I thought we’d kick off this Monday following a long holiday weekend with some humor. This is a tongue in cheek list on why social media (one of our favorite things to write about) could easily be mistaken for porn.

9 reasons social media is like porn:

1. No place is off limits. People sneak a peek while driving, during work meetings, at dinner, at church, etc.

2. You’re slightly ashamed to admit to your family and closest friends how often you’re really doing it.

3. It’s the last thing you do before you go to bed.

4. It’s the first thing you do when you wake up.

5. You have to get one more interaction in before going out for the night.

6. People have been known to do it in groups.

7. Following a date it’s the first thing you do when you get home.

8. Some people sneak off to the bathroom or dark corner, addicted to knowing every last update.

9. You mute your phone or computer so your partner or spouse won’t wake while you’re doing it.

So what would you add to the list?

A little over two weeks from now, we’ll be moving to our new office space. You might have already seen our preview tour. We snapped a lot of “Before” pics. As remodeling nears completion, we’ll put up the “After” shots.

Life has been interesting in the weeks leading up to the move. A lot of us are excited about it…. some a bit more than others (as evidenced by the videos below).  Don’t forget to swing by our site to see some of the other ways we’re celebrating the move to our new neighborhood.

Hello friends. Over the years, I have become intimately acquainted with many of you, countless of you have ogled my images on the World Wide Web, and yet no one has ever asked me to speak. For some time now I have held my tongue patiently but I must break my silence. I, The Orange Couch of Bailey Gardiner, have accomplished the impossible. I broke into the BG Facebook Page. I intend to use this page to, at long last, express my concerns, my worries, and my joys  – at least until the crafty people of BG figure out how to take it back.

So to give you a little background, here’s my life story and a little about how I achieved my elevated status as the famous Orange Couch:

My earliest memories were of the couch pound, a.k.a. Ikea. My parents, a yellow armchair and a red futon, shared a love that was forbidden. So they gave me to Ikea where I spent my days amongst strangers and surrounded by couches far inferior to my status. I yearned for a home to call my own. People to love. Tushies to warm.

Then along came a day when, without ceremony, I was promptly loaded onto a truck. I feared the worst. There were rumors of unwanted couches being transferred to some dreadful place known as “Clearance.” Was I headed there too? Thankfully not.

After a short ride, I was unloaded and carried up a flight of stairs where my first view was of an orange wall. Orange! From that moment on, I was home. And ever since, I’ve been warming the bottoms of Bailey Gardiner employees. Inspiring them to greatness with my brightness and cushy comfort.

Life has been busy here and, at times, tumultuous. These crazy BGers are always taking me on regular field trips to visit clients. Now don’t get me wrong, I love meeting new butts. However I would appreciate being handled with a little more care. Scuffs don’t exactly help my complexion.

I am also the background for many a pictures, which is part of how I have become such a celebrity. As much as I love looking at my handsome self all over the BG website, Facebook, and Twitter, I sure wish people would be a bit more diligent about capturing my good side. Seriously. I am not that short or stout.

All in all, it’s a happy and creative existence here with the BG gang but I am looking forward to turning the tables on them every once in a while and using their Facebook page to finally express myself. Hope to see you all on there.

Yours Truly,
The Orange Couch

I recently read Emotionomics by Dan Hill. As an emotion management and facial coding expert, Dan has been called on to interpret the real meaning of facial expressions from everyone from Barack Obama to Paris Hilton. His book is filled with valuable insights into client and co-worker relations including the importance of building positive emotional connections. Here are a few of my takeaways and thoughts:

- It’s almost impossible for you to disguise your emotions. Your face is the only place in the body where muscle is attached directly to the skin—this makes it extremely difficult for you to hide how you’re feeling. Initial reactionary facial expressions are so brief, they last less than half a second. Your eyes are so hard to control that only about 10% of the population are able to do so. During a meeting you can listen to a client’s rationale, but reading their emotions is even more important in understanding why they are/aren’t buying into an idea. A glimmer of something on their face might mean they are afraid—understanding this during a presentation can help you adjust what you say to assuage your client’s fears.

- There’s a reason humor works in advertising. Too much advertising has to be explained. Many brands have a complicated point of difference that is hard to get a consumer to connect with quickly. A better angle is to use humor—a joke is easy to get and doesn’t have to be explained. It provides an instant connection and makes the viewer want to engage because they are being entertained. End result? They walk away with a positive impression of the brand.

- Focus groups are a bad measure of what people really think. You never know if their opinion is really their own or if it’s been filtered through the group dynamics. The only time they work is if you read initial reactions instead of answers.

- People who can manage their emotions hold their jobs longer. According to a study by Leadership IQ, more employees are let go because they lack the emotional confidence than the necessary job skills—a stunning fact. The most toxic combo of emotions for people in the workplace is fear and contempt. It means you are afraid, dismiss people, find they’re below you and are afraid to take in new information. This leads many people to isolate themselves—the most dangerous situation.

- Some of the most successful ad campaigns work because they are emotional, not rational. Creating a rich story for your brand engages consumers. Just ask the people at Hal Riney & Partners. The San Francisco-based ad agency that mastered the art of the emotional campaign. They created a rich story behind the brand of Evian, helped Ronald Reagan get re-elected and popularized the Carpenter’s song “We’ve only just begun” in this commercial for Crocker Bank.

Want a contemporary example of emotional advertising? Just check-out almost any ad from the computer giant Apple. I bet you’re either a Mac or a PC person, right? Apple played-off that emotional urge to choose a side in these ads. How about their latest iPhone campaign promoting FaceTime? Yep, emotional too.

Have you seen any good examples of emotional advertising or have any good stories about using emotion in marketing?

