COMRADITY

The Creative Business can be Uncomfortable

It has always been hard to sell ideas.  As the saying goes "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". 

And it has always been hard to tie a dollar value to ideas.  As the saying goes "twenty year overnight success".

It isn't getting any easier.

When there were three networks, a few popular, magazines, local radio morning drive time (referring to when everyone was driving to or from work at the same time), and local newspapers, it was easier to imagine how an idea could be capitalized on to grow a client's sales. After twenty years of "disruption", new media's most significant transformation is to splinter the audience for almost all media into microscopic chards, with no visible patterns. Visualizing how an idea might reach critical mass and how to leverage it to grow sales is virtually impossible to plan. Today more hope than strategy goes into creating an idea that will capture the hearts and minds of enough influential folks to reach critical mass by the viral effect. And the client's internal stakeholders can't anticipate opportunities.

Breaking through is made even more difficult by new technology. "Amateur" technology makes it easier for everyone to increase the "noise", but professional technology requires more skill and practice to master than ever before.  No single creative professional can produce multimedia.  So you have to "sell" your idea to partners, too. And hope you find a team with a comparable vision, commitment and professionalism.

Look the creative business is inherently uncomfortable.  Because comfortable is expected and the most effective creative idea is not.  But there's a lot of unnecessary uncomfortable stuff in the Creative Business to eliminate by revisiting lost lessons learned.

Selling isn't as hard when you know what all decision makers' interests are. When agencies and clients approached the planning process collaboratively, choices were more thoughtful because all stakeholder interests were considered by everyone, especially the end users'.

Experiencing which peers you jam with well and knowing whose work you respect improves the odds of productive collaboration. When creative professionals with diverse expertise enjoy the camaraderie of working side by side and chose whom they work with, the knee jerk reaction of second guessing and defensiveness doesn't dominate teamwork.

Finally, the odds of the "20 year overnight success" are remarkably low because the veterans and younger more technologically proficient are isolated from each other.  Back in the day, agencies invested in both formal training for the veterans and keeping them around to share knowledge with the younger generation.

Today, independent creative professionals spend their spare time doing paperwork and collecting payables from clients. When agencies took care of the financial accounting, creative professionals had more time to learn and share.

Most co-working spaces focus on startups and consider it "a favor" to invite veteran creative professionals to contribute time to help young people develop overnight success stories, oblivious to the value of the wisdom from years of life and work experience. At COMRADITY, startups are the result of people with day to day experience discovering better solutions that happen when creative professionals and existing businesses change the game in the creative business for mutual benefit.

INTEGRATING Communication in a DISINTEGRATED Media Landscape

Digital media has succeeded in making communication more and more disintegrated.  Whether on a personal level - as an independent marketing professional - or their clients - there are more essential media to communicate on, more often, and now in real time.

Conversations are awkward if not impossible in disintegrated media.  So the perceived value of integrated communications in marketing is more precious than every before.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the advertising agencies and media companies haven't figured out how to integrate traditional and new media and social media.  They couldn't figure out how to integrate Network TV, Radio, Newspaper, and local retail Promotion, then Direct Marketing, then Cable TV. 

There's one basic hurdle. How do all those stakeholders make money?

As they have struggled, performance and profits are eroding. Many experienced professionals have left and are operating as sole proprietors. They get the problem. That's why COMRADITY Creative Professional Community makes a lot of sense to so many.

These independent professionals have valuable assets - knowledge and experience that are isolated from each other and from perspective clients. As the media continue to disintegrate, each silo requires more expertise. And no one individual can provide an end to end solution. True professionals - with a passion for creative communication that works - want to invest in continually improving and finding peers to collaborate with.

COMRADITY is an opportunity for them to disrupt DISINTEGRATION.  We provide a space and resources for independent diverse experts, with individually valuable assets to collaborate and realize more value than the sum of the parts, for the mutual benefit of themselves and their clients. 

No one individual has that answer.  That is the number one criteria for resident studio membership at COMRADITY.  The answer is by building a community with the camaraderie to collaborate. 

The Trouble with Experienced Creative Pros

If the future of the economy is knowledge based, why aren't experienced professionals flourishing?  Any marketplace operates on "buyer beware", but in this "knowledge based economy" anyone can sound professional, even when they have no experience.

