At Sample U, Consumers try so you know what they’ll buy.

I have spent the last 20 years shaping the brands of Fortune 500 and start-up companies. The more successful companies share many things in common. One thing in particular is the subject of this article: Research. The more successful designers, advertisers and marketers know you have to go to your customers for feedback on usability, price and suggestions for improvement. Today, this practice is proving even more essential as consumers have become guarded of their hard earned dollars.

Tryvertising is the future of advertising. It combines market research and advertising by putting products and creative ideas in the hands of the people who will be buying them. Sample U, a research laboratory on the campus of Alliant International University in San Diego has put Tryvertising into the spotlight. The company places products from well known and soon to be well known companies in a retail test environment and asks you, the consumer (whom they now call their Trysumers) to give your opinions about the products you test. Trysumers move through this mock retail store, answering survey questions about the products and leave with a bag full of free gifts for their work! Its a win-win for everyone. The companies get valuable information about their products directly from Trysumers, and the Trysumers get free stuff!

The advertising aspect comes into play since Trysumers develop a natural affinity for the companies of the products they test which results in sales after the Sample U experience. Consider that the Sample U TryStore can move 10,000-30,000 Trysumers through it’s doors every month and you can see the value of this kind of experiential marketing and advertising.

Advertising and marketing agencies have gotten into the game as well by placing their creative concepts in TryStores to get evaluations from Trysumers before they present to their clients. This way, they can validate their concepts before spending their client’s dollars which increases the campaign’s success. We at Deal Design Group have been using Sample U and Tryvertising in all our creative development since October of 2009. It has totally changed our world! Instead of participating in the battle of egos that breaks out when you try to justify creative concepts to a room full of type-A personalities, we simply show them how the concepts tested with consumers, and the discussion is over. I tell them “we went to customers, we asked them what we should do. they told us, so let’s do that.” I know, its a revolutionary idea: Validating your ideas before you spend dollars. And its amazing how many companies don’t simply because old fashioned market research is too costly and takes to long. Now, Tryvertising through Sample U gives us feedback in as little as 48 hours, is crazy cheap,  and makes us smarter designers and marketers. I don’t know about you, but I can always use a little more “smart” on my side.

Check out www.sampleu.com.

Pop artist including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Keith Herring elevate the ordinary image and manufactured product to art status in their commentaries about America’s obsession with beauty, popularity and tragedy. Pop art is born.

Today, Pop lives and morphs into electronic media. Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In build social media into a new way to relate to one another.

Recently, I held an opening of my art for friends in a recreation of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory: The studio and playground for the New York elite underground scene in the 1960′s.

Pop art challenged our views about what is art worthy. The Pop artists elevated ordinary products and images to the status of high art––blurring the lines between pedestrian and artistic. Through their commentaries on force feeding of repetitive imagery, they reveal how media desensitizes us to the beautiful, ugly and tragic. Our culture’s obsession with beauty and fame drives our buying decisions, celebrity fascinations and fashion sense. The Pop artist’s work imitates art which, in turn, imitates life in an endless dance of reality and fantasy. The next time you look at a soup can, or celebrity photo, or dollar bill, consider how many people have seen the exact same image, and how their need for this object drives their decisions every day. Everyone is longing for love, beauty and their 15 minutes of fame. And, if they get them and lose them, they become obsessed with getting more. Its an insatiable American hunger that the rest of the World loathes and admires simultaneously.

Find your way / Creative idea contest.

Deal Design’s client, Finder Technologies, is giving away 3 free Auto-Finders to the most creative 3 ideas submitted on how to use the Auto-Finder.

HOW TO ENTER: Email a description of how you would use the Auto-Finder in no more than 50 words. And tell us how much you think this should cost.

Send to: info@dealdesign.com
Include: You name and address for shipping if you are a winner
Deadline To Enter: Monday, Aug 31 2009

About the AUTO-FINDER
Auto Finder – How It Works

The Auto-Finder finds anything

• Keep track of your children in theme parks
• Avoid danger by finding your car quickly
• Locate base camp in the wilderness

The Auto-Finder locates the ones you love––protecting them and enabling you to get to them when they need you. Your mother, grandmother, children––find them quickly and get them to safety with the Auto-Finder.

It’s a 2-part link between you and something else: Your child’s backpack, your car, or your base camp. Simply place the beacon with the thing you want to keep track of. Then, keep the Finder with you. Simply press and scan left to right to find the direction of the beacon. The Finder beeps and lights up when you are pointing the right way! (up to a half mile away).

• Use it to find your car when you just can’t remember where its parked
• Use it to keep track of your children at big amusement parks
• It can even act as a homing device to lead you back to base camp

How would you use Auto-Finder? Tell us and win one FREE!

Once in a while, I meet true talent.

