Hugh MacLeod Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
Hugh MacLeod
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books. gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
In the old, pre-internet days, if you were a cartoonist like me and wanted to be successful, you pretty much had to be famous.
Not hugely famous necessarily, but somebody with a pretty major publishing gig. Like Peanuts, Doonesbury, Dilbert, Garfield or Bloom County, or some of The New Yorker heavyweights like Steinberg or Ronald Searle.
And those gigs were hard to come by. You needed a big time publication syndicate or media company to back you. And then the newspapers, the advertisers and the media landscape in general had to be on board as well.
And of course, all this required a VERY large audience. Millions of people, literally. Just so you could make an OK living.
As we all know, the more people you need to keep happy, the less likely that’s going to happen, or at least, the less you can control. Mass audiences are a fickle, unpredictable bunch. And they have a nasty habit of ignoring people like you completely, and going for people like Justin Bieber or Paris Hilton instead.
Which is why I never took this route. Too many variables I couldn’t control. And my work was never mainstream enough, anyway.
Thank God the internet came along and changed everything. Suddenly I found myself making a damn good living, without having all those mainstream hoops to jump through first. Just by doodling wee, non-mainstream cartoons all day, to what by old mainstream standards would be a TINY audience that I reach via this blog, Twitter and my newsletter.
This is made possible because the web, as we all know, is a SUPERB way to sell relatively high-end products. In my case, private, client-based commissions are worth THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of times more than the advertising eyeballs that ultimately pay for the newspaper cartoonist’s mortgage. Of course they are. Not to mention, the commissions are fun and intellectually interesting to work on.
Which is why my advice for anyone trying to succeed on the web is, make the highest-end product you can, and then target the tiny handful of people– the microaudience- who are likely to buy it. Forget the masses. Targeting the latter is too much like trying to win the lottery– though great when it happens (however unlikely), there are just too many damn variables outside your control.
So somehow or other you found yourself online in a big way.
Somehow or other you decided, like millions of other people, that if the future is online, it would be silly not to join in. So you decide to get with the program.
And so you get yourself hooked up with the usual stuff… a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and whatever Robert Scoble is using that week. And then wait for that aforementioned future thing to start happening.
While you’re waiting for that future thing to begin, you can’t help noticing that certain people in the same field as you– people far more successful and well-known than you, people who you aspire to be like one day– have fifty times the amount of Twitter followers as you do. Or whatever.
So you spend the next two years of your life trying to get as many Twitter followers as those people. Not only do you fail, meanwhile, your wife leaves you, your car is repossessed, and you have to move back in with your parents.
The futility of “Keeping up with the e-Joneses”. You’re better off spending that time and energy trying to have a “smarter conversation”. Of course you are.
[Bonus link:] Seth has a few thoughts on the subject, as well. Well worth a look.
Art that you hang in your cubicle, in order to affect change, in order to start a conversation. Art that you “toss” into the work/corporate environment, that hopefully causes a small “explosion”. Hence the term, Cube Grenade.
“Art with purpose. Work with purpose”.
Exactly.
Thanks to the Internet, the nature of work is changing in so many amazing ways, and we’re all so damn lucky to be caught right in the middle of it.
As a cartoonist, my work is totally inspired and informed by this– this is exactly why the work took the direction it did.
And your work, whatever it may be, should also be affected in the same way. I can’t think of a better time to be alive; I really can’t.
So besides friends and family, what better reason is there to celebrate Thanksgiving? Seriously…
It’s one of my favorites I’ve done so far. [More Rackspace work is here.]
I hope you like it, but it’s OK if you don’t. Here’s why I’m partial:
I like the elegance of the drawing.
I like the way it’s talking about something specific to the business (i.e. the cloud), not just some vague, “Go Team!” cultural platitude.
I like the direct honesty of it. “We live or die by the cloud” etc. is basically the God’s honest truth; it doesn’t matter if one agrees with it or not. That IS Rackspace’s business strategy, in black and white.
It just works. Straight and to the point. It does everything a good cartoon ought to do.
I am enjoying my gig with Rackspace. Even if it’s still early days, they’re letting me play around with a new, HUGE idea. Yes, I am stoked.
