A year to remember

As we close out not only the year but the decade, it seems apropos to reflect a bit on where we've come from and where we're going. It's hard to believe tomorrow will mark the first day of 2010. It doesn't seem like all that long ago that the world trembled at the prospect of Y2K, with the more intrepid worrywarts stockpiling canned goods and avoiding technology. (Don't worry, for those folks, they can now wait with bated breath for 2012 and the Mayan calendar's prognostications of doom and destruction.) A lot changes in a decade .... ten years ago, it would never have occurred to me that I'd end up working in advertising, or that I'd be an entrepreneur before I hit 30, or that I would come to love cooking, soccer (um .... Fernando Torres in specific), and the color pink. Who knew?

It's odd to think back even a year ago. Crazy Savvy was as yet nothing but a gleam in our eyes (ha ha) and a plan for the distant future. We would never have guessed that opportunity would come knocking so soon, or that we'd have the wherewithal and the gumption (and, let's face it, the luck) to get our business up and running so quickly and so smoothly. Yes, 2009 was a good year in a lot of ways, for both Erin and yours truly .... professionally and personally, we've embarked on plenty of adventures and turned over lots of new leaves.

Speaking of adventures, it's time to recap our 2009 Crazy Savvy Fan-Mail-Extravaganza. As promised, we will be crowning our postcard contest winners early next week (prizes to follow!) .... Erin and I will confer and pick the cream of the crop. In the meantime, though, let's take a trip around the world together as we revisit some of our favorite bits of fan mail.

Since we sent out our call for letters in early August, we've received postcards from 4 continents and 7 different countries. Our longest distance love letter arrived from Johannesburg, South Africa (8,979 miles) — although Kyoto, Japan was a close second at a distance of 8,682 miles. Our nearest bit o' fanmail came from Grand Marais on Minnesota's North Shore — a mere 289 miles from C/S headquarters. The postcard arriving from the place with the warmest average temperature would be my lovely missive from Negril, Jamaica (oh what I wouldn't give to be back there right .... about .... now), while a letter from Finland takes the cake for the coldest. Every time we check our mailbox and find that a new note awaits us, we're giddy with delight .... so keep 'em coming in 2010!

We wish all our fans, friends, and followers a very happy new year and best of luck in 2010. As for me, I'll be ringing in the new decade with Veuve Clicquot and plenty of exciting plans for 2010 and beyond!

Madcap Holiday Recap

From the shores of snowy Lake Superior to the banks of the mighty Mississippi, both Jen and I got some travel in this holiday season and I'm happy to say, we're no worse for the wear (if a little tired!) — and that's saying something given the weather bookending our travels!

As Jen mentioned, I was off in St. Louis visiting with my main squeeze's near and dear. Great conversations, terrific food, adorable children, and lots of laughter — in short, everything a holiday should hold. All too quickly, we were on our way back for round two of celebrations closer to home.

Jen did her traveling in reverse fashion, heading off to a beautiful inn on Christmas Day for some much-deserved pampering and fireplace time.

Finally, for those of you who may not have yet seen them, here's a peek at Crazy Savvy's original holiday card, featuring the original illustrations of artist Anthony Kamstra. Happy New Year!

A Crazy Savvy Christmas

With t-minus 3 days until Christmas, it's time to send holiday cheer to our C/S fans ... and then take a well-earned break! The past week at Crazy Savvy headquarters was as busy and bustling as the Elves' toyshop up there at the North Pole. In addition to posting our holiday cards (thanks for all the great feedback!), baking and delivering chocolate chip oatmeal cookies to clients and vendors (and maybe eating more than a few ourselves ... ), and tidying up our accounts and bookkeeping in anticipation of the year's end, we also saw the completion of a major project ... phew!

For this particular client, Santa came a little early, as we were able to deliver their annual report (lookin' pretty awesome, if we do say so ourselves) from the printer — ahead of schedule, no less. To say they were thrilled would be the understatement of the year. Woo-hoo!

