Does the adge, "Fast, cheap, or good; pick two," still apply to advertising and marketing?

With technology, I’m pretty much a traditionalist, relying on PowerPoint for visual stuff and Word for verbal; I prefer email to text messages.  This explains why, when I sat down ten years ago to write my last book proposal, Microsoft Word made the most sense. 

Word is perfectly serviceable if all you want to do is capture keystrokes, but add in a photograph or other image?  It is, by any measure, pretty primitive, something I discovered when I added images to what I wrote. 

Whatever its shortcomings, the result apparently worked well enough, given I landed a new agent, Jeff Herman, who was able to recruit a new publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

Ten years, however, is equivalent to forever in the digital space, so with my latest proposal I figured I should seek a different, more sophisticated software platform, one with greater design flexibility.  There is no such option on my computer and even if there were one, using it is well beyond my pay grade, so I planned to retain an Art Director to help with design and layout.

I was unhappy with the look of The Art of Client Service’s first edition cover, prompting me to turn to Belinda Downey, who proved inventive and resourceful in formulating a solution.  I returned to Belinda to see if she wanted the book proposal gig; when this didn’t work out, I asked my talented Art Director friend Amy Hall, who also was fully committed.

At a loss for other Art Director/designer answers, I resorted to crowdsourcing with 99Designs; if it didn’t work, the sunk cost of running a book proposal contest would be modest and I’d then seek out other Art Director/Designer options.

I wrote a Creative Brief and launched the contest on a Saturday.  In a matter of days more than dozen designers – mostly outside the U.S., not that it mattered – submitted solutions.  All were surprisingly good, demonstrating a serious sense of craft combined with a clear understanding of the Brief. 

One of these, by Dzine Solutions, stood out with an execution that closely matched my own design predilections.  I awarded the assignment to the Dzine designer, who subsequently revealed his name as Anuj Kumar.

You want fast?  I began the contest late last month; a little more than a week later I emailed a finished proposal to my agent.  By any measure, that’s fast, far faster than if I had gone the more conventional route of working with separately with a designer.

You want cheap?  The investment was, at least by U.S. standards, incredibly reasonable, far less expensive than if I went with a more conventional route.

You want good?  You be the judge:  below is the cover of the proposal I wrote, in Word, followed by Kumar’s design, executed in Adobe Illustrator.  “Good” is a matter of taste and you might not agree, but the difference is noticeable, and to me a vast improvement over an amateur’s lame attempt using Word. 

Lest you think this is a commercial for crowd-sourcing a solution, rest assured it is not.  It is, however, a well-deserved shout-out for Anuj Kumar, who vastly exceeded my expectations with his speed, responsiveness, and design sensibilities.

I suppose it’s possible the “Fast, Cheap, or Good; pick two” rule still might apply to advertising and marketing.

It didn’t apply here.

• #book proposal
• #design
• #advertising
• #marketing
• #anuj kumar