Today's Marketing Cookie - Compliments To The Chef

Today's Marketing Cookie is bigger than me.  All I do, is wake up early and write them every day, but there's great people in the kitchen helping me get them ready for you. It's time to send my compliments to the chef and kitchen staff! Without them, the cookies I write every day would never make it to you.

About six weeks ago, Lisa McCarthy, our agency principal bought Chinese food and asked people to stay after work so we could develop a new strategy for our blog. We came up with the tactics we would employ and developed a content calendar. By the end of the evening, we had finished our meal and Lisa passed out the fortune cookies. Our founder Bob Fields handed his fortune to me which said, "it takes a long time to achieve instant success.", which I thought would make a good blog post. As more people opened their cookies, there were more and more blog posts emerging. As the cookies crumbled, this whole idea just sort of hit me. However, if Lisa had ordered pizza instead of Chinese food, the Marketing Cookies would have never happened.

The next day, I went on Amazon and ordered a giant box of fortune cookies and sat down with Chad Smith to talk about the format of the daily cookie posts. Should the title of the blog be the fortune itself? We cracked one open and decided that, "If I bring forth what is inside me, what I bring forth will save me." was probably too long for a blog title. Chad spent many evenings with me after work for the next two weeks to work through many of the issues. He helped me sort out questions like, should our Marketing Cookies be on the blog, or should they have their own section? What category should we create for them? How long should they be? Every project needs a holistic thinker like Chad to keep the cookies on track.

When I first announced the idea on our blog, I got a lot of feedback. One comment in particular, came from my friend and former client, Will Slotnick, who asked it the Marketing Cookies would provide the lucky numbers or if I would help people, "learn to speak Chinese". Wow! I was so focused on the fortunes, that I hadn't even thought about the stuff written on the back. I sat down with Chad and we came up with the "Learn to speak marketing" section. While the Marketing Cookies would likely be more serious and genuine, the "Marketing Speak", section could poke fun at marketing and maybe make people chuckle a little. 

Coming up with new sayings for the "Learn to speak marketing" section has proven to be the most difficult part of the Marketing Cookie! After Chad and I had exhausted all the sayings we could think of, we reached out to Mark Selewacz and Steve Close. Mark is an insanely talented illustrator, and Steve is our Chief Creative Officer, a true Big Apple mad man who came to us from Madison Avenue. These guys are amazing and their marketing sayings have been a terrific addition to the Marketing Cookies!

One day, a message came in from my friend Katharine Conroy, asking if I would be posting the cookies on Facebook so she could remember to read them.  Then it hit me. What if I sent out a weekly recap? Then if people miss any of the cookies, they could get a weekly dose sent directly to their inbox!  What a great idea! And they're low fat cookies too! So I met with Matt Fontaine, our incredibly talented interactive designer, to see how we might send out a weekly email every Friday afternoon to all of our cookie fans. He came up with a terrific template and he packages up the cookies for you every single week. Without Matt, the weekly cookie delivery would not be possible.

We had just about everything ready to go... except for a name for the cookies. I had come up with about a dozen names and they were all stupid. I had come up with names like, "My Marketing Fortune", and "Make a Fortune with Marketing"...  Really dumb stuff like that, and none of them were working.  While sitting with our awesome web developer, Bill Bowles, to talk about all the technical improvements we wanted to make to the blog, Bill single-handedly came up with the name. "How about Daily Marketing Cookie" he said. I shook my head saying, "I can't do this every day. What if I miss a day?". So, Bill responded, "How about Today's Marketing Cookie?". 

G E N I U S ! ! ! !

...and that's only in the first two weeks. More great ideas like the "Fan Cookies" came from Bob Hackenson, where people have been ordering Chinese food and sending me photos of their fortunes. There's also the soon to be released Marketing Cookie smartphone app and a monthly eBook, which are great ideas I got from the very talented Professor of Illustration at Mass College of Art, Ric Allendorf. YAY!  As you can see, "Today's Marketing Cookie" is much bigger than me. There's a whole lot of people in the kitchen, cooking up great ideas for the cookies you enjoy every day and they deserve a hearty "Thank You!".  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you... and repeat.

In the meantime, please also send a thank you to the folks in your kitchen.