Persistence, Biology and Business

Sing It, Fellow Monkey

This week at my gig, I found myself going over presentation decks for a couple of absolutely critical pitch meetings, and obsessing over... how to make the fonts and spacing more consistent, and delving into the extremely fidgety points over exactly how large the bullets should be.

Widow and orphan copy protection, column widths, trying to avoid to start a line with symbols over text, checking back and forth to see what was the more consistent usage, and so on. It's the kind of work that always takes longer than you think it should because any interruption that you get in your life will take precedence over this. At its core, this level of document control is stuff that your brain is just *trying* to be distracted from, no matter how many times you've done it.

There are tricks around editing and QA, of course, which you learn from painful trial and error and experience. First, to remind yourself of just how important the meetings are; that has a way to sharpen the attention. A second is to edit backward, so your mind doesn't fill in blanks that aren't there. A third is read all of the copy out loud, which is an old broadcast journalism tactic that's great for self-editors. I also like to do my rounds at different speeds, so that my double and triple check doesn't feel like I'm just going through the motions.

Sometimes when I'm doing this, my mind wanders as to why the edit is necessary in the first place. Persistence and attention to detail seems like something anyone can do, after all. But keeping a sharp point during what others might consider drudgery is a talent, and I work at a start-up; people are incredibly busy and need to move to other projects with speed. Having the eye to find these points seems like it's in shorter and shorter supply, especially as we get more and more used to machine learning that lulls us into thinking everything is OK..

Which leads the skeptical reader to wonder just how much value is being added through this level of due diligence, and the answer is, well, no one knows. When a prospect doesn't convert to a client, they'll never tell you that they aren't going to sign because of tiny errors that made them lose confidence in your brand. But just because they don't recognize these things at a conscious level doesn't mean that it didn't happen. What we're trying to do at my current gig is hard; it requires our clients to disrupt their current way of doing things, and to challenge assumptions that they've been living with for, in some cases, many years. Having everything just so is almost like, well, insurance.

Believe it or not, such things even have a basis in biology.

I've been fortunate enough to run into a few interviews recently from a Stanford professor, Richard Sapolsky, who will gladly give you way too much to think about. After a lifetime of study, the professor believes that free will is simply the biology that we haven't learned yet, and so much of the stuff that we think is a conscious choice is, well, anything but. Sapolsky cites the mathematical woes faced by prisoners trying to gain parole with hearings just before lunch (dramatically lower than any other time, but never, of course, in front of judges that would admit that they were too cranky before feeding to feel much in the way of mercy). He also talks about the historical culture of blame that society would give to epileptics, people with scurvy, dyslexia, and so on. All of these classes were blamed for their afflictions until the world knew more about what caused them, and then they weren't.

Sapolsky also notes, with the evidence of people answering questions while hooked up to various scanning technology, that we make decisions almost instantaneously, and then spend much of our time and gray matter justifying those decisions. How people of different political persuasions, or those with better backgrounds with parents who had lower amounts of stress, react and manage complex conditions, or more darkly, racial relations and class differences. It's all simultaneously depressing and empowering, as it points to how little we should feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and how seemingly intractable problems might have solutions, if only we can get past the conditions that are causing near hard-wired dismissal.

Which is all very far away from a presentation deck, until we get back to decisions made by individuals in micro-seconds, on near unconscious levels. On criteria that will never be stated out loud.

Persistence is in my biology. It might also be in our audiences.

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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.

M&AD Holiday Special: July 4 Memories

Do Not Try This At (My) Home

Since the industry is officially in Hangover Time between Cannes and the holiday weekend, I thought I'd take a break from the usual profession-centric column and share a memory of a past holiday. If you aren't down for the flight of fancy, feel free to take a pass and check back next week.

First, I need to set the scene for you. I'm in my early '20s, trying to make it as a musician, working temp jobs after college. I'm broke from dealing with college loans, and I'm living in a terrible part of Philadelphia, known locally as Fishtown. (It's kind of like Brooklyn, all the way down to the recent revival and spike of real estate values with hipster gentrification.)

So I'm sitting out of my corner gun turret window, about a quarter of a mile away from an elevated train stop, because it's hot and I don't have air conditioning. I'm noodling on an acoustic guitar and trying to write a song. It's pretty much how I spent most of my evenings. I'm looking out at an empty lot with broken glass and drug paraphernalia, and that's when I see these two guys. (Don't worry, we're getting to the good/holiday part.)

