Whose Faulty Vision

Revising Quotes

Have you ever tried to transcribe the way people talk exactly? I’m writing down quotes from a focus group I’m watching, and I find myself correcting their grammar as I go along. Fixing the subjunctive, subject-verb agreement, things like that. I’m not even consciously doing it, I just find myself writing down grammatically-correct versions.

Which is fine for what I’m doing, since it’s the gist of the statements that really matters, but I think I’d have a hard time being a court reporter or similar, doing something where you really need to get a word-for-word transcription.

Link: Marketing Lessons from the Election

An insightful post about marketing lessons to be learned from this election. Best bit:

Attack ads don’t always work. There’s a reason most product marketers don’t use attack ads. All they do is suppress sales of your opponent, they don’t help you. Since TV ads began, voter turnout has progressively decreased. That’s because the goal of attack ads is to keep your opponent’s voters from showing up. Both sides work to whittle down the other. In a winner-take-all game like a political election, this strategy is fine if it works.

So why didn’t the ads work this time?

The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. This is the lucky situation Apple finds itself in as well. Attacking an Apple product is like attacking an Apple user.

Insane Travel Week Disrupted

This sucks. This sucks a lot.

As I described last week, I was supposed to spend this whole week traveling for business: first Denver, then Vancouver, then Orlando. Well, I got to Denver just fine, but when I got to the airport this morning to leave for Vancouver, I discovered that there’s a new policy in effect for US to Canada travel. Having a driver’s license isn’t enough any more. Since the start of the year, you need a passport.

Now I have a passport, but I didn’t take it to Denver with me. I’ve always been able to get into Canada with a driver’s license before, so it didn’t occur to me that I’d need anything different.

Upshot is, I’m not going to Vancouver. I’m missing the focus groups there. Instead, I’m returning to NYC tonight, and flying down to Orlando tomorrow morning. I’m not sorry about missing the redeye I was going to take from Vancouver to Orlando, but I’m sorry about missing the groups. Not only would I have learned useful things, but it was face time with the client as well. This makes me look bad, and all because I didn’t think to grab my passport on the way out the door.

So yeah, I’m a bonehead.

Business Travel

Holy crap.

I’m going down to Atlanta tomorrow for two days of focus groups on the new account that I mentioned previously. That’s not a big deal.

But then, next week, I’m traveling for both accounts that I work on, as follows: Monday in Denver, Tuesday in Vancouver, Wednesday and Thursday in Orlando, and back to NYC Thursday night. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but I think I’m going to have to take a redeye from Vancouver to Orlando to make that possible, which I’m not at all looking forward to.

And then, the weekend after all of that crazy travel is Otherworld, so I’ll be in Connecticut for the weekend.

It’s going to be a crazy week.

Open letter to seemingly everybody who stops by my office

Please don’t touch my computer screen. You leave smeary fingerprints on it, and then stuff on my computer looks blurry until I clean it off. Do you do this on your own computer? If so, how do you put up with everything looking blurry?

Sorry, just had to get that off of my chest.

Feeling Good at My Job Again

Close to the end of the day on Wednesday, one of my department heads stuck his head into my office to ask if I’d be able to help out with a new business pitch. Like all new business pitches, it’s on a crazy timeline, and he needed me to organize some focus groups for today. We were just using company employees, so there was no recruiting problem, but I had to write a discussion guide, get together all of the necessary materials, arrange for video taping and moderate the groups.

Now, a couple of years ago, this would have intimidated and overwhelmed me, especially on such a short time scale. I wouldn’t have known where to start with the discussion guide, I would have been nervous about the moderating, and I undoubtedly would have forgotten some important steps of the process.

But none of that happened. I just finished with the groups, and they went great. Everything was in place, I moderated confidently and smoothly, and we got a lot of good material. And we had a cameraman who was really on the ball, so I’m sure that the videos will be good for the pitch.

So upshot is, I’m feeling good at what I do again. It feels nice.

Possible Changes at Work

For a while now at work, I’ve been wanting to have an account that would be mine, rather than one where I’m working under a more senior planner. I think I have enough planning experience and know-how that I think I could handle that at this point, and I’ve been chafing a little bit.

I have two bosses now, on the two accounts that I’m on. One of them just came in to my office to talk to me. There’s some reorganizing going on in the department in general right now, and as part of that, she wants to bring me onto another account that she’s working on. (Which would make her my only boss, taking me off of the other account.) This second account would be one where I’d start off working under her, and she would gradually transition off of the account, leaving me the sole planner on it. Which would be great for her, since she has too much on her plate as it is, and it would be great for me, since it would finally give me an account of my own!

Now, this is by no means a done deal yet. I need to meet with the account people on the team, to make sure that we’d work well together. And then there would be the whole transition process, of course. But I can see light at the end of the tunnel at last!