January 3rd, 2009, 4 Comments »
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
Seth articulates this idea in a recent post:
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
Otherwise, they’re operating on faith alone.
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December 26th, 2008, No Comments »
We’re on our way back to Panama City tomorrow. I’ve read some more books, and will spend my first hours in civilization desperately seeking English language literature. Following on from part one, here’s what I read:
Little Brother - This is a Cory Doctorow novella for young audiences. It tells a gripping, Orwellian tale of terrorist attacks, hackers and civil disobedience in our uber-surveilled world. It’s a righteous indictment (from a Canadian, I’m proud to point out) of torture, police brutality and how 9/11 has restricted personal freedoms in the US. It’s also full of cogent mini and micro essays on a slough of digital rights issues: file sharing, online privacy, cryptography, DNS and so forth. They read a little like EFF propaganda at times, and only present one perspective on these thorny issues. I almost always agree with that perspective, but it’s so vigorously argued I’d want young reader to consider some alternative points of view.
Next - Michael Crichton’s novel was one of the bloated, mouldering books on the shelf here at Punta Laurel. I hadn’t read a Crichton book since Jurassic Park in my adolescence, so I thought I’d give this one a try. He might as well have skipped the novel and gone straight to the screenplay. That’s what the book reads like–action sequences interspersed with a lot of pseudo-science. I did appreciate that both Doctorow and Crichton included extensive bibliographies at the end of their books–I wish all novelists would do this.
Everything’s Eventual - In the past, I’ve found Stephen King’s short stories to be his creepiest work. Not so much with this set of 14 stories. Most of them seemed a little flawed, or incomplete, or wrong-noted somehow. I was pleased to read “The Little Sisters of Eluria”, which featured Roland, the gunslinger from King’s excellent “Dark Tower” series of books. I kept hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” in my head while reading it. I haven’t seen the movie made from the stand-out story “1408″, starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. While I often find that short stories lend themselves to novels, there isn’t really enough meat on the bones of this one for even a 90-minute movie. Judging from the trailer, the screenwriters fleshed things out quite a bit.
Tribes - Seth Godin’s latest book is, to quote Stephen King, “a little fingernail paring of a book”. It’s his bite-sized take on leadership, and largely feels like a distillation or tweaking of the ideas from his previous books. One of Godin’s gifts is, I think, identify truths that should be self-evident, and articulating them in an inspiring and consumable way. His ideas are worth revisiting (”safe is risky and risky is safe” is a mantra around Capulet), and Godin does make some astute observations about leadership in an Internet-enabled world. However, the book feels a little rose-tinted, under-structured and incomplete for my liking. I think it under-estimates the difficulties of leadership, and is pretty light on the how-to’s. Still, many should find it inspiring, and I’d recommend it as a quick primer in Godinosity.
The Interloper - A first novel by Antoine Wilson. It’s a mixed bag, really. There are some terrific bits, and some lovely characterization. On the other hand, the diction feels overly fussy in places, and the plot is pretty predictable. I’m often frustrated by the work of young artists when it’s too concerned with the process of their art form. Full of letters faked by the protagonist and rambling diary entries, The Interloper seems overly interested in the act of writing. I did like a quote in the novel that apparently comes from another source “writing is like trying to dance with a bear who only wants to wrestle”. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it somehow resonates.
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November 24th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Seth Godin writes about my beloved Cowboy Junkies. He calls it the ‘Cowboy Junkies Paradox’, because the band sold huge amounts of their first album and then have never been able to repeat that success:
The paradox occurs at their concerts… when they play one of the old hits, the crowd goes wild. The people most likely to come to their concerts are the ones most likely to encourage them to become an oldies act. Of course, once the group does that, people are going to stop showing up.
Maybe I’m being overly-defensive about my favourite band, but I don’t think they’re an apt example. They probably once were, for the first few years after the monster success of The Trinity Sessions. Because their subsequent CDs were somewhat stylistically diverse, they surely disappointed a lot of Trinity converts through the early and mid-nineties.
Today, however, the people who are most likely to come to their concerts are longterm fans. Those fans aren’t expecting to hear a lot of songs off that first album, because they have given up a long time ago. The Junkies have a smaller fan base these days, but it’s one that’s familiar with most or all of their albums, and not just The Trinity Sessions. I’ve seen the Junkies live several times, and these days fans cheers just as loudly for, say, “Murder Tonight in the Trailer Park” or “Anniversary Song” as they do for “Misguided Angel”.
To the band’s credit, they continue to be reasonably experimental on recent albums. They’re no longer with a major label, and seem pleased to be free from the restrictions that relationship implies.
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November 1st, 2007, 3 Comments »
I was invited to participate in a Seth Godin webinar today, sponsored by Search Engine Strategies Chicago. Seth discussed his new book, and then answered some questions. I took some notes:
- Rhetorical questions: How come when we go to find stuff online, we don’t visit YellowPages.com? How did they fail? Why doesn’t Sotheby’s own the online auction space? Why don’t we have TV Guide videos instead of YouTube videos? Why don’t I complain about having to update my status on AOLBook?
- His book is an articulation of a contemporary industrial revolution.
- A meatball sundae is a combination of two things:
- Meatballs are commodities sold to everyone.
- The toppings are the tactics of the new Internet.
- The toppings work best when put on companies that know how to use them.