The Internet has flooded the market with instant access to abundant, free information. We always had access to free information in the library. Technology has saved us the steps of going there to get it and search engines have relieved us from learning the Dewey Decimal System. Technology has not, however, relieved us from the process of researching, analyzing, hypothesizing, validating to create new, valid insight. The professionals who have learned to do it efficiently and effectively are being laid off by newspapers, marketing departments, ad agencies, consumer research companies.

Digital Media companies take the money of bloggers who think the only difference between them and their favorite author is a willing publisher. But the stories told by charcoal on cave walls are more resonant. Because they are inspired by living an awe-filled experience and the visualizer of the tale has talent. Technology doesn't increase the chance that we will live an awe-filled experience - in fact we spend more and more time alone in our homes in front of a screen, experiencing life vicariously. And if you can't draw a story on a piece of paper with a pencil, technology will not compensate. 

Experienced talent deserves an advocate in today's marketplace.  Experience acclerates the process of creating something new and resonant in today's abundant marketplace.

The Price of Social Media

Today the Pope stepped down and tweeted "@Pontifex: If only everyone could experience the joy of being Christian, being loved by God who gave his Son for us!"

Who believes the Pope actually tweeted this himself? No one.  #1 loss of authenticity = Priceless.

It is understood that someone else - a paid person - tweets on behalf of the Pope.  Does the Pope direct the tweeter is there yet another person in the office of the Pope?  Surely at least one other person is authorized to write the Pope's tweets.  #2 $$ paid to hire people who tweet on behalf of a person without the time to tweet.

Social Media is about conversations. About an hour after the tweet, the most favorited response to the Pope's tweet:

@timcore: .@Pontifex If only you could clunge off, you twatting mingehead. 26 Favorites.

#3 fanning the flame of a controversy & proving a leader of a global enterprise is incapable of being sensitive to individual customer needs  = priceless

The message to any leader is crystal clear.  The price of social media is extraordinary.

 

 

 

Expecations of the "Next Era"

December 22, 2012 - Happy "Next Era"!

The debate about the meaning of the end of the Mayan civilization calendar is over.  The world didn't end - the "Next Era" is beginning.  

What a relief.  Because we need a new beginning.

The economy sucks.  No one has a compelling solution.  Because anyone with a microphone has an agenda to protect.  

For example, I recently heard a government policy maker, whose job depends on moving the needle, declare that employment is improving because (the good news for moving the needle) people are starting to take lower paying jobs. In other words from her perspective, the reason the economy is in trouble is because unemployed people aren't willing to lower their expectations. Let's hope lower expectations is economic recovery theory of the last days of the "Old Era".

It certainly wasn't the economic theory of the last century. Henry Ford started the Virtuous Circle by paying employees enough to buy what they make. He hoped they'd make a product they wanted to buy. He probably imagined that they'd be so proud of what they made that they'd tell their friends and family about it and that word of mouth would give Ford's advertising credibility. Even though he may have expected these consequences intuitively, he curbed his enthusiasm and didn't promise that the Virtuous Circle would start a Cycle that did, in fact, propel the US economy while Europe declined after World War II.  

Nor did he anticipate what would happen when labor costs would grow faster than demand. That companies would cut costs to maintain profits: reduce their workforce, lower product costs, reward efficiency improvements and slow investing in product improvement. Employees would no longer be motivated to make products they want to buy. They would do (or not do) whatever it took to not lose their job. He didn't expect that the Virtuous Cycle could reverse, becoming a Vicious Cycle, accelerating economic declines.

Even the 5th estate - the news media - has become biased by the fact that it is in survival mode, competing for eyeballs in a marketplace of exponentially growing choices. Publishers who prided themselves on getting to the truth by verifying sources and had the integrity to not publish stories with potentially worse consequences than the benefit of revealing the truth, have been replaced by the reverse motivation - the more controversy they can create the better, because all that matters is attracting eyeballs and ad dollars.

Adding to the downward slippery slope, those ad dollars are exponentially less effective for many reasons. The more spent, the more is wasted on duplicated audience. And no one believes what ads say. There are many measurable contributors. For example, PEW has documented the decline in media credibility. When the medium isn't believed, the advertising loses credibility too. The effect Ford imagined on advertising credibility by employee pride in what they make has probably evaporated, multiplying the Vicious Cycle effect by some unmeasurable factor.  

