, or twenty minutes to commute to work are all healthy boredom breaks for your brain. Instead of scrolling through your Twitter feed or checking your email, do absolutely nothing else. Those little breaks will give you the space to think and imagine, and might even free up a bit more time for your creative endeavors.
Listen to Manoush Zomorodi’s podcast “Note to Self” or read her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self for more ideas like this. Get the book from Amazon for $18.35, from Barnes & Noble for $19.28, or find it at your local bookseller on IndieBound.
9.Keep your “darlings” in a separate file so you don’t actually have to kill them.
If you’ve ever created art, written a line, or created a character that you were sure was peak genius, you have darlings. And when someone doesn’t understand them, it seems like the most ridiculous, outrageous thing in the world. Throwing out, killing off, or scratching out your darlings is painful. But if they’re getting in your way, hide them away in a place you don’t see but can dig up later. It’ll be less painful to get rid of them later when you’ve replaced them.
10.Join a team of other creators so you have people to rely on when the going gets tough.
Creating something can be a lonely business…but it doesn’t have to be! Create a network or start a monthly meeting with a few people trying to pursue on creative endeavors. You’ll hold each other accountable and have people to bounce your ideas off of.
If none of your pals are interested, join groups that already exist. Meetup can help you find communities of people in your local area that are doing the same things — writing, drawing, photography, etc. — as you!
11.Stop judging yourself and take that first step because imperfect action is better than no action at all.
The hardest part of doing something is doing it. Don’t worry about whether it sounds good, looks good, or even makes sense. Start creating and don’t look back. You can edit, delete, burn (idk, it’s your process) it later.
12.And remember that you have the skills to get it done, and that the hard work will be worth it in the end.
If you’ve never doubted your creativity or potential, then hats off to you. But for most, it’s one of the most paralyzing parts of the process. It’s so easy to tell yourself the reasons that you can’t do it, that it’s hard to remember the reasons why you can. You’re a creator. Keep telling yourself that. Or get someone else to do it. The Creative Pep Talk podcast will support you through those tough times, and give you the tools to get through it.
Everyone who uses YouTube to promote themselves or their company has their own goals. The following is information about six popular ways YouTube can be used as part of your overall online strategy to achieve your company’s goals.
1. Promote Yourself as an Online Personality and Entertain Your Audience
One strategy small businesses use effectively to personalize their brand and build a rapport with the audience is to use YouTube videos to introduce their company’s leaders and position these people as spokespeople who appear in videos. Some company spokespeople have even achieved celebrity status from starring in YouTube videos to promote themselves, their products, and/or their companies.
If you’re a small-business owner with a big personality, consider starring in your own YouTube videos to help build your company’s brand, tell its story, and promote its message. Featuring the actual leader of your company can help personalize your business and build its credibility. You could also demonstrate products, speak authoritatively, and boost your company’s brand recognition and reputation.
2. Share Your Knowledge, Commentary, or How-to Information
One reason YouTube has become so popular is that in addition to watching countless hours of entertaining videos, people can quickly find informative and easy-to-understand how-to videos about any topic imaginable. As a business owner, chances are you have expertise that other people could easily benefit from.
YouTube offers an informal yet powerful way to communicate directly with your customers, in your own words, in a forum that gives you absolute control over the content. Using a bit of creativity, chances are you’ll come up with a handful of ideas about how your business could benefit from communicating directly with its customers (or potential customers) using YouTube. For example, you could create a product demonstration or product comparison video. Other options might be to showcase customer testimonials in a video or to create how-to videos that explain how to assemble, operate, or use your products/services.
One popular trend on YouTube is for companies or individuals to produce “unboxing” videos. Basically, someone takes a new (still packaged) product, then films themselves opening and using the product for the first time, as they share their initial impressions. These videos are watched by people interested in the product, but who haven’t yet purchased it.
In addition, many companies have dramatically cut costs associated with offering telephone technical support by supplementing printed product manuals and product assembly instructions (which people hate to read and find difficult to understand) with informative how-to videos that are highly engaging.
3. Introduce a New Product or Service and Direct People to Your Online Store
Showcasing products on YouTube is a low-cost yet highly effective way to demonstrate products to your customers, showcase features, and explain how to best use a product especially if you’re operating an online-based business or there’s an online component to your traditional retail business. In addition to showcasing a product’s features or functions, you can use YouTube videos to answer commonly asked questions.
Keep in mind, people who use YouTube don’t want to watch blatant commercials for your products or services. Consumers are already bombarded with advertising in their everyday lives. While your videos can certainly promote a product or service, and build awareness or demand for it, take a soft-sell approach that’s entertaining as well as informative.
4. Teach People How to Use a Product or Service
Many businesses have discovered that producing YouTube videos as an instructional tool can help improve customer loyalty, reduce returns, and allow a business to enhance its customer service efforts without putting a strain on resources.
How-to videos for a product offer a different approach than a product demo, yet both approaches can benefit businesses looking to promote and sell products. While a how-to video is designed to teach someone how to do something, a product demo simply showcases a product’s features or functions, and gives the viewer a chance to see a product in action. Either type of video can be used as part of a business-to-consumer or business-to-business sales and marketing strategy.
Instructional videos can help to reduce incoming customer service (and tech support) calls. You can produce instructional videos to teach people how to assemble and/or use a product, for example, plus help customers easily discover the true potential of a product, while eliminating their potential frustration. Your videos can also be used to highlight lesser-known features of or uses for a product that your customers might not otherwise consider.
5. Share Video Footage of Business Presentations You’ve Given
If you’ve presented a lecture, workshop, or some type of presentation, consider uploading the edited video footage of it to YouTube for your customers, clients, and the public to see. This will help establish you as an expert or authority, allow you to convey valuable information to potential customers and clients, plus help you build awareness of you and your company.
