secrecy is not your friend.

No one can tell their friends about the amazing, completely secret thing that you’re working on.

Even if it doesn’t materialize, an ambitious and transparent failure is better than continued, unremarkable anonymity.

(All advice is given on the assumption that you aren’t actually full of shit. Infinium Labs, transparency will not save you.)

copyright will kill disney, or disney will kill copyright.

Disney is the greatest company in the world, when it comes to turning creative content in to money. You can argue, but I’ve only got to say: Miley Cyrus, Beauty and the Beast, High School Musical, and you more or less have to admit that creating massively influential cultural touchstones / money factories is what Disney does best.

I’ve recently become convinced that Disney’s reliance on strong copyright is going to be it’s downfall.

Until recently, things worked pretty simply. You would create content, and then exchange it for money. We can get more specific and discuss distribution, advertising, investment, but mostly, it came down to that singular exchange: a piece of culture would be created, and then sold, to individuals and groups, again and again. As a bonus, you could also create additional related products, to be exchanged for money. If we’re talking about music, it would be posters, concerts, tshirts, limited edition packaging, stickers, etc. If we’re talking about movies, it would be toys, clothing, games, special edition books and dvds, etc.

Many of these things were just clever or attractive repackaging of the content itself. But that packaging was still important.

Things have changed, because the concept of distribution has changed. Access is simple, no one is comfortable with operating on your schedule, and, crucially, piracy has made content free. Not packaging, not experience, not perfectly, but free. It’s easier to download an album than listen to the band on the radio, and it’s easier to download an album than buy it online, if you use certain legal download services (looking at you, PureTracks).

The new map of this experience? Content is released, in hopes to build interest. You can charge for it, sure, but this isn’t where the real money comes from. When interests develops, if you are lucky it can bring loyalty, or a sense of debt. That interest means that people will buy your products, whether they are packaged content, or merchandise, or an experience.

The reality of creativity as business is that ROI has moved further downstream. It’s not money for album, or money for movie anymore. It’s non-rival (digital) content for consideration, and then an exchange of money for a rival good, something tactile, something to be displayed and appreciated.

Strong copyright is now a tool for alienating your audience, and complicating the task of building that key interest. Your core creative products are best considered advertising for the things that really make money. The physical products that can’t be duplicated perfectly, that can’t be supplanted by ‘good enough’ copies.

This isn’t to disparage the importance of the creative arts that companies like Disney create. It makes them more important. Movies, television and music will have to be so good that they inspire consumers to associate themselves with the content in real life. My nephew went to sleep last night in Lightning McQueen pyjamas, and woke up to put on a Lightning McQueen tshirt. This wouldn’t have happened if Cars wasn’t so impressive for him that the only toys he wants are inspired by the movie. The film itself may have earned, total $100 from my family, even counting DVD sales and individual movie tickets. The merchandise has earned thousands, without exaggeration.

Disney has the reach, the intellectual properties, and the tools necessary to restructure a business that is based on the new content/profit map. They can clearly influence culture – look at how successful the company has been when people had to pay for the content. Make it free now, and profit. Copyright used to work. Now it’s only standing between you, and the collective wallet of your audience.

buying attention is not a long term plan.

I'm no longer sold on the concept of buying attention.

It makes perfect sense in a broadcast media world with few channels, the world traditional advertising was born in. It even makes sense, to an extent, is a world of hundreds of cable channels, with a few category defining hits in each major time slot. Buying attention makes sense if you can cajole a large number people to sit through something they don't really want, in order to access something else.

A short list of things that break the functionality of buying attention: pvr, p2p file sharing, content distribution across regions and markets, streaming, time shifting, format shifting, fragmented audiences. All of these things are made worse by attempts to control them, as making it harder to do each of these things individually, decreased the barriers to removing the advertising from the content at the same time as sharing, shifting, etc.

As always, the fight to enforce the rules of the past just broke the present a little bit faster. Ask the music industry, they seem to have figured it out, now that it's too late for them to go back.

You can no longer reliably buy attention. You can, however, create something that is worthy of attention. You can create associations with a personality, or outlet, or with content that people would like to pay attention to. You can sponsor things worthy of attention, without interfering. You can earn attention, or positive associations, in any of a million ways.

But none of them are the strict exchange of money for attention that traditional advertising is based on. That deal is no longer as effective as it once was. What's left is earning attention, or supporting others as they earn attention.

