BIG QUESTIONS
Are you afraid to ask the most basic questions?
A question can be a powerful device. A good question can change conversations, change organizations, change economies. It has the power to refocus a group, a culture, a nation on something long neglected – which is sometimes fundamental. And often those fundamental questions look too basic to have NOT been asked and discussed before. The person who has that fundamental question bubbling up in their brain often feels self-conscious about asking it. Fear takes over and they think, “By asking this question, am I outing myself as the dim bulb in the room?” So they hold it back. But the person who has the courage to play the fool is often the one who throws it out there anyway.
And those are the people who change everything.
TOOL JOY
Tools for online brand guidelines
Brand guides are critical tools for maintaining brand fidelity and consistency, which helps your brand stand out in the sea of sameness and develop trust with your audience. But PDF’d brand guides are awfully hard to update and redistribute. That gets in the way of evolving the brand and making sure everyone is on the same page. To ensure that your brand is easy to evolve and easy to access for everyone who touches it, putting those guidelines online is a better idea. Here are seven of them to consider:
WHAT CLIENTS WANT
6 insights about the state of in-house marketing & creative in 2024
Cella, a consulting and staffing partner to marketing and creative teams, recently completed a report about the state of marketing and creative operations in 2024. A few interesting take-aways from their webinar:
Testing, not learning. Creative and marketing are outputting new work, but not doing much retroactive analysis. Hence, the A/B tests are not informing new efforts.
In-house burnout? The majority of creative work (60%) is being done by company staff, but only 55% of the internal creative teams feel adequately staffed to handle the ever-increasing workload. Staffing is stagnant and there hasn’t been much change in operational rigor. Meanwhile, there are more channels and content demands.
Less time for thinking. While the complexity of the work is increasing, teams do not have the bandwidth to think strategically, innovate, and tell stories. They feel like order takers and are not proud of the work that comes out. This leads to a drop in the perceived value of the in-house agency.
Shorter planning cycles. The marketing planning horizon has shrunk from 3-6 months down to 1-3 months. Only 39% of creative teams are involved in the marketing planning process. Creative teams have trouble getting a seat at the planning table.
Increased focus on performance. There’s less team building, but more incentivizing – which shows an increased focus on measurable performance.
Audience blindness? To a large degree, customer sentiment data (mostly from surveys) isn’t trickling into the creative department.
DESIGN WE ❤️
Coach Emily
The great outdoors gives us strength and clarity. Yet BIPOC people often face discrimination in these natural spaces. Pinwheel was thrilled to take on a pro-bono client: a documentary film called Coach Emily about Oakland-based Black climbing coach Emily Taylor and her journey to navigate racism in the outdoors while teaching kids about climbing – and themselves. We helped the “Coach Emily” team with their log lines, graphical identity, and pitch materials. Catch the trailer here and consider contributing. Pinwheel services were included in the first-prize award in the California Film Institute’s Doclands Film Festival.
BEEP BOOP
Mandate hate: Return to office mandates show no bottom line improvement and noticeable damage to employee morale, study shows.
Glassdoor FTW: Pinwheel client Glassdoor went fully remote after noticing that “remote” job postings attracted 50% more applicants and ones with better qualifications.
Not hot: Have you noticed that jalapeno peppers are losing their heat? As it turns out, that’s by design.
Shiny happy people: In a recent study, 61% of marketing workers said their work was a source of positive mental health. The #1 profession for that particular metric.
Now hear-see this: Meta is exploring the idea of earphones powered by AI with cameras that will detect the wearer’s surroundings, identify objects, and translate foreign languages. Odd.
WORD TO THE WISE
“Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses.”
“That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own – the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every person, when they get quiet, when they become desperately honest with themselves, is capable of uttering profound truths.”
—Henry Miller, Essayist and Author
ICEBREAKER
How do you activate your vagus nerve when stressed?
From yoga to forest therapy, there are many ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, an important part of our parasympathetic nervous system, to help decrease stress, anxiety, and even migraines. Here’s how we’re resetting our vagus nerves during Mental Health Awareness Month.
Todd: I’ve recently started listening to shamanic drums after work. It’s a repetitive rhythm that begins slowly and then gradually builds to a tempo of 3 to 7 beats per second.
Melissa: I have been practicing regulating my breathing by using the 4 to 6 method. Breathe in for 4 and then out for 6. It is amazing how concentrating on your breathing can help you reset.
John: There’s a very handy technique I’ve recently been made aware of called the physiological sigh. It’s a very simple technique that you can use any time, which is taking two breaths in, followed by a deep exhale. Recently canceled Andrew Huberman explains the physiology of how and why it works in this short video.
Laura: I’ve recently started doing breath work at the end of every day and it’s been, dare I say, magical. And a great way to separate my work life from my home life, given they’re both happening in the same place.
Sarah: My two favorite ways to trigger my vagus nerve are connecting with nature and yin yoga. Practicing both daily always gives my mood a giant boost and helps me sleep like a baby.
Marielle: We have a cold plunge that I keep meaning to use, but the steady stream of teenage boys immersing themselves post workout is a bit of a turn off. Then again, maybe grime exposure would be good for my microbiome, which is said to stimulate the vagus nerve…
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
Narrative identity theory
Beginning in adolescence, people start to become historians of the self. They start to see their past as something they can make meaning out of and reconstruct it in a way that helps them understand where they may be going in the future. Once this project develops, it stays with us for the rest of our lives. There is nothing inherently fixed about these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, but they do often become fixed, and people make decisions – life choices even – based on them.