This information can be supplemented with an animated and narrated digital slide (PowerPoint) presentation that you post on your YouTube channel, and/or include a recorded one-on-one interview with you talking about something in which your (potential) customers or clients would be interested.
6. Provide Background Information about Your Company and Tell Its Story
Every company has a story to tell, as do the founders or current leaders of that business. By telling your story, chances are, you’ll be able to enhance your customer loyalty and brand awareness, while also educating the public about what your company does and its core philosophies.
Any type of behind-the-scenes videos can also be useful. For example, you can produce and publish a video that focuses on how your product(s) are made, provide a tour of your company, and introduce some of the people who work at your company within the video(s). If you’ve invented a product, you can explain where the inspiration for the product came from and why you’re personally passionate about the product.
Jason R. Rich, based in Foxboro, Mass., is author of more than 55 books on topics including ecommerce, online marketing, digital photography and interactive entertainment, as well as the Apple iPhone and iPad.Follow
Opinion: It’s in the real world, so it’s not prone to click fraud
When I was expansion manager for grocery delivery service Instacart circa 2014, I ran into a problem: declining effectiveness of our social media and online ads.
The market was simply too saturated, with delivery services like Instacart, plus a fast-growing cadre of meal-kit delivery services. It was hard to cut through all the noise.
We also suspected, but couldn’t prove, that a high percentage of our clicks were junk, powered by bots. And this was well before the 2016 election with Russians on Facebook.
So, our team decided to do something really different: We turned to outdoor ads—specifically, billboards and transportation ads, such as bus stop and subway posters. At the time, the ability to definitively measure their impact was sparse, but we did see a boost in subscriptions and had no other campaigns running at the time.
Since that experiment, I’ve left Instacart and started my own company focused on making outdoor advertising easier to book and measurable. And as someone who once relied almost entirely on social media ads, I can tell you that outdoor is now just as quantifiable if you use the right tools and know what you’re doing.
Here are the ways in which outdoor has advantages over social media:
It’s in the real world, so it’s not prone to click fraud—at least until someone invents bots that drive past billboards or take the bus and subway.
It’s super-high-frequency, with significant exposure and traffic. No other medium reaches consumers with the frequency of outdoor advertising. We all know that one billboard or subway ad that greeted you on your commute for months.
It reaches more than 90 percent of the population. Not everyone is online—and in particular online at the social media sites you’ve selected for your campaign—but within a community, chances are that almost everyone will see a local billboard or other outdoor campaign in the course of their daily activity.
It’s easily shareable on social media, because it’s so visual.
Geographic targeting is unmatched: You can select media right down to the longitude and latitude of the community you want.
It drives an outsized share of online searches. Out-of-home advertising is the most effective offline medium in driving online activity, according to Nielsen.
How do you make outdoor measurable? There are a variety of ways. Options include:
Campaign integration with Google Analytics to measure lift in site traffic by area. This technique has been proven to increase site traffic by more than 40 percent versus controls.
Integration with Google AdWords to measure cost per click and click-through rates by area, in order to quantify performance efficiencies in online advertising. As outdoor advertising drives up a company’s awareness, its online ads perform more efficiently.
Social media image recognition, an algorithm to scrape social media images to quantify the number of additional impressions using campaign images or tags. We at AdQuick did this for a campaign for Drake’s OVO fashion brand and found $6,000 worth of Instagram shares in one week from one New York billboard.
Shortcodes, which are beneficial for transit and pedestrian-focused campaigns. They give any campaign a call to action and make it more engaging, and results are easily measured simply by tracking shortcode usage.
Geo-fenced mobile ads to measure engagement rate by area. This technique involves creating and serving ads on smartphones that mirror the message on outdoor advertising. This gives advertisers another way to measure engagement and provides consumers with a way to learn more about a brand’s offering and quantify the boost OOH drives in other channels. This technique can lead to engagement rates that are 30 percent to 50 percent higher in areas with outdoor ads versus controls.
Geographic surveys (based on ZIP code), tracking brand awareness and channel attribution in the areas surrounding the outdoor advertising locations.
Movement tracking, to quantify the increase in foot traffic an outdoor ad drives to a brick-and-mortar location.
If you are a digital marketer who hasn’t considered offline ads in recent memory, you need to give outdoor another look. Enough has changed in the past two years to make it a valid alternative to the crowded social media ad landscape.
Feature Image: We all know that one billboard or subway ad that greeted you on your commute for months. Lya_Cattel/iStock
Curiosity, according to Ian Leslie (link is external), is a combination of intelligence, persistence, and hunger for novelty, all wrapped up in one. It is what psychologists might call a trait cluster. Leslie, in his new book Curious: The Desire To Know And Why Your Future Depends On It (link is external) explores the power of curiosity through a combination of entertaining anecdotes and summaries of pertinent research across many fields. He makes a compelling case for why it is more vital than ever, as we grow older and more demands are put on our time, that we stay intellectually curious. In the spirit of that pursuit, I have distilled some insights from his book on how we can all improve our curiosity and wonder.
1. Read widely and follow your interests
John Lloyd was a hugely successful TV producer and director until one day he started to encounter a string of failures. This led him to depression. He dealt with it by taking time off work, going on long walks, and reading voraciously. He read about “Socrates and ancient Athens. He read about light and magnetism. He read about the Renaissance and the French impressionists. He had no method or plan, but simply followed his curiosity, wherever it took him.” All this reading eventually led to his idea for the BBC quiz show QI, which is loved by millions for its “ability to make anything—from quantum physics to Aztec architecture—entertaining.”
Take away lesson: B. F. Skinner said “When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.” “The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.”
2. Polish your mind with the minds of others
On a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks is a to-do list:
Calculate the measurement of Milan and its suburbs
Find a book that treats of Milan its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio.
