Satellite Of Brand

Just Add Money

I remember the first time I was shown an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." It was on a VHS tape, in a friend's college dorm room, and I had never heard of the show before. The person showing me the episode was downright evangelistic about it, and within five minutes, I completely got why. There was nothing this smart, this clever, or just so on my comic sensibilities. I wasn't a complete fanatic about it, and there were plenty of episodes where the movie that was being riffed was just too terrible to redeem, no matter how quick the comedians were. But when they hit, my heavens. It hurt, you'd laugh so much.

I became a fan, in a time when sharing such things required work. VHS tapes were fantastic technology compared to the great nothing that were before them, and you could honestly have a party -- ok, a fairly nerdy party, but still, a party -- over who had the cool tapes that no one else had.

There was more to the VHS approach, of course. Small bits of animation from the Spike and Mike festival, odd moments from Japan, redubbed weirdness and sports moments, and some more infamous stuff that we don't need to get into here. Before YouTube, you had to have connections and be proactive about such things. Circulating the tape was social currency, and there was no more valuable token MST3K tapes.

The show ran for many iterations, and moved from network to network, eventually ending in 1999. DVDs of past episodes have been intermittent, due to rights and licensing fees. Both sets of personnel from the show's main run have continued to do the basic gig, under different new brand names. And now Joel Hodgson, the original creator of the show, has worked out a deal with Shout! Factory to buy the rights and make (be still our hearts) new episodes. There's a Kickstarter that, as I right this, is more than 40% of the way to its minimum $2 million goal with a month to go, and given MST3Ks hard-core nerd audience , it's hard to imagine how the target won't be met. If the full $5.5 million target is met, Hodgson hopes to make 12 future-length episodes with the funding.

Personally, I'm a little surprised that this isn't a Netflix experience already, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime. It's not like this is a new brand that needs a great amount of PR; it will generate its own. But maybe this isn't something that needs to be on any channel, especially because every old fan (and the show started nearly 30 years ago; we're all old fans) is going to share this in their social media feed.

That's the power of a real brand. It never quite goes away, and makes the people who identify with that brand root for them. And evangelize.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Speed Of Change

Only Getting Faster

The other night, I was driving back after a gym and grocery run with my youngest in the car. I had tried to do too much too quickly (yes, this is common), and we were going to be about 5 minutes late to pick up my eldest from her gymnastics session. So I dialed up my wife to try to arrange a pick up, as she was closer, while also trying to figure out if I could do everything I needed to do without stopping for gas. All in a neighborhood that I didn't know too well.

One dial, voice mail. Second dial, voice mail. Map application, not working. Now I'm going to be ten minutes late, because I've made the wrong turn. The low gas light is glaring at me, and my stress level is rising. Why can't the tech just work? My phone keeps having calls that don't go through, messages that aren't answered, routine dead spots in my day to day. How much do I have to pay each month for a phone that actually works when I really need it to?

Five minutes later, the mini-crisis was over, with my wife calling me back, having always assumed she was going to pick up the eldest. As my blood pressure went back to normal and the map application kicked in, with the ability to stop and get gas opening up, a few things became clear.

First, that all of that drama was self-inflicted, which was obvious even when it was happening. Just trying to do too much, and expecting to be able to get through a grocery store checkout too quickly. You'd think that I would be smart enough to give myself some leeway, but, well, I'm not.

Second, that this sort of experience was impossible not so very long ago, but that as soon as you get used to the tech working for you... it's intolerable when it does not. Even if you are old enough to remember a time before mobile phones.

Third, it's going to seem charmingly quaint in a very short period of time. Connection maps will improve, the Internet of Things will allow me to know where, say, my wife's car was (i.e., if moving towards the pick up for the eldest, no need to call), the map application won't fail, and even the older model of car that I was driving will have an exact calculation for the remaining gas.

Finally, that as savvy as I may think I am about my capabilities and how the world works, there's still really no hard and fast rule as to when it will all change. If you had asked me if I was going to have this experience an hour before I had it, I would have laughed. No chance! I had this!

How this all relates to marketing and advertising is a bit of a stretch... but there are parallels. The day job now is email, and the way that people interact with that has changed a lot recently, and will just keep changing. The call to action for a great deal of our work is to get the list to view videos, and that's been changing a lot as well. My field is prosperous, but also under a lot of scrutiny, and could change dramatically in the next couple of years. The shifting tech might change as much as the politics, really.

We are living in amazing, and very transitory, times. That's likely to be true for a really long while. What about your world is going to change soon?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Five Tips To Avoid Blog Writer's Block

More wall than block

This week, several people in my network commented on the prolific nature of my writing... and the funny thing is, some of them don't know the half of it, in that I also write a blog about sports, to go with this one about marketing and advertising. As I am on target to post over 100 times in 2015 on both sites, in addition to holding down a day gig that also involves writing, and have been doing this for the better part of a decade, I know how to keep the fires burning. Here are five tips for getting yourself out of a sticking point.

5) Cheat with numbers.

I've talked about how a learning engine of analytics driving creative is an edge. It also works for writing. Your blog posts that get more traffic, retweets, likes and comments are all good for inspiring more thoughts. Or, darkly, less.

4) Don't give a block power.

Writer's block is like any other form of self-created drama; it requires fuel to burn, and that fuel is your own mind telling you that you are blocked. You can, and will, get unstuck any moment now, because you have every other time you've stopped writing. This isn't a matter of blind self-confidence; it's a matter of looking at past track record, and assessing the situation from an emotional distance. The next sentence will come, and more after that one. So write it already.

3) Be open to many sources of inspiration.

I've written about everything from my leisure activities (golf and poker), entertainment choices (Bridgett Everett, the Daily Show succession), dog (the rise of high-end services for pet owners), technology (the IoT), current events (Volkswagen and others) and war stories from my past gigs. I don't view everything in my life through an advertising and marketing filter, but the nice part of the subject matter is that it travels across a wide swath of experiences.

2) Fill the frame.

The late great Frank Zappa once described art as the stuff that's inside the frame, because without the frame, it's an open question as to who left that mess on the wall. (I am not quoting exactly, because Frank was wonderfully rude, and didn't say mess. You get the gist.)

Blog posts follow a template, and a rhythm, that is fairly consistent. It's not like we're cranking out rivets in a factory, or blind to quality or flights of fancy, but let's be realistic about this. I'm writing three posts a week, I'm turning in the post after so much time writing it, and killing myself with over-editing and perfectionism is just a way to waste time, and not get to the next item on my to-do list. Fill the frame, then move on.

1) Live your story.

All of us have any number of other things we can do with our time. I could pull out my guitar, work on my stand up comedy, clean the house, play golf or poker, run some miles, toss the frisbee for my dog, watch a game, and so on, and so on.

But the story that I tell of my life is that I am, more than any other hobby or avocation, a writer. Writers have deadlines, and need to meet them, or they are not writers. (Yes, I know, there are other kinds of writers, and you can be a great one without a deadline... but this is my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

So my story is never that I need time off, or that I'm sick, or over-committed, or can't function unless a certain amount of sleep happens at a certain time of day. The saving grace of all of this is that writing has strong elements of craft to it, and you get better at craft the more you do it. (Also, thank heavens, faster.) I am infinitely happier when I am being true to the story of my life; most people are, really. So I write.

What's the story of your life, and are you living it?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.