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Archive for February, 2010

Design War – Down With Corporate America

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

“If one factors in all the world wars, diseases, poverty, illiteracy, and natural disasters, a well-designed hangtag is silly. But I don’t think the responsibility for the visual environment of our society is silly or trivial, and collectively, that is our charge.” – Paula Scher: “The Devaluation of Design by the Design Community: I Have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us”

“Designers who win awards for edgy design they did for a friend’s business, with a print run of one hundred or something like that? They’ve got no art director, no creative director, no client’s representative, no agency person. Where’s the obstacle to good design there? But take something like a cheese. When I see a really good package for a cheese, I know what that designer went through to get there. It makes me want to fall on my knees and kiss that designer’s feet, that cheese.” – Ernesto Aparicio.

An interview by Paula Scher with Josh Berta of Pr*tty Sh*tty:

Scher: I use a couple quotes of yours to sum up some of my own motivations and philosophy behind this blog. When I contacted you about this interview, you said those quotes were never more true than now. Why is that?

Berta: Many talented young designers today have abandoned their roles as improvers of the general visual environment. Many only want to work on cultural work, or not-for-profit work, or on projects they perceive as “good-for-society” which may have a high profile within the design milieu, but don’t really reach ordinary people. These designers are afraid to get involved in mainstream packaging, promotion or corporate work. They forget that these are the products and messages that most people really encounter in their daily lives, that these products and services are at the heart of the American condition, and that there is responsibility for us as designers, always, to raise the expectation of what design can be. We are responsible for that daily experience. These “ivory tower designers” leave the job to others (ad agencies, schlock shops, etc.) who are simply doing it for the money, and are often cynical about the outcome.

Scher: What do you think has perpetuated that pattern?

Berta: I think the design community has caused it. The “First Things First” manifesto inspired a lot of young people to move away from corporate branding, advertising, promotion, packaging (except for books and magazines, as if they are somehow more noble). If “responsible” designers who care about society and our environment refuse to work on branding, advertising, promotion and packaging, then just consider, who will? This line of design-thinking has been perpetuated in so many design schools and grad programs and it is perpetuated by the AIGA and other design organizations. It’s easy to inspire young designers this way as it creates a real calling for them: “down with corporate America”, etc.

But, ultimately, it creates a design society where it is OK for designers to
abandon most of American communication.
Good God!

Read the rest of this interview here.

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SXSW Magazine Interview with Dave Allen

Monday, February 15th, 2010

SXSW Fight Portland

At last count, if I’m correct, I’ve attended the SXSW Conference at least 17 times, and on many of those visits I have been very grateful for the opportunity to speak on a panel. When Brian Zisk, a co-founder of the SanFran MusicTech conference, invited me to speak again on a panel in December, and also to join him on his panel at this year’s SXSW, I gave pause. 17 years is a long time, therefore that begs the question – what has all the talking, presenting, networking and mingling at SXSW achieved for the music industry/community at large? The answer to that is simple – it’s hard to know what, if anything, changed and even harder to quantify. Yet change came along anyway.

In that 17 year timeframe we all saw the rise of the more public face of the Internet, the nascent World Wide Web. And as Chris Anderson of Wired points out, “… the Internet is the once-a-century invention. The Web is just one application upon it. There are, and will be, others.” For music, as we know, this was a serious game changer. The labels blinked. Some musicians learned to use the web well and at SXSW in March 2007 David Byrne warned record labels that they must act very quickly and adapt much faster to the web’s promise. He predicted that by 2012, sales of music as downloads or through streaming services would strip the sales of CDs. He was very prescient.

I share his views but I also now lay the blame at the feet of the musicians themselves. There is so much more they could be doing if they fully embraced the social web with a strong, well planned digital strategy. Or, as I put it in this essay – Dear Musicians, Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of The Way.

What follows here is the full version of an interview I gave for SXSWorld Magazine. An edited version appears in the print and online magazine on page 58. The discussion centered around our company Fight and its approach to brand strategy and iterative marketing. Our ideas would work just as well for bands and labels. After all, they are brands too.

For the layman, how would you describe what your company does, and how it functions in relation to the changing online and media landscape?