Discover the measurement of the Corte Vecchio [courtyard of the duke’s palace].
Get the Master of Arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
Ask Bendetto Portinari [a Florentine merchant] by what means they go on ice at Flanders?
Draw Milan.
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night.
Examine the crossbow of Maestro Gianetto.
Find a Master of Hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill, in the Lombard manner.
Ask about the measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Take away lesson: Not only are Leonardo’s interests wide ranging, but out of the fifteen tasks on his list, at least eight involve consulting with others, and two involve others’ books. “Montaigne wrote of how travel to different regions and countries allows us to ‘rub and polish our brains’ against others, and Leonardo seems keen to polish his brain against as many others as possible.”
3. Visit a physical bookstore or library and browse the shelves
In the era of Google searches, we have no problem finding the exact answer to our question, but we may be less likely to serendipitously encounter information that is not specific to our question. Visiting a bookstore or a library allows us to encounter other information in a way that is not dictated by the structure of the algorithm. “A serendipity deficit makes innovation harder, because innovation relies on unexpected collisions of knowledge and ideas.” Curiosity is also about discrimination. It is about which knowledge we want to explore.
But, “A truly curious person knows that she doesn’t always know what she wants to know about. Discussing the future of his company, Larry Page described the ‘perfect search engine’ as one that would ‘understand exactly what I mean and give me back exactly what I want.’ But what if I don’t know what I want?”
Take away lesson: Get out from behind your computer and explore. “Economist John Maynard Keynes once offered advice on how to conduct oneself in a bookstore: ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.’”
4. Be willing to ask dumb questions
Says Mike Parker, CEO of Dow Chemical:
“A lot of bad leadership comes from an inability or unwillingness to ask questions. I have watched talented people—people with much higher IQs than mine—who have failed as leaders. They can talk brilliantly, with a great breadth of knowledge, but they’re not very good at asking questions. So while they know a lot at a high level, they don’t know what’s going on way down in the system. Sometimes they are afraid of asking questions, but what they don’t realize is that the dumbest questions can be very powerful. They can unlock a conversation.”
Take away lesson: Be willing to ask all sorts of questions, even what may seem to be dumb ones.
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5. Put a lot of ideas and facts in your head: Don’t rely on Google
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED video “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” has been viewed over 4 million times. But Leslie argues that “Robinson has it precisely the wrong way around when he says that a natural appetite for learning begins to dissipate once children start to be educated.” “Progressive educationalists like Robinson frame existing knowledge as the enemy of new ideas. But at the most basic level, all of our new ideas are made up of old ones…to create a smartphone, you need to know about computers and phones.”
“We romanticize the curiosity of children because we love their innocence. But creativity doesn’t happen in a void. Successful innovators and artists amass vast stores of knowledge which they can then draw on unthinkingly. Having mastered the rules of their domain, they can concentrate on rewriting them. They mix and remix ideas and themes, making new analogies and spotting unusual patterns, until a creative breakthrough is achieved.”
“Anyone who stops learning facts for himself because he can Google them later is literally making himself stupid. Children who aren’t encouraged by adults to commit information to their long-term memories are having their potential damaged and their desire to learn stymied.”
Take away lesson: Facts don’t kill creativity. Rather, they make creativity possible. Human memory may still be better for creativity. “Digital databases cannot yet replicate the kind of serendipity that enables the unconscious human mind to make novel patterns and see powerful new analogies, of the kind that lead to our most creative breakthroughs. The more we outsource our memories to Google, the less we are nourishing the wonderfully accidental creativity of our unconscious.”
6. Be an expert who is interested in everything
“In the marketplace for talent, the people most in demand will always be those who offer an expertise few others possess. But having a breadth of knowledge is increasingly valuable, too. These two trends exist in tension with each other. Should you focus on learning more about your own niche or on widening your knowledge base?”
“The thinkers best positioned to thrive today and in the future will be a hybrid…In a highly competitive, high-information world, it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives and to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations.”
Take away lesson: Leslie writes: “I don’t agree with those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. The only person or thing that can make you stupid, or incurious, is you.” Don’t blame the Internet for your lack of curiosity. Use it in a way that helps you gain both depth and breadth.
7. Don’t just focus on puzzles but on mysteries
“Security and intelligence expert Gregory Treverton once made a very useful distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles have definite answers…Once the missing information is found, it’s not a puzzle anymore. The frustration you felt when you were searching for the answer is replaced by satisfaction…Mysteries are murkier, less neat. They pose questions that can’t be answered definitively, because the answers often depend on a highly complex and interrelated set of factors, both known and unknown.”
“Puzzles offer us the satisfaction of answering a question even while you’re missing the point completely. A society or organization that thinks only in terms of puzzles is one that is too focused on the goals it has set, rather than on the possibilities it can’t yet see.”
Take away lesson: Leslie argues that mysteries have a longer half-life than puzzles, giving the example of Shakespeare, who commonly adapted story lines to his own ends up until the mid-1590’s. Around this time, his son passed away, and Shakespeare began to remove “crucial planks” from these older narrative structures, which created a greater sense of mystery because not everything in the narrative could be logically explained, in the way a puzzle can. This is also true in science. As Einstein remarked: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious…It is the source of all true art and science.”
Choosing Instagram for business provides huge opportunities to reach 700 million potential followers who can positively impact your business fortune. Yes, the number of Instagram users crossed the 700 million mark almost a year ago. The most positive aspect of Instagram is the outlook of Instagrammers towards business. They are eager and ready to engage with it both within the app and beyond.