The major difference is, before you could get away with piggybacking on the value created by others. If you expect people to watch your messages as the price for watching 'Lost', you aren't earning attention, you are interested in buying it.

If you asked someone to care about you, as a cost for caring about someone, or something else, they would laugh at you. I would laugh at you.

You don't force people to care. You don't ask nicely for them to care. You offer them a reason to care, and you hope that the reason is good enough that they do.

You can't buy attention. But I can give you a long list of ways to earn it, if you're interested.

looking to the future.

As a Black person, as a person of mixed race, as someone who believes that we as humanity can do better, it makes me happy, proud, and hopeful to say that Barack Obama is the next President of the United States.

We all know that this campaign was unprecedented in terms of social media application, use of newer communications media to organize and bolster support, and clean design and pitch perfect marketing.

I'm calling it now - every other president in recent memory has gone on the lecture circuit talking about leadership, or entered the military industrial complex, or oil business, as a high powered executive taking advantage of his connections - Barack Obama will leave office (hopefully in 8 years) and be reached out to for his ability to craft a compelling message, build his own tribe out of a disparate people, and market himself, his product better than anyone in living memory.

For his next trick, living up to the hype.  Best of luck, President-Elect Obama.

on impositions.

I was watching the Obama infomercial last night, when I received a call from a charity hockey game, asking if I was interested in buying tickets or taking donations.  I generally follow my father's example in these situations, which more or less means being polite, hearing them out until I know what they want, and then saying 'No, thank you' ad infinitum until I feel justified in hanging up.

The first thing the woman said to me was 'It's nice to hear a pleasant voice, everyone either hangs up or yells at me.'

This would have been said, but she was essentially opening everything with an imposition at 8:05pm.  Irritation is acceptable. But it's difficult to build an outreach and awareness campaign without any imposition whatsoever.  'Permission marketing' is a good idea, but it's also based on existing awareness of a product or service, or a transactional 'for permission you get this newsletter/trinket/exclusive widget' model.  People need a core reason to hunt you down, merely offering things for them to learn about or try isn't enough.

Options include being remarkable, indispensable, or controversial.

Another option is to, carefully, impose on people.  It's irritating, bothersome, and increasingly being screened out.  But the funny thing is, a carefully targeted, remarkable / indispensable / controversial imposition is rarely considered as such.

If someone had called me at that time with a request for funds related to someone I care about deeply, or to ask if I was interested in receiving a package with information on something I care about, I probably would have considered talking to them.

This is why it all comes down to targeting for me.  Targeting offers the chance to make impositions, on a consumer level, obsolete.  Given, of course, that what you have on offer is of sufficient value to offset the irritation of a ringing phone or unsolicited email.

normative music and the personal touch.

I came home to a package from the Normative Music Company.  Two important things to point out: 1) Normative founder Jakob Lodwick made the offer to send out these CDs to anyone who send him an email, with no cost.  2) He sent them to me, in Canada, without a second thought.  These are important points that curry my favour.

First, the music.  It’s good.  Francis and the Lights is great walking around music.  Good to listen to, good to think to, good to type to.  I’d definitely go see them live, if only to see how it measures up to the video for ‘The Top’ that Normative posted online.  I’d already heard the Vulture Realty disc, but it remains good nonetheless.

Second, the idea – The CDs came with a personalized, typed note, addressed to me, signed by Lodwick.  A nice touch by any means.  The disks were packaged in simple sleeves, solid photography on the front, reflecting the character of the music fairly faithfully.

And now, because I’m me, the criticisms.  Well, the criticism.  Only one.  And it’s not really anyone’s fault, but a CD died in my superdrive, the top layer flaking off.

I like the Normative Music Company.  Hopefully the personal touch, and the quality of the product, don’t falter as it grows.

it's not your fault, and you can't fix it.

Continuing on the subject of radio ads, the ads for a product called Evercleanse have been inescapable.  They are also hilarious, but they make an interesting point when to comes to selling people products related to healt, wellness or fitness.

Evercleanse, in brief, is a product that contends your intestines and colon are filled with waste that is making you fat.  The waste is diet proof, immovable, and compared to 'spackle or paste'  That's right.  Evercleanse wants you to know that you aren't fat.  You don't need to diet or exercise.  You are merely filled with secret poo.

The genius part of this, for me, is that the ad opens with a condemnation of men: we're overweight due to fast food and overeating.  With women, it's a matter of secret poo, so diet and exercise won't do anything.