Fight is a brand strategy company that works with clients to help them align their brand strategy both online and off. For too long, advertising agencies have been struggling with the asymmetrical online world. It puzzles them because they consider the web like TV, as if it has multiple channels. They see the web as packed with eyeballs all wanting to see their clients messages – that is totally untrue. Getting attention online is the key. One-way, controlled messaging is not the answer.

Fight approaches this problem by working with companies, setting realistic goals and targets, then moving ahead in iterative steps to see what is working. If all is well, we move to the second stage of the campaign – based on results. If something isn’t working we move back to the previous phase. We continue testing and analyzing throughout the campaign. The old adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t work on the web. We want to show results and actual $$ ROI for our clients.

How does the social-networking aspect fit into this, and how can musicians make better use of it?

What needs pointing out is that “social media” is just an idea. [Edit: I prefer to use the term, Social Web] The term “social media” feels like it was dreamed up by marketers, who, believing the web is like TV, wanted to create “channels” to reach people online. Remember, as Chris Anderson of Wired wrote in a Tweet recently “the Internet is one of those ‘once in a century’ inventions and the web is just an application that sits on the Internet. There are, and will be other applications.” 

Social networks are simply places where people gather online. Anthropology takes care of the need for humans to be constantly in touch, technology just shortens the distance between us via, say, the web or mobile devices. Therefore, I’d argue, that bands need an online digital strategy worked out in advance. Having a MySpace page or Facebook fan page is not a digital strategy for musicians. Now that Google has delivered Google Music Search and Twitter provides real time search, I argue that musicians must now have their own url. If they did, then they would benefit from those searches by having their url come up in the results. If they don’t then their MySpace url will come up first. A digital strategy would ensure that the intended actions of a fan landing on the musician’s web page might include buying some music, a T-shirt or signing up to an email list. If you are just one of millions of bands on MySpace I’d say those are difficult result to achieve. All those social network tools should simply be used as part of a strong digital/online strategy.

How does your background as a musician and [former] label owner influence the way you approach these issues now?

I developed my thoughts and ideas about online music distribution over the last 15 years. I reached my current phase of thoughts and ideas after attending SXSW 2009 and realizing that musicians were using the web because of its zero barrier-to-entry model, but I felt they weren’t using it wisely. That was when I wrote “The End of The Recording Album As The Organizing Principle” 

In your SanFranMusicTech essay, you lay much of the responsibility for the current state of the music industry on musicians, rather than record companies, for not taking better advantage of the branding and social-networking opportunities available to them.  Could you expand on this a bit, and on what musicians can do to function more efficiently in the current climate?  Should artists be focusing more on building and developing their brand, rather than focusing on record sales?

I’m not sure that you’ve grasped the big idea behind the essay. I’m not saying that musicians should necessarily be using the web for branding and social networking opportunities, I’m saying that merely releasing a CD in 2010 will be a bad idea. The web should be used as one part of musician’s strategies for the music-release-as-an-event idea. Big thinking is required and unfortunately the thinking still remains small and cloistered around the old way of releasing a CD, as part of a release/reviews/tour campaign that is still a label mindset. The web isn’t suited to a ‘campaign’ strategy. Labels will argue “oh, but we use the web by posting videos to YouTube and getting MP3s to music blogs” but that is small potatoes I think. I know it’s a cliché, but Radiohead and NIN gave everyone pointers to how it can be done. Embracing those ideas is now up to musicians. If they don’t start to embrace bigger thinking, then musicians will definitely not make a living from their recorded works.

What are your goals and objectives for your SXSW appearance this year, and what issues do you plan to address?

I believe I have attended SXSW at least 15 times and I have been fortunate enough to have been asked to speak on panels for many of those visits. I always look forward to SXSW [especially now, as it has expanded into the Interactive world] and I arrive expecting to learn something new, which does happen occasionally. One example was being able to sit in and hear Clay Shirky remind a panel of journalists, book publishers and newspaper folks that “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” 

That phrase of his could also be paraphrased as “the internet is the largest group of people who care about music ever assembled in history…” When musicians, labels and others paint music downloading as ‘piracy,’ ‘stealing’ or ‘illegal’ they are creating a “Fog of War” that is intended to serve one purpose that can be summed up as – We don’t understand how music lovers want to access music, nor do we understand how an eight year old girl today will want to access her music in future. Therefore we will continue to speak out in media catch phrases, instead of doing deep research that will allow us to understand, via real data, how better to serve new generations of music fans. 

My goal? That’s easy. I would love nothing more than to have a forward-thinking record label or band manager hire Fight, to help them be successful in a shifting online music world. Talk is cheap, action is required based on real information.

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Fight, Strategy, Technology, Thinking, Twitter, brand, facebook, social web | View Comments

Fight, Iterative Marketing and 30 Coffees

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Iterative Marketing Fight Portland

In the early stages of the 30 Coffees in 30 Days rollout, AdPulp’s David Burn joined the fray and the result was a well-rounded discussion of how Fight approaches Iterative Marketing. David wrote up his thoughts afterwards and posted them to AdPulp. Here’s an extract:

“Dave Allen, a partner in Fight–the strategic marketing firm he launched last year with Justin Spohn and Rob Shields–is holding court. He asked me to join him in order to practice his agency’s pitch. I said yes because I like Dave, he promised me beer(s) and I’m curious about Fight’s strategy-is-all business model.
Allen says he, and his partners, are frustrated by traditional advertising, and undue reliance on the big idea. “Fight is a right idea company,” he says. Allen adds that the big idea is a Hail Mary, every time.
Fight’s response to the rise of the Internet and the profound impact it has had on not only marketing, but culture, is something called “iterative marketing.” Iterative means “steps.” Thus, an iterative marketing strategy is built on many little steps, versus one big idea.”

Read the whole article here.

Related post by Fight partner Rob Shields

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Posted in Advertising, Business, Fight, Thinking, agencies, brand | View Comments

This is not the Facebook login page

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The story goes like this: an article on ReadWriteWeb about the Facebook/AOL partnership was getting a lot of comments from readers complaining about how “The new facebook sucks…” and “please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy…” Basically, people were coming to the ReadWriteWeb article and thinking this was the login screen for Facebook.

At Fight, we spend a lot of time thinking about how people use the web. So when I first read about this on daring fireball it sparked a pretty good conversation about the difference between the web and the internet, how people think about both, and about the systems that have been created for people access them.

As Gruber points out, a logical assumption here is that people are not saving “facebook.com” as a bookmark, or even typing it into their address bar, but instead typing “Facebook Login” into a search field and clicking the first link, which for a while was this article.

I relayed this story to Rob who felt the whole thing seemed a little fishy. Believing there might be a different explanation for what was going on, he started looking into it. Typing variations of “Facebook Login” into Google, he followed those top links and found an almost identical set of comments on those sites as well. Clearly, Gruber is correct on what’s happening and I think it’s a fascinating insight into the way most people conceptualize their computers.

It points not just to a break down of how people understand the web/website/browser model, but in a lot of ways how they relate to their computer as an object. Among other things, Rob pointed out, it’s interesting that people are not searching for a place (“facebook”) but rather, looking to take an action (“facebook login”). This lead to a long conversation about whose role it is to fix this, if it’s something that needs to be fixing at all.

One personal insight I took away from this little anecdote though is a new view on something that has historically bothered me: brands that take a website and turn it into an iPhone app for no clear reason. Turns out, they may have unknowingly been onto something. Rather than trying to “fix” the existing model, it may be that “objectizing” elements of the web is the right answer. For people using a Facebook application on an iPad, for example, the level of conceptual understanding at issue here wouldn’t be an issue. Rather than needing to understand the concept of an application (the browser) that one uses to render documents (html pages) that are fed from servers, which you then “bookmark” for future reference; people may be better served by having an object on their desktop that represents these web apps. This concept obviously doesn’t address general browsing, but all this leaves me thinking more about how much people need the web versus how much they need internet connected systems. It also makes me think the insistence from people the something like the iPad breaks down too many of the established computer interaction models may be putting far too much stock in any of these models in the first place.

For something as ubiquitous as the web has become in our lives, it’s always good to remember that for a lot of people, this all makes about as much sense as our cars. There is an expectation that we can put the key in, and the car will start and as long as that happens, everything is fine. Once that system breaks down though, even just a little, we’re right back in the wilderness.

P.S. If you’ve arrived here looking for the login to Facebook – thats here.

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30 Coffees Learning: Of Goats, Cows, and Dragons

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

While it’s only officially day 1 of our 30 coffees in 30 days extravaganza, we’ve already gained valuable insight that I thought were worth sharing.

While talking with Chris Robson and Scott Laing at Parametric Marketing, Scott mentioned that a hurdle that they faced (when working for a company that they both worked at before Parametric) was how to describe themselves to potential clients.

They thought of themselves as something new in the world (as does Fight), and so described themselves as “nots” compared to other companies that they might be compared to. They were “not company A” or “not company B”. They were, in fact, new and better than those companies.

The trouble was that few companies had budgets for “not” companies. They didn’t fit anywhere that people were familiar with, and people had trouble getting their heads around the company. Ultimately, they started talking about themselves as “like company A plus new, better things”.

The metaphor that occurred to me was an idea of goats versus dragons. Let’s say that a company wants to buy a goat; they’ve been buying goats for a long time. They know what a goat is, and what kinds of things a goat represents. They have annual budgets for goats because goats are understood organization wide.

Let’s say that you have something new in the market: a cow. But the idea of “cow” is brand new. No one knows what being a cow means. The word “cow” is something that your company made up (or is in use in the industry but not by many people). So to help people understand how new this thing is, you describe it like it’s a dragon. It’s not at all like a goat. It’s something new entirely.

You probably already get where I’m going here. People don’t know how to relate to the dragon. They don’t have budgets for dragons. They don’t have infrastructure that supports dragons. Many people are going to be scared by the radical concept that a dragon represents; it’s potentially dangerous. Others are going to feel pretty confident that your dragon doesn’t exist at all. It’s something that you made up just to sound new. Maybe, they’ll think, you have a goat dressed up like a dog, but it’s really a goat after all.

The challenge is to position yourself as a goat plus. Something that fits all of their needs, AND MORE. Something they understand, BUT BETTER. Something they have budget for, BUT MORE VALUABLE.

A cow is like a goat, but bigger. It’s like a goat, but produces more meat. It’s like a goat but easier to manage. It’s a goat plus.

So, this is one of our challenges. We think of Fight like a dragon, but we need to find a way to describe it as a goat plus. It’s something we’ll be noodling on and trying out in our 30 coffees. If you know something about Fight and how we could talk about ourselves in a more goat plus sort of way, let us know. If you’ve started your own thing and have tackled this issue, we’d love to hear it. And if you’re starting a new thing, and are having the same problem, we’d love to hear that too. Maybe we can help each other out.

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Let Dave Allen Buy You Coffee! Free!

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Fight face man, and actual rock star Dave Allen wants to spend 30 minutes with you (and he’ll buy you coffee too!).

Fight has an awesome community of supporters, so we thought:  Who better to turn to to help us make a good thing better?

We believe that Fight is a different kind of company from other marketing strategy firms, and we’d like to get some practice talking about ourselves to people in the business, marketing, and agency worlds so that when we talk to potential clients we can really shine.

To help us hone our elevator pitch we’ve set the goal of having Dave give it 30 times in 30 days (an aggressive schedule, and a whole lot of coffee!), starting on February 10th, and ending on March 11th.

If you work for a brand, are in the agency world, are a strategist, planner, marketer, or PR person, we’d deeply appreciate it if you would give Dave 30 minutes of your time (did we mention that he’ll buy you coffee?) to run through our spiel and give us your honest feedback.  We’ll be hitting you up with a couple of questions via email afterwards to get your thoughts on a couple of specific topics as well.

This is not a sales pitch…well, it is, but we’re not pitching YOU, so there won’t be any kind of sales pressure.

We’re expecting that this will take 30 minutes altogether, including chit chat, feedback, and answering any questions that you may have.  Short enough to fit in to an extended coffee break.

Interested?  Reach out to Dave on Twitter, or email Ned (ned.failing@fightpdx.com) and we’ll set up a conversation.

If you want to help us out, but aren’t in the group of people we’re itching to talk to, please pass this message around.  Every little bit helps!

We’ll be providing updates on how we’re doing towards our goal.  You can follow Dave’s progress on Twitter at @DaveAtFight.

Update: Looks like we’re getting more responses than Dave can handle at the moment (and he’s flying back from New Orleans today), so let’s just reach out to Ned.  Thanks!

Update 2: Or feel free to indicate your interest in the comments.

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