The business friendliness of the social media platform becomes evident from the fact that numerous business brands enjoy the interaction with 120 million users on the platform. This is great news for SEO because all Instagram business accounts carry links to the business websites that enjoy the patronage of the Instagram traffic. It thus becomes clear that Instagram can reinforce your SEO campaign and make it more effective. That 80 percent Instagram users track (follow) at least one business is the reason that more and more businesses are turning to Instagram as the chosen social media platform.
Connect with real people
Since followers are at the core of your Instagram performance, it is natural that people often go into overdrive to expand their fan base. While you can buy Instagram views that can prop up your business albeit artificially, garnering the attention of viewers organically would ensure that you interact with real people only. Unless you have meaningful interaction with real people, you can never derive the real gains for business. Only when people take an interest in your niche, build a relationship with you and engage with your content that you can develop a band of loyal followers that no bots can match.
For succeeding with Instagram, you must know your target audience and have the means of connecting with them. You must create powerful content that provides a meaningful way of building followers comprising of real people who can contribute to better business results. What you should do to develop real followers that can pay back to your business would become clear on going through the remaining part of this article.
Have a sound strategy for Instagram
To ensure that you can justify the returns on investment, you must have a good plan for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Be clear about what you want to achieve by using the platform, mostly it could be for boosting SEO so that you can devise suitable strategies for implementing the plan. It would point out the audience that you must target to fulfill your business goals.
Know what competitors are doing
By researching on what your competitors are doing, you could know what kind of realistic following you should expect. It would also help to know what kind of content would work for you, the frequency of posting content, what are the key industry hashtags including branded hashtags and more. You would also gain insight into how other businesses interact and engage with the audience that you are trying to reach.
Set goals
Set goals to achieve because it forms the foundation of the Instagram strategy. Consider your overall business and marketing strategy to get leads about how you must frame your Instagram strategy that aligns with the business goals. Whether you want to drive more traffic to websites, build brands or support the SEO and marketing campaign, the platform can support you well.
Give a purpose to your content
Create a compelling story that you can tell by using images that would give a purpose to the content and make it interesting. When there is a purpose behind the content, it creates engagement among the audience you target and would lead to sharing of content that opens the doors for would-be followers. You can share some inside information about your products, uphold how others perceive the brand or present the brand by showing how it has received the wholehearted acceptance of customers.
Engage in cross promotion
Since the purpose of taking your business on Instagram is to acquire high visibility that leads to increased followers, an easy way of doing it is to propagate your Instagram content and account on other social media channels through cross promotion. As you are likely to have business accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. you must make those fans aware of your Instagram account. By mentioning your Instagram account on other social media platforms and by incentivizing them to visit your Instagram account, you can drive more followers to your account. You can even publish your Instagram posts on other channels.
Hashtags must be relevant
The hashtags have to be relevant to the industry niche or your business so that potential followers who are keen to engage with photos and content relevant to your business would be able to discover you. This would lead to the enrichment of the follower base. When creating hashtags make sure that you infuse enough originality into it that makes it exclusive for your business. Indeed, you must take a cue from popular hashtags by using the search function of Instagram, but you must add your creativity to it. However, you must avoid the lure of going overboard to create hashtags that can be quite weird. Also, avoid using gimmicks in hashtags that might momentarily seem profitable but would keep you away from engaging with real people meaningfully.
Drive people to your Instagram account from all channels of communication
You must not lose any opportunity to showcase your Instagram account and must use all communication tools at your disposal to drive more traffic to Instagram. Spread the Instagram links on all social media platforms and website as well as in online newsletters and e-mail signature so that whenever people visit those places, they know about your Instagram account. Since these people already know you, they would not hesitate to visit your Instagram account. Even providing Instagram links or hashtags in blog posts would further expand the horizon of followers that originate from the blogs.
How much advantage you get from Instagram depends on your capabilities of using the platform correctly.
Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic shift in how brands are able to effectively market to consumers. It’s hard to imagine that over this 10-year time period, digital marketing has gone from its infancy to accounting for an average 41 percent of marketing spend.
Brand experiences have also seen significant growth, with companies increasing budgets year-over-year and investing in face-to-face marketing strategies. Not only have these proven to have a higher ROI related to changing consumer behavior (98 percent of those who attend a brand experience are more likely to purchase), but according to a report by Event Marketing Institute and Mosaic, these experiences result in extremely high frequency content creation and sharing, which further feeds a company’s digital strategy.
But, in marketing, we are nothing without measurement. In attempting to measure marketing impact, companies often look to those metrics that are readily available. These might be impressions, likes, shares or other “vanity metrics.” Many times, brands focus on these for several reasons:
They are easy. They are readily available and give marketers something to show to executives that gives the appearance of progress.
They mirror traditional marketing. We love what we are used to. Focusing on likes and shares is a lot like using traditional advertising metrics related to Nielsen ratings for television ads.
They provide immediate gratification. In the digital age we have lost patience. We want instant results and often lose sight of the need to examine multiple data points, some of which may take time to gather and require additional investment.
Looking to vanity metrics does not provide the answers we need to truly understand campaign impact. We are not able to translate this data into revenue numbers or identify and qualify “leads” to nurture into a sale.
How to maximize marketing impact and deliver measurable results
Put the vanity metrics aside. Marketers should be focused on driving sales while achieving the lowest cost-per-acquisition. To do that, we need to establish performance-driven metrics that go beyond the “low hanging fruit” of simple interactions. We need to understand how our efforts tie directly into revenue.
There are ways beyond traditional or vanity metrics to better illustrate marketing and brand activation impact. Pay attention to the following to increase conversion rates, reduce cost-per-acquisition and better demonstrate campaign ROI.