With this checked off our to-do lists (going to find out if we've been naughty or nice ...), it's time for a holiday roundup. My wonderful business partner is currently vacationing in St. Louis (no doubt warmer than it is here!), and will return to the Cities in time to spend a peaceful Christmas at home with family. I am reversing the trend, first spending Christmas Eve with kith and kin, and then heading up to Bayfield, WI for a peaceful long weekend at a bed & breakfast on the shores of Lake Superior. Merry Christmas to us, indeed!

These relaxing holiday trips will no doubt leave us feeling refreshed, energized, and ready to kick off 2010 in high style. And speaking of high style .... today's image is a snapshot from last weekend's birthday-holiday soiree .... I feel like, with a dress this rockin' (thank you Betsey Johnson), who needs actual ribbons and bows under the tree? (Well, ok, I probably still do. You know our PO Box address ... ha ha ha!)

So, we're wishing all our fans and friends a very merry holiday season. We'll be back in action soon, but in the meantime, have fun, drive safe, and stay warm! (Oh yeah, and send us postcards .... because when we're back from Christmas respite, we'll conduct the C/S Card Contest 2009 and crown our champion!) Happy holidays to all!

Spreading holiday cheer... And a few extra calories!

With our holiday cards in the post, Jen and I turned our attention to matters of a culinary nature yesterday.

Armed with a recipe developed by a friend of ours who happens to be an extraordinarily talented chef and food stylist, we cranked up the holiday tunes — everything from classics like Nat King Cole to punk rock renditions that made Jen cry.

We had the good fortune to find an enthusiastic young assistant who specialized in quality control — are those chocolate chips up to snuff? Better try another just to make sure.

I totally put Jen to work in the kitchen. I'm happy to say she rose to the occasion. Just look at her wielding that spatula! You'd never guess that this was the first time she's baked cookies as an adult.

The results were so delicious — and a select few of our beloved readers (and clients!) have firsthand knowledge of this fact! — that we have decided to make this an annual Crazy Savvy tradition.

A recipe for fun

Ingredients:

2 business partners, slightly addled

1 great holiday card concept

1 bottle of wine (not cooking wine, s'il vous plait)

10 sheets of notebook paper, to be used for sketches by a decidedly untalented sketch artist (ie, yours truly)

4 sheets of drawing paper, to be used for sketches by an artist who can actually .... draw (that would be our talented illustrator Anthony)

2–5 hours in InDesign, depending on who's using the program (considerable time is saved if this is Erin and not me)

4 lines of whimsical, slightly irreverent copy

1 hour of focused proofreading (optional, but highly recommended)

Liberal use of the color pink, as garnish

Directions:

Combine business partners, holiday card concept, and bottle of wine; mix well. Add irreverent copy and sketching paper. Remove sketches by Jen; insert sketches by Anthony. Garnish with a healthy dose of the color pink and complete the process with a highly focused round of proofreading (Note: this step particularly useful if amount of wine added to the recipe is increased.) Send cards to printer; await delivery with bated breath.

Yield: 250 amazing holiday cards

And folks, they're in the mail now! Check your mailboxes this week for some holiday cheer, as only we can provide. (Yes, we will eventually post pictures of our cards, but not until they've been received and thoroughly drooled over by our fans. There's no way we're spoiling the fun here!)

And to compound the holiday cheer, this afternoon the principals of Crazy Savvy will find themselves in the kitchen, whipping up delicious confections for our most beloved clients and vendors. As anyone who knows me well can attest, this would have been a highly frightening proposition a year ago .... but my cooking skills have rather improved since then. My eating-cookie-dough skills, though, remain unparalleled. Mmmmmmmm .....

On an unrelated but equally tasty note, today's postcard comes to us all the way from the Czech Republic! Our literary postcard (thankfully featuring Kafka himself and not, say, a cockroach ... ) arrives from Prague, city of gorgeous buildings, music, and really good beer. Thanks, Jen & Scott!

