Is your cardboard Receptionist a mongrel?

My view has always been that your business card is no less important than your Receptionist at the office. In fact, thinking about it again ... it's actually MORE important!

I'll explain: in 90% of cases, your business card is the first impression a client will get of you and your company. The first company 'person' they meet directly after meeting you.

It's exactly the same as if they were walking into your reception area and meeting your Receptionist for the first time. If your Receptionist looks angry, quiet, meek, too trashy or just plain ugly and boring, like it or not that's the brand image they immediately have of your company.

And if your business card looks angry, quiet, meek, trashy or just plain ugly and boring, guess what ... that's the brand image they immediately have of your company too.

And guess what? First impressions are the hardest impressions to change.

So is your cardboard Receptionist a mongrel or megastar? If upon handing your business card to someone you don't get an immediate positive reaction or comment, chances are it's a mongrel, so here are some of the big do's and don'ts to unleash the megastar:

• Don't cut corners with your business card any more than you would your Receptionist. Make it solid - no whimpy paper stock, make it solid card.
• Don't be so ridiculously vain as to put a photo of yourself on it - do you really think you'd make a great/good-looking receptionist?!
• Use colour sparingly and well - 4 colour cards often look cheaper and more 'cut price' than brilliantly designed one and two colour cards. Every business I own/have owned has NEVER used any more than three colours. Adding matt & gloss varnishes, emboss or vercotype is far better than adding even more colour.
• Less is more - don't cram you card with so much information that it looks like a brochure for Pygmies. LESS IS MORE! The less you say the less you leave open to interpretation.

Six media planning mistakes

A very insightful article!

Emotional media: building a brand on radio

It's actually very easy to build a brand using radio in Australia. NRMA in particular did it extremely well in the 80's, with a long-running radio campaign that - gasp - won awards for the agency/Writers AND a lot of business for NRMA.

Radio is the theatre of the mind. The reason we develop a liking for so many radio personalities is that listeners are free to add their own visuals: face, hair length, style of dress, nervous tics ... the lot. The same applies to radio campaigns. On the surface there is little difference between stations until you take this into account and realise that the very difference is all in listeners' heads ... and ears.

Used creatively radio can drive sales and build brands as well as any other mainstream media. Used strategically it can deliver access to finite target audiences. Yes, Mums with kids are a crossover. And yes, Mummy's little angel may well know all the lyrics to the AMI's latest radio campaign, but like TV and print it's her role as a parent to avoid the situation.

Jingles thankfully made a graceful exit at the same time great radio campaigns did - the early 90's. It wasn't because the Writers who wrote great radio also wrote great jingles (radio jingles then were predominantly just soundtracks from TV commercials thrown on to radio, masquerading as a radio commercial). It was purely that after the 'recession we had to have' many agency clients began looking for far greater transparency and adland became rightfully nervous.

With that came an agency reaction of 'Shit! We have to trim our internal costs now if we're ever going to be able to afford 3 weeks in Cannes this year! Unload a few of the biggest salaries!!'

The greatest salaries were of course the greatest Creatives and thus, thanks to limited creative mentoring in the industry for the last couple of decades, the dearth of great radio today.

As for outdoor and ambient media, well, that's another topic ...