1. Optimize your campaigns.
Embrace the Pareto Principle: In 1997, Richard Koch authored “The 80/20 Principle,” which tiedthe Pareto Principle to business. This principle, a.k.a. “the law of the vital few,” or “the principle of factor sparsity,” is relatively simple. It asserts that, “for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.” In other words, 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your core offerings. Eighty percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your targets. Whether you are creating digital campaigns or face-to-face ones, optimize your efforts by embracing the 20 percent that is performing and hyper-focus on improving metrics in those areas.
Know when to fold ’em: Do not target consumers in areas where you haven’t seen activity for the past few months. Reduce cost per acquisition by working to increase sales in locations where you are already finding success. This applies for ad spend and brand activation. Still work to break into new markets, but do so in a targeted, measurable way that does not consume a significant percentage of your resources.
Short- and long-term planning: Know what success looks like today, this week, this month, quarterly and yearly. It’s important to view a marketing campaign as more than a single effort or interaction. For most companies, the sales cycle might be longer than they think, or can see.
For example, if a shopper at a mall is stopped by a brand ambassador and invited to demo a company’s newest smartwatch, she could very well purchase the product as a result. The problem is, it might not be that same day. It could be a week, month or even a year later. Just because she didn’t buy it that first day doesn’t mean that the demonstration didn’t succeed in driving purchase.
Our agency, A Little Bird, recommends that you don’t design campaigns that “close” after a short period of time. Consider what you will track and measure now, as well as later, to determine success. Put attribution tracking methods (discussed below) in place so you can better understand campaign impact, your typical sales cycles, and more.
2. Use the right technology to track sales attribution.
Tying the right technology into your campaign is critical in determining success. You need to know what happened after the brand interaction or click on your website. You also need a method by which to analyze, segment and personalize future interactions to nurture consumers toward the sale.
Your consumer communication strategy must be specific to each activation, person and product. Choosing the right technology that provides the conversion tracking you need should be at the top of your list of priorities. For digital, this might be marketing software, such as HubSpot or Marketo. Also look to Google for analytics, or some social media ad platforms to pre-qualify, track, and nurture leads.
For in-person brand experiences or marketing events, you can use digital tracking related to event registration, digital kiosks, photo marketing, offer redemption — whatever your company dreams up as an engagement strategy.
3. Retarget and re-engage.
A clear and targeted ongoing engagement strategy must be incorporated into every marketing campaign. Marketers can no longer expect to close the deal in the moment. We must be conversation starters to succeed in driving sales and earning consumer trust.
The initial consumer touchpoint, whether in-person or digital, is that first step in starting a two-way dialogue with the consumer. By utilizing attribution and engagement technology, consumer data is captured and later used to personalize your brand’s communication with your consumers through relevant content and ongoing retargeting communication.
In all cases, marketing must live by a “consumer first” ideology, with establishing attribution and driving conversion at the forefront.
At SXSW, YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki revealed that the site will begin using Wikipedia to try and curb the spread of conspiracy theory videos.
Conspiracy theory videos on the site will now include text from Wikipedia pages that users can click on to learn more about the topic in question. For instance, someone watching a video about chemtrails would see a “companion unit” featuring Wikipedia’s “Chemtrail conspiracy theory” page.
According to Wojcicki, the feature is set to roll out in the coming weeks. While she did not explicitly say how exactly YouTube plans to determine what is considered a conspiracy theory video, she did say that the site will be “using a list of well-known conspiracies from Wikipedia” to help it decide which videos should receive the additional information.
“When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy, we will show as a companion unit next to the video information from Wikipedia,” said Wojcicki. “People can still watch the videos, but they actually have access to additional information.”
The move comes weeks after YouTube was criticized for letting a conspiracy theory video about last month’s mass shooting in Parkland, Florida take the top spot in its “Trending” section. The video accused David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting who has since spoken out for gun control, of being a “crisis actor.” YouTube eventually pulled the video for violating its policies.
Over the past year, YouTube has struggled to keep its platform free of extremist and offensive content. About a year ago, brands including Verizon and PepsiCo pulled advertising from the platform due to concerns that their ads were appearing next to videos that promote terrorist groups.
In December, the Google-owned video site rolled out a four-step action plan in hopes of curbing the brand safety concerns that have plagued it in recent months.
Feature Image: Conspiracy theory videos on the site will now include text from Wikipedia pages that users can click on to learn more.
AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively
Today, digital trends seem to be fashionably altering too rapidly to keep pace with. What’s not keeping up is an organization’s agility to adapt. Social platforms have made it imperative for marketers to be the first or be scrolled out and in the fusillade of messaging, a consumer trolls down any that is not unique or irrelevant.
10 important trends will define the marketing framework of organizations. Five of which are in the organization process framework and five are emerging trends driven by consumer preferences. To be able to ride this hyper-wave, we need to ask ourselves a few questions… everyday!
Transforming a legacy organization to a dynamic one requires a fundamental change in thinking, structure and process evolutions. The more visionary ones that lead the way will be the change makers, large or small in size irrespective.
Five Organizational Trends That Will Impact Digital Marketing Frameworks
Structure on Demand – Legacy organization structures are a bane to its agility. Unless the entire internal eco-system is networked to remove all hurdles and expedite the process from idea to end delivery and service management, the threat of getting disrupted hangs sword on its head. Organizations will be forced to create “structure on demand” teams that emerge and dissolve to needs without the baggage of the old-fashioned matrix reporting hierarchies. Marketing will no longer be the sole ownership of the marketers but will be split into specialized parts being led by experts.
Leader on Demand – A ‘Structure on Demand’ will also require ‘Leaders on Demand’. Leadership too will become more project based than a fixed organization structure based since solutions at any point in time will require a very different set of leadership skills suited to a particular project. The concept of a universal leadership will loose its appeal in the coming years and we are beginning to see this trend in the more progressive marketing organizations.
