The Chevy Volt isn’t selling. It’s not because it looks boring. It’s not because of a battery fire incident. Perhaps it’s because of some political maneuvering. But most likely, it’s GM’s unbelievably confusing and intentionally anti-persuasive advertising.

This isn’t about whether the car is green or not. I’m speaking purely from frustration over what I believe is an advertising campaign designed to cripple the sale of a product. I’m not suggesting the Chevy Volt ads are weak. I’m not suggesting they were put together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. I’m suggesting that the creative direction that was given to their ads was meant to do two things:

1. Convince the public, shareholders (which, post-bailout, also include the American public) and government officials that GM is indeed trying to promote the Chevy Volt
2. Hobble sales through confusing advertising that does not effectively persuade a consumer to purchase a Chevy Volt, much the same way a political party will muddy the water on an issue until people tune out

Yesterday, the Detroit News reported that GM sold about 7,700 Volts last year, far below their target of 10,000. During the bailout process, GM had originally told congress and the American public they expected to sell a whopping 45,000 this year — but now they are gearing down production to match the (supposed) lagging demand.

Meanwhile, last year Nissan sold about 9,700 of their all-electric Leafs. They expect that number to double this year, perhaps in part because of their competent advertising campaign.

Maybe it’s because some decision-makers at GM didn’t ever really want to build the Volt. What would make me think that? Well, their latest ad would. In this likely expensive spot, a manufacturing line somberly proceeds through a worn-down Detroit community more like a funeral procession than a parade of hope and change.

It’s grimly titled, this isn’t just the car we wanted to build, it’s the car we had to build.

Before it was built, in 2008 the Chevy Volt was sold to the American public as the savior for GM. We bailed GM out in part because we were told they could build a vehicle for the future — one that will have high demand, help lessen impact on the environment and decrease our dependency on foreign oil.

GM’s other ad features a befuddled Chevy Volt onwer taking a potty break at a gas station and being harassed about his purchase by a loudmouth kid and his even more abrasive father.

…and, in this upcoming weekend’s pre-released 2012 Super Bowl spot, some poorly rendered CGI aliens also harass a Chevy owner. At least the spot isn’t depressing.

So why does GM want the Chevy Volt to fail? I don’t know, but this 1996 nuclear holocaust-inspired ad for the now defunct EV-1 suggests a deep level of internal conflict over the existence of an electric car.

Malls and big box stores are getting smarter. But will the public and politicians view it as acceptable or an invasion of privacy?

Privacy is a funny thing. We all say we want it — but we’re also willing to quickly give it up if we believe it’s in our best interest (think national security) or if we don’t really understand how we’re giving it up (think Facebook and Google).

Website analytical tools have long been able to track visitors as they click through menus, products and pages. Full disclosure: tracking website visitor and social media behavior are some of the things at which we excel. Based on click-through data, we’re able to find how visitors move through a site and what they’re interested in based on the patterns of breadcrumbs they leave. This information is important. It makes better websites, better user experiences and, of course, helps increase sales.

But if you have a brick-and-mortar store you’ve had to rely on surveys, eye-witness accounts and inventory and purchase data. That is until now. Companies like Beemedia, RetailNext and Path Intelligence have invented technologies to learn about shopper behavior in real-world pedestrian environments.

Anonymous data collected from the paths people walk through their environment can provide a wealth usable information — just as it does online. For example, tracking how people respond to sale signs and banners during an event (ie. how effective they are at causing a shopper to visit a particular display or area) can help create more effective advertising and promotional tools. It can help tell a manager where to deploy sales associates, what products to highlight and which to remove. It can even help reduce inventory shrinkage (products lost through deterioration, obsolescence, pilferage, theft, and/or waste.)

The technology to track pedestrian behavior works in different ways. Beemedia offers free wi-fi — and uses the signals they receive to anonymously triangulate wireless devices. RetailNext uses advanced software to monitor existing in-store security camera video, as they do for Family Dollar. Path Intelligence’s FootPath technology uses anonymous cell phone signals. This past holiday season several malls began testing Path Intelligence’s FootPath technology, but after being installed only one day, the experiments were suspended following privacy concerns from Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Real-life retail tracking is coming — and the necessary results it will provide will not only translate into profits for stores but also better shopping experiences for visitors.

