How to Draw Yourself Out of Trouble.

Illustration > VersaMe

Being able to draw gets you out of a lot of sticky design situations. Maybe I lean on it too much, but if I need a technical illustration of a product I’m doing a brochure for, it’s easier for me to just whip one out myself without having to go find someone to do it, get an estimate, get an ok to spend the money, wait for them to fuck it up a couple of times before I like it and then get back to work. Who’s got time for that?

CHEATING: Yep. This is my animation cheat. Same head, different mouths. This is what I gave my talented After Effects friend so he could do the fake animations for our video.

CHEATING: Same with this. I gave him a ton of different mouths for both characters so they’d look like they were blabbing.

CHEATING: Same here. Below is all this cheating in action. :-)

Being an illustrator also comes in handy getting ideas across. Fast. When I was working with VersaMe (they made the Starling early education wearable), I had LOTS of opportunities to put my drawings to work. I’d had to make a series of YouTube videos, from scratch, in about a week. So I figured out an idea that would work, populated the spots as much as I could with stock photos and then filled in the gaps by hand. The spots were heavy on After Effects (lots of stuff zooming in and out and such) so the drawings had to have a little extra something something to spice things up.

Oh, I’m no animator. I mean, I’d love to be, but I don’t have the time. So I faked it. I drew out tons of key frames and handed them over to my After Effects editor to do his magic with ‘em.

There were also a lot of technical drawings to be used in gif animations I’d end up building for onboarding tutorials. But the really fun stuff, personally, was concepting story ideas for an educational gaming app we were developing to tie into the Starling. We had a handful of story ideas that we wanted to test via Facebook ads. Really shoestring market research – the ad with the most clicks for more info was the theme that won. I’m a big fan of those old Bell Science Films, and I wished and wished that the child-brain-cross-section idea was the winner. It totally wasn’t. Mad Face Emoji!

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Describe Something That’s Never Existed.

Strategy > Product Description

VersaMe made an early-education wearable that would count the number of words a child heard throughout the day. Not WHAT the words were, mind you. It just counted how many of them there were. Parents would get detailed data in almost real-time about how many words were said, and when. So, what would you call that? A word counter might be your first thought.

Now think of a device that counts your steps. A-ha! Easy, right? A Fitbit or, step counter or whatever. Tons of them that exist. But you already know, after decades of education from various sources, that exercising is good for you. Even walking adds benefits to your health. So, steps x healthy = the more steps the better. Done. Good job.

WHAT DOES IT DO? So small, so cute, so frustrating to describe! AAAAAAHHHHUUUGHH!

But the vast majority of people don’t know why more words are good for your baby. When I started working on this, the best way to get people to understand the product (once you established it was a wearable for infants that improved Junior’s educational potential by counting the words he heard) was to say, “It’s like a Fitbit for words.” You could literally see cartoon lightbulbs go on over people heads.

But that’s no way to brand a product. You can’t rely on another brand name to describe your product no matter how different an industry it’s rooted in. This is a really stupid, hard problem. It starts to sound like a really mean logic puzzle when you get into it a bit.

Wearable Word Counter - Doesn’t explain the fullness of the system (hardware, mobile software, benefits)

Advanced Early-Education Wearable - Doesn’t say what it does.

Early-Education System - Well, it’s more than a word counter, but again, not very descriptive.

Wearable Word Tracker - Sounds like it keeps track of which words a baby hears

Also, the Starling didn’t record the words a baby heard. It literally just counted them. So words like tracker were verboten.

FINAL: Where we ended up on the redesigned packaging – complete early education system. Which was super accurate, but still a clunky mouthful.

This kind of technology never existed for everyday consumers, so they had no point of reference to lean on to understand it. In the end, the closest I got was to describe it as an early-education monitor. And I thought that was SUPER close. After all, you use a sleep monitor to be sure your baby is sleeping enough. Why wouldn’t you use an education monitor to tell if your baby’s learning enough? I’ll always wish we had more time to reconfigure in this direction to see how this would have done. Never underestimate how hard it is to sell something no one has ever seen before. And know that the only solution involves repeated education, and time. And lots of both.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Be One and Done.

Advertising > One Sheets

VersaMe was doing most of its heavy marketing lifting online. It made sense (sorry print pubs), but even still, there was always a need for printable downloads and leave-behinds for meetings, that kinda thing. When we shifted focus to our Partner program, we needed specific materials for all that. Plus, we brought on sales reps to follow-up leads in a couple of industries we were getting traction with. And those guys love leave-behinds.