New Marketing Roles – With the core of marketing shifting from brand-centricity to unique Customer Experience (CX) creation, traditional designations of digital marketing and channel marketing etc will start to disappear. Marketing teams will be led by CX Managers, Omnichannel Managers, Content Marketers & Design Managers. Digital by itself will no longer be a role as it become ubiquitous in the organisation.
The Marketing FlexiForce: The future will be run by young professionals, especially in fast changing markets like India. And these young bees choose flexibility and freedom over fixed pay and formula. Ubiquitous digital makes remote talent leverage possible and allows for speed of innovation and delivery making marketing super agile. Transcending time zones keeps the engine running 24×7, a new expectation that customers are demanding.
Automated Marketing – Automation in marketing platforms and programmatic deliveries will also be complemented with automated CRM processes relieving organizations of its dependence on human timelines and errors. Visionary organizations are building strong capabilities in automating the infrastructure for production and logistics to support this speed-need of marketing teams. Stronger inter-dependencies will be established between departments forcing co-marketing KPIs across functions.
Five Trends That Will Reshape Digital Marketing and the Brand-Customer Equation
No two global markets are in the same level of digital maturity and so reflect trends unique to each. However, they do converge at some level on customer choices of the 3 Vs – video, voice and visual. This is of particular significance in lower literacy geographies and multi-lingual needs that drive new trends in search and social platforms.
Mobile Video on Demand (VoD)
VoD is now a no-brainer. Over a billion hours of video consumption daily by Youtube viewers, over 8 billion videos by Facebookers and with equally staggering numbers on Twitter and Snapchat, it is no surprise that over 87% of online marketers use video content. But the next wave of VoD will be the increase of what I call “RFC Content” I.e. Relevant, Forwardable & Commercializable Content. Much of what we see is a churn out of the old advertising style with tear-shedding emotional messages. The rise of this medium will be in geometric proportions. Especially in the inner markets, over-riding language and literacy barriers propelled by increase in mobile connections will see a rise in Product and Conversational Content; and Commerce embedded social content taking over.
Voice as the Primary Tool for Search and Social Media
Perhaps not fully leveraged all through 2018, but this will clearly become a growing trend in the near future. Human lethargy to type as well as lower literacy levels in inner markets will catalyze this shift. Marketers will be wiser to create voice based interactive modules that can engage users better than verbose text to provide information. So better fine tune that voice of yours as you begin to leave voice-prints all over the net!
Visual Search Over Text
Image search, together with voice search, will ease the tedious task and errors of type search. The Power of Google Lens and its immense application potential will open up great possibilities in sectors such as Travel, Healthcare, Education, Fashion to name a few. Marketers must collaborate with leaders in visual search tools to leverage this for their brands early and even participate in its Beta stage.
Augmented and Interactive Video Group Chats
Still in its nascent stage, this trend will be a definite enhancement of chat platforms that are currently very text restrictive. And as voice and video grow in search and social use, this natural extension will bring like-minded social groups closer together and creating stronger but closed peer to peer influence groups. Marketers will need to create data access points to weave into these micro group chats and use extensive AI to leverage conversations to their advantage.
Customer Becomes the New Big Influencer
Already a trend in the West, the trend of customer-certified products will rise and brand claims will lose relevance on hard sell promotions. Social influencers are already impacting purchase decision amongst the netizens and the credibility they bring steadily peels off the delusive claims of celebrity endorsers. And now, customer influencers are beginning to add a whole new dimension of post purchase review authenticity. Organizations must work on managing long term customer relations to ensure these brand ambassadors are active throughout their product use journey.
AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively. Simply embedding the features to their digital assets will yield little result and ROIs will be under the scanner. Marketers are getting overly swayed by content storytelling. That’s great for a few awards if it tugs at the heart but smart digital presence has to bear concrete business results and marketers who seamlessly integrate the organizational fluidity with agile innovative customer solutions will wear the crown and hold the shield with pride.
Feature Image credit: Shutterstock
By Charulata Ravi Kumar
Director of Digital Marketing at SP Jain School of Global Management
KFC has restored ties with its former chicken distributor Bidvest in the wake of a disastrous switch of its logistics contract to DHL, which resulted in the temporary closure of hundreds of restaurants as stock ran out.
The volte face comes just one month after the bungled switch from Bidvest to DHL began and sees Bidvest pledge a ‘seamless return’ to supply 350 of the chains 900 UK and Ireland restaurants.
Prior to 13 February Bidvest served as sole supplier for the fast food chains operations across the British Isles.
DHL has blamed software developed by Quick Service Logistics and ‘operational’ issues at its Rugby depot for its failure to deliver the goods,
A KFC spokesperson said: “Our focus remains on ensuring our customers can enjoy our chicken without further disruption.
“With that in mind, the decision has been taken in conjunction with QSL and DHL to revert the distribution contract for up to 350 of our restaurants in the north of the UK back to Bidvest Logistics.
“We’ve been working hard to resolve the present situation with QSL and DHL. This decision will ease pressure at DHL’s Rugby depot, to help get our restaurants back to normal as quickly as possible.”
KFC is still battling with the after effects of the breakdown in its supply chain with 3% of its restaurants still shut and others offering only ‘limited menus’ two weeks after being forced to apologise to customers in a responsive print ad.
Back in the 2000s, it was commonplace to see websites that were built using Flash. By viewing the source of a website, you’d often see very little HTML and an embedded SWF file. This meant a few things. First, the browser didn’t natively support Flash, so you had to download the Flash plugin. Browsers found it difficult to go into the SWF to read content. Amongst other things, this had a detrimental affect on SEO and accessibility.
In 2007, the iPhone was released. It didn’t support Flash. In 2015, Google moved all its YouTube videos to HTML5. In July 2017, Adobe officially announced it would stop working on Flash by 2020. People used Flash because it could do things that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript couldn’t do at the time. It’s incredible to see how far web standards have come (and what’s coming).
