Hasta La Creative!

Much to my dismay, not long into my tenure as a Facebook designer I found something in the company glyph kit worth getting upset about. There in the middle of the photoshop file were two vectors that represented people. The iconic man was symmetrical except for his spiked hairdo but the lady had a chip in her shoulder. After a little sleuthing I determined that the chip was positioned exactly where the man icon would be placed in front of her, as in the ‘friends’ icon, above. I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me.

Insert pun of “she has a chip on her shoulder about chips on women’s shoulders” – but sure, that makes sense. Odd little design idiosyncrasies tend to drive designers batty. That’s why they’re designers. Off she went, to fix the shoulder. And once that was done, she wanted to give her better hair, that old school helmet-bob is not feeling very modern these days.

Once she had sorted out the best hair for the woman, she went on to fix the man, making his shoulders a little softer and creating a silhouette for cases where a gendered icon was inappropriate. Then she moved on to placing ladies first, as the old saying goes.

Next, I was moved to do something about the size and order of the female silhouette in the ‘friends icon’. As a woman, educated at a women’s college, it was hard not to read into the symbolism of the current icon; the woman was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in.
My first idea was to draw a double silhouette, two people of equal sizes without a hard line indicating who was in front. Dozens of iterations later, I abandoned this approach after failing to make an icon that didn’t look like a two headed mythical beast. I placed the lady, slightly smaller, in front of the man.
The old ‘groups’ icon featured two men and one woman, the woman sat in the back left behind the larger centered man. It was an obvious refresh to use three unique silhouettes instead and, here again, I placed the lady first.

The new icons were saved into facebooks own work files and then with the help of other designers and front end engineers trickled their way out to the platform and apps once little iconic step at a time.

So how does it work? Presumably pretty simply:

After installing the Chrome extension, whenever a user opens a new tab they are greeted with a potential match. If both users click the heart, they can exchange messages in the same window. If not, they simply carry on browsing the Internet until they’re ready to open the next tab. The service banks on the fact that people open hundreds of tabs a day whilst browsing the Internet.

Co-founder Shib Hussain told Adland:

We designed Tab to be the most seamless and frictionless way to find love online. It fits into people’s normal online behaviour, so you can find love in every corner of the Internet.

For people like me who have basically given up on a) A work-life balance, and b) Ever finding anything approximating love, this could be exactly what us busy antisocial creative types need. Despite hearing almost daily from my Art Director how I should be on Tinder, I’m simply not excited by the idea of being actively rejected in both real life, and actively on the online dating scene. This might be a nice way of creating those serendipitous chance meetings in life, only in your browser as you desperately seek inspiration on Reddit. And who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll be asking “What’s a nice girl like you, doing in a Tab like this?”

You can find out more about Tab by visiting their site www.tab.dating (currently in beta, and launching later in the year).

1) Always check out your ad on multiple devices before running a campaign. Seriously, a lot of devices.

I decided to run a topical ad the day after Carlsberg was plastered all over social media with their “Probably the best poster in the world” stunt (a Shoreditch-based poster which dispensed free beer). I was going to use some borrowed interest to make myself relevant and funny. Unfortunately, while my ad looked acceptable enough in photoshop and on a PC screen, I later found out that it looked like shit on any mobile device. Huge mistake. Why did I not check this out before running the ad? Because I didn’t give it any consideration. Check out your ad on several iOS and Android screens before even thinking of hitting the go switch.

2) Consider what you’re CTA and business aims are.

My ad didn’t really have any Call To Action, or any business aims beyond making people laugh and maybe, just maybe crossing the eyes of a few ECDs. Then six months down the line when they’re reading my portfolio, some tiny unconcious bias creeps in, a few neurons remember the name of David Felton, and BAM – I’m drinking beers on a beach while we shoot a commercial for the Hawaii Tourist Board. But you should have less nebulous aims that that. Luckily, Twitter spoon-feeds you across the entire process and lets you customise your campaign to drive traffic, raise awareness, promote sharing and clicks or whatever you fancy. Here’s a big learning on my part: advertising on twitter is an extremely simple process. They could not make it any easier for you. It’s almost as if they want your money or something.

3) It’s true, adlanders all have iPhones and Macs.

There’s a bit of a cliche across the ad world that we’re all a bunch of Mac loving, iPhone using, Apple junkies. Personally, I’m fine with anything; I like my four-year old piece of shit Samsung phone, but I’m also not saying no to a brand new MacBook Pro at work if someone offers. Well the rumours are true. Out of 574 impressions, 505 were from iOS users. Even more shocking out of the 102 people who clicked or interacted with my ad, 100 were Apple users. That’s 98%. Now this leads to an interesting question – did my ad reach such a disproportionally high number of iOS users because I specifically targeted the advertising industry using industry keywords and accounts only followed by ad people, or because iOS users are more likely to interact with advertising? I’m veering towards the former, although there’s plenty of solid quantifiable evidence out there that Apple users spend more on apps, use more apps, and are willing to pay more for an app on average. Do they take this willingness forward when it comes to their relationship with advertising too?

Conclusion

It was good fun running my own miniature campaign on twitter, even if only reached 574 people and cost £5.89. My engagement rate of 18% was very high, well above the industry average based on any metric I’ve seen. However, I’m not sure it was high for a good reason – my dark and basically illegible ad, was a great example of a lack of preparation and it’s not too hard to imagine people clicking on it just to simply try to see what was going on.

The great thing about online adverting is there’s no minimum spend. It’s not like print where you need a media buyer, an agency and deep pockets just to get started. You could literally run a campaign where you only spent $5 per day. So my advice – give it a try. You can play around with being the client for the price of a cup of coffee.

It’s like an updated version of the SHOTS reel Markenfilm ad, which was based on the insight that creatives fast forward through the commercials to get to the commercials. This was also later done by VW so we badlanded it like the killjoys we are. The knowledge that Russian youtube viewers with a morbid curiosity for crashes speed up to the crash part of any given video serves to speak to the exact target that needs to hear Intouch’s message: Every year in Russia, around 200 thousand people are injured or killed in car accidents. Slow down, yo.

Very clever, I love it.

It’s time once again to duck and cover kids, as yet another Ad network has been compromised, just this time it’s Google! Shocker, yes, and the worlds largest reach.