There and Back Again

Yes, The Author Is A Short Fellow

Last Thursday (3/21/19), RevJet ended my role as part of a force reduction. It wasn't for cause, I don't bear them any ill will, and a wide range of senior personnel have reached out to express their condolences and willingness to help. There's even a chance that I'll work with them again, once they get past their current issues, and in some ways, I feel more valued now than I did when I worked there.

I believe in their application and value proposition, and the future of digital advertising is going to look a lot like what they do. As to whether it will be their name when the dust settles... honestly, I have no idea. There are a lot of good competitors in the space, and as last week shows, they don't have the deepest pockets.

Which brings me to, well, why the blog wasn't getting a lot of updates.

RevJet is many things: a boon to marketing and creative personnel, a way for ad ops people to get their lives back and do more interesting things with their time, a DAM and an ad server and a test machine and a dessert topping and a floor wax.

On a personal level, I learned a lot -- about strong practices in creative, about durable learnings in dayparting, about animation cycles and creative heat maps and reporting and a ton of far more technical ad ops stuff than I had ever been exposed to before.

It also wasn't, well, lucrative.

I took their first offer and drove to California as fast as I could to work for that company. I lived in a 200 square foot hut (that cost over 40% of my mortgage back in New Jersey). I spent the past two years away from friends and family, doing everything I could to ensure optimal service for clients. At the end of every day there, no matter how much stuff we had to do, I left with a clean in-box, set agendas for the next day, completed documentation and a sense of accomplishment.

And then I'd work 5-7 hours as a rideshare driver to cover the shortfall, and 12-14 on weekends, and served M&AD clients.

It was an interesting ride and a great learning experience, and more proof that when I believe in something, I go all-in. (See also past gigs, my time leading a rock band, putting mysef through college, and such.)

It's also made me dramatically more useful to, well, the next employer. (If that's you, please get in touch. Papa needs a new pair of health benefits.)

More about what I've learned later, and thanks for reading.

The Myth of the Indispensable Genius

And, presumably, women

This week, I've been struck by the downfall of Louis CK, the prominent comedian who has been brought low by a long history of sexual abuse against women in his field.

It's similar, in some respects, to the Bill Cosby situation, in which a giant of his industry suddenly and irrevocably has been more or less erased from the culture. Sure, some people still go to Cosby shows, but he's more or less shunned in decent society. And while there are significant differences between the men, it's similar enough to draw parallels, and, well, lessons.

If you've worked long enough in any industry, you've probably run into difficult people. Maybe you've even had periods of difficulty of your own. At its core, the CK issue is one of abuse in the workplace -- his victims were fellow comedians and personnel on shows where he worked and held power or influence -- and you don't need to go to criminal extremes to fall in the same continuum.

There's a tendency to look the other way at such things when the work is, well, good enough. And CK's stand up is phenomenal, both in its cultural impact and sheer dollars. (Personally, I have a station of comedians in my own Pandora mix, and it's called Louis CK Radio. Which really needs an edit now, and perhaps Pandora can stop emailing me reminders that it's been a long time since I came back to listen to it. Anyway, moving on.)

But here's the thing about the difficult genius: it's a complete myth and trap.

For most people, the workplace is a collaboration, and toxic people prevent that from occurring, or simply drive other people away. Life's too short for that, frankly, and while genius is always missed, there's always someone else -- or, in the case of CK, many people -- who will thrive in the absence. In every case where I've had to work with an indispensable but difficult person, in the long run, the former just wasn't true.

A final small point about this, because this is one of those areas where being a cis white male makes me way too self-conscious for comfort... if you are in a position of privilege and you are absolutely certain, beyond any realm of doubt, that this isn't your problem, you are wrong. Because even in the event that you don't fall into traps of power abuse, that doesn't mean your entire team is immune to it, or that you aren't more or less condoning its existence by not seeing it, or at the very least, not considering the possibility that it exists.

At its core, the CK situation seems to be an abuse of power. Every organization has that, and every person who wields it has the potential to do so in a less than optimal manner.

And if you really have a problem with the idea that you've got to walk on eggshells about that...

Well, I'd start to wonder if you really don't have a problem after all.

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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.

Finding Something To Sell

Brick Walls: Always Funny

One of my side interests is stand up comedy. I watch a fair amount of it, have listened to a great deal of podcasts about it, and have even done it a handful of times. It's fantastically nerve-wracking, mostly because you get an extraordinary and debilitating amount of feedback in real time that you want to act on... but if you go too far into that, you'll never get into your prepared material, and get wiped out by anything that doesn't go according to plan. You also need to project confidence even when you have it in short supply, because there's just any number of ways that it can go off the rails.

I think I'm pretty good at stand up, but I probably will never have enough time to go beyond an occasional hobby. What I've learned from the exercise is more important.

Which leads to the following bit of advice, which I've cribbed from a number of sources. For an aspiring stand up (or consultant), your first and only job is to find something that makes people want to see you. It's not to honor your heroes, redefine the medium, try something no one has ever done before, air your grievances, and so on. It's just to find something that makes people want to see you, want to listen, want to hear more. Once you have that, that's when Art or Experimentation or Indulgence can happen. Not before.

This seems like obvious advice, but what it really does is simplify your thought process as you start creating material. I've worked on honing a few pieces, working out specific punch words, listening to see when the small laugh happens, when the big laugh should go, when to slow it down or speed it up. At its core, it's about story telling, and that's more Craft than Art.

Which brings us back to the point of the column, which is marketing and advertising, and what I can relate about the day job. I generally don't try to talk about the day job too much, because it's an NDA situation and I take such things seriously... but it's fair and safe to say that as a start up with remarkably powerful and versatile tech, there are any number of reasons to use us. Some folks go for digital creative optimization advantages, some for creating testing opportunities, some for custom personal creative, and I'm really just scratching the surface.

There's no specific reason why you should buy and use our stuff. Whatever is most important to you is most important to us.

But once we've got you hooked? That's when I want to spread out and expand the offer. Go beyond the initial appeal, bring in ancillary benefits, help you learn how to change the way you work.

The first time you choose to listen to a particular comedian, you want to laugh. The second time, you want to hear that comedian. The order isn't ever in question. Forget it at your peril.

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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.