We’d already made a killer brookchure (I think every time I mention it I’m going to change the name), that covered a LOT of ground for the various organizations that could use the Starling. But once we got a nibble, we needed something to send them that was more specific and direct in asking for the sale. That’s where these little one-sheets came in. They were informative advertorials that acted as really brief product brochures for each field. If you’ve read any of my bits about brochures, you know I have a sort of system. For a one-sheet, the rules are the same, but also a little different. While no one wants to read a brochure OR a one-sheet, if they’re holding it then they did qualify for a call to action. So, they’re a little more likely to read at least a little bit (if not half) of your long copy. And for this format, the eye-candy rule still applies. Pepper the thing with visual stimuli and repeat your points over and over in pull-quotes and captions. Keep things brief, lively and kinetic, with an eye on the hierarchy of your messaging.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Make a Package a Salesperson.

Design > Packaging

If you’re an entrepreneur reading this, let me tell you – packaging is as much the product as the product is the product. VersaMe’s founders had the Starling itself designed to perfection. A powerful wearable in a sleek, cute little device. Even the Starling’s dock was extra-credit handsome. But the product packaging was made before any of the messaging was solidified. So it went the Apple route – sparse and simple. Thing is, the Starling’s tech wasn’t as simple as printing “iPhone” on the lid. It was actually really hard to even explain what the Starling was. In fact, we’d struggle for two years with what to even call it. After all, VersaMe didn’t have the luxury of making their product and being able to say it was finished. Far from it. There were still bugs being fixed like crazy, software updates being slammed through, overseas suppliers to keep on top of, investors to update, and all kinds of other important things going on. I noted this issue with the packaging when I started working on the Starling’s Kickstarter launch, but it wasn’t high on my priorities for practical reasons (it was only sold online initially). Remaking the packaging is expensive and time-consuming and really wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear just weeks before the big launch.

FINAL: Packed full of useful info about both the product and the problem it’s meant to solve for you’re little one. Oh, and the asterisk in the headline? We were always extremely careful to not overpromise the product benefit and instead of walking back such a statement (which was scientifically true and proven anyway), we turned it to our advantage by referencing the study and pointing people to learn more at the VersaMe online research center I had built.

Eventually we’d get feedback on the current packaging that would push it up to the top of my list. The buyer at Barnes and Noble looked at the box and said flatly, “It’s not ready yet.” And she wasn’t all wrong. The product was good to go but the packaging would never sell it without someone standing there explaining it to you. I went to our local B&N and took a ton of photos of where the box would live. I even even snapped a few existing Starling boxes which I placed on the shelves to show the gang back at VersaMe how they really got swallowed up. These are important steps that should A) be implemented before you even start sketching ideas for a package, and B) demonstrate to a client why their current packaging isn’t working.  We all agreed it was missing a lot of curb appeal so how could we compete there?

BEFORE: The Starling product was beautifully designed. But no matter how beautiful a product is, if it comes in a box, the box is also the product. And it needs to sell the product. The Starling box was simple and clean, but really didn’t communicate the importance and benefits of the product inside.

COMPS: Look, no one wants to redesign their packaging, no matter how much they know they have to. I started from the ascetic they wanted to achieve to begin with – clean and simple, only with a lot more info about what this special wearable is and can do. Even still, the best description we had for the thing that’s never existed was the confusing, “Wearable Word Counting System”. Because, still, what the Hell is that?

COMPS: The Starling’s value proposition was more compelling (at first glance) than “Wearable Word Counting System”. I added a lifestyle shot of an existing older-than-newborn baby to define the category and the big shocker of a proposition to attract any shelf-browser’s attention. Shown here are color and side panel variances.

COMPS: Yep, the back of the box. Everything had to work so hard and this was working the hardest. So many points of value for this product. Too much? Well, I don’t see how you could leave anything out with a product so full of important benefits.

It wasn’t just a matter of being louder or bigger, or more obnoxious and loud. The new package had to be true to our product, be informative, and be compelling to our audience. It also had to be inexpensive to produce and easy to switch out. Telling our story took a long time and was necessarily layered. So I went unconventional. I didn’t lead with an illustrative lifestyle photo of the Starling in action. If a picture says a thousand words, it still wasn’t enough to explain the Starling. Besides, they had already done that. I didn’t lead with a giant product shot (Pretty but what is it?), or our logo (no one knew who we were). Instead, I screamed our proposition – Loud and proud. If it took time to get people to understand the Starling, then I needed to get their attention first. Then I’d use bullet points, diagrams, eye candy, and short captions to educate them quickly.

In the end it worked. Kind of. For the Starling, typical rules of packaging just didn’t work, so I got to break them all – which was fun. Think of this the next time your project isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Maybe you need to tackle it from a different angle.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How Honesty Isn’t Always the Best Policy.