We believe there is a lot of room for improvement in the marketing and creative services business. And we believe the experienced, professionals, who would rather work on their own if they have to lower their salary expectations, are the ones to do it.

COMRADITY is a member only community for independent marketing and creative professionals and clients who believe in raising their expectations.

We are raising expectations of independent Marketing and Creative professional members by helping them to capitalize on what they have to contribute. Membership initiation fees include professional strategic coaching to help each member clarify their unique resources and a video professionally produced to merchandise them in the COMRADITY online community network.

We are raising expectations of clients with professional strategic services to design a plan uniquely designed to grow their business and execute it cost effectively.  

Our mission is to stop the vicious cycle in our industry started in the late 1980's.  That's when reduced ROI from marketing and creative services led most clients to look to their agencies to lower costs. Most agencies did it by laying off the most experienced to lower labor costs. The result has been dumbing down marketing with so called "formulas for success" taught in business schools.  Formulas like the creativity- blocking formulas in the music industry that Don McLean sang about - "the day the music died".

Our philosophy is to exceed expectations of both clients and professionals by sourcing strategically - independent professionals with the specific expertise - and improve collaboration productivity by optimizing compatibility of the team and client's culture to set a client a part.  

We believe raising expectations of independent professionals and clients will bring a renaissance of the "Virtuous Cycle" in the "Next Era".

Smart Marketing is a Bigger Idea than Big Data

The Big Data industry is on a PR blitz, ranging from claiming responsibility for Obama's victory to announcing that people want to be tracked to get more relevant ads.

Smart marketers know that the industry is very loose with data. 

Over the decades, zillions of television dollars have been invested based on ratings projected off of a sample base of thousands of people and their recollection of behavior in diaries, despite the availability of more accurate raw data. Cable companies are sitting on data that would more accurately reflect viewership, but no one has made it worth it to the cable companies and their box manufacturers to agree to a universal data collection and reporting system. But there would be real benefit to marketers - worth paying for. For example, instead of using blunt numbers to value programming, better data would accurately reflect the nuances of the audience. For example, audience duplication. A media buyer would know if a spot adds more frequency against the same audience or reaches more people, which is much more valuable.  Smart marketers would pay more for reach than they pay for frequency, rewarding better programming that draws the 80% of the population that has something better to do than watch the crap that dominates programming.

One wonders who benefits so much from the existing system to keep an innovation from getting off the ground that would benefit marketer, audience, and the creative industry.

Instead of innovating to benefit everyone, the Big Data industry is monetizing the data it has access to: tracking Internet users and claiming to make sense of this data.  Since a large proportion of the results of clicking I do are unsatisfying and Big Data has no way of distinguishing between my clicks, how do they know what is relevant to individuals?  Oh but they tell advertisers they do, insisting that there is a return on spending a premium to personalize ads. Can they automate writing personalized, relevant messages too? Of course not.  But they are trying to monetize that data somehow.

Smart marketing is three things.  One is being realistic about the limitations of marketing and media tools.  Second, is figuring out how to leverage the strengths of the many alternatives to optimize the value of resources to deliver the best results.  And third, is crafting a message about a brand that smart people will believe and compel their curiosity.

 

 

 

 

 

Marketing Math

Marketing balances science (the numbers) with art (inspiring action). When the math is bad so is the art.  And the art can not make up for bad math.  

The Value of Understanding the Numbers

In today's business news, the metric of business growth is percentage increase. The problem is that percentage increases are only as good as the size of the base of the business.   

When a $10 Million brand doubles (+100%), it doesn't add as much incremental revenue as a $150 Million Brand growing at a 10% rate ($15 Million). But on Wall Street, companies with the highest short term percentage gain get a lot more press than larger businesses which grow at much lower percentage but grow more in absolute dollars. 

The consequence is that managers are not motivated to understand and respect the factors which built the past business and build on it. The only thing that matters is making the numbers, especially when the revenues begin to decline.  Instead of understanding why demand is eroding, managers pull a card from the playbook that worked while the business was growing and throw it down:

• Elevate profits by improving operational efficiencies even if it means diluting one or more product features that make the brand unique.  An example that actually killed a brand is the Schlitz Beer.

• Spending to business even if it means investing all the marketing dollars in keeping loyal customers who are dieing off instead of understanding how they and what matters to them could help marketing efforts replace thems with new customers. This is how P&G got into trouble in the 1990's .

