Monday, November 13, 2017

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.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

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.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Shifts In Your Continuum

So many business images
This week at various roles, I was struck by shifts in the continuum of work. Without getting into details that will remain private for reasons of business, things are starting to change as we ramp up, and start to re-examine the way we do things.

Or, in hopefully less obtuse words...

> You can either be easy to work with, or hard. Most of us try for easy, but easy also might extend to pricing, at which point easy starts to become untenable.

> You can make what you do seem simple, by eliminating any mention of nuance or detail, or complex, by itemizing and communicating every small point.

This usually falls into a middle ground, or changes as your relationship with a client moves away from implementation to maturity, but once again -- you run the risk of making your service seem less valuable, or maybe even setting up the basis for replacing you with someone else. Simple and easy doesn't always translate into hard to replace and valuable.

The key to all of this is, of course, an effective read of your audience. Technical roles generally want the details, while creative types want the overview. But that's not always true, and very few people want to get into the weeds for stuff that's outside of their lane.

The best time to set your place in a continuum is early in a relationship, so you aren't giving up leverage, but that's not always possible due to other factors. Knowing when you can change the rules a bit, especially with existing clients that are used to certain rates on payment and turn, usually takes a leap of faith.

Faith that what you are providing is as valuable as you think. Faith that the read of your worth matches what the client thinks of you. Faith that the details that you cover matter to your client, that the merits of your speed or your competitiveness are game changers and separate you from competitors.

It's not easy. Or simple. But if your place in the continuum never changes, that means your business never changes, either.

And businesses that never change?

Tend to change in dramatic and unfortunate ways.

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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.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Wrong With Confidence

Two moments from my week that struck a chord with life in advertising and marketing.

> On a podcast dealing with the rise of alt-right political views, and how some in that movement pule over distinctions over pride in their heritage not equating to white supremacy, the following telling point from an activist: how this side is so confident in their views and beliefs, despite the long march of history noting how they've been wrong so often.

Slavery, apartheid, colonialism, Jim Crow, intolerance towards LGBTQ... it's just a long line of, well, white guys acting with complete certainty that what they believe is correct, only to find out later, well, no. (Let's exclude the very real possibility that so much of this was done just for the money, just because that's not the track I'd like to follow here.)

And yes, everyone always thinks they are right about what they are saying, because if you think you are wrong and say it anyway, you're a sociopath. Tangent, moving on.

> One of the people I met while doing ride sharing, who while conceding the fact that climate change is real, told me that's he's not going along with the idea that it's done by humans. Might just be something the Earth just does, since we've had Ice Ages before. When  I noted that he was confusing geologic history (eons) versus modern (at most, decades), his counter was that there's just no way to solve the problem without an untold number of people just ceasing to exist. (You get all kinds doing ride sharing, by the way.)

Not seeing how these relate to the effectiveness of your ad campaign? Hold on, we're getting there.

The worst experiences of my life all share a common thread: a lack of information that led to the wrong conclusion, and actions that were predicated on that conclusion. In my personal life, this manifests as various people who were important to me having severe issues that were beyond my power to assist, or their ability to change. In my professional career, that certain lists or channels were the products of faulty data, that management or venture capital didn't have the same goals as the rank and file, that promises weren't going to be kept, and so on. (By the way, to be perfectly clear -- I have no regrets. You work in this field, and with the kind of start-ups that give you front-line knowledge of the way the world works as it changes in real time, and you have to accept that the road isn't always going to be smooth.)

This lack of information translates to macro levels as well. If we had a clear cost to the environment for various energy choices, plane travel might come with a 5X price addition for a carbon offset, new phones may be 2X cost for the requirement to re-use rare elements, gas might be a boutique items for hobby cars as electrics powered by mandatory solar roofs dominated the roads, and so on, and so on. Instead, we all act on incomplete information -- the gallon of gas or plane fare just reflects the cost to the consumer, not the cost it creates when consumed -- and do the best we can.

