Sweating the Small Stuff

In general, "don’t sweat the small stuff" isn’t a bad way to live. If you obsess about every teensie-weensie little thing - did I just spell teensie-weensie right? - you’ll drive yourself nuts, and lose track of the "stuff" that really matters.

But in marketing, a lot of what we do ends up entailing a lot of "small stuff", and if you don’t sweat it, well, you can end up looking pretty silly sometimes.

I thought of this when I saw an ad on TV the other day for AAA’s travel planning services. The last time I used AAA for trip planning was in the 1970’s, when they prepared a handy triptych map for my Route 66 drive cross-country with my college roommate. (For those old enough to get the Route 66 reference, we did not have a Corvette, but we did have Joyce’s almost-as-cool Karmann Ghia.  Hmmmm? Is that how you spell Karmann Ghia?). But I’m guessing that they provide pretty good service.

In any case, although I am generally head-in-a-book or Sudoku puzzle when the TV’s on, I looked up to watch their ad, and while the narration talked about "planning a trip to Norway," the images were of St. Mark’s Plaza, pigeons, and gondoliers. Now, I’m a believer in global warming, and it’s been a long while since I was in Oslo, but I really don’t think that it suddenly looks like Venice.

"Small stuff" kind of mistake - and maybe it was even intentional - but it really looked pretty darned stupid.

Not that I’ve never been involved with things that ended up looking pretty darned stupid, myself. Why, just the other day I slipped a client’s fax number onto the bottom of a data sheet where the telephone number belonged. Thankfully, it was "just" a pdf - and not a massive print job - but, still… It was something I should have double checked.

(Small stuff, but I should have sweated it.)

In the past, I’ve called every number listed on a piece of collateral to make sure that it’s working, and I’ll have to reinstate that practice.

Years ago, as a product manager, I worked with the marketing group of my company on a direct mail piece. The many years that have gone by have not erased my memory of just how hideous the piece was. It featured heavy black chains, and a lot of (cheap-o) use of reflex blue (not my favorite color). But the problem wasn’t just the design, which I had no control over. It was a missing apostrophe. Its should’ve been it’s.

This happened in the dark ages, when you’d actually go to the printer to okay a job that was on the presses and about to roll. The marketing production manager had, in fact, noticed the error, but decided that it really didn’t matter. Let ‘em roll!

Well, it mattered to me, and I went out and got Electraset sheets of apostrophes and made everyone in sight insert them onto the direct mail pieces before they went out. (Trivial, absolutely, and these days I might overlook or forgive it, but any time something goes out with errors in it or on it, it reflects poorly on the company. If a company let’s an error go by on a marketing piece, might they not also turn a blind eye to bugs in their software, flaws in their hardware, deficiencies in their services? Somebody better be sweating all that small stuff!)

I can think of quite a few misses and near misses I was directly or tangentially involved in over the years. An illustration of PC that was a type our software didn’t support.  The "Data Window" product that was called "Data Widow" in the brochure. (Given that the clients for that product were mostly Wall Street boyos, the product may well have created more than one data widow, but still…) Alluded vs. eluded. (Gulp! Would anyone notice?) The web site content that got loaded on with a comment embedded in it that read "Can we say this? Is this even true?" When I sent someone on my team up to the web services group to get it fixed a.s.a.p., they told him that they’d get around to fixing it tomorrow. Fortunately, George stood his ground and they made the fix in real time.)

I could go on, and I’m sure that every last marketing professional on the face of the earth could add to the list. We’re only human. Mistakes get made. Mostly they don’t really matter.

No matter how many times you check and re-check, occasional errors will slip through, and the only way you can guarantee that you won’t make mistakes is to do nothing. (That’s no fun.)

But a little sweating of the small stuff is important. Better to catch it before the CEO, your top customer, or your mother-in-law calls it to your attention.

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