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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.)

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.