Visa Takes On Android

Starbucks can now send you vouchers for cut-price cappuccinos straight to your mobile handset, thanks to a new partnership between Visa and Google’s newly released Android mobile operating system. Users can sign up to receive offers from marketers that will be delivered directly to a simple interface on their mobile phones. Those who opt in click an ‘offers’ button for the latest promotions, and can then use their handset to find out the location of their nearest Starbucks. Visa is also teaming up with Nokia to roll out a mobile payment system before the year-end. More.

Money, So Beautiful You Wouldn’t Want To Give It Away.

From the place (Holland) that makes some of the world’s most beautifully designed currency a new Five Euro coin, designed by artist and architect Stani Michiels (here’s a link to his pretty detailed blog post on how the design came about) The fact that Michiels is a designer and an architect worked for him as the brief for the job was to design a coin on “Netherlands and Artictecture”. So he brought in both these skills to play while creating the design. For the front of the coin, he listed the names of prominent Dutch architects according to their popularity on the internet, or how many hits they get. Using different weights of a monoline font that he designed especially for the task, Michiels arranged the names to create a portrait of the Dutch queen. On the reverse, Michiels referenced the sheer number of architecture books published currently, arranging different sized books around the edge of the coin so that the space between their tops forms the outline of a map of The Netherlands. It’s really futile to describe such a wonderful piece of design in words. Take a look at it here.

Bank Branches Wither Or Not?

Amidst all the chatter on what went wrong in the world of financial services, one ignored little aspect of this industry is getting renewed spotlight. Bank branches. While technology and its tools will continue to chip away at many of the services banks and bank branches delivered in the past, many experts think the time is just right for reinventing retail banking by infusing it with, yes technology, and other learnings from the retail industry. Oregon’s Umpqa Bank is an oft quoted example. Here’s a rant from Christopher Johnson, a former banker in Financial Times UK, on what’s broken with the UK retail banking model. There are other voices piping in. Most notable from Paul Penrose of Finextra. Here he wonders if branches are a weak link, or the new opportunity, supported by some stats that point to an increase in the number of people visiting branches in the recent times. Paul also believes that the bank manager has a better chance of reassuring customers one to one, better than any piece of technology can, more here. And this last bit from Park Paradigm, a VC’s blog where the author calls on people with ideas to come up with an alternative to retail banking, that he could go out and fund.

Making Working Together Work

David Sherwin at Change Order blog has an interesting post on why we in the design, advertising and creative businesses need to collaborate more with people. Here is his interesting little list of whys and watch outs …

1. Great ideas, with proper nurturing, attract the support of others. This holds true for creative organizations that strip personal politics out of the design process. People want to help your work succeed (if you’re generally nice to them).

2. Collaborative making is a sign of maturity in your portfolio. I respect nothing more than seeing a designer’s portfolio stuffed with killer creative work, chased by a presentation where the designer talks about how they brought the unique strengths of each team member to bear on the work. The designer carries the vision, while the team supports it. Such a designer can become a leader.

3. Great teams know how to play jujitsu with client feedback and sell work through. A real red flag that comes up in interviews with designers is when they show their original concepts instead of what ended up being printed or went live. It’s not just on you to sell an idea. Your team will help you. And anyways, even an edited idea is “yours” when it contains the spirit of your intent for a concept.

4. You don’t own it anyways. Your company owns your ideas. Then, after the client pays you for them, they usually own it (or a license to it) forever. So once those ideas come out of your mouth, they’re no longer yours.

Now, with this said: Great ideas still need to be on brief. And you need to be on a team where you’re all on equal footing. Here’s a few situations regarding team dynamics that you should look out for.

Voice your intent before starting a team engagement. Before you start working a project as a team, say out loud exactly how you want it to play out. “First, I’d love for us to share our ideas with no editing for an hour or two. Let’s have fun! Then, we’ll take a walk, come back, and relate the ideas we’ve brainstormed back to the brief… and maybe see if one or two of them can be merged into something even better.” You’d be surprised how voicing your intent, along with an attitude of real humility, can blow the roof off a brainstorm.

Great ideas come from the bottom up, not top-down. If your creative director keeps on handing your team ideas and tells you to execute them as is, you should consider going somewhere a little more democratic. You’ll learn by example, but not by doing the work. Great designers know how to follow the thread of a glimmer of an idea through into the full-blown work, molding feedback into it.

If you keep failing to land an idea, there is likely a clear reason. But it may hurt when you figure it out. If you brainstorm in teams, and you come up with a ton of ideas that end up getting discarded at the end of the process, then you need to consider why your work isn’t getting support. It may have been because you were off-brief or just didn’t connect with the audience on an emotional level. Or, most likely, you didn’t describe your ideas clearly. Lack of articulation is the number one killer of great ideas.

Don’t fluff yourself for being a “creative type.” The number two killer of great ideas? Preening yourself regarding creating the idea after you present it. I’ve worked at places where there was a note in the employee handbook that said, “No divas.” Those rules are enforced with an iron hand, and for good reason. Such behavior keeps people from sharing the most valuable commodity in any creative agency: themselves.

Envelope Advertising

If you think you are being bombarded with advertising messages from every possible avenue, look at these artfully designed envelopes from the early 20th century. Biscuits, wine, soaps, tea, cereal and more. One man’s art, spam for another?

A Design Manifesto From The World Economic Forum

BusinessWeek contributing editor Bruce Nussbaum is one of the world’s pre-eminent design thinkers. He was at the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Dubai, where he spent time discussing what design thinking can do to help reshape the big issues of the day like human well-being, sustainability, learning and innovation. Read the manifesto here

Towards Better Email Standards

Email Standards Project (ESP) works to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email an the one hand, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike. Among the many things they do, is test popular email clients like Gmail, Outlook Express and Lotus Notes and rates each one of them. Discover the many parameters by which emails are tested at ESP. See how some of the top mail clients came through. And make the ESP blog a regular read…

Social Media: The New Face Of Financial Lead Gen?

As the financial services market reels from a huge indiscriminate reputation hit, they are still pumping out brand advertising. Those media dollars are going to waste. Building awareness for your financial service – bank, investment, insurance – when all that people are aware of is doom, gloom and questionable civic morality (e.g. golden parachutes, bailouts for the top tier, etc).

Turns out that traditional search marketing lead generation also tilts away from the reasonable to favor…social media. Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins over at Mashable covered the purchase of the blog Bankaholic, essentially a one man shop, for $15M by Bankrate. The value to bankrate? A way to connect with potential customers beyond traditional advertising or search marketing. I posted about an alternative approach for retail banks to start digging their reputations out of the colossal crater. This is a similar approach. Bankaholic is doing well but not a huge reach play (Alexa ranking of 42,168 average less than 20 comments per post). Mark has a strong POV from his own experience:

“Several years ago, I served as chief technology officer for a financial services and credit restoration company, and assisted in setting up our systems to work with our AdSense buys at the time. At the time, bankruptcy laws were in extreme states of flux and people were looking to get in quick on matters relating to their credit ratings before the legal changes went into effect, and AdSense keyword buys were sometimes north of $48.00 a click.

It was around that time where it became far more efficient to look to social media as a means for promotion than CPC advertising for lead generation, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here.”
Main story and all links within it here.

The Crisis & What To Do About It

George Soros author of The New Paradigm for Financial Markets writes: Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the subprime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to subprime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.

Although the financial crisis has shown signs of abating, the race to save the international financial system is still ongoing. Read this rather in-depth article here.

Now, A Robot To Help You With Your Account Aggregation

ANZ Bank Australia introduces a Robot Mascot to help customers with their Account Aggregation. ANZ Head of Online Banking Sam Plowman said: “ANZ MoneyManager is a convenient and simple tool for people wanting to better manage their finances. It’s particularly relevant given that Australians, on average, have a relationship with more than four different financial institutions.“
ANZ MoneyManager can help provide people with valuable insights into their finances and spending habits by bringing all their information into the one secure place, so they can make better informed decisions.”

Account Aggregation is not new. What is new perhaps is that the bank uses a novel little programming trick to turn your curser into a GIANT robot hand (see screenshot in linked article). A little disconcerting at first, but it does get your attention and proves you are dealing with a creative enterprise. All in all, an engaging user experience. Read more.