Because, and this is the hard part...

If you wait to have complete confidence in all of your decisions, you will never make any, because complete confidence is impossible. Even for something as cut and dried as a digital marketing campaign.

So, to sum up.

1) If you are utterly and totally sure of something -- anything -- that's more about your faith in your story, rather than the merits of the decision.

2) If you never go back and test the stuff that you know is right, you are at significant risk of acting on wrong information.

3) A little humility and flexibility is more than warranted, especially in the face of all of the times we've been wrong before. Even if it's not matched, say, in public discourse, or by "strong" leaders.

Making wrong decisions isn't an indictment of your career, or the value you bring to a client or organization.

Failing to learn from them is.

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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.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Showing Up, or Five Lessons from Ride Sharing

Bodies in seats
Full disclousre: to make ends meet these days, because the Bay Area is crazy expensive and life hasn't quite worked out the way I'd like, I do ride share on nights and weekends. It basically boils down to minimum wage employment, but with the flexibility and non-compete that fits in with my career. Here's what I've learned from the experience.

> There are ways to make the gig more lucrative on an hourly basis -- work at odd hours, put up with drunk people, turn the app on and off to position yourself in more lucrative areas -- but for the most part, you just have to put in the hours. Even base rate rides can work out if they are long enough, or drop you in a position that sets up for chain work later. As the old saying goes, 90% of life is just showing up. I pretty much do this every day now, mostly so I don't have to do full days of it.

> I give my riders amenities that most other drivers do not -- water, mints, cough drops -- and a choice of in-flight entertainment options (music, NPR, conversation), because I treat passengers the way I'd like to be treated as a rider. Most just defer and ride without a lot of interaction, but the ones that don't make the gig kind of fun at times. More importantly, they tip, and those tips save me hours every week. I've even made some professional connections from it.

> The vast majority of riders pass without incident or comment, and don't make for very entertaining stories. But the ones that go beyond, either due to their position in life (I've picked up people from outside the bail bonds office, and others that work for extraordinarily wealthy individuals) or their eagerness to be very candid with a total stranger that they aren't very likely to ever meet again, make for the far better stories. I've got about a half dozen that are slowly but surely getting honed for use in stand-up comedy, because that's something else that I do. (Don't worry, riders, no names are used to protect the guilty.)

> While technology is always improving, it's far from foolproof, and when it fails you, it's utterly maddening. Network outages stop all revenue, mapping fails cause extraordinary frustration for all parties, and there are moments when the app sends you to chase passengers that are far too far away to be feasible for anyone. Cellular coverage isn't total, either. Things seem to be getting better, but I have to wonder if these issues are part of the reason why so many drivers don't make it past their first few months at the gig.

> It's really not for everyone. The hours are very erratic, since the driver doesn't know the passneger's final destination before they are in the car. It gets lonely, especially if your crop of passnegers aren't engaging, and you have to be pretty tolerant of a wide range of personalities. But the biggest problem with the gig is the difficulty of getting a true profit perspective, since you have to take into account the depreciation and advanced repair needs of your vehicle, along with higher insurance and gas costs. As with any business, gross and net are very different things, and if you don't do the math, you can get the wrong idea about how it's going.

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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.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Get Out Of Town

Tough Town!
Several decades ago, when I fronted a rock band, we'd gig at whatever venue would have us. The work made rehearsals more productive, because they gave us deadlines, and even the most ill-scheduled gig was, for the most part, better than not having it. This led to several hundred gigs, all told, in a wide range of settings and locations.

Where this is relevant to your life as a marketing and advertising pro is this simple piece of human psychology; if the band was from far away, the crowd was inevitably more interested in what they were doing. There's an ego-flattering point to this, in that if you know about bands from outside your area, it must make you a more discerning fan of music. It's also a tiny acid test for the band, in that audiences think you have more on the ball if you are from somewhere else, since the assumption is that it's your full time job, as opposed to a hobby.

