We Are Team Rubber

Nothing makes a catchy headline like an unsupportable proclamation. Do Google really have nothing on Claude C. Hopkins, self-declared creator of measured advertising? Well, probably not, but Hopkins did stack up a mountain of achievement a long time ago. That’s the strongest impression I formed from reading Hopkins’ book My Life in Advertising / Scientific Advertising.

In the early 1900s Hopkins was measuring and optimising direct-response advertising to an impressive degree. His tactics included:

• Detailed and endless revision of ads based on split tests of their performance, similar to the split testing now being widely adopted by digital agencies of all sizes (thanks to our ubiquitous friends Google and their Website Optimiser).
• Tailoring of ads to suit specific locales, regions, dialects, attitudes - on high circulation campaigns, using primitive technology.
• Crunching a lot of numbers to assess the performance of ads.
• Writing great copy - the secret sauce that measurement and revisions can only ever support, never provide.

For those who know direct marketing inside out, Hopkins might be less impressive. For those who are sometimes tempted to believe that advertising has been thoroughly re-invented by Google, Hopkins is a salutatory read.

Power-napping is good, especially if it’s an art form, or a precise science…

Check out a definitive and excellent guide - something for Rubber towers to implement?

Personally I thought the ‘REM’ phase was more of a ‘passing out on the sofa at a mate’s house’.

(At b.tween)

Nicole Yershon talk describes moving Ogilvy from ‘analogue to digital’ as being like turning an oil tanker around. This is a candid, fun and interesting observation, but otherwise this post is just an over-extended excuse for me to mention David Ogilvy yet again - it’s fun to think that the guy really did write the book on advertising.

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Although I’ve tried to buy every copy I see (to give to other people, not because I’m a weird book-collecting freak surrounded by piles of paperbacks), you may find Amazon has a couple new and used - if I don’t get there first.

Watch out for those nasty nasty Amazon new and used shipping charges though; £2.75 for each copy I buy, even if it’s from the same seller. That’s unfair and unjustifiable and I buy less books as a result. Amazon are you listening? - you’d make more money if you changed your shipping policy.

(Live event blogging - how shiny and digital is that?)

After a spell of living in Cornwall, my family and I moved to Plymouth. My parents bought an ordinary end terraced house halfway up a hill, on one side of a valley.
My father decided to paint the house, so he painted it pink, baby-doll pink with postbox-red window frames and door. My school was at the top of the hill across from my house. The hill was high and once you reached the top it afforded a view of the valley. My house stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the grey brick and pebbledash. When I was asked where I lived, I just had to say the pink and red house, it was for a while an icon on the landscape, I even used to get post from my school friends addressed to ‘the pink and red house’. I think Gordon the Gopher was having the same problem.
After a while, another pink and red house appeared, and soon the Royal Mail sorting office in Plymouth was also pink and red. Slowly, over the next year, coloured houses started to appear all over the valley. One day, I turned around at the top of the hill and the valley was a wash of colour. What I was fortunate to have was a visual example of a tipping point; I would like to think my dad started the small phenomena.

Whatever happened, something had changed in the landscape of our small area of Plymouth. Malcolm’s book is about change and how, even though our world at times may seem unmovable, a social epidemic can spread. My dad was not trying to make the valley more colourful or working for a paint company trying to boost sales of exterior house paint in Plymouth, but what if you wanted to spread your message or make a change?
The Tipping Point gives loads of examples and anecdotal stories, much more accurate and relevant than mine, to provide an insight into how social epidemics can be achieved, and with much more hard work, belief, intuition and reflective research that my dad would have ever intended.

After trying and failing to teach myself mysql in ten minutes I purchased this book. It clearly describes and directs the user in the practical uses of PHP, Flash and MySql. The inclusion of evaluative chapters at each stage of the book gives the reader an overview of the newly covered area of PHP/MySQL/Flash; as such it was clear, straightforward and easy to follow. It introduced me to the syntax of PHP while illustrating how it compares to ActionScript, and how it integrates with Flash.

This book assumes the reader only has knowledge of Flash and basic web design skills, as such it leads you by the hand - I can’t tell you how useful this was to me -  as I found that although open source software is free, most of the supporting documentation is written for, and by developers and as such can be seemingly cryptic to a layman such as myself.