Hot off the presses

The digital age has revolutionized the creative industry. Darkroom magic tricks give way to the miracles of Photoshop, illustrators with pen and ink have been largely replaced by Illustrator (though not completely .... see our holiday cards for proof that this fine art is still alive and well!), and promotion these days is as much about social media and viral buzz as it is about media buys. For us in the field, this often changes the nature — though not, one hopes, the spirit — of the day-to-day work we do.

That’s why there’s something oddly fun about the printing and production process. Wait, wait — hear me out. Yeah, no one in their right mind likes 4 a.m. press checks or frantic calls from proofreaders on Saturday nights. But there’s something viscerally satisfying, at least for me, in getting to lay my hands on a piece we’ve created as it comes hot off the presses.

So few things in our line of work are tangible, tactile. We create websites and other interactive applications, but the work itself is something off in the ether (behold: my amazingly sad grasp of how the Internetz actually work ... ) You can click it, send it to a friend, tweet it ... but you can’t touch it. It’s a similar phenomenon for branding initiatives, in my eyes anyway. We may create an identity system and work on the collateral it generates ... but just as often, we hand off a logo, style guide, and identity system to the client, and step away (and pray that our hard work isn’t bludgeoned to death in bad in-house PowerPoint presentations and internal communiques .... but that’s another ballgame entirely!) Needless to say, this sense of distancing is true in our pure consulting work as well.

I’m not in any way complaining .... variety is the spice of life, and for a creative, it seems as necessary as trendy glasses and an iPhone. But it’s always a secret (not so secret anymore, I suppose) delight to work on a print project and see it through production. It’s nice to hold the finished product in your hands and think .... this is mine, my baby, my precioussssss .... (cue creepy music). It’s a nice reminder of the way things used to be, although I certainly wasn’t alive to see them that way! (Thank you, Mad Men.)

Anyway, that’s been the week’s experience for us ... a project we’ve been working on for months is at last at the presses (oh, more beautiful words have ne’er been spoken!) A more perfect end to our week could not be imagined!

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

Today is the kind of day that I'm so glad that I get to call the shots. You see, the first big snowstorm of the season is under way in Minneapolis right now. It's ugly out there. And yet the true Minnesotans all around me are trudging forward. (Needless to say, I do not count myself in this hardy group.)

You can't turn on the news without hearing words like "blizzard," "snow emergency," "winter storm warning," and "wind chill."

I would like to replace those words with "down comforter," "laptop," and "coffee."

And the beautiful thing? Voila! Done. I am the mistress of my own working environment, after all. Which is not to say that I'm not working today, for I most certainly am. But in our line of work, I've always failed to see the reason for trudging through snow drifts and traffic jams to congregate in an office setting. If ever there was a good reason to collaborate via technology, I'd say winter in Minnesota qualifies nicely. And dare I say, working with a down comforter close at hand might even boost my productivity.

Keep warm out there, locals!

The art of naming

When I hand someone my business card (a treat that, honestly, will probably never grow old), one of the first things that I almost always hear is .... Crazy Savvy, huh? Where did you get your name?

Well, it's a fair question. When Erin and I began to finalize plans for our business, of course we devoted ourselves to the momentous task of picking a name. Much like naming a child (something I know nothing about) or a pet (something I know all too well!), choosing a name for your business is a Very Big Deal. It sets the tone for who you are and what you do, and very often makes the difference in whether or not you can successfully market and promote your business. Too bland of a name and people are liable to forget who you are. Too avant garde, and people may not take you seriously. (Thankfully, working in advertising gives us a bit of leeway on that account. Crazy Savvy works fine for an ad agency, but maybe not so well for, say, an insurance company ... or school ... or mental health services provider ... )

Plus, there are pragmatic concerns. Can people easily spell your company name if they're looking for you in a search engine or if you tell someone your information over the phone? Are there other companies in your industry or in the local marketplace that share your name or have something so similar it will lead to confusion? Does that oh-so-witty name that you thought up have other connotations to broader audiences, connotations which may be less than savory? We've seen all too many cases where these factors aren't considered, leading to emails lost to the void, embarrassing mixups, last-minute name changes, and worse. (With a last name like Emelianova, I am empathetic to business owners with complicated-to-spell company names .... but I vowed, this time, it wouldn't be me!)