Strategy > Sales

Before I came on board, VersaMe, makers of early education technology, had brought on an expensive big box rep group with great credentials. Turned out they sucked for lots of reasons, but they managed to arrange a phone call with a buyer form Barnes & Noble while I was in California and so I took the call with co-founder and CFO, Nicki Boyd. We did our thing and at the end, the buyer was still on the fence when she asked, “Are you going to be at ABC next week?” “Of course we are,” I said. “I’ll get you the booth number later today.” She said, “Fine, I’ll come by your booth Friday afternoon at 2 to take a closer look at the Starling.” We hung up the phone and I looked at Nicki and said, “Guess what? We’re going to the ABC show.”

ABC SHOW: Mmmmmm. Vegas convention center. Soak it in.

Of course we had NO plans to go to ABC. Nicki didn’t even know what it was. But I did. ABC is the huge annual, baby gear trade show in Vegas for wholesale buyers big and small. I’ve done ABC multiple times in the past for Wrybaby. Booth space typically starts at around $5,000 for the three and a half day show. That doesn’t count your airfare, lodging, and food. Nor does it include what it costs to have a decent presence there. And if your product is a high-tech baby gadget, don’t even go if you’re only going to use what they supply you for $5K, $10K, or even $15k: plain industrial carpet; two folding chairs; dark blue fire-retardant curtains as your walls; a plastic trash can; and a white plastic sign hanging from the curtains with your company name and booth number printed in Helvetica Regular. No, you’ve got to either spend $$$$ or $$ and be clever. We had to do the latter. Because this was a one off show for us. Of course we wanted to be in a big box store, but at the time we were really trying to make a connection with consumers on our own. We weren’t focused on a wholesale strategy. So it was worth the gamble to go and make our Barnes & Noble meeting, but we’d also have the chance of meeting other relevant big box buyers (Target, Buy Buy Baby, etc.). Not to mention all the indie mom and pop buyers.

ABC SHOW: Welcome to the show. Here’s what you get for all that $$$! Now to paint some lips on this pig.

This post isn’t about booth design. Because our booth ended up being the least expensive version of what it would take to pass for looking like we had advanced tech to offer, that we knew what we were doing, and that we had done shows before. All were important bars to meet for any exhibitor. OK, I’ve gone this far, so I’ll give you some quick exhibitor tips for going on the cheap. Get a pop-up display to use as your back wall and get a snazzy, eye-catching graphic wrap made for it. After 8 years of doing big shows twice a year for Wrybaby, I had never used a pop-up (I always had those spaces custom built), but for VersaMe I used monsterdisplays.com. They were affordable, fast, and the quality was great. Still, that solution alone is pretty lame. You gotta spice it up with furniture. Don’t rent tables and chairs from the show. It’s expensive and they look like shit. Find an IKEA nearby and go buy the small tables and chairs you need there. Also, if you’re going to display a product, get some shelving there, too. Oh, and some accent rugs for color. Then get an Uber and take it all to the convention center and start building. In the end you’ll have something that’s somewhat unique, eye-catching (if you bought the right stuff) and a step or two above being a basic bitch. Your booth neighbors will also not hate you.

ABC SHOW: A quick Uber to IKEA and we’re in business. A table set in company colors (YAY IKEA) for our big Barnes & Noble meeting (and whoever else we’d be talking to)!

Anyhoo, we made it there. Our lodging was an AirBnB apartment in a dingy mixed-use building behind the convention center, whose retail anchor was a psychic. The dark halls smelled strongly of heavily seasoned fried foods. It was amazing. We got our goods at IKEA, built them all night, arrived for the first morning of the show...and waited.

We made contact with interesting folks big and small (a lot of ABC is meeting buyers, then closing sales after the show). We also got to practice the pitch, refining it here and there for everyone who stopped (and there were a lot). Finally, the moment of truth – our Barnes and Noble buyer arrived. We went through our pitch as she stood looking looked at the display we’d set up. The Starling was out of its box perched in front of a pyramid of the packaging behind it. As I talked, I saw she was looking hard at the packaging. She asked a lot of smart questions, and then things went quiet. She was still looking at the packaging when she said, “I feel like It’s not ready yet. Let’s stay in touch.” She thanked us and she was gone. We’d taken a chance and it didn’t pay off.

ABC SHOW: Here are some very real, very terrifying things one could purchase at the ABC Show. Don’t ask me why. They were in a catalog I found near a trash can by the bathrooms. I wondered if this company also had a pending meeting with our Barnes & Noble buyer.

