From Good Concept to Bad Outcome

I came across this ad today when I was looking through the Sunday paper. It bothered me because it was a good concept drowned through seemingly bad vision or leadership.

The idea no doubt started as a way to fill a full page of advertising. "Let's do some sort of supplement informational piece," someone might've suggested. This in and of itself is not a bad idea at all. If you can make the piece look interesting enough to stop and read it.

As it is, though, the piece is sorely lacking. One, it looks like a regular newspaper article about feet. I'm sure this is at least partly the intent, however, this looks like a badly paginated newspaper article. It's very boring, and most newspapers would break up the monotony of the text with more readable sections.

The article itself is a Q and A. It's good that they did it this way, but I'm guessing they could've pulled about half of these questions and really focused in on what the customer is looking for in terms of information: Do I have a problem and do you have a solution? As it is, it's simply too wordy and definitely doesn't look like a light read, even in its more approachable Q and A format. The project simply lacked someone who could look at all the pieces and figure out what should have stayed and what should have went.

The lesson to learn here is that it takes someone in any project with understanding, vision and confidence to be the gatekeeper. If a project doesn't have that person, you get a lot of good ideas, but not a lot of well-executed pieces.