I picked this little book up off the Rubber Book Shelf about a month or so ago now. After three weeks I had still not taught myself Mysql.

This book is not for complete beginners - I was after a book that would guide me through the implementation of a database to aid in the passing of information from it to Flash. However, this book gives more of an overview as to the practicalities of working with MySql and the syntax’s that it reacts to. It was informative in as much that it taught me the basics of tables in addition to the storing and calling data from them - however, it did not communicate ( to me at least) what i did with all this information and how I would actually implement a database and ‘hook’ it up to my application.

Cradle to Cradle, written by William McDonough (an architect) and Michael Braungart (a chemist), explores the notion that we humans aren’t doing ourselves and the planet any favours by our modern processes and consumer demands. But this book thankfully has a load of new approaches and innovative suggestions for rethinking the usual manufacturing, building construction and design of consumer goods.

Why do “we” create things that serve one purpose, and are then scrapped or destroyed when we’re done with them? I love the notion that packaging could have a secondary purpose, buildings can be design to self-regulate temperatures (rather than relying on expensive and damaging - to health and planet - ventilation “systems”), and that shoes can be easily renewed and reused when needed.

This book covers a lot of ground and challenges the way people think about eco-effectiveness, efficiency, design, diversity and waste. It’s also not made of trees and is fully recycleable, though the book will hopefully be passed around and read before being recycled anytime soon.

I am thinking of ways it can apply to my own work at Team Rubber: write general user instructions that can be copied and reused and create Selenium tests that aren’t specific to one user type unless needed. They alone won’t save the planet, however. Others might find some inspiration in Cradle to Cradle too - share them!

Personally, I will wrap presents in reusable wrapping paper (a tea towel or a t-shirt - why not?), buy those tasty desserts that come in the reusable glass containers when I can’t be bothered to cook and look for way to support companies that are serving the “cradle to cradle” movement.

After all, the environmentally-minded individual doesn’t want to be a part of the “bad” demand

P.S. It’s back in the bookcase for the next person.

I am not going to lie, I was drawn to this book purely because of its size! I thought, “can I really learn something useful from a book only 47 pages long?” I am delighted to say I did, and it didn’t hurt to do so. It was easy to read, flowed well and had enjoyable similes such as, “For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk”.
Young’s book believe it or not came across as if it was padded at first, but the run up to his ‘technique’, where you do lots of nodding in agreement, did give it more substance. I don’t think his five-step method would seem as interesting or respectable without it, which in a nutshell is:

1. Gather raw materials
2. Work over them
3. Stop actively thinking of it/ them
4. Give birth to an idea
5. Shape the idea

His ‘technique’ taught me (as Andy put it) that you don’t have to lock yourself in an empty room for hours and hours until you come up with something and that being organised is a good thing – which I always like to hear. This book is short and sweet and proves that…. Yes I am going to say it… size doesn’t always matter… sorry!

“Don’t Make Me Think!” is fun to say, and is rather fun to read too.

This is one book that everyone creating web apps, design and/or content ought to read. The clue is in the name - a lot of web usability *is* common sense, but we all need a refresher course now and again.

I’d read the first edition years ago, and second edition is equally awesome. Especially useful for me personally were:

• Chapter 2 & 3 - how users really use the web (imagine users treating the web as a billboard - they are zooming by, rather than sitting down with a cuppa to read every single line of text on the page)

• Chapter 5 - writing for the web … it’s related to the billboard issue! Though the sales guys may disagree
• Chapter 6 - designing navigation
• Chapter 8 & 9 - usability testing
• Chapter 10 - usability as common courtesy

If we all were able to persuade our clients to listen to our suggestions and trust us to make the right decisions about general web usability, our projects could run run a lot smoother.

Don’t take my word for it — check out the zillions of 5* reviews on Amazon.

PS. Kirk, Chapter 11’s subtitle is “Just when you think you’re done, a cat floats by with buttered toast strapped to it’s back”

i) We love reading, especially books; the web’s altogether more organic foe.

ii) The reading list is getting longer.

Here is some visual proof for both of the above statements:

Books = stacky