After the show, I followed-up with the buyers we met. Especially our Barnes and Noble friend. I wrote that it was great to meet her and I totally understand her assessment that we weren’t ready for prime time yet. In fact, I forgot to mention to her that we’d heard that before, and we were just wrapping up a redesign of the packaging. I was getting some final mockups next week, and when I did, I’d send some photos over to her. Of course, there was no redesign underway. So now I had a week (including the weekend) to redesign the packaging. I threw myself into a full study on the project and got founder approval. I’d still heard nothing back from the buyer, so I kept cranking. I printed designs and built fake boxes, photographed them, and sent them off to the buyer. Again, I heard nothing back. For weeks. She didn’t reply to my follow-ups. I was bummed. We took another chance and that didn’t work, either.

Three weeks later I got an email out-of-the-blue from Barnes and Noble. It was a PO from their purchasing department with instructions on how to register as a vendor. They wanted 500 units for a test run in a few stores. We did it! It all worked! Except, wait, was it because of the packaging? Because it would take time to print the new sleeves for reals and get 500 existing boxes unwrapped and repackaged. I wrote to ask if they expected the new packaging. I wrote everyone – buyer, purchasing, underlings, interns. No one would get back to me. So, we shipped the order in the old packaging.

I wish this story ended with something cool, like, “They sold out in minutes and the buyer took us out for a fancy dinner and we swapped stories and laughed all night long”. But what happened is usually what happens when you’re a small business working with a behemoth. We heard nothing. As a vendor you get sales information every week. Or at least you’re supposed to. We didn’t for a really long time, so I wrote to everyone in the organization to fix it. Finally, months later, I got a spreadsheet from them and the total units on hand were incorrect, and sales were listed as none. We asked which stores they were in, and they couldn’t say. After a while, I had to turn my attentions elsewhere. About 6 months later I got an email from Barnes & Noble’s purchasing dept. They were planning a reorder, and they wanted to know if we had enough units in stock. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote back again and again, saying yes – we were ready to go. Then I got an email alerting me that there was a new buyer. So I called her to say we were so excited to supply her with more Starlings, and she said, “Oh, we have no intention of ordering more Starlings.” I never heard from them again. And that, my friends is how most big box adventures end with a 😐.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Achieve Good, Fast and Cheap.

Advertising > Video

They say it’s impossible. That you can only pick two. Want it fast and cheap? Well, it’s not going to be good. You get it. I do, too, and agreed with it until I figured out how to get all three at once.

VersaMe’s Starling was an amazing little piece of technology. If you haven’t read the strategy bit behind this, then take a few minutes and go for it. You’ll get the big picture. This part’s all about the YouTube videos we launched in support of a giant AdWords buy worth tens of thousands of dollars. And I only had two weeks to concept and produce video for it.

When pitching the Starling, there’s a lot to get across. We had to describe a wearable technology for early-learning that no one had ever seen before, and then explain the problem it solved to people who didn’t know the problem existed. Before I got involved, VersaMe had signed onto an expensive Google AdWords plan where Google would assign you a personal rep who’d not only set you up with their best practices for production on every front, but also do Google-y things in the background to maximize your kill count. First, I dove into the secret sauce they gave us on video production. What you see here follows EVERY one of Google’s recommendations to the letter.

They say if you don’t have anything to say, sing it. Well, if you have too much to say, sing it and add pyrotechnics, a chorus line, and maybe a donkey. That was the idea behind these spots. The Starling’s whole existence involved explaining some pretty dry early-education research. And, as I note in the strategy part, you couldn’t really prove any kind of results, because, well, the results would be intangible. Oh, it worked, or would work, based on decades of research, but not like a vacuum that could pick up a bowling ball. You couldn’t immediately see X affect Y. And remember, even though we were spending a lot of money on placement, production had to be done on a shoestring.

This is the fun part for me. No time and no money – so what can I bring to this party to help solve the problem, be on brand, and come in on no budget? It’s such a challenge! Hahaha. Oh, also, the spots had to really make a big impact. 

FINAL: One of my illustrations in the Brain Hacking spot. They go by so fast! See more of my illustrations for these spots here.

WORK: My professional storyboard style and OH! Hey, look! It’s me at VersaMe actually drawing the brain hacked baby! Yes, that tie does go with that shirt.

Luckily, I’s cans draws. In various styles, too. So I put together a kinetic, breathless campaign for the Starling that a talented After Effects editor I knew (Peter Baker with sound assistance from his partner Anthony Proctor) could hopefully put together quick. I boarded out the spots, then illustrated or scrounged up all the elements and laid them out in a super-detailed, layered Photoshop Tiff. The “animation” I illustrated frame by frame, and I included them as layers for Peter, too. My copywriting wife had the perfect voice for this, so we recorded her VO in a sound studio in Charlotte (Hi, Ground Crew!). Peter would get the VO and Tiff file and apply his After Effects wizardry. Then we’d make some adjustments, and send it off to Anthony for SFX additions and final mixing. In the end, each of these spots cost about $1,250 to produce.