They are, well, *painfully* drunk, in the way that's just hard to look at, because they are standing at angles that look wrong. They've got well-lit torches, which is kind of worrisome in any situation that isn't a movie set, and they also have a steel trash can.

Oh, one last thing. They've got fireworks.

Professional, end of the day at an amusement park level, fireworks. Stuff that goes up into the air and makes all sorts of pretty colors, and I have to think they stole some of it, because it's just not the stuff that you see sold to the general public.

Which they proceed to light, at random intervals and random angles, for the next hour and a half.

Which I watch, because how could you not? And I was struck by the following realizations.

1) They could easily end their own lives, or at the very least, seriously impact their future enjoyment of same, at any moment, really. Even if they weren't drunk, but especially more because they are.

2) They could easily end *my* life, in that I'm not very far away from them, and the right/wrong angle means I'm going to get incoming.

3) My choice of address means that there isn't going any real chance of police coming to my location.

Because luck and/or aphorisms about the kind feelings of God toward drunkards, the fireworks show ended without mayhem. The guys set off what they had, laughed like schoolchildren at everything they lit, then staggered off when they were done. I didn't get any songs written that night, but I did get a memory that will last a lifetime, even though it may have ruined me for every Fourth of July since.

After all, professional fireworks shows are great... but they do tend to lack a certain element of drama, right?

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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.

GLOWing with quality

Wrestling is the new awesome

This weekend, I binge-watched the new Netflix comedy/drama "GLOW", which stars Alison Brie and Marc Maron. It's a fictionalized version of the creation of an '80s television show for a women's wrestling promotion, and, well, it's great. The writer and director who worked on it honed their craft on the acclaimed "Orange Is The New Black", it hits all of the period notes just right, it does a wonderful job of stretching out and telling the stories over over a dozen people in its ensemble cast, and I hope they make many more seasons of it. Full stars.

But as delighted as I was by watching this, and as much as I'd recommend it to friends, that's not the most striking thing about watching this. What "GLOW" does is prove, not exactly for the first time but in a way that just deepens the conversation while adding more precedent, is provide the viewer with something they hadn't seen before. By doing that, it's just one more moment of long-form/small-audience entertainment that is just so much better than anything you might see in a movie theater. "GLOW" doesn't have to follow the set rules of big-budget stuff, which means it can be, well, so much better than what it might otherwise have been.

This way, you don't need to check the demographic boxes of people who will pay and leave their homes to see a project, and shoehorn in elements that don't really fit. Nor do you have to put the needs of multi-lingual audiences first with big special effects and less than full verbal acceptance. You can avoid having to sand off the very rough edges of your main characters in the goal of making them conventionally likable or attractive. You can also go to deeper and darker places with your plot twists, and not have to worry about de facto censoring from corporate interests and co-promotional tie-ins.

You can, in short, just make art for art's sake, and do so over a far more optimal amount of time. (In GLOW's case, 10 episodes, or the much better part of one day / evening's viewing.)

This is, of course, a dramatic and disruptive change in our world, where movies go from not just cultural hegemony and economic dominance to a much more blunt and narrow place. It also creates the conditions for economic upheaval, since I suspect shows like "GLOW" are going to be part of a retail apocalypse-like meltdown of movie screens, the same way that North America will eventually lose a third of its retail stores from the shift to online and economic leveling.

For everyone who thinks the U.S. is just going to keep growing, I've got a heaping helping of skepticism from the sheer passing of the Baby Boomers from areas of impact. There will be exceptions at the individual company level, of course, but it's not going to be a rising tide for all boats. Which all translates to rough time for the most treasured placement in brand advertising, the 30-second broadcast spot. Now that I'm cord-cut and the NBA Finals are over, I haven't seen one of those in over a week, and probably won't again until the NFL season starts. I can't imagine I'm alone in that group, really.

But all of that, of course, is Not Your Problem as the individual consumer. For us, there are simply great and memorable viewing experiences that stick in your brain for a long time to come, an unprecedented array of choice and convenience, and the desire to share that better way of living with friends and family. Hopefully for many more seasons to come.

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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.