Author Archive

Useful. Usable. Desirable.

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Shel Kimen is SVP of Digital Strategy at SaatchiNY. Below are some of her thoughts on Groupon’s new Smart Phone-powered coupons, and why they’re such a good idea. Above image is from Mashable.com.


Yesterday I saw that Groupon has added a nifty new bit of functionality. When you sign-up for a Groupon discount now,  a little bar code image is sent to your phone that is scan-able by the merchants when you show up for the goods.

WHY IT WORKS
This is pretty cool for a few reasons:

1. It’s useful. Who wants to waste paper printing out a discount and add to it the burden of carrying it around with us? And it’s pretty annoying when we show up and realize the paper is gone … It also allows merchants to collect the coupons electronically and creates an easy way to track sales. Yay metrics!

2. It’s usable. It’s pretty easy to use for both the customer and the merchant. All the consumer has to do is pull out their phone. For the merchant . . .  just take a quick scan (or snapshot) of the bar code. Everything else is automatic!

3. It’s desirable. Most people get at least a teeny bit excited when their phone can make some magic, especially when that magic is just simple and elegant. If a small piece of tactical functionality can also leak some ‘that’s cool’ into your experience, well then, it is cool!

IDEAS WORTH ADVERTISING
Though this may be a simple example, it’s a good enough vehicle to talk about “Useful, Usable, and Desirable,” – the holy trinity of good Experience Design. Liz Sanders coined the phrase in an article for DMI (The Design Management Institute) in 1992 and I’ve personally been using the tenets in the design of (digital) products and services since 1998. I still use it today… not in product design, but in advertising.

It’s no longer good enough to come up with advertising ideas. We need to come up with ideas worth advertising. And in order to do that we need to borrow liberally from those who have been making stuff not messages. Today marketing and brands need to do something, not just say it. And when they do it they need to be useful, usable, and desirable.

Category: Digital & Interactive, Retail & Shopping

4664: A cool Palindrome

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

William Willis on his raft - the embodiment of "Nothing is Impossible"

Shel Kimen is SVP of Digital Strategy at SaatchiNY. In response to a recent Nielsen study on the baby boomer generation, she’s started a website dedicated to breaking down age barriers and opening up a discussion about one of the most misunderstood generations around.

4664 

1946 marks the beginning of the ‘baby boomer’ generation. And 1964 marks the end of that era. In 2010 those born in 1946 will be 64 years old, like my father. And those born in 1964 will be 46, like some good friends of mine.

Not Your Grandfathers Baby Boomer

In July, Ad Age reported on a Nielsen study with the hapless title: This Isn’t Your Grandfathers Baby Boomer that challenges marketers to look away from the shiny new mom and towards the highly influential, with disposable income, and not nearly-so-brand-loyal-as-we-think, market of baby boomers. Amen.

It seemed like a perfect opportunity to launch my new blog. A blog that thinks ‘boomer’ is an unfortunate pigeon-hole stereotype for people who are frickin’ cool and interesting and are in most cases much much smarter than me. Boomer says: Old fashioned, afraid of technology, and stuck in one’s ways. But when William Willis was 60 years old he built a custom raft out of 7 Balsa logs and sailed solo from Peru to Samoa… And he did it again when he was 70 (on a bigger raft that went farther)!

Age is irrelevant. It’s mindset we care about. So this slowly growing collection of anecdotes is about defying expectations and embracing the chutzpah of people who have enough experience to teach us a thing or two.

Check it out: http://sixty4.tumblr.com/

Category: Our People, Retail & Shopping, Strategy

King St. Q&A with Shel Kimen

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Shel Kimen is SVP of Digital Strategy at SaatchiNY. To learn more on her professional background, you can check out her LinkedIn page.  If you’re a fan of sailing, music or olives, you might be interested in her blog.

1. What do you do at Saatchi & Saatchi?

I do a lot of different stuff that loosely falls under the heading: Digital Strategy. I help our brands find new ways to engage with and learn from their consumers. I’m part of our strategic planning group.

2. What was your first job?

I worked the counter at McDonalds. I got my first real break though when I was 18 working in a T-Shirt shop. They let me design a font. Back in 1989 we did that by hand…

3. If you weren’t at Saatchi & Saatchi, what profession would you most like to try?

Sailing adventurer? I’d also like to write about eccentric and inspiring kooks and history, like about how the Inuit played three day long ‘soccer on ice’ games over a ‘field’ that spanned ten miles and used a walrus head as a ball.