What I’m going to do is recommend to the CEO, Mike Natalizio to get it made up into a stack of signed, limited edition prints. Say, 30 or 50 of them.
Then get them framed.
Then send them off as gifts to the the 30 or 50 most influential people in the trucking business. As a conversation starter.
“Let’s talk about the issues, People.”
The trucking business is full of messy issues [e.g. people dying in road accidents every day, which HNI is in the front line of], so why not address them more openly, more forthrightly?
But for iPhone users, AT&T is pretty much a monopoly again, with their exclusive deal with Apple.
AT&T, Verizon, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodaphone, it really doesn’t matter. They’re generally expensive, they’re restrictive, often the service sucks, so you’re always trying to bypass what they have on offer– trying to hack your way around it.
Line2 with their VoIP service, is trying to do the same.
We all are.
Click on the link (or click here) and see what we’ve done. There’s just a fun cartoon right now–
It’s a start. We’re hoping to make this the start of something bigger. Much bigger. We want to “hack” the phone company. So do you. So does everybody else.
[PS: Here’s a link to what NYT Tech writer, David Pogue, has to say about Line2.]
[I drew this cartoon back in New York, 1998. Backstory here.]
Mark Earls, one of the greatest marketing minds on the planet, is bored of social media. Or at least, the conversation about social media.
So let’s try to get at least this thing really straight:
Social networks are not channels for advertisers or for the adverts/memes you, your clients or any of your so-called “influentials” create, social networks are for all of the people who participate in the network.
Being a social creature means you spend your life in social networks; being part of a social network gives each individual a number of benefits — shared protection, shared resources and most importantly shared learning. Our ability to learn from each other (the appropriately-named Social Learning) is one of our all-too-mutual species’ most characteristic capabilties and the engine by which stuff gets pulled through populations (from technologies to health habits).
In other words, social media (and the brands that want to be part of it) are at their most powerful when they offer two things:
Shared learning.
Shared teaching.
Great art teaches. Great artists teach. What do you teach? What does your business teach? What is actually learned, imparted? Not just the practical stuff, but the deep, messy stuff about ourselves?
Just thought I’d ask…
[UPDATE] Darren left a great comment:
I frequently talk to people and companies who are looking to take their first stab at social media presence specifically for the purpose of advertising their product or service. No! No! No! Its about engaging your audience in meaningful conversation. Inevitably, they push forward, create a Facebook page and Twitter account, post for a few weeks. They have almost no fans or followers and wonder why their 27 posts with 10% coupon codes brought no increase in revenue!
Because their 27 posts and 10% coupon code played no part in shared learning or shared teaching, that’s why.
Basically, the truckers that are most profitable for any trucking company are generally the most hard to insure. The ones who score highest on safety make less make less money for the company… and then you’ve got these Feds coming in with “CSA 2010″, making it even more complicated. Lucky truckers…
The cartoon by itself, is not that interesting.
The fact that HNI are the only people in the insurance industry willing to talk about it in the open, are willing to have a “Smarter Conversation” about it, is interesting.
Maybe love does have a place in business after all. Maybe more and more of us will start to have the courage to begin to talk about what really matters to us about work and our relationships with each other and to push back the sterile language of business that we have been trained to accept. Maybe we will realise that accepting love into the workplace reminds us of the original purpose of work – not to maximise shareholder value but to come together to do good things, to help each other and hopefully to make the world a better place.
Maybe …. Oh and by the way if the above is too new age and namby pamby for you I reckon social computing is capable of talking 25% out of the running costs of most businesses – so there!
A couple of days ago my buddy, Robert Scoble (himself a Rackspace employee) twittered the question, “How do do you amplify a start-up culture inside a big company?”
A damn good question, Robert. I thought it would make a good piece of art, hence the cartoon above. More specifically, I thought it would make a good image to go on the back of a Rackspace business card.
