One third nerd, two thirds creative

My first job out of college involved promotional/theming design for online contests that Dell ran for their call center staff. You know, incentive programs. Employees who performed well in the contests won “points” that they could spend on cheesy merchandise. My boss would approach me in the morning and say: “Drew, we’re wanting to push broadband packages as add-ons this week. Come up with a theme and promotional materials by lunch.”

Ordinary guy calls Dell to buy a computer, and the sales rep would do his best to sell, well, you name it: printers, extra software, broadband packages, warranties, etc.. And Dell tracked all these stats and kept metrics for each individual employee, allowing for all kinds of interesting internal web based contests complete with live leaderboards.

It was interesting because the add-ons weren’t strictly Dell merchandise. The external vendors like Microsoft and Norton would kick-in funds for the contest payouts and everyone would make money.

Working in that type of environment served as good kick in the pants for kid just coming out of college with an art degree. Seeing the inner workings of the giant sales machine that Dell was, and still is, was a humbling experience.

In the beginning, most of the call centers were stateside, but during 03 and 04 they were popping up in South America and India as Dell caught the outsourcing bug. A call center rep working in say, Bangalore, would participate in the same contest as their counterpart in Round Rock, Texas. Not only were the contest rewards and payouts drastically different based on location, but in my case, attempting to develop sales contests and promotions for a multi-cultural audience, even though they all spoke english, proved very interesting.

Imagine you’re a salesman and your buyers are locked up in prisons all over the world. Similar would be a corporate motivational artist attempting to inspire a confined audience of telephone jockies. Thats was me. Below are highlights from that illustrious 2 – year stage of my design career. Finished pieces were in the form of web banners, posters, also site designs.