4. What motivates you most?

The search for new perspective. Good old fashioned competition is pretty powerful too.

5. What blogs, magazines, books, papers or websites can you not live without?

I’m not very attached to most media unless it helps me fix my boat or find wind like Practical Sailor or Windfinder.com. (She’s a super geek, super geek, super geeky). But I am pretty sure I couldn’t live without a radio. A real one. There is something sexy about uncontrollable and intermittent static.

6. What are your Lovemarks?

Kiehls makes me feel simple and sophisticated. Fairway Market is luxurious, exotic, and insanely practical and democratic all at once.

7. What’s your best “nothing is impossible” story?

My mother spent most of her life working very, very hard and taking care of other people – her brothers, father, me, my father, her mother, etc… She kept trying to go to college but work and family always got in the way. When she was 48 she finally got to go to school and ended up with two degrees and a masters in education. She always wanted to help kids with learning disabilities. Now she teaches mostly migrant middle school kids in Florida that don’t know how to read. They love her. She is awesome. And she knows that people learn best when they want to learn about something they care about. So she has them study phonetics with their graffiti fonts and make hip hop songs to teach poetry. It’s frickin’ inspiring.

8. What is your favorite place in the world? Why?

Tierra Del Fuego and the icy fjords at the very bottom of South America. I like all snow and ice but until you see it there is no way to describe it – all blues and greens and fierce power. It is epic and raw and I am humble and small. Plus, penguins ROCK.

9. Who do you most aspire to be like?

I think it’s hardest and most worthwhile to just be who we are…

10. If stranded on a deserted island and you could bring only one thing, what would it be?

My boat.

11. Tell us something surprising about yourself.

I am a huge Green Bay Packers fan and I am addicted to fantasy football. Wanna have a Saatchi league?

12. What’s your DOT?

A return to minimalism.

13. What’s your favorite creative pursuit?

Writing and making mix tapes (even though they aren’t tapes anymore and I use my laptop now instead of turntables…).

14. What led you on the path you’re on today?

Doing what I enjoy. Building real and lasting relationships. Trying new things. Taking comfort in ambiguity. Embracing failure. And OK with occasionally being broke because of it.

15. Do you have a motto?

Nope.

16. What do you do for fun?

Sail. Read. Listen to music. Harass Aisea Laungaue.

17. What’s your favorite client story?

I’m very much a behind the scenes woman. But any story that involves a client respecting the Account Sup or Producer who stayed here until 1am for a week straight makes me really happy.

18. What’s your favorite thing to do in NY?

I’m a broken record here… but yeah, I like to sail. And sailing in the Long Island Sound is just spectacular. You don’t have to go far to get very, very away from it all.

19. Who is your favorite artist/musician/designer?

Lately, I really like this writer Pierre Berton, a Canadian who writes about miners and artic explorers. I also like the photographs of my friends Gabriella Marks (www.triggerfinger.com) and Julia Solis (www.darkpassage.com). And I listen to possibly unhealthy amounts of American roots music. John Fahey is super awesome. WKCR on Sundays rocks my world.

20. When’s the last time you gave a standing ovation?

EFFIE awards June 2010. A big ad man who cared deeply about kids in Detroit died suddenly near the end of a tireless campaign to engage them in their own education. He got the gold and in a tear-jerking moment his wife and two kids came up with the team to receive the award. Should’ve been High Life though…

EDITORS NOTE:

Interested in doing the King St. Q&A? We want to meet all of you! All you have to do is copy and paste the Q&A, overwrite with your own responses, then send it to the editors via the Contribute button on the bottom right.

Category: King St. Q&A, New York, Our People

Krafty Apps

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Steve Smith had some smart things to say about the iPad and app design in this week’s Media Post Mobile Insider. He rightly tells us that “an app is only as good as the content that flows through it.” It seems so “Digi-Strategy 101,” but remarkably, in the frenzy to be cool and go iPad, many brands and content providers have fast-tracked apps that don’t provide real value or entertainment. They don’t think about their content and how people will really interact with it, and the whiz-bang fizzles pretty quickly.