Between following Google’s best practices, the frenetic pacing and the fun visuals, the view-through rates for this campaign were off the charts. After so many years in the business I’ve become more than a little cynical regarding praise from people who you’re paying tens of thousands to. Right? But our Google rep was legit blown away to the point where I didn’t think she thought these would do well at all! Of course we didn’t stop there. We started running these spots on every other platform, too. We also tried some tamer material too, but later on. It was more traditional tech/baby stuff that was soft and fuzzy and important sounding. The analytics on that weren’t as amazeballs in comparison to the fun stuff, which kind of surprised me. Oh, why don’t I also show you the stuff we did with social influencer and legit funny guy, DudeDad. He made some of his own videos, and you can see how someone else explains the Starling to parents.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Make the Complicated Simple.

Design > Brochures

Every client is different, and every marketing problem is different. But sometimes (although rarely) you don’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. If something works, heck, keep it! I already had a brochure-making system that worked and I already made a bookshure (I really need a better name) for VersaMe’s Starling Partners program. It was a cool idea that worked great, so we kept all the physical formatting (same size, dimensions, heavy cover and nice page weight) for the next project. Besides, if you have to do multiple brochures for a company, you might as well build a library that looks uniform and tight when they’re all together.

FINAL: The name and logo I created for VersaMe’s platform came directly from how it worked. Also, Spoke’s not a bad name for a company that’s all about verbal communication, right?

The Starling was VersaMe’s early-education wearable. You can read all the deets here, but in short, The Starling was based on a super advanced platform that VersaMe created called Spoke ( I named it that based on the eventual infographics). The Starling logged data about an infant’s early-developmental progress and sent it to Spoke. Spoke would process that data and send it (along with recommended action items) to the parent and any parent-approved care givers. For consumers, the data usually just went to parents, grandparents or a nanny. But if parents wanted, they might also include their pediatrician. If an infant is a little short on direct verbal communication, their parents and the pediatrician would recognize that and, at the regular visit, they could figure out ways to improve that outcome together. Think of it like an educational thermometer that parents could share with their pediatrician.

Anyway, that’s it’s simplest version of how VersaMe’s Spoke platform works. Spoke was developed to sustain the maximum amount of early development team building. Unlike so many of today’s algorithms, this one wasn’t built to exploit user data to deliver relevant advertising. Spoke was built to deliver relevant, actionable educational opportunities to a team of caregivers in the development network the parents created, in order to meet their child’s specific needs. Cool, right? And that’s what this brochure had to explain to an audience that wouldn’t want to get into the coding weeds about exactly how that was even possible. Investors, partners, etc. just wanted to know the basics of how Spoke worked and what its potential was. 

And I made up everything you just read. Sort of. Mostly. Look, although Spoke’s functionality was clear for the founders and developers (so they could build it), no one ever really defined it in a way regular people would understand. Even though I’d made a name for myself making complex stuff simple, I was lucky to have the capable help of VersaMe’s Product Manager, Susan Tahir. Together we defined, named, branded, iconically mapped, invented creative uses for, and I can safely say, improved the complicated process that made this Spoke so valuable.

So for the brochure (and this didn’t have to be a brochook): same company; different audience; different product; slightly different look. This had to convey all the existing brand attributes, but send a different message – we were confident, smart, sophisticated, and had created a (truly) amazing platform.

INFOGRAPHICS: I really enjoyed designing the graphics showing how Spoke worked for different users. It’s was crazy complicated and I got it boiled down to an easy-to-follow, step by step guide.

I kept with my favorite system of solving one problem per spread, but this was so targeted, that I didn’t need to go overboard on the eye-candy and repetition. Here’s how this one broke down:

Cover: Sexy and High-Tech.

Spread 1: What we’re doing is a big fucking deal

Spread 2: Look, here’s why it’s amazing for everyone...

Spread 3: ...and here’s how it changes everything

Spread 4: Here’s exactly how it could be used to do this...

Spread 5: ...and this

Spread 6: You’re already behind in this emerging, proven technology

And we’re out. If you’ve seen the other VersaMe stuffs I did (the Partner Brochure, or the videos, or even the packaging) this a similar example of taking existing materials and jerking the message into new territory without having to recreate everything.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Not Make a Brochure a Brochure.