We can do a lot today that was previously only possible with Flash. Not only that, but we can do it in a way that’s far more accessible and performant. I’ll go over some of the groundbreaking things Flash could do and how we can go about doing them today.
Disclaimer: I love Flash, and it will always have a place in my heart, but for me at least, its time has passed. Just in case you’re wondering: there are still so many interfaces and engines running in Flash, especially for games, and this article addresses some of the issues that are very relevant there.
Video
One of the great things Flash heralded was video, offering basic support as early as 2002. It wasn’t until 2009 that the <video> tag was introduced in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Furthermore, Internet Explorer (IE) 8 didn’t support the <video> tag, and it wasn’t until 2011, when IE 9 was released, that it got support.
Now, we can simply write <video src="filename.mp4" />, although it is important to be aware of different video formats across browsers, the most popular being MP4, Ogg and WebM. Taking things a step further, it’s possible not only to support the <video> tag, but also offer fallbacks and helpful alternatives:
<video width="320"height="400"><source src="filename.mp4"type="video/mp4"/><source src="filename.webm"type="video/webm"/><source src="filename.ogv"type="video/ogg"/><!-- Flash fallback --><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"data="flash-player.swf?videoUrl=filename.mp4"width="320"height="400"><param name="movie"value="flash-player.swf?videoUrl=filename.mp4"/><param name="allowfullscreen"value="true"/><param name="wmode"value="transparent"/><param name="flashvars"value="controlbar=over&image=placeholder.jpg&file=flash-player.swf?videoUrl=filename.mp4"/></object><!-- Text Fallback --><p>No video support found. Please download the video below, or upgrade your browser: https://browsehappy.com/</p></video><ul><li><a href="linktomovie.mp4">MP4 format</a></li><li><a href="linktomovie.ogv">Ogg format</a></li><li><a href="linktomovie.webm">WebM format</a></li></ul>
Because YouTube makes use of the <video> tag and has an API, it’s possible to create a full-screen background video. Take the following YouTube video link code, for example:
Using the different parameters it’s possible to change the way the video behaves.
controls=0 Hides the controls.
showinfo=0 Hides extra information.
rel=0 Hides related content.
autoplay=1 Auto plays the video when the site is loaded.
loop=1 Loops the video.
mute=1 Mutes the sound.
Here’s the example put together, with Mr. Smashing Magazine himself presenting a talk:
Interaction And Gaming
Another thing Flash excelled at was interaction and gaming. The popular website Miniclip was founded in 2001 and hosted a wide range of Flash games. In 2008, it was valued at over £900 million and is still going today.
JUST A REFLEKTOR
JUST A REFLEKTOR is an interactive music video that rivals and even surpasses the capabilities of Flash. With the use of various web technologies, it’s now possible to interact with the video using a mobile device, as well as at one point using your webcam so that you actually appeared in the music video yourself!
The website Just A Reflektor makes great use of modern web technologies to create an interactive music video.
Cube Slam
There’s some fantastic web-based Chrome experiments online today, such as Cube Slam. Cube Slam is a game that makes use of WebRTC (an open web technology), letting you video chat and play a game within the browser. Although Flash was heavily used for video chat, it came with a number of drawbacks compared to WebRTC: It relied on the Flash plugin, it required a media server, and it had various security implications and poor performance.
Cube Slam is a web based Chrome Experiment that allows video chat whilst playing a game.
HTML5 Game Engines
There are a number of HTML5 and JavaScript game engines. This next example makes use of canvas and WebGL. WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is an API built in JavaScript that allows interactive 2D and 3D graphics within the <canvas> tag.
As mentioned in Good Boy Digital’s own post regarding the project (the creators of the example):
“Star Wars Arcade really pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with HTML5 and WebGL technologies. This allows for the creation of a single build that works seamlessly on both desktop and mobile browsers without having to download an app; the advantage of this being able to offer an ‘app like’ experience on all devices so anyone can enjoy it, instantly. No passwords, no App Stores, just hit the URL and play!”
I especially love this bit: “Just hit the URL and play!” One of my earliest “Wow” memories of the web was having my own website in 1999 and being able to type that URL into any computer connected to the web and view it. It seemed absolutely incredible to me that this was actually possible (and continues to amaze me to this day!).
Browser Support
One of the advantages of building something—especially a game, due to the extra complexity—in Flash that is still relevant today is browser support. Browser support is generally pretty good these days, and Can I Use can help us to quickly find out about the state of browser support for a particular specification. However, there are still discrepancies that could cause issues. So, if you’re OK with only supporting browsers that are installed with the Flash plugin you’re working with, then you’re likely not to encounter any cross-browser issues.
Typography
Flash was originally designed as an animation tool. As such, it had various limitations with typography.
Flash had a pixel-grid system. If typography was laid on the grid at X:100.3 :100.7 and, thus, out of alignment to the pixel grid, it would look blurred.
As a result, I found that pixel fonts were useful because they sat on the grid and remained crisp. Another limitation here would be if you used an 8-pixel font but set it to 10 pixels, it would go out of alignment with the grid and, again, be blurred.
Thankfully, today in HTML and CSS, we have a host of tools to help us. We can set fonts as an absolute unit in px (pixels) or, more common these days, use ems and rems to aid with responsive web design (I’ll be covering more on this later).
Another issue with Flash and typography was fonts. If a font wasn’t available on the device, a fallback font would be provided. To circumvent this in Flash, you could embed the font in the .swf file. By doing this, though, you added to the file size and, thus, the time that the SWF would take to download and appear.