Here's another data point that proves the practice. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she had a standing gig at Caesar's Palace in Atlantic City, as she's a harpist. (Weddings, corporate events, hospice work, bookstores, specialty events. Book her early and often; you can reach her through me. End of product placement.) When patrons asked her where she was from and she replied trutthfully, there was a feeling of disappointment and a quicker end to the conversation. So she started adopting an Irish accent instead, created a small back story to match her persona, and watched her tips triple.

This is, of course, silly on its face. But the same thing occurs in business, honestly. Now that I live and work in the Bay Area, the people I run into during my day to day are inevitably more interested when I mention where I'm from (Philadelphia, originally), as opposed to where I work (a start up that most people haven't heard of yet, on the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco).

There's no sign that this trend is slowing, even in the age of remote work and easy plane bookings. Travel broadens the mind -- and not just the mind of the traveler.

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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.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Football In the Time of California

He's Right
I admit that "Love in the time of . . ." is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time.” - Steve Martin, "Pure Drivel"

Martin's essay is always in the back of my mind when I get the chance to appreciate living in the Bay Area, and as it was the first week of NFL football, it rang in my brain once more today. I don't have cable anymore, as I'm living in temporary housing without a television while onboarding at a new startup, but going cold turkey on my football laundry (Eagles) isn't going to happen. So I headed up and out this morning, found a place with a good enough breakfast menu and enough televisions with a satellite dish, and got to watch my team at the utterly wonderful hour of 10am, rather than 1pm.

My laundry won, which always helps, but getting the football game out of the way before late afternoon makes the entire exercise seem like so much less of a vice, honestly. I caught the later game at the gym on a treadmill, took care of my errands, and still had daylight hours to spare. Back East, this would have required an unsightly wake up early in the morning while trying not to wake the sleeping family, not to mention the preparation of getting to bed early on Saturday. Full and total pass on all of that.

I suspect the NFL is getting wise to this on their own level, what with the increasing number of games in the UK on European time, but (a) those games are almost always terrible, seeing how they involve an inordinate amount of Jacksonville Jaguars, and (b) the games will likely always be terrible, because they are in front of crowds of mostly neutral fans, with players who resent the really big dumb plane flight in the middle of their year of big dumb plane flights.

Having the game wrap up early works whether your laundry wins or loses in California. A win, you are out in the sunshine afterward, getting stuff done, feeling virtuous. A loss, you are out in the sunshine afterward, remembering that the people who are really angry and bitter about this are three thousand miles away and won't be inflicting thier negativity upon you. The last time I was in California, my laundry had the best era of its history and went to its last Super Bowl. Maybe they just need me to be away from them. It's a sacfrifice I'm willing to make.

Final point that brings this all back to stuff a marketing person might want to think about: dayparting matters, and also shouldn't be a single set point. Something to keep in mind for the email professionals, as well as media planners who are resolute enough to price their banner buys on a clock basis. (Hint: you really should price your banner buys on a clock basis. If only because they work very differently, and to very different people, depending on the hour of the day.)

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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.

Monday, September 4, 2017

Scale For Some

Unvisited Book
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” - George Eliot

My first gig in marketing was with a physical manufacturer of products, and by the end of my time there, something terrible happened: the marketing worked too well. We were up by a lot more than our people could handle, no one could take vacation time, and the challenge from a management perspective came from trying to find qualified personnel who would work second and third shift hours to try to keep up wih the demand. Rumors started of how we would cut the marketing budget for the upcoming year to try to throttle down the growth, and my belief in the long-term viability of the business, coupled with concerns about how I was valued by higher levels of management, made me very anxious. You don't do your best work when you're anxious. So when another company made me an offer, I gave notice and relocated.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I don't regret the move in the least. I've learned a ton in the time since, and it's all led to the current gig, where I get to work with and shape the marketing of tools that pretty much fix every problem I've ever ran into as a marketing and advertising pro. Notably, also, this: none of the companies that I've worked at since gave as many people jobs as that first employer, mostly because I've never taken a gig since that didn't scale.

