very brief tonight:
our music contest page is FINALLY live!
http://lightninginabottle.org/contest
thank you to the undaunted mr. shaw for getting it to work.
LIB07
[LIB07] what the hell is a strategy, anyway? #2
i’d like to say a few words about how horrifyingly, dismayingly, pitifully, AWFUL our purchase page is. we didn’t design it. it’s what our ticketing company is making us use, and we can’t change it and it’s totally driving me crazy!
yeah, THANKS, inticketing!
yeah, i know you’re green, and use soy-based ink, and recycled materials, and that’s all great, but…what are you thinking with your web services?
check it out:
THIS is our website that the Do LaB designed:
THIS is our purchase page from inticketing:
…..i think i might cry.
like are you kidding me? who okayed THAT from an experience design standpoint, huh?
yes, dear, customer, you’ve come this far with us. we have reminded you of how awesome LIB was last year, we have managed to convey some hint of the kind of crazymagic experience that awaits you this year, and just at the point where you are really ready to make the commitment to join us on the LIB adventure, the point at which, you are essentially trying the ticket on in the dressing room, asking us, “what do you think? does this look good on me?” what does inticketing do?
oh, it throws the lamest looking webpage with a whole lot of T+C bullshit at you.
well, you know….. those tickets do kind of make your butt look sort of big.
oh… this is making me so frustrated, i’m considering just getting our programmer to hack the freakin‘ thing. at least put some pictures on it, for god’s sake! move the T+C crap BELOW the credit card info part. or, better yet, just keep the “i agree” checkbox, and say “click here for terms and conditions.”
bad experience design is bad customer service, inticketing!
from the standpoint of an experience creation company, this makes me feel like we’re actually MISTREATING our potential attendees.
like, no, really, our event is WAY better than this lame purchasing experience.
we promise!
sigh… anyway…
miraculously, even in spite of all of that, tickets are starting to pick up this week. in the past three days alone we’ve acquired guests from utah, ohio, and texas! we probably have about 15 states represented at this point. including hawaii, oregon, colorado, new york, and my home state, massachusettss—woot!
the word is definitely getting out there.
[LIB07] what the hell is a strategy, anyway? #1
people keep asking me what i’m up to these days. people that don’t know that my life has been completely taken over by Lightning in a Bottle. and i try to explain something about how there’s this 3-day greeen music festival, and how i’m directing the whole marketing strategy for it, and how that involves managing everything from our email communications, website updates, street promotions, pr efforts, and to all kinds of other initiatives… but the truth is that when you’re so in the thick of it, it’s really hard to step back and gain enough perspective to really be able to articualte ANYTHING that you’re doing. it’s hard to comment on the state of the battle from the trenches.
so it’s dawned on me that i should have started this months ago. but what the hell, 4.5 weeks out is better than not at all, right?
at this point there’s new moves happening fast and furious, and i figured this could be a good place to document the LIB07 marketing & communications strategy process. it’s also the process through which a grassroots organization is transitioning from the underground to the spotlight, elevating both its community of fans and network of creators with it.
here’s what’s happened within the past few days in the land of LIB promotions:
– LIB + worldchanging = : worldchanging is an online hub that aims to connect innovative, forward-thinking people who are doing things now to create profound, positive change for a better future. i thought they were great even before that fortuitous introduction to alex steffen at sxsw that resulted in this great little piece. turns out worldchanging digs us too: we’re now officially the “coachella for environmentalists”! awesome!
– what lucent dossier really wants to know is… : met with dream this weekend about really kick-starting community interaction among lucent’s 16,000+ myspace friends. we’re so excited by all the great response we’ve gotten already that we’re planning to continue stirring up conversation among that community on a very regular basis leading up to LIB. (taking cues from gnarls barkley on this one, for sure. 😉 )
– the santa barbara news press, which did an article on LIB last year wants to know what’s new about LIB this year. they’re saying that unless there’s something drastically new it probably won’t warrant extensive coverage. so what do you say to that when you know that the santa barbara community digs us hardcore for what we are, not for any gimmick we might be doing differently?
i say:
“last year it was the first time we’d ever done an event in s.b. we have a devoted following in l.a. but we had no idea how people there would react to it. whether they’d even care. the response we got from the people there was really overwhelming. we kept hearing over and over how excited they were that we had brought an event like this to santa barbara. people really loved this festival.
so the big difference is that while last year our venture into s.b. was somewhat of an experiment, the genuine enthusiasm for LIB within the santa barbara community (the same community where “earth day” originated) is what’s giving us the support to bring LIB back on a larger scale in all areas in 07.”