That being said, what was possible with Flash was Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR). sIFR allowed HTML text to be replaced with Flash. Before this, in order to use custom fonts, we used images. However, using images didn’t allow for selectable text, and it meant you had to create images manually. Moving on from sIFR, developers came up with Cufón. Cufón avoided the use of Flash by using an SVG and VML version of a font. It was faster than sIFR and didn’t require the Flash plugin; but, again, with this technique, it wasn’t possible to select text.
Today, we have the CSS @font-face rule and a host of standard web fonts available:
In Chrome and Firefox (and, hopefully soon, Safari), we have font-display in CSS. If you’re using a custom font, by default the browser will wait to get the custom font. If it can’t get the custom font, it will use a backup font (the speed varies among browsers, but it is usually 3 seconds). This is known as a flash of invisible text (or FOIT). To improve this scenario, we can use the following:
By using swap, we’ll see the text immediately using the backup font. When the custom font is loaded, the browser will swap the backup for it. This way, the user gets to read the content as soon as it’s available.
Animation
One of the things that Flash did very well was tweening. Tweening is used to animate elements. In Flash, you could create an element in a keyframe, duplicate that keyframe along the timeline, and then add a tween.
With HTML and CSS, we can apply the same animation using @keyframes, transform and animation.
With Chrome Developer Tools, we can inspect and adjust the animation by going to Chrome Dev Tools → Cmd + Shift + P → Animation.
An example showing Chrome Developer Tool’s ‘Performance’ tab.
It’s also possible to debug potential performance issues that may arise when dealing with animation. In Chrome Developer Tools, there’s a “Performance” tab. By clicking this, then the “Record” circle icon, we can see a range of useful information. This technique greatly helped me when I built Mind’s Annual Report 2012-13, particularly the section of the website that has a map with animated circles showing the locations of Mind shops. Initially, the map section was loaded at the start, which caused repaint issues. Using the “Performance” tab, I was able to identify and update this, so the map only started animating when it was in view.
Vector Graphics
The web has benefitted and still does benefit enormously from careful consideration of file size. Back in the early 2000s, the web was mostly viewed on desktop computers, with slow dial-up modems. A simple image could take seconds or even minutes to load. To help with this, Flash made heavy use of vector graphics. Using vector graphics, where appropriate, instead of JPEG or GIF images, significantly reduced file size and thus load more quickly over the web.
Over the past few years, and particularly thanks to Sara Soueidan, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) have become more and more widespread on the web. SVG is an XML-based markup that enables us to create vector graphics for the web. It works extremely well with animation and I’ve had the pleasure of building some websites that make use of this: the Mind report website (previously mentioned) and How Clean Is England? which Sara mentioned on Twitter! Thanks Sara!
Mind’s Annual Report website made use of SVGs and animation to create a fun way to display their statistics for the year.The How Clean Is England? website was heavily based on illustration. SVGs and CSS animations helped to make the illustrations look crisp and keep file sizes to a minimum.
Responsive Web Design
One of the main pitfalls of building a website in Flash today is the lack of media queries. Today, mobile and tablet usage has surpassed that of desktop. In order to create the best experience, we must create a website that is accessible on all of these devices. On many devices, Flash will simply not load at all, and even if it did, it would most likely breach the viewport’s width or would scale and be unusable.
Using media queries, we can create a layout that responds to the content. Here’s an example:
<div class="someContent"><p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Est excepturi enim id ratione blanditiis voluptate dolore necessitatibus culpa maxime eius assumenda eveniet dolores odit sunt repellat, rerum amet delectus vel.</p></div>
ActionScript is used in Flash and, thus, has the same pitfall of SWF files mentioned earlier, in that it requires the Flash plugin. JavaScript, on the other hand, is readily available in all modern browsers.
Let’s look at an example of setting a variable in both and their differences:
With ActionScript, we declare that the variable is a number. If the variable is assigned anything else, it will get an error. JavaScript is loosely typed, which means we could assign the variable as something else, such as a string:
In JavaScript, if we wanted to check that it is a number, we could use typeof(x);, and this would output “number”. Another option would be to create a function and use isNaN to detect whether it is “not a number”:
functionisNumber(value){if(isNaN(value)){return value +' is not a number.';}return value +' is a number.';}
console.log(isNumber(42));// "42 is a number."
console.log(isNumber('forty two'));// "forty two is not a number."
With HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and many other coding languages), Git and GitHub make collaboration extremely easy. For example, if I wanted to edit the HTML of Smashing Magazine’s “Author Template,” via GitHub, I could click the “Fork” button. This would create a version of the files (also known as the repository) under my own name. I could then make any amendments I like and submit a pull request. This would give the owner at Smashing Magazine the ability to review my pull request and accept or reject it. Once accepted, the code would go in the main repository.
There are a number of great reasons for working in this way: You always have a backup of your work; you can revert to previous versions of your work, and collaboration becomes very easy. Someone could be working on one section of the website, or on the CSS or JavaScript, and when each team member has finished, you could review the changes and pull them in as required.
If we tried the same with Flash, it would be a lot more difficult having to save and send an .fla file each time. If multiple people were to work on the same .fla, things could get very confusing. With HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it’s’ possible to do a “diff” on the code, which allows us to compare and review the code. We can even select certain code chunks, bring them in, or comment on them for further review and work.
Conclusion
Flash was one of the reasons I started building websites. It pioneered in a lot of areas, and this led to people creating amazing things with it. Over the years, it’s pushed the web forward a great deal. Adobe’s official announcement of dropping support of Flash, though, does raise concerns. It would be a massive shame if millions of websites using Flash were lost. There’s a petition to open source Flash and Shockwave. I do hope we don’t lose it forever. We’ve had some great — and weird — times. I’ll leave you with this classic example of the “weird” to which I refer:
Simon Owen is an award-winning freelance front-end developer with over 10 years industry experience. He has worked on a number of successful projects for …