There's a significant article in the NY Times this week that has made me start to wonder if that stance didn't come with some costs, though. The article compares the impact of Apple to its home city (Cupertino, CA) to Kodak with its (Rochester, NY). The entire article is worth a read, but the gist of it is that by creating a contractor class to take care of aspects of the business that aren't seen as core competency (janitorial is the focus, but the movement also extends to security guards, food production, and so on), Apple has created more shareholder value at the cost of blue collar jobs. So while Rochester has traces of Kodak's benevolence striped through the community, Apple is a global company, with those dollars either on campus, or spread to the bank accounts of shareholders all over the world.

There's nothing particularly evil or unique about this, and had Kodak's management thought of it first (or, for that matter, how film was going to go away due to changing technology), perhaps they would have made different choices. But the end result is the same, and that's a marketplace where many workers, especially if they didn't start from a position of priviledge, have to pinball from company to company to reach economic goals, rather than work their way up.

That toothpaste is long gone from the tube, of course. Emulating Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world, is what will happen for decades to come. Innovation at the top levels drove their profit margins, rather than squeezing custodians. But I can't help but feel that this reading of the market isn't entirely accurate.

There's damage done when only the current highest achievers can get ahead. There's social stratification that happens when people can't work their way up, ambitions thwarted, motivations dulled. From the unpaid internships with amazing social networking opportunities that only young adults of priviledge can take, to the gig on top of gig economies that the working poor gravitate to, we create skepticism about capitalism itself... and when that occurs, the engine that creates people who can buy these wonderful goods and services dries up, becomes ripe for piracy, and accelerates income inequality to the point where a civil society is no longer a given.

The company that I left twenty years ago is still in business. It can't have been an easy ride for them, but they are privately held, and ownership always took pride in giving people jobs, rather than maximizing their own revenue. If every company were like them, we'd probably have more people working, a more stable economy, maybe even less extremism in our political climate. But we also might not have the tech and innovation that no one wants to live without.

I live in the Bay Area now, perhaps the least accomodating philosophical market for unvisited tombs. It's a great place to be, filled to bursting with ambitious and disruptive people, and to live here generally means you chose it, because so many people aren't native to the area.

If every area in America tried to be like this, we'd have astonishing problems. Probably even worse than what we have now.

But if you are faced with, as I was twenty years ago, no better option?

You make the change.

And deal with the ensuing challengs to the best of your ability.

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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.

Monday, August 28, 2017

The Jet Blue Way

Jet Blue HQ
This past weekend, I flew cross-country on a red-eye, spent the better part of a day getting a venue to its proper state, and was genuinely touched by my community. In some respects, it was an ordinary experience, because I've done all of these things before. In other ways, it made me feel validated that the project that I've taken on is on the side of the angels... because it feels like more of the same.

Let's get into it chronologically. I've never flown JetBlue before because it just hasn't been an option from a logistics or expense standpoint. This time around, the overnight flight from Oakland was in the market on the budget, the pre-dawn arrival at JFK was OK from a pickup standpoint since my ride out was too early for morning rush hour traffic, and my late August flight dates didn't put me into holiday surge pricing.

There's nothing *particularly* magical about JetBlue, and I'm not sure it's a better experience than Virgin (now Alaska)... but it's close. The wifi works and it's free, the leg room is just better than others, the flight attendants don't seem beaten down by the gig, and the whole experience just seems a little better. Not so much in ways that are going to make me pay more all the time, and I still wish that they had more mid-Atlantic ports of call because JFK is just not a great place for me. But they are preferred now, and I wasn't sure that there was enough of a difference in airlines to bother with before. (Frontier and Spirit, on the other hand, seem like they are actively trying to punish you for saving money.)

I flew back to New Jersey this weekend to run a poker game for my regulars, then conduct a fantasy football draft. The poker game has been going on since I left for the Bay Area in May, with the regulars keeping the flame alive... but the guys just don't have my same attention to detail and fiddly personality, so the venue just wasn't as clean as it should be, the snacks just weren't up to the same level, the vinyl records weren't spinning, and so on, and so on. There's no specific single thing that I do that makes people more into the game, but the cumulative impact of all of the little extras just gives the players more of a premium feel and helps them get more enthusiasm for the game. They reciprocated with an unprecedented expression of generosity, and I honestly teared up a little when I told my wife about it the next morning. It's not just nice to be appreciated for what you do. It's life-affirming.

Finally, Saturday was the fantasy football auction, which was more involved than past years given the depth of the draft, and another moment where my community picked me up when my own performance was lacking. I got the number of bench slots wrong on the prep materials, a basic oversight that I've never made before, and a mistake that could have had a real impact on the outcome for the players involved... but everyone just rolled with the mistake and picked me up. I have a history with both of these groups, and I know that I've given them value over the years. We retain our players in both the poker and fantasy leagues. Jet Blue retains their customers. The word of mouth from people who play in my leagues, or my poker game, draw new players because people like to tell the story of good service. (Not as much as they do bad service, but there's nothing you can do about that.) The same goes for Jet Blue.

There's always the temptation, especially when you can put dollars to decisions through data, to cut corners. Jet Blue probably loses a few fares every flight for the leg room decision and puts themselves at risk of not seeming as serious about making a profit as their competitors. I put myself at a little more financial risk, especially if my players don't tip at the poker game, or make my role difficult as a fantasy league commissioner. I also could have turned the time that I spent working on the venue into cash, or just not flown back for the events in the first place. There's also the love and tolerance shown by my family, who don't see me very often during this period and then shared my time and attention with my friends this weekend.

As a consultant and a marketing and advertising pro, I've known for a long time that you make your own luck.

To me, the best way to do that is to make your clients love your service.

Besides, you feel better about yourself that way.

And it seems to be working for Jet Blue, now in its 20th year of operation...

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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.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Five Lessons From A Fantasy League Commissioner

Actually, It Is
Twice in the next week, I'll participate in fantasy football drafts; once in the office, the other in a basement that's 3,000 miles away from where I currently live. When these drafts happen, I will act as Commissioner, because this is a thing that I do, and herd the cats who are in the leagues to all come together and do a transparently dumb thing as a single group. I've performed this role for (gulp) over thirty years, in a wide range of leagues, ranging from dear friends and relatives to near total strangers.

Here's what I've learned, over the many years and situations, that have helped to inform the person that I am when working as a marketing and advertising pro. You might find it helpful. (But not as helpful as when to draft Tennessee Titans RB Derrick Henry, perhaps the best handcuff in the league this year. That's clearly a state secret.)

1) Your worst client will always take up the majority of your time.

Whether it's someone who can't get their protections on time, struggles with the tech, needs an inordinate amount of follow-up requests to pay the dues, takes way more time to make their picks than everyone else, or just finds some other way to throw a wrench in the works... well, this has made for *wonderful* training on dealing with particular clients. Keeping your composure when all you really want to do is spit fire at someone for making things difficult is an incredibly valuable life skill, but it's also kind of like getting to the gym every day for maintenance work. You might need to figure out ways to self-motivate.

2) People are going to make fun of you for the very reasons why you have the gig.

In the league that I run out of the basement, there will be giant labels, several kinds of Sharpies, clipboards and pens and assigned seating, and an inordinate amount of getting things Just So. Owners are appreciative, but they also will make jokes about this, re-arrange things just to see if they can get my goat, and so on.

The point is that if you are a good commish, you have to sweat the details, and sweating the details is just an irresistible softball in the search for humor. I (honestly) don't really mind, because this is just how I'm wired. Making fun of me for this stuff is kind of like making fun of my height or hair color; have at it. I didn't choose it, so I'll probably join in.

3) Bad ideas are like weeds, or zombies; they always return.

If you have an owner or two that wants to change a rule, and it gets voted down or rejected, rest assured that it will return at some point, with as much force and vigor as previous. There is a strong intersection of math, engineering and problem solving in the mindset of fantasy sports, and people like to think they are right about things, otherwise they wouldn't say it.

So the owner in your league that hates kickers, and wants to ban them... will always hate kickers, and will always want to ban them. They might even be right. And they'll ask until they get their way, or the sun burns out. Best to just shrug and move on.

4) Balancing the interests of the league against the interests of your team is tough.

Running my basement league, for me, is a mix of conducting an auction while also trying to make picks for my own club, which leads to mistakes for both sides. It's also my built-in excuse for not having a particularly good team, but what's more likely is that I just don't do as well in football as other leagues. Finally, if you are in a league with especially competitive people, rule changes or innovations that you propose will be regarded with suspicion, because they'll seem like they are in the interest of your team first, and the league second. The only way to overcome this is by building up goodwill and precedent as an honorable dealer. There are no shortcuts to that status.

5) This is all part of your personal brand.

I've had job interviews where the conversation went to personal habits, and I've always felt that this was a competitive advantage for me, because my hobbies... well, speak to my professional attributes. It's one thing to say that I sweat the details; it's quite another to rattle off the particulars of my various leagues. People like to hire folks with good references, because retaining clients is a critical skill in business. I have clients in these leagues that have spent the majority of their lives with me. Innovating in small spaces, learning from outside sources, caring about the happiness of your partners, self-awareness and self-deprecation for when you are nerding out with abandon...

Well, I'm putting data and precedent to these claims, rather than just saying them.

Good luck with your drafts!

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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.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

The Generalization Trap

Twain Me
The prevailing story this week in adtech was the continuing discussion about the memo that got James Damore, an engineer at Google, fired for the views expressed in the piece.

There's been a lot of back and forth about this in my feed. Some feel that terminating an employee for their views is tantamount to censorship, and just aren't down with that. Others believe that Google also missed an opportunity to retrain the asset, and defuse the controversy. More people have contributed what it's like to be female in tech, and the sheer fatigue encountered from having to continually overcome stereotypes. There was also a strong piece from NPR that showed how enrollment in colleges for tech courses changed dramaticaly, on the diversity level, with just a few minor tweaks to how the course was marketed. (Note: no content changes, just titles.) Finally, there was talk about the strategies involved, the ensuing lawsuits, the media coverage, and so on.

What I've found to be the silver lining in the experience is that tech, unlike too many other parts of our world, is actually learning from the experience, and adding more information. That is, after all, what tech types do; challenge assumptions, gather more data, go where the math takes you. Rather than simply point at a problem and declare the other side to be unrealistic and/or malevolent, we default to the science.

Which makes me wonder why so many people who are willing to defend some of the points in the memo are, well, missing the forest for the trees. And here's that forest: when you generalize about a group, and you aren't a stand up comedian trying for easy laughs... you are pretty much setting yourself up for catastrophic failure.

I get why people *want* to make these generalizations, of course. It's shorthand for thinking, and thinking all the time is absolutely exhausting. Our minds want to rest from time to time, and maybe even more than that, and a generalization can put you at ease, and make the world seem simpler. Run into trouble on the roads? Generalize about the demographic of the person who offended you, rather than how you might be bringing your own problems to the table. Annoyed about your economic status compared to some other profession? Generalize about their moral or ethical culpability. Don't like your working environment because it pushes you out of your comfort zone? Generalize about hiring practices, class structures, and so on.

It's lazy thinking, if it's even thinking at all. And it's a mistake. Always, and especially in a professional or business environment.

Which makes my closing statement on the matter curious, because it's going to sound like I'm stepping in the same hole.

What people really hate, even more than generalizations?

Being told they are wrong.

Monday, August 7, 2017

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.