So .... the naming process. One of the first things we did was fill a gigantic whiteboard with adjectives that described who we are and the sort of agency we envisioned ourselves running. Crazy and savvy consistently rose to the top of this list. We liked crazy because it spoke to creativity, to a certain willingness to push the envelope, the desire to take risks in pursuit of creative solutions. We liked savvy because it seemed to capture the other side of what we do ... strategic, canny, intellect-driven, worldly, eyes open to our constantly shifting milieu.

We tried to come up with names that reflected this notion of duality, names that would convey the connotations behind crazy and savvy in a succinct, memorable, professional way. To put it mildly, we failed. As writers, we could come up with plenty of names .... and we did, oh believe me, we did ... but nothing quite felt right. Indeed, the process grew so protracted that we took to calling our company by shorthand, using the two adjectives we liked best — crazy and savvy, natch. Our business plan near completion, launch strategy in place, legal forms and accounting procedures double-checked ... and we still had no name, aside from the Crazy Savvy moniker we had come jokingly to use.

And then the lightbulb went on.

Why don't we just, well, call ourselves Crazy Savvy?

The rest is history. I can still recall the precise conversation in which our name was decided, and the deep sigh of relief we both breathed (at the exact same time, of course) as we realized we'd both been secretly hoping to call the agency Crazy Savvy all along. It just .... fit. It was pithy, easy to spell, rolled nicely off the tongue. It was fun to say, fun to write, and memorable. It spoke to our capabilities, our approach, and our identity, and it provided the foundation for tying together our brand and promotional materials cohesively. Most of all, it was unequivocally, organically us.

These are some of the lessons and experiences we return to now as we do naming and brand development work for clients — often, work that involves devising taglines, naming products or services, crafting a messaging platform around a brand identity. As Scrabble and crossword puzzle aficionados, it's work we enjoy greatly! And each and every time we sign our name to a proposal, contract, or letter (or, you know, sign autographs for our adoring fans ... ha), we both smile a little as we remember the adventures through which we became Crazy Savvy.

Confess-o-meter

I have a confession to make.

I don't really watch TV.

Disclaimer: It's not exactly true to say that I don't watch television, period. I do tune in to the Daily Show whenever I remember to do so... (Oh Jon Stewart, how I adore you.) And my Mad Men predilections are well-documented. It's just that...my evenings do not routinely involve turning on the television.

Digression: This was aptly illustrated last night, when I did, in fact, turn on the television with my children to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. At the first commercial break, a look of horror came over my four-year-old's face and she wailed at the sudden and cruel disappearance of the show. It quickly became apparent that she does not know what a commercial break is.

So is all of this just awful of me to confess as a marketing professional? Shouldn't I be immersing myself in pop culture, after all? Don't I need to tune in to keep up with the latest trends in advertising and branding? Well, actually, no, not at all. I do just fine via the Internetz and other media consumption, thankyouverymuch.

And of course I do have Jen to fall back upon in case I need someone with more authentic broadcast cred....at least when it comes to the NFL, anyhow. (Uh, go Colts?)

Guilty pleasures

We are lucky, here at Crazy Savvy. We choose our own clients. If we don't want to work with an organization or company .... we don't. It's pretty simple. Both Erin and I have learned, from our years in the industry, that life is too short to take on migraines knowingly .... life is bound to throw you some one way or another, but there's no sense looking for trouble. One of the myriad advantages of owning your own agency? You get to make decisions like that ..... no means no.

Others in our field aren't so lucky, though. And that's why this website has become our newest guilty pleasure (well, that along with Go Fug Yourself, Garance Dore, and Kickette, of course).

Happy reading! More later this week .... right now we're busy putting the finishing touches on a big project and sending it off to press. Happy December!