While Googling away one morning for the latest info on the housing market and loan modifications, I came across the Web site of Martin Andelman. Click for Website or go to LinkedIn. I read a few of his articles and was immediately entertained by his hysterical satire of our government systems. Martin is an author, journalist, columnist and his brilliant assesments of why our government systems work or don’t work are insanely funny and usually true. One of the amazing things about Martin Andelman is that he points out the simple and obvious hilarity in the blundering antics of our government and political systems (and you don’t have to be Democrat or Republican to find them funny.)  I was so taken by him that I called him and he actually answered his own phone, which was a very nice change from the cumberson technology web we usually have to go through to communicate today. We laughed and talked about the State of California, our government, and stupid people in general. I finally had to hang up and catch my breath from laughing so hard. I strongly urge you to visit his web site, read a few articles, and then proceed right to subscribing to his newsletter. Martin Andelman is like the new Dennis Miller of political humor and satire…or should he be classified as a non-fiction writer. I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Smart Planet Technologies™ is a packaging R & D company focusing on sustainability. Through advanced development, our products are designed to conserve precious natural resources and provide high quality environmental alternatives to a wide range of flexible and rigid packaging applications.

I love that our packaging technologies keep pushing us into greener options. I hate the fact that the trash bag I carry to the side of my house 3 times per week it 80% full of packaging from all the food and personal products we buy. At least companies like Smart Planet Tech are working to keep our environment as clean as possible. I will feel much better about my 3-bags of trash weekly when I know they will be biodegrade in a few years instead of a few thousand.

A relic from Noah’s Ark gives a religious fanatic and his followers a weapon that will let them recreate the effects of the biblical flood, and former combat engineer Tyler Locke has seven days to find the Ark and the secret hidden inside before it’s used to wipe out civilization again.

Not a bad pitch line huh? That’s my good friend and creative brother Boyd Morrison. I have known Boyd since 1997 when we met during a department-wide Quake game, back in the day when Quake WAS the hands-down best first person shooter on the planet! Boyd was a program manager for the New Media division of Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA and GE brand consumer electronics). I was the Creative Director for Brand in the Americas Design Organization of Thomson. We quickly became friends and built a strong  friendship on a shared love for all things manly: Firearms, The Smiths, video games, and explosion movies. Ok, I added the Smiths in there to make us feel better about liking them. Boyd likes them too, and he’s plenty manly, so there.  Boyd is the perfect example of doing what you love, and never giving up on your dream. After writing 4 novels over 15 years, Boyd and his epic thriller The Ark have been picked up by Simon and Schuster for a 2-book deal! And so far, he is going to be distributed in 10 countries. Even though he was a successful New Media Designer,  NASA Usability Engineer, Microsoft Xbox Director of Game Testing, Jeopardy Champion, he never stopped writing and chasing his true dream. Look for his novel in the Spring of 2010. It will be quite a launch party. All friends and family are invited to come!

BoydMorrision.com

The Ark, by Boyd Morrison

It was 1994 and David Deal was beginning a freelance gig as graphic designer for a revolutionary technology company: AirMedia. The company was the first of its kind–delivering news and information from the Online world to mobile hand sets (pagers and mobile phones). Just when most of the U.S. was being told to “get wired”, AirMedia was saying “go wireless.” The company ended up being a bit too forward thinking for the times. People were not ready for the wireless internet and the carrier networks were not fast enough to handle the data rates needed to deliver a valuable mobile internet. AirMedia eventually folded, but not before winning numberous awards for its software product and graphic user interface design which was created by David Deal and his development team. AirMedia was granted a patent for a then unknown technology called Short Messaging Service (SMS) which would later become known as the communication phenomena “Texting.” David Deal comments on the evolution of mobile computing. “Back then, we were frustrated we could not push more data through the carrier networks. We were pushing companies like Sprint and AllTel to increase the allowed bandwidth to enable us to deliver a truely mobile internet. And, like all pioneers, we took the arrows. But, our work paved the way for what we know today as texting and Apple’s iPhone Apps. Our software, AirMedia Live, offered news and information “Channels” which were the forerunners of Apple’s iPhone Apps. Now that data networks are at 3G speeds, and 4G on the way, I predict that we will see a truly fused wired and wireless interent by 2012.” View Deal Design’s work developing the original “Apps” for AirMedia Live at this link.

Deal Design named Top List Agency for the 4th consecutive year by the San Diego Business Journal.

Every year, the San Diego Business Journal recognizes the top 20 companies in every business category. Deal Design is proud to be named among the top advertising and marketing agencies in San Diego (the 6th largest county in the United States.) Cool? Yes. However, awards like this are based on gross sales. It does not measure how our branding, marketing and design work performs for our client. Where are those awards? If you find them, let us know!