Time is more valuable than Space.  

When considering how to predict value, this rule is powerful. When I started in Media, Television spots were much more expensive than print. On television I was buying "time" a limited commodity.  In print, I was buying "space".  They could add as many pages as I was willing to buy.  Consider the internet.  Talk about infinite space.

Consider a live event. People still pay and pay an increasingly high premium to attend a live event. Even when they have access to an infinite amount of Archived recordings. Even if Google makes it possible to search and discover the archives, we still perceive more value in the discoveries that may happen at a live event. We even pay upfront.  

Secrets of Success.

Numbers are not enough to understand the secret of success or failure.  Understanding what they mean is important. Very few chronicle the facts behind mistakes or successes and lessons learned. In fact, the numbers are used to perpetrate myths that live infamy. Those myths have led many to the kind of mistakes I mentioned above. When I worked at Burnett as an Assistant Account Executive, my job was to write up the case studies that were shared with Harvard. It was a good strategic exercise during my training. These case studies were the basis of the Business School Curriculum. I had never been to business school or lived the stories behind these case studies. The numbers told a story that was reviewed by more experienced folks than I, but not by the people who lived them and new what they meant.

If the numbers say everyone is doing it, that's a reason not to.

This is the most prevalent use of numbers - justifying an action because everyone is doing it. It is routine that a marketing decision maker or agency tells me that they have to be on Facebook because everyone else is doing it. Many of these folks have kids at home who are saying the same thing to them. I can only imagine what they say to their children. Why don't they heed their own good advice?

The Communication Challenge

Delivering a message in real time is easy. Predicting if anyone will read it . . . not so much.

Technology makes communication more complicated. Crafting the message for the audience, timing the delivery, being prepared for the response are just a few of the decisions to make.

Should it be multi-media or text? With every aspect added - images, video, sound - the potential to miss the mark goes up.

Mobile is the newest communication channel, introducing the challenge of not only knowing what matters to your audience but knowing how that changes in context - the time of the day and where they are when they receive it.

The population has never been larger, the internet offers access to a global market.  These are opportunities for businesses to grow exponentially. But they aren't. 

Communication choices are abundant and the number of decisions are overwhelming to the best managers. At each point in the "go to market" process - from internal to external communications - a choice is made that affects the odds of success. A great choice at one point could be foiled entirely by a failure later on. Each of those choices could be influenced by better communications.

For the past twenty years, the digital media technology industry has promised to make communications more customized to an individual, and measure performance.  All automatically. In the commercial media market, the messages miss the mark more than 99 times out of 100. Laughingly, competitors proudly announce when they double another's response rate.  And that is still below 1%.

A Super Bowl commercial still has more impact even if we aren't really certain exactly what it is. When only a tenth of the audience finds a message relevant, the impact is more significant than almost any alternative. Since it is an event, it has the news value to start conversations.  So people talk about what they remember. When a commercial message is relevant and well executed the watercooler effect multiplies the impact exponentially - always has even before Social Media.  Now Social Media makes it possible to measure. And the one who gets rewarded is not the creator of the powerful message that gives people a reason to use social media. There is something wrong with that picture. 

So here's what I wonder.  Why are so many investing more money trying to figure out how to improve a less than 1% response rate? What if surreptitiously collecting data from the past to automate customizing a message for the future isn't effective or efficient?

How about figuring out how to replicate the power of communicating in the context of an event more frequently, on a smaller, more affordable scale?  How about measuring the watercooler effect of professionally executed communications so the creators are rewarded for their skill and have more time to mentor and teach others to do as well? 

There's a challenge I'd like to build a team to tackle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Better Creative Services Business Relationships

We started COMRADITY Creative Professional Alliance & Studio because we understand the risks of the creative services marketplace.

This is a hidden economy and professionals are anonymous. It is easy to be burned in that environment. It is easy for someone with no experience to claim they have it.

Neither the professionals nor businesses benefit. 