Read more…
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May 25th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Via Digg or Delicious or somewhere, I discovered John Wesley’s speculation on not necessarily working eight hours a day:
After a couple hours of intense work, energy levels drop and workers downgrade to less demanding tasks like responding to email and tinkering with existing creations. Towards the end of the cycle, the mind is so cluttered and drained that workers resort to “work related activities” that appear productive but don’t contribute to the bottom line. The afternoon cycle is similar but the productivity peak isn’t as high. For different people the peaks and valleys will vary, but overall I’d estimate only 3-4 hours a day could be classified as highly productive.
This reminded me a Seth Godin post, as well as sections of one of my favourite Paul Graham essays.
I agree with John’s central thesis–that a consecutive, eight-hour workday is antiquated, and doesn’t map very well to knowlege workers’ activities. Frankly, I never work more than three or four hours at a stretch. Some days I work five hours total, and some days I work ten, but it’s almost never consecutively.
This schedule works for me because I have a short attention span, and I think it keeps my brain fresher. It also enables me (or at least enabled me, back in Canada) to go see matinees in the afternoon.
I could work for eight hours straight every day, but I think I’d be less productive. I remember when I worked as a technical writer, four o’clock would roll around and most days I’d feel pretty spent. Maybe I just have a low tolerance for work?
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May 20th, 2007, 4 Comments »
This post is brought to you courtesy of three facts:
- I’m reading Small is the New Big, a compilation of Seth Godin’s blog posts, articles et al. Great, readable book (though, speaking as a former technical writer, that’s one slipshod index). I’m enjoying it even though some of the pieces are repeats for me.
- I recently contributed some advice to an eBook for college graduates.
- I’ve been sucked beyond the Facebook event horizon (why is the URL for my public profile so hard to find?), and discovered where some of my university classmates ended up.
Back in 2002, Seth wrote a post about the vast vistas open to every new post-secondary student:
t reminded me of my days as an undergrad (at a lesser school, natch), browsing through the catalog, realizing I could learn whatever I wanted. That not only could I take classes but I could start a business, organize a protest movement, live in a garret off campus, whatever. It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.
Yet most of my classmates refused to choose. Instead, they treated college like an extension of high school. They took the most mainstream courses, did the minimum amount they needed to get an A, tried not to get into “trouble” with the professor or face the uncertainty of the unknowable. They were the ones who spent six hours a day in the library, reading their textbooks.
Shopping Around
Through a happy accident (it certainly wasn’t insight), I took six courses from six departments in my first year of university: creative writing, theatre, geography, philosophy, english and…hmmm….there definitely was a sixth. Anyway, the point was that I got to shop around and see what I liked, and what struck my fancy. Mind you, that also meant it took me five years to graduate, but I really liked going to school, so that was a blessing, not a curse.
I chose creative writing and theatre, and by the end of my double-major, was really struck by the difference in the programs. The Creative Writing department (subsequently just renamed to the plain old ‘Writing Department’) seemed full of people like those Seth described–average, plugging away, just trying to get finished and get out.
The Theatre department, on the other hand, was full of passionate people who put in long hours for their classes, and then voluntarily put in even longer hours on extra projects. People didn’t care so much about grades, but about artistic achievement and the respect of their peers. Of course there was politics and infighting and backstabbing and everybody sleeping with everybody (I only learned that last bit after my degree!), but that’s because everybody seemed so stirred and, well, dramatic.
The Board
I wanted to offer a photo as tangible evidence of this collective passion and enthusiasm, but Flickr fully let me down. In the back hall of theatre department, there was a glass display case known as The Board. The Board displayed room assignments for the current week. Outside of classes, usually every room was booked from 8:00am to 11:00pm.
By the end of the week, The Board would be covered in Post-Its from students swapping rooms and claiming empty hours. There was never enough space, and it wouldn’t be unusual to find students rehearsing in the concrete hallways below the mainstage theatres.
There was this complex pecking order for booking rooms, and the work-study student who handled the board (hello, Tobi Hunt) was the Corporal Klinger of the department, constantly managing a stream of pleading requests for space.
It was a high-pressure environment, but also heated, creative and downright joyful. I’m sure I’m looking back at it through rose-coloured glasses, but when I compare it with the ordinariness of the Writing department, the differences are stark.
I’m sure my experience at the Phoenix (that was the difficult-to-spell name of the theatre) wasn’t that unusual. In fact, had I also not been in creative writing, I’d have assumed everybody had that level of engagement with their learning environment.
You Have More Freedom Than You Think
So what was the difference? The professors? The application process (both fine arts departments required an ‘audition’, but maybe one was better)? The art form (writing being solitary and theatre being collaborative)? I’m not really sure, but there was an unmistakable secret sauce at work.
I am sure that, though I do very little theatre these days (only the very occasional play), my time in the Theatre department served me much, much better than my time across the quad in the Writing department. It taught me how to be a leader, how to listen, how to understand design, how to harness my creativity…I could make a long list. The most important thing it did, though, is the thing that every university degree must do–it taught me how to learn.
I doubt there are many 18-year-olds reading this site, but if there are, take my advice: try everything at university, and follow your instincts.
For the rest of us, follow Seth’s advice:
You have more freedom at work than you think (hey, you’re reading this on company time!) but most people do nothing with that freedom but try to get an A.
UPDATE: Another telling difference between the atmosphere of the two departments: UVic’s Theatre department has no less than five Facebook groups. The Creative Writing department doesn’t have any.
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