Rackspace is a big company (3,000 employees), but not big enough where they can no longer remember when they were a small company. So maybe it’s better to start a conversation (which is what handing out a business card does, ideally) with a pertinent question, rather than the usual “Here’s why you should buy our stuff” shpeel…
I find something rather amusing about the idea of people at Rackspace printing out this cube grenade, and hanging it up everywhere in their San Antonio office. It would sure send a message to the newbies…
HR may not be able to say things like this, but hell, I’m a cartoonist…
[Last Friday I was signing prints– 175 of these puppies.SAP, the large, German enterprise tech company put in a very large order, to give out to certain key people within the organization. Trying to have a Smarter Conversation. Exactly.]
“Don’t be the best in the world at what you do; be the only one in the world who does what you do.”
That quote is me paraphrasing Jerry Garcia, lead guitar of The Grateful Dead. The thought always resonated with me.
If people like what you’re doing, and you’re the only one who’s doing it, you win.
Which is why I like doing Cube Grenades. Compared to what most people are selling out there, they’re fairly unique.
It’s also what makes blogs so powerful a marketing device. People can just see your own unique shtick evolving right there on the page, over time. They’ll either get it eventually or they won’t. No sales pitch needed. No need to compare yourself to somebody else. No need to fit into some pre-existing model, if you don’t want to.
It has never been a better time to be unlike anyone else. I hope you’re already taking full advantage…
Disclosure: I’m currently doing a wee bit of consulting work for Rackspace. This cartoon was inspired after talking to La Gesse the other day. He tells me that with all their assets– and with over 3,000 employees, they have many– their culture is the thing that they’re collectively most proud of. Rock on.
I just designed this cube grenade for one of my clients, the insurance broker HNI.
As always, it’s basically something to be downloaded [from here], printed out and hung up round the office. A “conversation starter” etc.
Most insurance companies want to sell you a lot of insurance, the more the merrier. One part of HNI’s shtick is, well, “More” is not always the most helpful thing for the client etc.
The guy in the cartoon looks so unhappy simply because the very thought of actually “Doing” something actually frightens a lot of people. Which is why the world is filled with so many clock-watchers.
Though this was designed for HNI, if the message has any value to your business, feel free to print it out as well, thanks.
[NB: This post was written by my business partner, Jason Korman. Expect to hear more of him round here in future etc. –Hugh]
Back in the Spring, we were approached by Troy Janisch, Digital Marketing Manager at American Family Insurance about creating a Cube Grenade that encouraged their 8,000+ employees to participate in their social media program.
Troy said that they wanted their 3,800+ agents to build stronger ties with their communities and also engage other employees who the company want to have a voice and share in the new vision for the business.
AmFam has a very particular market: Local communities in eighteen states in the West and Midwest, selling home and life policies to middle income families. For their local insurance agents, community is everything and the stronger their ties, the better their business– it’s that simple.
With this in mind, the goal was to have 50% of all agents online, using at least Facebook, but hopefully some other tools by year’s end.
If you think about it, its hard to imagine a more elegant use of tools like Facebook for building business.
On our side, Hugh’s goal was to create a ‘conversation starter’ – something that would, on the face of it, explain to the digitally uninitiated (a) why they should make developing online connections, a top priority, and b) remind the reps what building THEIR business is really all about. The solution ultimately was two drawings: “Business is Connectivity” above, and “We’re not in the insurance business, We’re in the Connection Business”, below.
A few weeks ago, I checked back in with Troy to see how things were going. For Troy, he wanted to nudge along a Smarter Conversation on a number of fronts and had a plan that not only called for the organic spread of the Cube Grenades through the business, but also, one that was an overt, front and center challenge to the culture of the business. As Troy said, his goal was to ‘Nudge the culture Forward’ i.e. “To Change the culture from Sales Orientation to one of Customer Orientation,”
After commissioning the Cube Grenade, AmFam, put up an exhibit of about a dozen of Hugh’s more inspiring works. They included: Intoxicated, X,Y,Z and the clean version of “Quality”. The exhibition was put up in a “bold location” in their headquarters in Madison, where it would be seen by all the employees over the period it was up.
While the spread of the Cube Grenades is happening. People are printing them out, and putting them on their email signatures, the art exhibition really got people’s attention, and not in the way that was originally planned.
