Blogger Archive

John Updike said, "Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better." I'd have to agree with Mr. Updike, especially when it comes to the work we do here at PlattForm. A perfect example of this concept in action could be seen at our annual company meeting on Friday. Each department was given 10 minutes to deliver a brief synopsis of what they had accomplished during the past year and what goals they had for the future. If you've ever sat through a company meeting before, I'm sure you're picturing department slide shows and monotone presenters talking about information that doesn't make any sense to anyone outside of that department. At PlattForm, we take a different approach to company meetings. The Sales, Finance, Internet Marketing, Web Services, Programming, Client Services, Print/Direct Mail and Video departments all created videos that poked fun at what they do and the people in their department. Our Human Resources/Administrative team developed a game show called "Name that Dame" to introduce their team members and what they do. The Quality Assurance department put together a PowerPoint presentation based on themes for the upcoming year. Business Intelligence followed a Matrix theme for their spiel, complete with department members' heads Photoshoped on movie character bodies. These presentations could have been matter-of-fact bar graphs and bullet points, but instead they were hilarious productions that anyone in the company could relate to. The company meeting ended up being entertaining and fun, all because people cared about doing it right and doing it better. That creativity is something that translates into everything we do here at PlattForm - whether it is a major project for one of our clients or a company meeting.

During college, it was nothing to see people holed up in the library well past midnight. The mix of students no doubt included your typical college procrastinators and habitual overachievers. But it also included a group of dedicated hard workers who wanted to do their best.

Junior New York Senator Hilary Clinton indicated in a recent speech that dedicated hard workers are a lost breed among the millennial workers. Such is not the case at PlattForm.

On any given night, you can walk through the halls of the Dungeon, Printopia, The Deuce, or the other nooks and crannies of PlattForm and find such dedicated hard workers. They work long hours pouring over data, revisiting print ads or commercials, or scouring the internet for lead generation opportunities for our clients. For this bunch of PlattFormers, work is much more than a four-letter word. It is a commitment to the vision of PlattForm and the needs of our clients.

Each and every client that we service benefits from such dedicated workers. It shows in our success year after year. And it shows that hard work is not a foreign concept to the group of employees who make PlattForm the education industry's leader in direct response advertising.

Maybe other companies do have a problem with getting millennials to work hard, but PlattForm is not one of them.

Did you ever make a sarcastic comment to your parents when you were growing up only to get the response, “Well, you think you just know it all, don’t you?” If you were anything like me as a kid, you heard that all time – practically on a daily basis. The best comeback I ever thought of was a snarky, “You said it, not me.” Here at PlattForm, we can say we know it all and really mean it. Seriously – we do know it all. At least in the higher education advertising and marketing business. Since PlattForm is a niche-market advertising agency, all of our employees are pretty much experts in higher education. And that’s a pretty cool thing. Most ad agencies have clients across all spectrums. Automobile manufacturers. Restaurant chains. Department stores. But all of our clients are in postsecondary education – traditional colleges and universities as well as career and community colleges. We even do some work for the military. All day, every day, we develop ideas to increase interest in our schools and the military among potential students or recruits. Because of this, we know A LOT about that industry. Maybe even more than anyone else does. Now I can tell my dad that I do know it all, at least when it comes to public relations for higher education. As far as knowing it all in other areas, I don’t … but don’t tell that to my dad.

Usability is a hot topic at PlattForm right now. Usability in this case applies to a web design. Ever been to a site with no obvious place to click? How about a site that was so confusing, you didn’t know where to go first? That’s what usability is all about – whether visitors know what to do when they get to your site.

The sad truth is that a poorly designed site will lose about half of your web traffic – they don’t convert into a lead and they never come back! Designing with usability in mind means that we have to make it easy for someone to find what they are looking for on your site – or easily take action. In our case, we want to (1) educate them about a school and (2) make it enticing and easy enough to fill out a contact form.

People in the “real world,” meaning anyone not in Internet marketing, use the Web much differently than I do. It’s so important that we keep the actual site visitor in mind when we design, write and even market a site. Soon, we’ll be conducting usability tests with people in the real world. It makes our skills much sharper and lets us design for the bottom line. Nothing is more valuable than sitting with someone as they navigate and critique your site. Nothing is more humbling, either. Ouch!