For the Graphic Designer, prepress means the procedure to prepare digital graphic design files for printers and vendors. These steps of preparation can include proofreading, revisions, checking size, fonts and color, and output of the file in correct format. Prepress at a printer can include making separations, platemaking, creating blue lines and color proofs. The steps stay basically the same on each job and when you do them professionally for several years you may notice signs of how they affect your life. Below are the top ten signs you may be a prepress pro:

1. Double spacing after periods in body copy REALLY bothers you.

2. While driving home after a long day using Illustrator – you imagine creating bezier curves with your car on the highway.

3. You get called nicknames like Genius, Design Darlin’, Design Dumplin’, Graphics Guru or Speedy Spice (from way back – Spice Girls).

4. You really wish you could do a “Command Z” on some actions in life.

5. You are fatigued explaining “Bleed” has nothing to do with losing precious bodily fluids.

6. Continuous tone is not about the car alarm that went on for hours in the neighborhood last night.

7. You feel nausea when you see the font Comic Sans or any True Type font or encounter a Microsoft Word file or Illustrator file used as desktop publishing software.

8. Dummy means an example of design work. You have a lot of other words for stupid people and dingbat is not one of them either.

9. Acid free paper is not about being completely bummed at a Rave.

10.Eating a meal is a major distraction. When you do get out to a restaurant and look at the menu, you recognize the fonts, typos and double spaces after periods instead of the food. Besides, fonts are considered a food group.

What signs have you noticed?

Last week we toured our new office space. Come November we’ll hopefully be making ourselves at home on the fourth floor of a building in Little Italy. A lot of renovations still need to be made. The ceiling will be extended up to make it look less law firm-ish. And many of the center walls will be torn down to create more shared space.

Just a few months away before we starting testing the endurance of the gelato machines at this fine establishment. The countdown begins.

Sometimes you just need a good laugh – especially when it’s a mistake you could have easily made yourself. Well, maybe you wouldn’t write some of these hilarious mistakes in grammar, editing and just bone-headed lack of proof reading – but it’s damned funny to laugh at whoever did:

And my personal fav:

With all due respect to the San Diego Addys, the most prestigious advertising awards show is going on as I type. Taking place on the French Riviera, the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival celebrates the best creative work in all forms of media.

Work in different categories are being awarded throughout the week. Here are a few highlights.

In Poland, car manufacturer Skoda wanted to tout the remote-controlled trunk of one of their cars. Two commercials were run simultaneously on two major TV channels. One with the trunk opened and the other with it closed. Viewers toggled between channels 1 and 2 to open and close the trunk.

In Argentina, beer maker Andes put Teletransporters in bars and clubs to give guys the perfect excuse when calling angry wives and girlfriends.

And from the land of the rising sun, we have this ambient outdoor ad for Supor Non-stick pans. Behind the facade of a pan was a half-pipe where rollerbladers dressed as food skated back and forth, creating the illusion of being tossed.

All of the above work is brilliant. Creative. And, sadly, not from San Diego.

Why is that? Do we not have the talent and desire to do so, or are we content with local award shows? Hopefully it’s a matter of simply stepping up our game. Big time.

If you happened to open the San Diego Union-Tribune over the past week you probably know that Seaport Village’s Spring Busker Festival happened this weekend. This year, I inherited the job of finding, organizing, and communicating with our buskers (aka street performers) and, with this being my first festival, I learned a lot about event planning.

Here are 5 lessons I learned from working with street performers

1. Phone > Email - While most people rely on email for the majority of their professional communication, that doesn’t hold true for everyone.  Some people just work better on the phone (some of our buskers couldn’t even open attachments) and if you need information or an answer quickly; just call. Make sure you’re prepared to leave a short, but detailed message. This may seem like common sense but if people know what you want when you call, they can be prepared when they call you back.

2. Not Everyone Reads Documents – We had a performer who was letting people staple their tips to his body with an industrial strength stapler. That would have been cool and all, except we had already told him in one of our documents, that he had to split his tips with the other acts.  Clearly he didn’t read everything we sent him.

Even if you think you’re being redundant, ALWAYS emphasize important directions verbally, especially when it comes to money. He probably wouldn’t have let people staple 20’s to his forehead if he had known he was going to split them three ways. (To note, we didn’t know he was going to do this ahead of time.)

3. You Can’t Anticipate Every Need – We tried. We took into account the size of our pitches (a.k.a. performance areas), how long certain acts were there, and what their expectations might be. We moved acts around the day of if they couldn’t perform, to the best of our ability, and asked for feedback. This year, a couple buskers suggested we provide water for our performers. I mean, they are only juggling fire and knives, standing on top of six to ten chairs, swallowing balloons, and riding 6-foot unicycles in the sun for hours at a time. Definitely noted for next year!

4. “Business” hours aren’t the same for everyone – Technically, I work 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. If you’re a street performer, you don’t and you’ll probably call me anytime. The same can be said for many journalists, media members, freelancers, and performers. While most of the world operates on a certain time schedule, there are many important people who don’t and it’s important to answer their phone calls too.

5. Have Fun! – Not that I’m about to leave my job for circus school, but you have to love what you do to excel at it. Most of our buskers travel the country, if not world, performing everywhere they go; it’s not a conventional lifestyle, but they would never do anything else.

So we’re in new business mode, diligently working on an RFP for a client we’d all give up our firstborn/left leg/dog to win. That means a lot of late nights. (Keurig, thank you for existing.)

While burning the midnight candle at BG may not be as scandalous as some agencies, taking a short break here and there does afford profound moments of reflection.

Here are three things that caught my attention. What do you think, should I flip the switch?