By ansik via Flickr Creative Commons

Like the clients we serve, Paperkite sprang from a vision to create a quadruple-bottom-line creative communications agency, adding genuine value to our clients, our creative team members’ lives, our communities and our financial sustainability.

To that last end, we welcomed this week a new member of our team, Angelica Goss-Bley, whose personal business philosophy dovetails perfectly with Paperkite’s.

Angelica is your typical Ivy League alumna who graduated with a double major in statistics and musical composition. She holds a master’s degree in experimental performance and social justice, and she runs her own accounting firm that specializes in helping locally owned businesses and farms build and maintain sustainable financial practices.

We’re thrilled that Angelica will bring to Paperkite both a keen mind for our own financial sustainability and growth, but also a singular ability to identify statistical strengths and weaknesses for our clients.

In the future, we hope Angelica will share her insights on financial sustainability here on the Paperkite site.

Welcome, Angelica. We can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

By NatalieMaynor via Flickr Creative Commons

I’m not a big fan of fast food. I don’t eat meat, so that means most fast food chains hold little appeal in the first place. On those rare occasions when I find myself hungry, on the road, without food and without time or inclination to go to a real restaurant, I’ll make a run for the border and hit Taco Bell.

It’s not exactly enjoyable or satisfying, but it is serviceable. One step up from astronaut food or a nutrition pill. Or maybe it’s a step down.

Regardless, that’s all I expect of it. If the kitchen crew screws up my order, that’s kind of par for the course. If it’s cold or the tortilla is a little stale? Meh.

A while back, Spike Jones of Brains of Fire compared different approaches to marketing using fast food and home cooking as an analogy. As usual, he was right on the money.

I think it goes beyond food and beyond my own industry. I think you can apply the fast food v. home cooking analogy to almost any service or business or organization.

And you can tell which kind of food you’re dealing with by looking at the cooks’ intentions.

Are they trying to nourish you and make you stronger? Do they care what your favorite foods are? Are they interested in the quality and skill that goes into each dish?

Or are they punching a clock and collecting a check?

Just what kinds of cooks are they?

And what kind of cook are you?

PS I have nothing to gain from promoting this, but Spike will be at the Albany-Colonie Chamber’s Bright Ideas Conference Oct. 15,

I have been reading Spike’s work and following him on Twitter for a long time, and am very excited about this chance to see and hear him in person.

The short version is this:

We offer creative marketing services with a conscience to businesses and organizations driven by a passion to improve lives and communities. That means non-profits, arts and cultural organizations, museums, schools and businesses of all sizes that are driven by a cause.

We maintain a small and selective client list so that we are able to give each client the attention it deserves.

We also support and nurture creativity in our community through workshops in all types of creative arts. The workshops provide children and adults with new avenues of learning and expression, while giving talented creative teachers a financially sustainable way to share their gifts.

Of course, the story of how we got here is more complicated, and more interesting.

Paperkite operates on a very simple ideal: The work we do should make a difference. Not only should it make a difference for our clients’ bottom lines (that’s a given), but it should contribute real value to the world.

It’s a pretty radical idea for an industry that brings into the world such things as Alex the Stroh’s dog.

How we aim to do that is a little different as well.

You don’t have to count the alcoholics on Mad Men to know that ad and marketing “creatives” have long struggled with the meaningfulness of their work. For me, personally, I have frequently felt a tension between creating something and marketing something that someone else has created.

That’s because traditional marketing is pretty icky – like tapping strangers on the shoulder in the middle of their suppers and shouting in their faces about a product or service they probably don’t need.

If you’re interrupting good people’s lives with spammy, irritating campaigns, it’s never going to feel as good as creating something new and valuable, helping people solve real problems and performing a genuinely helpful service.

We want our work to make people feel good – that includes our clients’ customers, our clients and ourselves.

If you think we would be a good fit for your marketing needs, drop us an e-mail at hello@paperkitecreative.com. We would love to talk.