Convincing, and promising to customers that they are blameless, as opposed to those other people, is useful.  Convincing them that the effort they weren't going to put forward anyway would be wasted, is useful.

Where it falls apart for me is the suggestion that Evercleanse serves a need that no one else can serve.  Being a solution, or the best solution, or the only logical choice, is great.  Telling me you are the only possible solution leads me to question your credibility.  That, and the secret poo.

the shock doctrine.

First, the capsule review: the book is damn good, changed my opinion on Naomi Klein, and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand the dangers of ideology being more important than evidence.  Go read it, and talk to your friends about how screwed up unregulated (or fundamentalist) capitalism is.

Now, what I actually learned from the book.  I've detested Klein's previous work.  No Logo bothered me for a lot of reasons, mostly the idea that there was something wrong with powerful, recognizable brands that resonated with large swathes of society, and influenced behaviour on a global scale.  If the point of the book had been that mis-using this power is wrong, it would have been obvious, laughed at, and unpublished.  By pretending that the danger somehow came from brands itself, it was edgy and revolutionary.  To most people, at least.

The Shock Doctrine however, attacks a specific brand of capitalism, and a specific type of behaviour.  The dangers of unregulated, unchecked behaviour is a reasonable target by any measure.  The book isn't an attack on capitalism in general (Libertarians may disagree), but an attack on an extreme form.  Most importantly, incontrast to Klein's earlier work, I could actually empathize with the victims.  Foreign economies that have been ruined by the greed of intervening governments are very different than disaffected upper middle class children protesting against the companies that employ their parents.

If you are going to condemn something, put together a narrative that shows you understand your target, the victims, and the reality of the situation.  Don't just decide that an entire branch of thinking or strategy is somehow evil, regardless of application or intent.  You have to creat a narrative that supports your opinions, whether in a book, or in a campaign.

To disregard unfairly is to be disregarded summarily.

[I'm still amused at how many of the people I know who read 'No Logo' did so because it was part of their Marketing / Advertising course readings in University or College.]

words to live by.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

In my opinion this quote very clearly explains the shifting stages in power dynamics, and the messaging that changes between large and small companies.  Which is why I've been applying it constantly, without realizing, to far too many conversations I've been having.

The important thing isn't applying this to yourself only when you are the little guy.  The truly important thing is to remember the dominant role in the story - if you can continue indefinitely against a competitor, either ignoring them or laughing at them, you are probably in good shape.  However, a competitior only gains status when you decide to start fighting them.  Don't give them the opportunity to win.

Keep laughing.

everything is aspirational.

A short one for lunch:

Targeting shouldn't be about who you think should have your product.  Targeting is about finding the people who WANT to be the person who should have your product.  Everything is aspirational, even when based on cold hard facts like location or stated interests.

passive promotion; or, i want hyperdunks.

[This is very much an example of blogging as talking out an idea.  Sorry if it meanders.]

I love creative advertising.  A great idea, something original well executed, ceases to become advertising to me - it becomes content.  Great content is watched, shared, etc.  But such a small portion of advertising reaches this level.

Which brings me to passive promotions.  Product placement, gift lounges, product seeding, etc.  Letting the presence and value of a thing speak for itself.  Product placement is valuable, but most often I find I think of it in terms of 'ways to keep television afloat despite rampant bittorrent downloads'.  This is a failing on my part.

If advertising is about creating awareness and interest, on-the-street visibility is priceless.  my question is why poorly done, low budget traditional advertising isn't almost always replaced by careful seeding.  Gifting lounges have been brought to consumer level in other countries already, letting random people from the street visit and test products, in hopes of creating word of mouth and interest.  While this isn't suitable for everything, it's suitable for something.

While lots of people will attack advertising because it represents a point of view, and offers something to be countered, the only arguments against free product are based on the quality, ethics, and environmental effects of what is offered, other than knee-jerk hate from the Adbusters crowd who sees an enemy behind any commercial offering.

This wouldn't be worth anything to many companies.  But, Nike consistently has the best advertising in the world, from a creativity, ingenuity, and beauty standpoint.  And I didn't want a pair of Hyperdunks until I saw the Chinese and American Olympic basketball teams squaring off in them.

Passive promotion is the simplest response to the army of people who like to pretend they aren't affected by marketing.  All it takes is a product that speaks for it self, and a well planned means of introduction.

absurdity is not an argument.