A true creative professional can grow the business, profitably, under certain conditions:

1. The client puts their paying customers first.  When the communication objective is to serve any other purpose, you will not get a creative professional’s best work.  Read an annual report which communicates why the company has improved shareholder value.  Then read one which credits the customers who have improved share holder value. You can guess which one is a story about a growing company and is the most compelling to investors.
2. The creative professional has the freedom to put the client’s business first. When the creative professional charges too little for their work, they are spending more time on the phone with their accountant, landlord, and partners than they are spending thinking about their clients’ business. 
3. The creative professional knows what they can’t do.  When the creative professional collaborates with others who complement their expertise, you know you are working with a professional. A detail such as using a proofreader may seem frivolous.  But no one can proof their own work. Anyone who leaves this off of an estimate on a project is an amateur or hasn’t been in business for themselves very long.

The COMRADITY conditions for membership improve relationships between creative professionals and their clients in three ways:

1. VISIBILITY by only accepting qualified professionals for membership. There is no credentialling system in this business, especially across diverse expertise.  So everyone benefits from professional distinction. 
2. TRUST by requiring members who buy creative services (both creative to creative and creative to clients) to accept conditions related to clear financial terms and ownership of intellectual property.
3. TRANSPARENCY by doing what we say professionals and their clients should do – variable pricing or pay for what you use.

We applaud the many platforms making it easier for creative professionals and aspiring creative professionals to publish their work.  Our intent is to be the place that makes a distinction based on membership conditions.  We believe this community will contribute to a better marketplace, raise the bar, and help those who aspire to be creative professionals to know what that looks like. 

W.T.F.

Why They Fail.

Our leadership, Politicians, and Media are failing because they are choosing sides instead of solving problems. 

Today's issues are nuanced, ambiguous and require compromise to solve.  Choosing sides won't do anything but perpetuate the problems, and make them worse.  Instead of two sides finding common interests, they are even more polarized, unwilling to trust the other side because of what the Media and Politicians say.

Fully expecting to be told fracking is a bad thing, I asked a friend at the EPA what their policy is. She tells me that the EPA does consider the nuances. Recognizing that energy independence is critical to turning around the economy and world peace, the EPA considers fracking to be the best energy alternative. Specifically, she said, every possible downside can be fixed.  In contrast, nuclear energy still hasn't figured out what to do with nuclear waste disposal.

I was amazed because that is not what you'd expect given what you hear in the media, would you?

But low and behold, when searching EPA Fracking Policy on Google, I find this headline for a review of an EPA decision on April 2012 in the Wall Street Journal: "The EPA's Fracking Miracle. Behold, the agency shows restraint on shale gas regulation"

Did anyone else pick up on that in the mainstream media? The point is that a leader in our government (not a politician by the way) has acknowledged the complexity of the situation and come up with a compromise.  And a business media outlet noticed. Who knew?

Until we embrace the complexities of an issue, everyone is in the NO mode.  And when they are in the NO mode, no one is imagining anything better.  Period. 

As long as everyone is shut in their own homes, communicating without eye contact through emails, texts, tweets, etc., isolated from everyone else, listening to Media and Politicians who choose to support either one side or the other, no one is inspired to imagine solutions to problems.

Creative Professionals Unite at www.comradity.net

It is time to do more than talk.

Creative professionals are united by each specialty's association. The musicians, writers, designers, film editors, game designers, advertising, etc.  - each has their own. 

Each association advocates for the value of their constituency's contribution.  But while each is defending its share, the pie is shrinking.

No one is advocating for the value of creativity. We try from this blog. It is time to walk the talk.

We aren't asking for "everybody" to join us. When "everybody" is talking, no one is listening. 

We invite "A level" creative professionals from every specialty to unite.

We don't intend to replace associations.  We aren't another non-profit.  We are a new, hybrid model: real estate + services, that we've named COMRADITY Creative Professional Alliance and Studio.  This is not a "virtual agency" although we are making it easier for members to form their own alliances and be a temporary "virtual agency" themselves. 

The Comradity name is a combination of community and camaraderie to define our mission and value. All this sounds very serious I know, but the founders and the people we hire to serve you are like us - they are trusted and they are fun.

It will be a creative to creative marketplace for the best to find each other, serve each other, collaborate, and even work side-by-side in the studio to raise the visibility and perceived value of creative professionals and their profitability. In other words, growing the market with us will be a lot faster than doing it alone.

When the market is growing, creative professionals have the freedom to create.

Learn more and apply to be a member of the Comradity Alliance and Studio

Here's a very short story by one of the founders about why we are investing our resources to unite the best creative professionals and to give them the freedom to create: