Having worked in the music industry for the better part of my career, with concert promoters, music festivals, and musicians, this is a topic very near to my heart — you may even recognize a few passages in the deck from my recent All Your Music Are Belong To Us post — but the trends and ideas presented below are as relevant to the biggest consumer brands, or the indiest creative capital producers as they are to music acts. So without further ado, here’s how you Connect or Die:
last week i was on the marketing 101 panel at the startupLA conference. it was
actually a lot of fun, and there were some great questions afterwards. here’s some of my favorites, and my answers:
Q. what’s the fastest way for a new company to get exposure?
A. look for existing communities that are comprised of your target demographic and approach them. if there’s already a connected group of folks that you feel will be interested in what you’ve got it’s a lot faster to generate authentic exposure through that network than trying to aggregate a community from scratch. from a completely different perspective, cliff allen of suretomeet.com who was on the panel with me, said the fastest way for a new company to get exposure is spam. so there you go. choose your own adventure.
Q. is social media, like facebook, going to be the future of advertising?
A. its impact on the process is hugely important. i think it’s certainly something that now needs to be factored into any kind of advertising plan. but i also think it’s completely foolish to altogether write off exposure media (which is what advertising has been primarily dependent on up until like yesterday). it’s not a battle between whether engagement or exposure media is better adapted to the natural selection of marketing, it’s about pursuing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and developing integrated strategies that are overall more effective. that’s the future…. or at least it ought to be.
Q. what’s one piece of marketing advice that is most important for a new company?
A. know your audience. really really understand who you’re talking to. or who you should be talking to. the danger in making a message that isn’t relevant or that isn’t approaching your audience on their own terms is not just that we, as consumers, “tune it out,” it’s that unconsciously we translate messages we don’t relate to as being “not for us.” that’s the #1 thing to avoid.
(and my #1 favorite…) Q. if you had $10,000 to spend on advertising and you couldn’t use any of it on the internet, what would you do?
A. throw an event. and if you’re targeting people over 50, buy some print.
this friday i will be part of the Marketing 101 panel at the StartupLA conference, an event “committed to building the startup community in Los Angeles.”
i’m really excited to be a part of it and share my insight, and i’m also excited that the organizers included this panel in the programming. marketing isn’t necessarily at the forefront of many technologists’ discussions, and precisely because of that, an opportunity to gain some understanding of the options and pitfalls in the current marketing landscape is crucial. (even if the understanding is just basic enough to glean that you could use a better understanding ;).)
after all, as any event producer knows, it doesn’t matter if you’ve booked the best music and curated the most amazing art, if no one comes to your party…it doesn’t matter.
my panel is at 3:35 on friday, october 26. for more info on the whole event visit: startuplaevent.com
while the rest of the do lab spent the last week preparing to syndicate our show for japan, i spent it putting together a powerpoint presentation. slide number 17, the one titled:
i figure, depending on how well the presentation has been going in the preceding 16 slides, i might point out that this particular moment was going on in a confession booth:
“expanding brands into experience platforms”…. you know?
the church obviously got the memo about that one. they’ve been using that tactic in their “engagement strategy” and it seems to be working out pretty well for them. (ok, well, maybe not that EXACT tactic–kissing in the confessional at st. vibiana’s cathedral was only made possible by the pope first signing a note establishing that “God has left this building.”–not kidding–but you get what i’m sayin.)
anyway, 2000 years of catholic church case study aside, modern day ad agencies want to know how to measure the success of such a strategy. which got me thinking, well, how does scion measure the success of throwing a party at alcatraz? or how does red bull measure the success of their underground ascension extravaganzas? and furthermore, how do we? at the do lab, how do we evaluate the success of an event?
well….
did you have fun?
did you meet new friends?
did you hook up with someone?
did you get your mind blown away?
…experience itself has the capacity to be a broadcast channel. a much more powerful, much more visceral, much more immersive channel than any without the prospect of making out–or, i mean, just connecting to other human beings (and sometimes god) in exciting ways in general, really. if you had the time of your life with us (tho we have yet to implement any real exit polls….if you were there, you did. believe me) then this experience is now part of who you are. and since people buy the brands that represent their identity, this whole brand-experience approach is like getting a brand in on the consumer psyche VIP-list, while all the other brands are standing in line waiting to get in the club.
oh my god, all my analogies are even party related.
when i was originally editing my presentation on the branding of authenticity i tried out an online audio mixing program called jamglue. it worked great up until the time came to export my file, where for whatever reason jamglue simply refused to cooperate. i ended up having to redo it through an offline program, and had it hosted elsewhere, but i left the presentation up on jamglue and totally forgot about it until just now. i returned to jamglue to discover that even in the exciting world of music production, apparently someone thought a girl yapping for 25 minutes merited remixing just the same.
the new iteration is called “the branding of disingenuity,” so as you might imagine it pretty much destroys the meaning of what the presentation is about. it’s a bit freaky, at first, to have your itention misinterpreted, but it’s also a pretty good opportunity to practice what i’m preaching anyway, what with saying fuck “managing the story” and all….
