When is creative too creative? ALorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In et scelerisque sem. Nunc molestie neque augue, at gravida mi blandit eget. Aenean eu augue id lacus eleifend interdum. Cras sit amet metus sit amet velit lacinia ullamcorper. Nam facilisis a orci quis tempus. Vivamus id odio justo. Curabitur ut [...]

When is creative too creative? Direct ordering. Who knew!? Last week I was at a local beer garden and was in the process of ordering some food to have with my nice, cold, kolsch. This particular joint has a food truck and while you order your beer at the bar, you order [...]

There's actually an app that cuts your access to certain sites during certain times. The idea is to force you to relax and take time for yourself.This would not work for me. My reaction, Don't tell me what to do! And what would I actually do with forced time off? I'd probably sit and stare [...]

When is creative too creative? Back in the 90s, I attended a DMA session on the subject of typography. I'm not sure what I was expecting but this was the takeaway. "Everybody is aging, so use larger type." As a 30 something year old Designer somewhat new to direct mail, who could still [...]

When is creative too creative? When driving response in multichannel marketing campaigns, create a seamless user experience for the user. Typically, for subscription marketing campaigns we're talking simple campaigns within a multiple elements, aka a series of emails digital ads, and print efforts linking to landing pages, interstitials, to an order page. There's a tendency [...]

When is creative too creative? In direct marketing we sometimes put brand at the bottom of the list. Offer, lists and creative are prioritizes. But brand can be a powerful tool to ensuring orders and retention. By implementing a brand messaging, colors, fonts and iconography, the audience makes an immediate association. The campaign benefits [...]

When is creative too creative? Before you whip out the starbursts, stamps, and dingbat ... DON'T. Until you've determined all of the options. Here's why.1. Why do you need them? Effective Direct Response Design relies heavily on copy. Great copy doesn't need help to get response.2. Starbursts, stamps, and dingbats are invisible on their [...]

When is creative too creative? Many a control has been lost to cost. The design may be gorgeous, the paper elegant, and the photography exquisite, but cost can be is a package-killer. This doesn’t mean designing on the cheap, it just means being “creative” in your design approach and having a clearly defined [...]

When is creative too creative? Think of the layout as the Offer Delivery System. The goal is to engineer the components in order to lead the reader organically to the order device where they'll find all the tools they’ll need to make a decision to respond, with design that is up front, transparent, [...]

When is creative too creative? You may think of design as choosing hip colors, selecting up-to-date novelty fonts and sourcing eye-catching photos and graphics. And you wouldn’t be wrong — except when it comes to designing for direct response. Here, creative meets science — where visual, behavoral, emotional and technical come together. Knowing [...]