After some well-deserved praise for Kraft and its successful and relevant apps iFood and Big Fork, Little Fork (great name) that teaches parents and kids to cook together, he gives some real-deal recommendations to creative folk that we think are important enough to rebroadcast here.

GIVE PEOPLE LOTS OF CONTENT & KEEP THE COST LOW

    KEEP THE INTERFACE CLEAR & CONSISTENT (DON’T MIX METAPHORS!)

      PROVIDE EXTRA CONTEXT FOR YOUR CONTENT

      In the case of Kraft this is nutritional data and shopping lists and quality games.

        DON’T GO CRAZY WITH THE BRANDING

        People know what app they bought and who made it. Show some subtle restraint and don’t clutter the user experience with persistent branding and logo

          HAVE FUN WITH IT

          Kraft lets you squish tomatoes and write your name in flour. What kid doesn’t want to do that?

            He ends with these wise words:

            Simple news feeds or pleasant mobile toys are not appropriate for this platform, and a mobilized Web site is not likely to cut it either.

            Amen. Now let’s go make some cool stuff!

            Shel is SVP, Digital Strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi New York

            Category: Clients, Creative, Digital & Interactive

            Social Listening

            Thursday, May 20th, 2010

            A few weeks ago Claudine wrote about Digital Exploring and mentioned that at Saatchi & Saatchi, in addition to partners we work with to help us find and understand online conversations, we also use some free tools.

            While none of this is scientific and I certainly wouldn’t bet the farm on their accuracy, they are really useful in our planning process. They can delight and inspire in unexpected ways—and more than a few times have started us on a path to pretty powerful insights. There are dozens and dozens of these, but here are a few I’ve had some luck with.


            This is a really attractive interface that aggregates twitter, blogs, music, and video. It’s my absolute favorite way to start peeking into a topic. It’s so much more fun than Google, Bing or Yahoo.


            How much are people talking about a brand or topic? You can compare up to five. Of course we have no way to know how much data they are looking at—or over what period of time. But heck, it’s still directionally interesting. For example, when I was doing some research for an insurance company in context of Gen Y—I compared “Life Insurance” with “Shoes” and “Rent.” It gave us all a good laugh and a poignant reminder about the significant of shoes to tweeters.


            Enter any search term and get a word cloud of the recent conversations. The only difference between this and searching in twitter is that you get to see related terms and concepts. It’s useful when you are just beginning to dig.


            This is cool. It feels like someone’s college thesis project and, unfortunately, is super slow. But it’s proven insightful. Have patience.


            This tool looks across multiple platforms. A lot of these tools are just looking for keywords. “Good Job Apple!” “Good god, what is Apple thinking?” Most low-end tools (and some expensive ones too) don’t know the difference between positive and negative sentiment. Even so, it’s a good tool to dabble with.


            This has a faster and nicer interface but can also be pretty random (and you need to create an account). Their professional service is likely much more accurate and I’ll write a little bit about “for pay” social listening services next time.

            A few other tactics we like… call it anthropology lite.


            Do flickr searches on ideas and brands; collect images and make collages to illustrate ideas. Also, read through the comments and look for patterns. Maybe even start a flickr group with photos you seed and get community participation in your project. What is freedom?


            Go to youtube and find popular videos about your topic or brand, read through the comments, look at the reply videos, maybe even make a reply yourself. It may seem tedious at first, but brave on. How do the comments change over time? What patterns do you notice? What kind of people are responding? Do they feel credible? Dr. Michael Wesch has an outstanding video: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. It’s a must watch for anyone who thinks YouTube is just about cats on treadmills.

            We shouldn’t have to say this, but always be transparent when you are doing market research and interacting with users online. There is nothing wrong with curiosity and learning from others. There is a lot wrong with deception and exploitation.

            - Shel

            Shel Kimen leads Digital Strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi New York

            Note to Art Directors from Editor: the source of the primary image is armyyouhave. The image is of social homeostatis in a termite colony. In biology, the most important contemporary science, social homeostasis is a phenomenon of social insect colonies, in which the collective activities of the colony’s inhabitants regulate the colony environment. For a full discussion, see http://www.esf.edu/efb/turner/termite/social%20homeostasis.htm

            Category: Clients, Digital & Interactive, Strategic Planning, Xploring