A common mistake in attempts to make a strong political statement, is to drawing a parallel between a commonly held position, and a contradictory position that people will likely react strongly to.

In these two examples, the parallels are between torture as a government sanctioned activity, and torture as a Coney Island attraction, and between the brutal, disturbing murder of a young man on a bus, and the use of animals as food and test subjects.

All I’m going to say is that these ideas only work if the point made falls carefully between two extremes - either people need to generally agree that, despite exaggeration, the points are the same, or people need to be able to justify the comparison made as less directly offensive than the thing you are trying to argue against.

I understand that there is a notable segment of the population that thinks hurting animals is wrong.  But arguing that human life is of the same value as animal life gets people to stop listening to appeals for the animals at all.  

I understand that if people are offended by seeing torture, they should be offended by it being government sanctioned.  But taking a day out with the kids and turning it into some thing mildly traumatizing doesn’t exactly cause a groundswell in support of civil liberties.

If the parallel you are drawing approaches the absurdity than the offensive action that inspired it, you are doing something wrong.  You are doing your argument a disservice.

All attention is good attention, if the only thing you want is attention.  If you want change, you’ll have to do better.

six misconceptions about the future of music.

I had a great conversation with a friend from school today, and the following misconceptions about the future of music came to mind:

1. Piracy has ruined the business for everyone except the massive acts.  Actually, the massive acts were generally the only ones making lots of money (for the recording industry).  Piracy has cut back on that, so labels can no longer offset the losses from other projects with the massive income from a few hit records.
2. The label system / the recording industry is dead.  No way in hell.  What's dead is that entire engine existing to create recorded music, and make money off recorded music.  What's coming is a label system that focuses on it's ability to break acts, broker cross promotions, and generate income from it's network of merchandising partners.
3. Independent artists will suffer.  Independent artists always suffered, if we're defining independent as 'not a major act'.  If we're defining independent as 'mainstream but angrier', please go read a different blog.
4. 'Real Fans' will pay for music.  Music, now that it is available in unrestricted (and infinitely copyable) digital files, isn't worth money.  Real fans will pay for an experience, or a collectible, or a memory.
5. Fans will pay for ease of use, or a simpler experience.  Piracy is, for a notable segment of the population, easier than having a credit card.  Therefore, piracy is not going to be trumped in terms of ease of use, or user experience.
6. NIN / Radiohead / Livenation will figure it out.  These entities are going to figure out how established names continue to make large amounts of money in a changing marketplace.  But, this has no real bearing on discovering how to freshly establish names, and then make large amounts of money, in this new marketplace.

Keep this in mind while you consider how to change this industry.

why are you trying to sell music?

The majority of discussion when it comes to music and new media is the creation of new business models. This would be fine, except for one core problem; every innovation worth watching has been a product from an artist who was already well known (Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Saul Williams), or at the very least associated with someone well known.

I’ve talked ad nauseum about NIN, but the important thing to figure out isn’t how to monetize the music business at a time when digital files are free to the majority of consumers, but instead how to develop an interest and fan-base for an artist, and then transition it into income for that artist, without ANY DEPENDENCE ON THE ESTABLISHED SYSTEM. Why does the argument always include some method of selling recorded music?

That last sentence excludes every MySpace band that developed a following DIY style, and then signed to a major and sold a pile of albums. The prior ones discount anything innovative we’ve seen in distribution, because those moves have been made by famous refugees from the label system, who are inarguably still indebted to that system.

If we’re talking about someone who isn’t part of the system, won’t be part of it any time soon, and is well known, the only name that comes to mind is Girl Talk. And it’s impossible to say whether he’s avoided working with major labels, because the complicated pseudo illegality of his mash-ups (which are insanely great) means they wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole.

The short version? The money, from now on, is probably in performing. The money has always been in performing, to a certain extent. I wouldn’t focus entirely on how to sell music in light of our new digital reality. I’d focus on how to distribute music to the largest number of potential concert attendees / merchandise buyers. Your album is now a non-rival good, something that can be replicated endlessly for no cost. This makes it hard to argue it’s worth money. But if 1) music is a great promotional tool, and 2) it promotes rival goods, like a concert seat, a tshirt, or a poster, I don’t see the music industry falling apart, just the CD and mp3 selling industry

It just moves recorded music another level away from the money.