While most people at Hile Design were just starting to fulfill New Year’s resolutions and sincerely regretting that extra slice of pie over Christmas, I was boarding a plane, on my way to a land of Bollywood, chicken masala and blue skinned gods. As part of a Spring Arbor University requirement, I needed to spend a month in another country in order to graduate. So, I chose India.

I spent three weeks bouncing from city to city, tasting food far too spicy for my American tongue and keeping a look out for elephants (alas, I saw none). Starting in Mumbai, my group traveled to Hyderabad, Calcutta and ended our stay in Delhi.

We were required to keep a journal to record our experience, and in the first page, I described India in one word: Thick.  India is thick with people, thick with smells and noise and pollution, thick with poverty and thick with luxury, thick with tradition and color and religious deities; India is thick with markets and vendors and food and traffic and non-profits trying to make a dent in the thickness, but, most of all, India is thick with media and advertising.

The minute I stepped out of the airport into the humid Mumbai streets, I was struck by how much print advertising dominated the aesthetic culture. If there was wall space, whether domestic residencies, retail stores, corporate offices or broken down structures (of which there was a lot), there was a poster or banner advertising some brand of food or technology. Typically in America, a sign advertising something like Coca-Cola on a building is usually a signifier that whatever business occupies the space probably sells the product. But, in India that wasn’t the case. It seemed that as long as the public could see the building, it was free for the advertising taking.

Amid all the mangoes, saris and bangles, I expected to see a reflection of the society I was in when I looked at the posters and billboards. Unfortunately, just about every ad I saw had a very pale looking model dressed in western clothes and selling either a western product or its Indian equivalent. Nowhere in the television commercials did I see a dark-skinned woman in her sari holding up a packet of curry spices to the tune of a Bollywood song. Nowhere in the print promotions did I see a man in his kurta sitting down for a meal in his brightly colored apartment and eat with his hands and some chapatti bread. As far as marketing goes, India may be stationed in the East but certainly has its eyes to the West.

This Eastern idolization of the West isn’t anything new; skin lightening and eyelid lifting has been a trend in Asia for some time. However, I find it fascinating that it has gone beyond personal appearance to entire cultures embodying this movement to become “more American” through its media and advertising. That raises the question of the power of marketing and if it really is the global identifier for a society. I wonder how many cultures outside of the US associate Americans with the golden arches of McDonalds or the seductive women of Victoria’s Secret.  I also wonder how many Americans look at the ads and have the same feeling I got in India, where what they see around them and what they see on the billboards don’t match up.

So, as I sit at my desk in my kurta and crave a mango lassi, I’ll leave you all with the question that has been on my mind of late: is media and advertising a reflection of the culture, maybe the best parts of the culture, or is it creating some sort of ideal that the culture is trying to achieve? Does it matter?

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to ask you to humor me for a moment. If I say the word “writer,” what picture pops into your head? My bet is that your imagination immediately conjured up an image of a bespectacled man or woman sitting in the lone corner of a coffee shop with a Moleskine and a pen. Of course, your imagined writer is not conversing with the other customers or being engaged with the world because the best writing comes from the inner-depths of a writer’s mind and soul … right? Well, yes and no.

Poetry and fiction may be more personal works, thus requiring seclusion from the distraction of others. But agency copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

Marketing writing is a form of communication that is constantly evolving, and to be successful copywriters need to be actively involved with others. I have learned a few things from my experience in writing copy for Hile: Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty years ago after my doctor recommended I get more exercise, I, like 40 million other Americans, went out and bought a treadmill. I knew that the odds of exercising long-term in our unfinished basement were against me (only 3 in 10 Americans exercise regularly) but I was going to beat the odds. I swore that I wouldn’t become a statistic by letting my treadmill turn into a back-of-the-basement, spider web covered, clothes hanger.

My 3-day a week treadmill regimen lasted 2 years.

Yup! I was a statistic. (Lest you think I’m a total slackard, I was exercising sporadically, but not on our expensive treadmill.)

Two and a half years ago when I decided to launch our company blog I had the same noble intentions as my early exercise aspirations. I promised myself I’d write two fresh posts a week, including compelling interviews with industry leaders, and that my entries would be GOOD. By my fifteenth post I realized that all those great ideas I’d had when I decided to become Mr. Social Media had run out. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave was interviewed by Lucy Ann Lance, local Ann Arbor radio personality, where he discusses the history of Hile Design.

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There’s a lot of pressure in the advertising world to think big. Agencies compete for “big” clients, who in turn want big ideas for big returns in the form of increased customer awareness, sales and profit. Type “think big advertising” into your Google search bar and you’ll score no less than 165 million hits. The “big” mentality can be intoxicating, with its attendant rushes of adrenaline, awards and acclaim. But merely thinking big can leave some important things behind in the dust—things like integrity, loyalty and just plain human decency.

In their book The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval talk about how focusing on the details yields big results. They know whereof they speak. Their agency, The Kaplan Thaler Group, started as a two-woman ad firm with a single Clairol Herbal Essences account and grew to renown as the creator of the ubiquitous Aflac duck. An excerpt from the inside front cover flap captures the flavor of the book: “Our smallest actions and gestures often have an outsized impact on our biggest goals… Going that extra inch—whether with a client, customer, family member or friend—speaks volumes to others about our talent, personality and motivations.” Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we had a project management consultant come to our office to discuss providing services to analyze and help improve our company’s web design processes. But this post isn’t about that …

Instead, it’s about being who you say you are (or “show” you are, in the case of a website). During her visit, the consultant mentioned that her experience when she walked in our door and met our staff was the same as what she encountered in her visit to our Hile Design website (and fortunately for us, she liked what she saw in both places). That was music to my ears, and was one of the main goals of our most recent website redesign. Before starting the project, I reviewed a lot of other agency websites, and quite frankly, many of them began to look and sound eerily similar. For us, it was very important that we not only present our business services and design portfolio (all advertising agencies do that), but that we also communicate the culture (informal) and personality (friendly and creative) of our company to our site visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Hile Design LLC has been selected to redesign the website for Ann Arbor–based Oliver Financial Planning, LLC, a fee-only financial planning and registered investment advisory firm.

As Fee-Only Financial Planners, Oliver Financial Planning does not sell products such as mutual funds or insurance or accept commissions from the sales of those products. Therefore, all conflicts of interest regarding compensation and recommendations are removed. As a result, the company is free to work in their clients’ best interest.