ProofHQ works with many retailers on all kinds of marketing collateral – both print and digital. Last week, The Times published an article titled “Grocers put their faith in coupons as shoppers go back to basics.” What I have found interesting is that the impact Sainsbury’s has made with printed coupons flies in the face of everything we assume about marketing in the digital age, mainly that print will eventually fade into obscurity as retailers focus their attention on digital.

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We wanted to share a great service called Scribit, which helps content marketers source and publish high-quality original content.

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to drive leads. Providing a regular flow of engaging content keeps a brand front-of-mind, positions a brand as a thought-leader and encourages readers to share content in their own social networks. However, there is a continual challenge for marketers to deliver new and compelling content.

Scribit is a new service from Vertical Acuity that helps content marketers source great content from a huge database of resources, and helps publishers syndicate their content to other sites. The advantage of the Scribit service is that readers stay on your site rather than being taken away to the content provider’s site.

Here is a short movie explaining more about the service:

Hat tip to Techcrunch for this story.

David Ogilvy has often been referred to as the “Father of Advertising“. He was admired for his innovation and creativity within advertising; an industry that needed such motivation to change back in the 1960s.

Despite having had no copywriting or marketing experience whatsoever in his earlier years, Ogilvy had however been a great salesman and had been asked to write an instruction manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA cooker, for the other salesmen he worked with. Thirty years later, Fortune magazine editors named it the finest sales instruction manual ever written. It was this very sales manual that later got him noticed and hired by his brother’s employers, a London ad agency called Mather & Crowther. And, in his own words, “three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world”, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Here are some treasured marketing quotes said by David Ogilvy through his years as an advertising executive:

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Thanks to Diego Zambrano

From the great folks at Flywheel Design…

Good design is the quickest, most cost-effective form of marketing.

Good design is the process of problem solving, not decoration.

Good design is always grounded in knowledge of the client’s needs.

What are your “Good design is…” quotes?

Jeremy Tuber of Being a Starving Graphic Artist Sucks has written a great review based on a recent article in Forbes magazine telling business owners how to cut their design costs using sites like Crowdspring, Elance and Guru.

The article was written in Forbes on February 16th called, “The Creativity of Crowds,” by Christopher Steiner.

Jeremy says that the problem is not that these sites exist – they have been around for years, but that they are creating a cult of “amateur design is acceptable”.  Add to this the need for all businesses to save money and professional designers start to feel the squeeze on rates and income.

However, Jeremy counters this by saying that ultimately good design wins because it gets a better result for the client.

Our view is that professional design beats amateur design hands down purely from a business perspective.  The way for professional designers to maintain their competitive edge is to be hyper-efficient.  Use good systems and processes to produce great design in less time.  This means that they can choose to increase their margins, reduce their charge rates or spend more time finding and winning new business.

Good designers who are INEFFICIENT designers lose twice.  They make less money and they don’t serve their clients well.

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As the recession bites there is daily news about CFO’s bearing down on marketing with sharp implements and slashing marketing budgets to the bone (see earlier post).

Kim Collins at Gartner has just released a report which confirms how much pressure marketing is under, but does provide some great advice for managing through the downturn.

In her report, “The Top Six CRM Marketing Processes for a Cost-Constrained Economy,” Collins warns against blindly cutting marketing during tough times, as this impairs growth when the economy improves.

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I have been reading a lot of Mark McGuinness’s work recently over at Wishful Thinking and have become a big fan.

Mark has published a new e-book called “How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself)“. Mark has been producing some great work on this subject and this book brings all of his thinking together in one place.

If you are a creative person yourself this e-book will help you:

* Understand your creative process
* Develop your creative talent
* Find more satisfaction in your work
* Influence other people
* Develop your collaboration skills

If you are a leader, manager, director or coach involved in the creative process it will help you:

* Understand how motivation affects creativity
* Get better work out of creative people
* Avoid (inadvertently) crushing people’s motivation
* Use rewards effectively
* Understand and influence many different types of people
* Facilitate creative collaboration

Topics covered include:

* What makes creative people tick
* Why motivation is crucial to creative success
* Why you can’t motivate anybody – but what you can do instead
* What Iggy Pop can teach you about management
* Why offering rewards can harm creative performance
* How to write 47 novels before breakfast
* Why some people seem so weird – and how to deal with them
* The positive side of peer pressure

I came across a great series of posts by Mark McGuiness on how to give and receive creative feedback.

He referenced a classic quote from Paul Kitcatt, Creative Partner at Kittcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw, about why agencies keep creatives away from clients:

Old-fashioned ad agencies keep their Creatives away from clients. With good reason. I know one who, having presented his work and had it rejected, got up on the table and mooned the startled client. They’re animals, you see, and keeping them hidden adds to the mystique.

So is this true.  If you are a designer, what’s the worst you’ve done?

By the way, I thought that this post should go in the “Best Practice” category.