5 Tips For Tumbleweed Season

Not Seen: Co-Workers

If you've worked in adtech for any length of time, you know what an August calendar means: vacation time. Either for you, the people you are working with, or the people that need to sign off on anything of major consequence.

As someone who has worked almost exclusively at start ups for the past couple of decades -- and at some start ups that have gone away with varying degrees of warning -- I've also had the experience of not having much in the way of time accrued at a new gig to take off when everyone else does. Here's what I've learned about Tumbleweed Season, under the hope that it proves helpful to you.

1) Collaboration is going to be really unpredictable. I've frequently come in to the office during slow times and expected quiet sessions where independent study and long-term thinking was going to rule the day, only to find a stray exec or senior sales personnel with very urgent needs. Don't assume that your day will be uneventful.

2) Commuting can be a joy. The comedian Bill Burr has a highly misanthropic but accurate routine in which he talks about how much nicer the world would be, if there were only a lot less people in it. Just in the last week in the Bay Area, my usual time in the car for the morning drive has dropped 15-20%, with no major crushes or delays. It can't and won't last, of course, but I'm going to enjoy it while I can. (Sadly for my friends who still work in NYC, this season isn't providing the same benefit.)

3) Travel makes for interesting dayparts. The nature of work in the connected age means that your contact who is spending time in Europe, Asia or the Pacific is still likely to monitor their communication channels, but maybe with less frequency or urgency. If you are prone to checking your device at all hours, you really need to break that habit before it destroys your health... but in the meantime, consider time-shifting your email sends to hit the in-box at a more sane hour.

4) Deadlines may be just as urgent, but for different reasons. Vacation schedules can make for an effective bit of leverage, in that many clients will want to clear the decks of projects before leaving. That can give you the impetus you need to push things forward, but only if you keep things simple. Deep complications aren't your friend in Tumbleweed Time.

5) T'is the season. At many of my gigs, Q4 has been an all-hands experience, with any number of seasonal creative needs crushing the team from mid-October to mid-December. Working ahead for your top clients in the summer months, especially for perennial tasks that can't look too much like last year's, but not too much different either, is best done when you've got some time and space to think -- and can keep you from truly insane weeks later.

Besides, looking at icicles and snowflakes in your marketing and advertising projects is a very good way to take your mind off summer heat...

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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.

Disrupting Disruption

How Adobe Is Makng Me Feel

You hear a lot of idioms when you work in adech. Fail fast. Long tail thinking. And perhaps the most powerful, disrupt everything.

This call to innovate has led to the engine that is driving the U.S. economy. A small number of tech companies are the biggest reason why the stock market as a whole has performed so well in the past six months, and there's no end of folks who want to be just like them. And for the most part, this is a great and good thing, especially if you are a fan of getting the U.S. off fossil fuel use.

I've made a living from innovation for decades, and at my current gig, continue in this vein. So what I'm about to discuss isn't an easy thing to denigrate. But here goes.

There are no panaceas in life, and nothing that comes without consequences. Sustainable energy infrastructure has an impact on the environment, albeit one that's remarkably lower than fossil fuel use. I may delight in my phone taking pictures or serving as a flashlight or guitar tuner, but there are untold numbers of people who, thanks to these apps, no longer have employment. Consequences.

Which leads me to news from Adobe, demoed on stage and covered recently in business publications, of Voco. Basically, Photoshop for audio, which gives the operator of the software the ability to create thoroughly realistic scripts that were never said by the speaker. All you need is 20 to 40 minutes of data to work from, and you can make anyone say anything, in a fake that's nearly undetectable to anyone who isn't looking at the actual code.

No, seriously.

And while the stated use case for the software is clear and useful for a limited number of professionals -- sound engineers on media that get to skip laborious recovery sessions -- the far greater negative impact on humanity seems clear, yes?

If fake news is the scourge by which elections and social media has been more or less permanently corrupted, how much worse does it get when you add these tools to the mix?

If governance is becoming an ever-growing toxic mix of tribalism, what happens when you give by any means warriors these weapons?

And if we've gotten into this mess due to a corrupting narrative of how you can't trust the media or your government...

Well, what amount of damage kicks in when sight and hearing are also suspect?

There are some tools that, at the risk of infuriating extreme libertarians, are widely regarded as not suitable to be in the hands of private actors, due to the risk of misuse. Tanks. Lethal gases. Nuclear weapons. And so on.

If Adobe about to make the coding equivalent... well, let me put it this way.

We're going to have bigger problems then, say, consumers no longer thinking that a celebrity is really endorsing your goods or services...

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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.

Can, Could, Won't: Managing Risk

Additional risk: eye pokery

At one of the earlier stops in my career, I was fortunate enough to work with a top-notch legal compliance officer. Not only was this person quick and skilled, they were also exceptionally patient and understanding. That was all very necessary, since it was their poor task to proof all of my copy for not just the usual editing maladies, but also for anything that could put our employer in legal jeopardy.

What probably made the work (slightly) more tolerable for them was that I had some background in law in the first place. A political science degree, some secertarial work for law professors and lawyers at various temp jobs, and other roles prior to that gig made me think that I knew some stuff. And, well, I did; just enough to be dangerous. Because my skill set was nothing compared to what this employer wanted to instill, and even less than what many of our clients wanted to enforce. That's why the compliance role was there in the first place.

After a few years of high throughput copywriting and creative direction, I just didn't go down paths that led to issues. Can was just automatically changed to could, claims were softened with puffery or avoided, dates were omitted because the nature of our delivery channel (email) led to way too big of a chance of a bait and switch accusal. Sweepstakes were swapped out for less problematic premiums, and sensitive discussions were taken out of email, putting us light years ahead of, sadly, people who get major political party nominations to be the leader of the Free World. I've pretty much worked in a legally compliant way ever since, and have even served as the de facto legal expert for several employers afterward that just didn't have the budget or interest to have true counsel.

It wasn't as if anything I wanted to try before I got all of that training was irresponsible. None of my clients ever ran into legal issues due to creative before or since, and while some of my stops have run into fireworks for poor practices, none of that was related to practices in my part of the business. But once you get trained to go in a certain direction, that's where you go creatively. Especially since the other directions don't seem to gain you much more than added risk.

Which leads me to the risk that's on the other side of the ledger. While there are plenty of consumer categories that play in arenas where true and correct fear lives in the heart's of your clients, the real shame of it all is that those are the categories that are most ready for innovation. (That's the reason why so many job listings in restrictive fields come with a heavy requirement for relevant experience; it's a safeguard for things that can never, ever happen.) Class action suits are just the end for many a buisness, if not for the obvious legal damages, but also from the turnover they inspire. Doing anything new or novel in these categories takes unusual courage from your client, and presentation skill from the agency.

The trouble with being too aware of risk is that it breeds a degree of sameness and safety to all of your finished work, and in that sameness, you can't innovate, learn from outliers, push the envelope... or feel truly alive in the gig.

Because at the end of the day, there's legal risk in getting out of bed. It's just a little more pronounced and obvious than the risk you get from weak creative.

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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.