We’re sure this has happened to you—you are browsing a retail site and considering making a purchase. For example’s sake, let’s say you are looking for a new hat. You have found one you think you like at Hats R Us, but you want to wait until tomorrow to make your final decision so you leave the site. Then, you move on to check the news on your favorite news site. And behold—a Hats R Us ad shows up on the front page. The same thing happens later in the day when you visit a completely different site to check the weather. Is this a sign that you and the hat are meant to be? Or is this just smart marketing?

And this can even work more specifically. Let’s say in the above example, you were looking for a cowboy hat for that square dance you were planning to attend. You spent a lot of time on Hats R Us in the Western section—and so all the ads that show up are specifically cowboy themed. The Hats R Us truly has your number, and after seeing the ads multiple times, you are more likely to remember and revisit their site when it comes time to make your purchase.

We call this an orchestrated fate for you and the hat. And whether you are a retail vendor, looking to increase appointments or registrations, building an eList, or simply branding, this gentle nudging of people who have visited your site is something we can help you accomplish.

Let’s say you are a hospital, and you have a lot of visitors to the cardiology section of your website. Visitors come, browse for information, but don’t always fill out eList sign up forms, make appointments, or take an action. You don’t have to end your visibility with them when they leave your site. We can help you program your site pages so that if a visitor has been to those pages, when they are browsing other sites your ads recognize that this person has been to your site, and are more likely to display. When it comes time to make an appointment, you are more likely to come to mind—or it’s possible that seeing your ad will push them to revisit and take a next step.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of how we accomplish this, here are the basics: within your website, we tag pages with a special code. Then we program your ads to recognize that code even after you leave the site. We can tag your entire site, or specific pages within your site to make the ads more targeted (like in the cowboy hat and cardiology examples above).

This benefits you, since your relationship with the consumer doesn’t have to end when they leave your site. And your consumers are happy, since they know you know what they want. And when their cowboy hat arrives, they can be pleased that fate brought them together.

A problem advertisers sometimes have is finding the most cost effective way to publicize a product. What we often forget is that if it’s good enough, people get the word out on their own. A couple recent (and humorous) examples would be Old Spice and Allstate, but as much as I love to laugh, I’d say an ad that can instill goosebumps is even more likely to stick with me.

There are few who can make me react this way in just one minute’s time. Really, the only one who immediately comes to mind is Google. But I can now add Chevrolet to the list after viewing the best one minute ad I’ve seen all year.

We learned last week that this event was not staged, that Herb did in fact get his beloved Impala back after 20 years and seven owners, but the authenticity is apparent even without that information, isn’t it? Herb’s family knows how important the car was to him. It was more than a car, it was the memories that came with it.

Even Tim Allen, the new voice of Chevrolet, was given a supporting role as the family was allowed to tell the story in their own voices. The only time we hear Allen’s voice is at the very end, when he gives us the slogan.

Kudos to Chevy for making an authentic, touching, subdued, and shareable ad in just one minute’s time.

One of the biggest questions we get from our clients when we are creating a new campaign for them is “Why should I buy a $250-$550 photo when I can get one for $30-$100 that is just as good?” Ever since the invention of stock photography sites, clients just can’t understand why some photos are just so darn expensive!

Since the recession hit, we designers have spent countless hours searching through cheap stock photography sites for clients. Sometimes sites like this are good because they offer us photography at a price that is affordable. This is great when you have a really small budget, but what if you don’t? Should you give in and buy the more expensive photos? The answer is yes. Here are my 4 reasons why…from a designer’s point of view.

Reason 1 – Cheap Stock Photography Can Cheapen Your Brand
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “You get what you pay for,” you heard right. There is no such thing as a good cheap photo – there’s a reason it’s cheap. Most of the photos found on these inexpensive photography sites have a cheesy, unprofessional look to them. If you’re building a web site for a hospital or bank, you probably don’t want that cheesy photo to be the first thing people see. Clients connect what they see visually with how they think of your brand. That’s why advertising is an effective and important part of your business. If you are trying to build a serious and reputable brand, you probably want a photo that shows that as well.

Photos on a cheaper stock photography site are usually submitted by amateur photographers who are just trying to make some side money. These photographers do not have the training or experience that a professional who is submitting their work to a more reputable site does. That means the quality of their work and their eye for creative and interesting shots is most likely not where it needs to be to make your brand really stand out from the crowd.

Reason 2 – The Cheaper The Photo, The More Likely Someone Else Will Use It
Back in the day, there was no such thing as stock photo sites. That meant that whenever a business needed to do a brochure and they wanted photos, they had to hire a photographer to take these images for them. The advantage of this type of photography was that no one else in the world would be using those photos for advertising, except you.

Well, times have changed. Now, anyone can get a stock photo downloaded from the internet in ten minutes or less. If you are a big hospital, do you want your advertising campaign to be built around images off a cheaper stock photography site that anyone can afford? Your campaign that you spent all that money on will not look so original if the guy down the street is using the same image for his small business.

Reason 3 – The Cheaper The Photo, The Less Specific They Will Be
Sometimes, when we’re building a campaign for a client, they want to see certain types of photos/demographics. Usually, this is not a problem to find when you are searching for photos on a more reputable stock photography site. These sites specialize in stock photography. That means that they use actual data and figure out what items are searched for most frequently and therefore do more photo shoots of these things.

Not only do they monitor what people are searching, they also know the rules and regulations of advertising. They know that in printed pieces and online you need a certain number of each type of demographic, therefore they offer this type of photography.

On the contrary, a cheaper site won’t offer as many images that fit your needs because most of their images are added at random by amateur photographers. This means that they are most likely not photos that have been taken as part of a shoot and also that they do not offer a wide range of demographics – therefore making it harder to find what you’re looking for.

Reason 4 – Series Photos Are Important
Generally, photos that are part of a series are the best photos to use for a campaign. Why? Well, they are all the same. They are a bunch of photos that all have a similar theme and were taken at the same time. Because of this, they will have the same kind of lighting, colors, and types of people.

This might not sound important, but it is.

On a cheaper site, you might be able to find one image here and another there that are of people who are 55 and older and gardening, but they will most likely be different gardens, different kinds of daylight, different people, etc. And what if you really like the style of that one image because you feel it fits your brand the best, but you can’t find any other images that look like it? Sadly, you’re pretty much out of luck. Contrary to some people’s beliefs, Photoshop can only do so much. You can’t always make images look the same, no matter how hard you might try.

Professional stock photography sites, on the other hand, offer series photos which come from a specific photo shoot. That means all of the images in the series were taken during the same shoot and have the same kind of lighting, people, etc. If you like one image from the series and feel that it fits the look and feel you are going for, then it is easy to find images that match and are of similar quality.

Instead of thinking of the internet as a way to cut back on quality and get things for cheap, we should be grateful that we are offered such an easy solution for great photography. You can get the quality of the images you would have received back in the day right at your desktop, without having a photo shoot. Back in the day, people had to pay upwards of $3,500 for a photo shoot every time they needed new photos for a brochure – and that didn’t include the cost of renting a helicopter, make-up artist, talent, and whatever else you needed. Now, you can even buy images according to the size you need! And that, my friends, is amazing.

I hope it’s more evident now why paying more for photography is a little extra dough. The recession has been hard for everyone, but we’ve all become so caught up in a penny pinching mentality that we have sacrificed quality in the process. As the economy takes a turn and things become better again, I hope we will not see ourselves clinging to bad habits just because we know we can save money. It’s important to go back to your roots and pay more attention to what that photo is saying about your brand instead of focusing on the cash.

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the massive impact Steve Jobs has had on the computing world since the news spread over Twitter and Facebook about his passing. I haven’t heard many talk about the quantum impact he’s had on our world as a whole. I’ll explain.

Steve Jobs is a rare individual — rare on a Jeffersonian scale. His push to make computers simpler, cleaner and more efficient began with a design that included a monitor and CPU all-in-one. The stout little original Macintosh Classic, with it’s unique graphical user interface (GUI), was a completely different way of looking at how we interacted with computers and how they fit into our lives. I learned design on a Mac Classic before there was anyone who could teach me about it.

Of course Jobs has had an impact on how computers function. I believe his impact extends beyond that into how we function. He’s impacted how we interact with each other. How we access information. How we learn. And that’s where his impact begins to compound on itself and grow exponentially — in a word, his impact becomes quantum.

Jobs heads up Apple, a company which creates tools that creative people use to create other things. Most creatives design, build, educate and inspire others from the the drawing table that is our Apple computers. From writers to designers to architects to chemists — so many of us start on a common platform which for so long seemed a little rogue — like an outsider’s alternative choice and even a physical identity (are you a Mac or a PC?).

It may sounds obvious, but to me it’s quite profound. For a creative, a computer is like a violin. It can be an object of beauty by itself, but in the right hands becomes a tool to create something amazing. A feeling. A desire. Something that can last a moment (like a website) or something that can last forever (a concept that takes hold of our collective imagination).

Many of us are remembering Steve Jobs today. For me, the best way I can remember Steve Jobs is to keep creating and inspiring others. That’s quantum.

A man approaching his 40s and 50s has one medical procedure on his mind that he would gladly avoid; a prostate exam. Just the mere idea of the procedure is enough to make the manliest of men cringe. You’ll never hear a story about how pleasant the procedure was or how kind the nurse was. In fact, most men prefer never to speak about it again.

With that being said, it is also one of the most important procedures that a man can get. This 15 minute screening can add years to a man’s life. Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in America, affecting 1 in 6 men. Even after hearing those staggering statistics, most men will remain extremely apprehensive to the idea of the screening.

So how in the world do you promote prostate screenings if the majority of the patients refuse to get the procedure?

Unlike most campaigns, the target audience wasn’t exactly who we targeted. Men, as stubborn as they can be, will listen to the women in their lives. So that’s who we targeted in one of the ads. The ad focused on a woman challenging her father to “Man Up” and get his prostate screened. Every variation of the ad focused on challenging men to “Man Up” and get the exam.

The results were incredible. In fact the results were so good last year (additional exam dates needed to be set-up), that we used the same ad concept this year. It didn’t fail. 94% of the men who scheduled a screening “Manned Up” for their prostate exam! I guess a few weren’t man enough.

If you have great video content, I’ll wait while you give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back. You’re way ahead of the game. Whether you have 10, 25, 50, or 100+ videos, it sure feels great to have such a wide variety of content online, doesn’t it?

Now, take a step back for a moment. Approach your channel and your library of videos from the perspective of a new visitor. Chances are that the plethora of videos you have on display is overwhelming for this newcomer, so much so that he or she will gladly exit to more familiar territory.

In a striking Catch-22, YouTube channels are where this is most prevalent. YT made it possible for you to upload video after video for public consumption, but your library soon became so daunting that visitors didn’t know where to begin. So they never did.

What’s the solution here? Step away from YouTube and try categorizing the videos on your web page. Take our client, Wet & Forget, for example. Their multitude of videos ranged from application how-tos to interviews about the product. Their library had grown steadily, and having every video on the same page was simply too overwhelming. Pictured below is the new look to the Wet & Forget Videos page.

If you feel that you have great video content that should be getting more attention, take a look at your videos from a new visitor’s perspective. Is it overwhelming? If so, it may be time to re-think the aesthetics of your page. An overwhelmed visitor is a lost visitor, so better categorizing of your material could work wonders.

A lot of times our creative pursuits outside the office help us find new technology. Since that’s the biz we’re in, we like that!

You  might remember a little post I wrote about the creatives here at DC. Danielle has a fabulous shop on Etsy called Whimsy Garden. When she decided to start showcasing her work at craft shows, she was a “cash only” kinda stand. But now, she is able to accept credit cards thanks to her little friend “Square”.

Square is a credit card reader that attaches to your phone through the headphone jack. With just a few steps, you can easily set up shop! Then you can use their free app to accept any Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express card from your lovers…..I mean patrons at a small fee – similar to PayPal. This is an awesome deal for someone like Danielle, who gained around 50% more business this year by accepting credit cards at her booth. Of course, this app wouldn’t be so fabulous if it didn’t work for both iPhone/iPad users and those of us who are still using Android (ahem…Danielle). Either way, it’s worth checking out if you are in this kinda biz.

Your sad devotion to that ancient Jedi religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, but now it may give you the clairvoyance to update your Facebook status. Or perhaps you’d like to boot up the old the W.O.P.R. or tap it out on your brand new iPhone 5.

Well now you can! With Status Via (inspired by a redit post) you can choose your method of Facebook status delivery.

But come on, really folks — let’s back up a minute. It’s cute. But how can we really use this to our advantage? Well, why are there those little tags declaring that that post was delivered from your Droid anyway? Advertising, of course. This is could be a clever little opportunity for marketers to allow customers to post status updates directly from their organizations or products.

Status updates from a product you sell or manufacture? How about from patients at your hospital? How can you do this? You’d have to use Facebook’s Status Message API to label updates with whatever source you want. Go forth and have some fun with your next marketing campaign. And may the force be with you.

Example: