Invisible Business Cards

Warning: Most of this blog post is an analogy. If you don't like analogies you should leave now before it gets too late and you regret it forever.

Still here?

Okay. Analogy.

One of my favourite things to do is go to events and pretend I'm someone important. I don't change my identity or anything over the top like that, I just act like my identity is one that other people should respect and admire. A few months ago I did this very thing at an event in London (where no-one knows who I am to prove that I'm lying.) At this event there were loads of students all studying design, advertising and illustration with their work out for prospective employers to look through. It was really something. Because I was pretending to be someone important I got a special wristband to wear. This wristband got you in places that otherwise you couldn't go and made everyone else there look at you with extra hope in their eyes. I like it when that happens. The wristband did not, however, differentiate between people who might actually be of use to the students and their ambitions and people like me who were just community managers who fancied a day out. Excellent.

Walking round the big hall the event was placed in I learnt something: Students had been told to look out for the wristband I was wearing and approach the owner.Whenever I entered a stall I was instantly hounded by people eager to show me what they could do. I felt like a bit of prized meat in a room full of wolves and it was fantastic. Never before have so many people wanted to talk to me, never before have I been able to kid so many people into thinking I was noteworthy. Mwahaha.
As part of this hounding I received approximately 1 million business cards. I quite like business cards, they make you feel special when you have one. You feel like you belong somewhere and you have a purpose, but the sad truth behind them is that when you collect a lot they all begin to look a little bit the same.

Business card metaphor. 

By the end of the day my pockets were full of a whole range of cards, some of which were really quite nice and others that looked like they'd been done on MS Word that morning. I had a portfolio card that you could open out to see all of the work the team had done. I had an edible card that I couldn't actually eat because it was full of sugar. I had a card made of faux leopard fur. All of these cards had been looked at for about 3 seconds before I'd put them in my pocket and most of them would never be looked at again because after that event was over I'd go back to being someone without a special wristband. Woe. However one of the cards I was presented with caught my attention. It was made of clear perspex and when I first got it I thought there'd been a mistake. You couldn't see anything on it. No names, no pictures, no website. Nothing. I asked the pair who had made the cards about this and they told me, with a look on their faces that suggested this was all they'd been asked all day, to hold it up the light. I did this and hey presto, all of a sudden things made sense. In the middle of the card a light bulb began to shimmer, under which was some clever copy (that I have shamefully forgotten) and their names and contact details. It was proper nice. I thought to myself there and then that if there was one team I would remember it would be that one. I would make an extra effort to look at their work later and maybe, just maybe, drop their names into an email to someone else who actually could have an impact on their lives. 

When I got home I took all of the business cards out of my jacket and put them on my desk. My room was quite small and full of clutter so I'd cleared a space just for them so I wouldn't miss them when I woke up the next day. That one card would come with me, I would make up for the fact I'd spent a day deceiving innocent young minds by actually trying to help at least one pair of them. Karma sorted!

The next morning I woke up and looked over to my desk. They were still there, my flat wasn't haunted. Result. Just before I left for work I went over to search for the one I wanted, the really pretty light bulb one that made me smile and was printed on near invisible clear perspex. You can probably guess what's going to happen because you're not an idiot, are you?

I couldn't find it. It was gone. With it had gone the chance of me writing a shy email with their names in. Obviously there was the possibility that someone who actually was important had seen their work and done something with it and in that case me losing that card doesn't really matter. But that would ruin the analogy completely so let's pretend that didn't happen. 

Now to the point (Hurrah!) It's all very nice making things look pretty and shiny, but if they're not effective then what's the point? I wish I could think of a current ad campaign to relate this to BUT I CAN'T so you can just think of one for yourself and go, 'Oh yeah, that Ash lad has a point!'

In a world where there are 340 MILLION tweets per day from over 140 million users, where there are thousands of TV channels to watch on hundreds of networks, where Sky Plus gives you the option to fast forward past the ads and go straight to the next part of The Vampire Diaries (yeah?) you really have to stand out more than ever. 

You can still go for pretty, you can still go for nice, but it's probably best you never go for invisible.