Design > Brochures

I was recently in a meeting with a CEO who was newly hired by a long time client (not VersaMe). He didn’t have the history on what lousy shape the marketing had been in before I started helping to pull it together. He mentioned his desire to increase B2B sales and I told him we’d recently finished a brochure for just that purpose. The CMO handed it over to him, and he leaned back and flipped through the brochure for nearly 2 seconds before he tossed it on his desk and said, “Well, this is table stakes.”

FINAL: The cover of the brochure that wasn’t really a brochure. Or was it? < Insert evil laugh here >

FINAL: Probably the most important spread in the brochook. Publishing information! So important-looking! :-)

I bring this up, not because it was kind of a shitty thing to do and say, but because it says a lot about what a brochure has to do. First, let me say that about a month before his arrival at the company, an old brochure (from before my time) existed. It was missing the logo on the cover. Actually it wasn’t missing, but the logo was the printed in the same color as its background color. So the tag line was visible in white and you could juuuussst barely see the logo if the light was shining on it just right. That CEO was actually lucky to even have table stakes to look at. Hahaha. But to my point – even though he didn’t look at the thing from the perspective of the reader it was designed for, which you should ALWAYS do no matter what C-level you are, he DID give just about the right amount of attention to it.

No one wants to read your brochure. Sorry, they don’t and they won’t. Not all of it, at least. That’s why you’d actually laugh out loud if you read all of a brochure I’ve designed and written. Look, every spread has got to solve one problem. Not page, SPREAD. But you can’t do it all at once, like in one big piece of copy. You’ve gotta boil down the point you want to make to its shortest, most effective form, and then repeat it on the same spread in different forms - pull quotes, diagrams, testimonials, icons, photos, captions. So that no matter what catches their eye as they flip through like that CEO did, something important will stick with them whether they like it or not (or even know it, or not).

FINAL: The first real spread is all about authority. This book is factual and the information comes from big places and important professionals.

All this being said, at VersaMe, we created a really quality piece as a leave-behind/mailer for our new Starling Partners Program. Our audience was libraries, pediatricians, speech language pathologists, pre-schools (public and private), teachers, and non-profit organizations. These people, who already knew the importance of early-education, were seeking out emerging technology that could: help their missions; keep them relevant; and in some cases, keep them well funded. This brochure assignment turned out to be my favorite ever because I decided I wasn’t going to make a brochure at all. Instead, I wrote a BOOK about the problems the reader faced. And midway (SPOILER ALERT), the Starling would appear as a fantastic example of what was available to solve those problems.

Because VersaMe were experts on early-education (true), and what we had to say in here was important (also true), we had to make this brochure (bookchure? brochook?) look important. That’s why I wrote it in a sort of third-persony way and even added publishing info to the title page (sometimes it’s the littlest things that do the most work for you).

FINAL: Second spread is empathetic. We know your struggle is real.

FINAL: AH! Third spread and we final get to the Starling. But still talking about it as if we had nothing to do with it until the second sentence of the copy.

As a side-note, VersaMe had always wrestled with a minor identity crisis. They had only one SKU, the Starling, so did they really need the VersaMe name? Was it confusing? Should they just call the company Starling? It didn’t make since to have an umbrella company until you’ve got more kids to put under the umbrella. Still, always plan for success. Who knows when those new products would come (turns out not very long, after all). So in this case, using VersaMe as the author and publisher of this book, and Starling as the example solution late in the story, actually helped define the company/product name hierarchy for us. And it was just good theater.

Anyway, here’s how I broke down the spreads before designing it:

Cover: Looks like a book from a research company. I see someone who looks like me and what’s that cool star thing?

Spread 1: This information we’re giving you is as legit as these researchers, respected people, and institutions.

Spread 2: Your job is super hard, we get it.

Spread 3: There’s a thing called the Starling that will seem like a miracle to you.

Spread 4: The data you could get from something like the Starling could finally prove what you do is effective.

Spread 5: Organizations are already using this Starling thing.

Spread 6: Something as helpful as the Starling is easy to set up.

Spread 7: Look at these smart smarties who are helping your peers.

Spread 8: This is all it takes to solve your problem. Not scary or complicated at all.

FINAL: Reading left to right, spreads 4-8

And there you go. I mentioned above that no one wants to read a brochure. But people like reading books. Even thin-ish, square paperback books that give the right reader true, helpful information that they’re interested in, delivered in a way that welcomes them to learn about a very real solution to the problems they have while trying to help their communities to raise their children right.

Remember that dismissive CEO from before? It wasn’t two minutes after he tossed my brochure on the table before he snapped it back up and flipped straight to the spread touting  friendly, knowledgeable professionals. Pointing to the feature photo of his IT Manager, he asked, “How’d you get him to smile? I’ve never seen a head of IT look that happy.”

Boom.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Market a Product No One’s Seen Before That Solves a Problem No One Knows About.

Strategy > Branding

OMG the world needs this early-development technology. I’m dead serious. But even though this revolutionary wearable looks simple, how it works is actually pretty complicated. And did I mention the results aren’t immediate? (Just wait, I’ll get there). But one thing is absolutely clear – the result of using this technology means your child will get a substantial educational head-start over his or her peers. That head-start begins in infancy, and keeps distancing your child ahead of others for life.

PRODUCT: This is the Starling. So tiny, so cute, so powerful.

FINAL: One of the first things I made at Versame – a 6”x9” two-sided handout for parents touting the Starling’s benefits.

The great advantage of doing what I do at this point in my career is being able to choose the projects I work on, and the people I work with. I really liked the people at VersaMe before I even knew about the product. Chris and Jon, two of the company’s founders, contacted Kelly and I out of the blue. They had left Silicon Valley like we did, and now lived just a couple of towns down the I77, in Huntersville. They explained that they were fans of our parenting board book, Safe Baby Handling Tips. In fact, the bit about Playing with Baby was one of the early slides in their investor pitch for a startup they were launching with a third partner, Nicki “The Money” Boyd (the nickname I gave her). Nicki controlled the finances and managed the development team back in Redwood City, while the rest of the team worked out here in NC.

BEFORE AND AFTER: The original packaging on the left didn’t communicate the product or it’s value. My redesign on the right led with the value proposition and steadily unfolded the whole story in easy-to-digest snippets.

Kelly and I met Jon and Chris for coffee and they explained what they were making. They had a passion for early education and learning (it ran in their family). They knew that the education system was not only broken, but historically broken and getting worse. From studying years of scientific research they concluded the only way to nip the problem was, literally, in the bud. They sought to jump-start the learning process as early (and as correctly) as possible. This was the problem they worked on at Stanford and they already went through a successful round of funding. The hardware and development infrastructure was built, and they were about to launch on Kickstarter. The three had a lot of the planning done (and it was good) but they asked us on to help them out with tightening up the branding and early messaging. That’s when we learned all about the Starling.

The Starling was a beautifully designed, high-tech wearable for children 0-4 years old. When you clipped it to your child’s clothes, the Starling would count every word spoken to your baby throughout the day. It did this in virtual real-time, without recording, and sent the data to your phone with beautiful graphics telling you how many words your child heard that hour, that day, that month, that year. It let you set word count goals to challenge you every day. Anticipating how hard it can be to carry on a one-sided conversation (Chris and Jon were also parents), the app gave you fun daily prompts to help you keep talking to your baby at every occasion - in the car, during your afternoon run with the jog stroller, at bedtime, etc. Feeling competitive? There was even a leader board that you could use to see how much quality engagement you gave your child compared to other Starling parents. Amazing, right?

I bet I can guess what you’re thinking right now. “Why?”

Why all this technology to talk to a newborn? It’s not like I’m NOT going to say anything to my baby, so why all the extreme fuss? You’re not wrong to think that. But here’s a big fact – the more words you say to a child from 0-4 years old, the more likely they are to reach their full potential. And the “to” is super important. You can’t just talk “at” your child, like over your shoulder while you’re doing the dishes. No, doing that doesn’t work the same way. Think reading, with the child on your lap. Or telling a story while making lots of eye contact. There you go, that’s the right stuff. It’s about engagement. Feed a child’s brain enough words like this and soon you’ll find yourself with an early talker. Then while other babies are still learning to talk, yours is busy learning to read. Get it? And while other people’s kids are learning to read picture books, yours is reading chapter books. This goes on for their whole life!

FINAL: For professionals who already understood the importance of verbal communication, I created this “bookshure” to introduce them to a powerful new tool – the Starling.

But understand this – doing all this talking with engagement doesn’t mean every child can grow up to be Einstein. It’s all about maximizing your child’s genetic (not economic) potential. If it’s only within a child’s genetic capacity to be average smart, they’ll get there faster and stay there for life. This can make a huge difference to a child’s quality of life, considering where they could end up without the benefit of this help. And I can’t stress this enough – I’m talking about  ALL children. Not just poor children. Or special needs children. ALL CHILDREN. (If you’re a parent reading this, please note your feelings right now. I’ll get to them later). 

Finally, dear reader, here lies the rub. Look how long it took me to explain the Starling to you and the problem it solves. My expertise in working with clients in San Francisco was taking really complicated concepts and making them dead simple for a consumer (best example here). I worked on the Starling for two years and what you read above is the shortest I think I’ve ever gotten the complete pitch. So as a marketer, here are your options:

1. Explain how The Starling works, and then explain why it solves an early-education problem you didn’t know existed

2. Explain how you need to talk to your baby as much as possible from 0-4 years old, and then explain what the Starling is and how it could help you do that

You can’t do one (explain the Starling) without the other (how early development works). 

The three founders had become early-childhood experts, for real. And their research scientist, librarian, pediatrician, speech language pathologist, mentors and partners were all in touch on the regular, keeping tabs on the Starling’s progress and correcting messaging when necessary so that everything stayed absolutely factual. We needed to look like experts, but not scientists. The messaging had to be intriguing, inviting and fun – but not misleading or fantastical.

FINAL: A one-sheet for interested schools to get a little more detail on how the Starling can help their mission.

The Kickstarter launch was a success in that it did what we needed – raise as much awareness as cash. (As I said, VersaMe was already funded by an investment group). Our mailing list blossomed. Sales started coming in. But that’s when the real work began.

I’ve worked on big tech in San Francisco. A lot. Sun Microsystems, Borland, Sybase, Veritas, Dell, Adobe, blah blah blah. That’s not including all the dot coms. I was there for the first big boom, and the first big bust, working freelance for almost every agency in the City. Startups are different. It’s EXACTLY like in the show “Silicon Valley” (the first season, anyway). It’s crazy and confusing and exciting and hilarious and scary and frustrating and fun as hell. You’ll NEVER pack more work into a shorter span of time than when you work for a startup. Because even though we were focused on who we were, and which audience we were talking to, we were saying it all - in every conceivable way. And we had practically no budget to do it with. Even though there was $10M in seed money, you gotta watch like a hawk how you spend it (right, Nicki?). Because it’s only going to last so long. So we were begging, borrowing, and stealing while testing the messaging multiple time a day, every day, everywhere. And once we saw progress in any direction we’d run after it full speed.

There’s no way I can ever tell you everything we did. It was so much! But one of the first things  was to use everything that inspired the creation of the Starling to build a giant online resource center for new parents, filled with published studies that prove the benefits of direct, verbal communication. Then we published articles and how-to’s on our blog everyday giving tips on how (and why) to maximize your baby-talking skills. Our newsletters were going out weekly to new parents, filled with communication tips and info on developmental milestones. I found out that the founders had invested in a HUGE AdWords ad buy that included a lot of YouTube videos. I had two weeks to deliver finished product and there was nothing in the works. We set up tents in shopping malls and Nicki and I did the ABC show in Vegas (to have a meeting with Barnes & Noble, who said no, then inexplicably sent us a huge order two weeks later). We got into a hipster tech showroom in Silicon Valley. I totally redesigned the packaging. I made an online school for new parents. We developed a custom Reading App that you could use with the Starling. We hired influencers on social media. We created a mobile app game based on the Starling. We brought on a respected social media agency to give it a go. We. Tried. Everything.

WORK: And lots of it! This is probably about 2% of the things we did to position, explain, and sell the Starling. Clockwise from top left: Dumbing it down, we created multitudes of info-loaded landing online campaigns and landing pages, we created and ran an online school, we sent the founders to present at indie book stores, parenting groups, schools and libraries. I made a Starling Honors program for little students, we made an educational mobile game, we tried multitudes of simple online campaigns and landing pages, we gave away free information (so much free information), we changed the whole website, we started marketing the platform the Starling was built on, and we developed ridiculously complex email newsletters and campaigns.

Nothing worked. At least, not on the level we wanted it to. It was just too much for people to wrap their heads around. Most thought it was a great product...for terrible parents. And of course, THEY were all excellent parents. There’s actually a study that exists which found 90% of parents thought they were parenting in the 5th percentile of awesome parents. Which, of course, is mathematically impossible. So we pivoted to focus on Starling Partners – schools (public and private), libraries, speech pathologists, pediatrician clinics, non-profit organizations. Frankly, any group that already understood the importance of early learning. Most ended up being too outright dysfunctional, painfully slow to act, or too strapped for funds to make a difference to our bottom line. Our biggest success came from developing a program for libraries to loan Starlings out to patrons. We got ourselves into a lot of libraries but not enough, and not fast enough. In the end we had to stop. There was nothing left to try. This amazing technology is now in the hands of the scientific researchers who inspired it. They’re using it to further understand how we can make our children better, smarter, happier people. I’m 100,000% sure that someday you’ll see this product (or something like it) make a huge consumer splash in the future. Sometimes a good idea doesn’t make it simply because of something that no one can foresee or control  – timing.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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