– “hi, i’m an awesome video of Lucent L’amour that no one’s seen before”:
david starfire, one our mainstay event djs, and on the lineup for LIB, turned us on to this really great video of an event we did in february 2006 (yeah, that’s how long it takes us to catch up here, at the Do!) anyway, we contacted the creator, and are considering using this video in the Spring issue of the Do LaB Artist Network email blast, which is going to be all about videos, especially music videos. he says he’s got footage from LIB06 as well, maybe we can find some way of convincing him to edit that too…- lots of other bits and ends going on, and in the works, including that ad in Plenty Magazine, now on newsstands, gonna be getting some coverage from bijoubreaks.com, the San Luis Obispo New Times is gonna be doing an interview with some our crew–jesse, dream, and shena, i think. brian shaw is hopefully programming our music contest as i type, i think…brian? are you? will we be able to announce it to the bands that sent in submissions soon? ….
and then there is, of course the constant construction and preparations going on for another little festival called Coachella where the Do will be producing an acre-big installation with full performance stage and sound-system just two weeks before LIB…. so that’s going to be madness….
i think this is all i can think of for right now…. not sure how often i’ll be making these “what the hell is a strategy?” posts, but i’m positive it’s a good idea that i started.
Lightning in a Bottle 2007
It’s the beginning of April, and The Do LaB has been in production on our Spring festival, Lighting in a Bottle for over two months now. I realized about a month ago how huge an oversight it was that I hadn’t written a single word about LIB here, and this is the first moment that I’ve been able to steal 15 minutes away to give this amazing, overwhelming, inspiring project a little mention.
So what’s the big deal about Lightning in a Bottle? Well, in addition to the 40+ musical acts on 3 stages spanning 40 acres of Santa Barbara forest ground, the whole to do is being powered almost entirely by solar, or otherwise renewable energy, and incorporating green production practices from top to bottom.
Having worked with major music festivals like Coachella and Vegoose through the Do LaB for years, we witnessed the massive amounts of waste these events generate. There’s something about crunching over an entire polo field of plastic water bottles at 12:30 am on Coachella Saturday and realizing that after the bulldozers come in to shove it all off to a landfill, the whole thing would repeat the next night, that really fills you with a bottomless dread for the future of the world.
So when it came time for the Do LaB to create our own festival, we knew we had to do it differently. With LIB we are setting out to not only produce an unforgettable experience, but to create a model for sustainable large-scale live entertainment.
My role on this team is directing the full LIB marketing campaign, which incorporates everything from structuring the communications strategy with our community, to sponsorship and press, and back to all manner of word-of-mouth building initiatives–for an organization that built its reputation in the underground, word of mouth is still what drives our events–and stirring all the ingredients together in the magic marketing cauldron to produce a strategy that optimizes each of its various components.
That’s where my head is at these days in an all-consuming kind of way. I am loving the team we’ve got at the Do LaB, I am loving the process and our creation. And I’m loving the work. Which is a very good thing, since there is a ton of it!
OK. Time’s up…. Back to work.
DO’in it
based in downtown l.a., The Do LaB is an “open source” artists collective of event producers, lighting designers, choreographers, performers, djs, constructors, welders, costumers, jewelry makers, dancers, airbrush artists, musicians, installation artists, glassblowers, photographers, and anything else you can imagine, all dedicated to creating interactive environments where experience itself is the artform.
in addition to producing our own events and creations, we also work on events for traditional clients such as lexus, scion, redbull, the coachella music festival, e! entertainment, aids project los angeles, and many others.
after almost two years of involement with the do lab–first as the production manager for the collective’s performance troupe, Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, and later as the sponsorship coordinator for our 3-day, green energy-powered, summer music festival, Lightning in a Bottle–i became the do lab’s director of marketing and communications this past october.
this responsibility is not only a huge committment in my life right now, but is also one from which i draw incredible personal satisfaction and pride. it is an honor to get to create and collaborate with this incredible bunch of folks in such a dynamic, innovative atmosphere. it is also extremely exciting to be a part of a company so prescient both in the experiential nature of its “product,” and in the democratic structure of its organization.
the do lab is a fascinating example of future trends in marketing and business, in action now.
there will absolutely be a lot more to say on these and other subjects involving our circus of a startup company in the future, but for now i’ll just offer a few highlights from our portfolio….
(click the links of the creation headings to find out more about the events).
