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Blog 5 – Benefits & Drawbacks Of DIY

Blog 5 – Benefits & Drawbacks Of DIY

What is DIY?

DIY is the method of building, modifying or repairing things by oneself without the direction of professionals.

While DIY does not involve help from a professional, they often come with instruction, support documents and other forms of direction.

What are the benefits of DIY?

DIY reduces costs (most of the time)

The cost savings when it comes to DIY is associated with the absence or reduction of labor costs – often expensive third party labor rates.

Not only are you saving actual money, when you do-it-yourself, you also learn all the intricate details that go into a valuable product or service. This learning can be transferred into increased cost savings, by further simplifying your DIY process.

Being DIY and saving money, however, comes with the initial investment of giving your own time to learn the skill of a certain task, with the information you are given. However once mastered, cost savings will be realized with every additional usage.

DIY lets you be in control

Being in control serves many purposes, especially when it comes to DIY learning.

When you are in control of something it allows you to work on your own schedule and eliminates the worry of having to work with third parties. With that, this saves the stress of back and forth communication. In some cases several back and forth communications. This communication can also be a source for information leakage and distortion (i.e. what you are trying to do comes out different than expected).

DIY enables you to learn new skills

Life is all about learning new things and with a DIY project or service you are compelled to learn whatever the product or service is all about. Learning new skills is interesting and rewarding, and now becomes part of your own skill set, to be leveraged throughout the life of your current role and career.

But much more than that, assuming the DIY service supports your business, you are already the expert in your business, so there is no one better to leverage an associated DIY service than you. And you will receive far greater results than you did when someone else provides this same service for you. Post whatever service/process you are running, you will now have a greater understanding of how to re-run or apply the same service again. For example, imagine using a DIY advertising service to advertise your products – learn first hand what ads sell the most products, then increase your ad spend, or produce more top selling products).

DIY makes you more creative

Creativity makes processes more enjoyable and rewarding and that’s the goal of DIY. Because you are taking this process on yourself, your first hand learning will drive all kinds of creative thoughts, which will turn into actions and continue to increase the success of your ultimate outcomes.

DIY is sustainable

One of the best ways to be mindful of the planet is thinking DIY.

When you are doing things yourself, you are minimizing resources and creating less waste, including; raw materials, energy sources, human resources and often your carbon footprint.

But DIY is also more sustainable to you, as you have better control of materials, processes and time to market.

What are the drawbacks of DIY?

DIY can be time consuming

While DIY should ultimately save you time, if it serves a one off purpose it could have the opposite effect – cost you time.

DIY will always take you more time in the process of  learning and educating yourself with a new skill. That said, if this DIY skill is something that you will do often, then the time savings will certainly justify the initial learning cost.

DIY comes with a different kind of support

With DIY you are forced to learn by yourself, so any good DIY product should be delivered with lots of support (step-by-step training manuals, videos and perhaps even best practice documents) and likely some level of human support to get started.

However, let’s not understate that when learning a new task or skill by yourself, it may be a little daunting, so for some, DIY may be difficult.

While you may have instructions or a help guide on how to do something, you don’t get that level of support that one would get from a professional.

DIY can be dangerous

DIY can be dangerous if doing manual work. For instance, if you are doing a home renovation project or anything that involves manual labor, it could come with more dangerous risks – especially if you are inexperienced. Wearing and using the necessary safety equipment will help in eliminating these risks.

DIY can run into software/service issues

DIY online or other software driven processes can run into unexpected errors that are out of your control causing you significant costs and delays. If you are depending on software within your DIY service, be sure to test it thoroughly and have support available.

About the series authors

The team at Adacado have been pioneering Dynamic Creative and programmatic advertising since late 2009. It all started as a platform with full service, where creative costs scaled into crazy 6 figure numbers. From the get go this made no sense at all, however big brands and agencies were satisfied, at least at the moment in time. Adacado knew this was not sustainable and began almost immediately shifting to self-serve and now to a fully DIY advertising platform that allows an agency or brand to create and launch a campaign in minutes.

Sounds like an instant success. No, we are not quite there yet! In fact we are a frustrated group of people as we watch in amazement, while prospective customers glow about its capabilities and ease of use…. But when it comes to rolling up their sleeves and doing the job (becoming DIY) they procrastinate, stall, ask for help, almost everything imaginable, except getting the job done themselves.

Thank goodness for our customers who recognized the proverbial opportunity of DIY, have figured out how and why to use Adacado, and have quickly become perennial customers with ever increasing usage. They keep our hopes alive.

So why not everyone? Not sure, so the journey goes on… Adacado continues to improve and educate, and has decided that perhaps the basics of DIY are not that obvious, so we have set out on a venture to learn more and more about DIY, and pass on our learnings, with the hope that it will encourage more people to become DIY with more things, including advertising.

We hope you enjoy the series!

The Adacado Team