A lot of attention was focused on the “Quality” image, one of Hugh’s most popular cartoons, and one that was redrawn in a Safe for Work mode for software giant, SAP, earlier this year. It seems that in Madison, Wisconsin, “Fricking”, is not yet quite Safe for Work, so it provoked a lot of ‘discussion’ about the appropriateness of the piece. However, this was the opening that Troy wanted. He turned the conversation into what the idea of “Frickin’ Amazing” means to a company like American Family, and ultimately, he had is objective in the crosshairs: “Customer Service”.
As Troy says “ Nobody starts the day thinking that they will give bad customer service, but it’s the culture that makes the difference as to whether it gets delivered,” he continued, “Everyone says that they have Customer Service, and many do, but Customer Service is not simply top down, it is how everyone actually acts, as opposed to aspires to act.”
And therein lied the rub, and the notion of having a “Smarter Conversation” internally about Customer Service, what’s wrong with it, and how to make it “Totally Frickin’ Amaxing”, and more importantly, how do you create a culture that supports people taking the risks necessary to deliver ‘Totally Fricking Amazing Service”. Creating that internal dialogue is not something that happens by itself, but if the goal is to nudge along the culture of an 8,000 person business, disruption is the order of the day.
We’ll be checking back in with Troy to see how things are progressing. But as Troy says, “The Connectivity Cube Grenade is about reminding people at HQ that the business is out in small communities, which is the heart of their business’ and whether the folks are on the front line, or in the call center in Madison, every voice is part of the brand, and everyone makes a difference.”
Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that’s a good thing, even when they fail. It’s frustrating for me to hear, “stick to your blogging,” when people criticize a project created by a blogger – because it’s part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what’s unfolding. I’d rather read a book that’s informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I’d rather read a blog that’s based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger.
Which brings us to Hugh MacLeod and his work for Microsoft. Some critics think he’s selling out. I don’t. I think he’s having a huge impact on an organization –from the outside– at the same time that he demonstrates how just about any large organization can rethink its role in the world. And he’s doing it in front of all of us, without a net.
On Friday I was talking to Peter Sisson, gapingvoid’s new client, the guy behind Toktumi and Line2.
We were talking about “The Cocktail Party Rule”- what’s true at cocktail parties is also true in marketing i.e. If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. If you want to be interesting, talk about something else.
Luckily, Peter concurs…
The way I see it, a product is an “Idea Amplifier”. You have an idea about something– phones or whatever– and you build a product as an expression of that idea.
For example, Zappos’ central idea is not really about shoes per se, it’s about company culture and customer service– “Delivering Happiness”, as its CEO, Tony Hsieh calls it.
Similarly, with Line2 the central idea is not about an iPhone app, it’s about, and I’m quoting Peter here, “What phones could be”.
And what can a phone be? I’m curious to find out. I think we all are.
I’m a huge fan of PSFK.com. I’ve been following Piers and his team for years. Recently I’ve even started publishing weekly cartoons on PSFK, for no other reason than I think it’s a very groovy crowd to be part of.
PSFK is a well-known strategy, trends and ideas blog, focusing mostly on advertising and design. In the early days Piers mostly wrote it all himself, but these days he has this vast army of volunteers writing guest posts on PSFK’s behalf.
The point of PSFK is to give its readers a constant stream of inspiration and new ideas, stuff they can use to inform their own work.
And it works. Close to three quarters of a million people read it a month, mostly from the ad and design community. In that space, it’s extremely well known [For an industry niche blog, trust me, three quarters of a million people is A LOT].
So how does PSFK make money? Hint: It’s not by selling advertising, like a lot of the big blogs out there.
The thing is, PSFK’s primary business is not publishing blogs. Its main revenue stream is as consultants in the advertising business. They’ve got a small handful of clients and a small staff of super smart advertising futurists, who get paid top dollar to share their brain power with large, global brands.
The blog is just a way to get the PSFK name out, to get their name on the radar screen of potential clients.
Basically, the PSFK blog is just an advertisement for the PSFK consultancy, even if on the blog there’s hardly any mention of the latter.
A “Smarter Conversation”, a smarter way of talking to potential clients, than say, just buying advertising space in one of the big trade publications.
Would this kind of model work for your business? If not, wouldn’t it be great if it did? Just askin’…
Like I said in my last post (and I am by no means the first person to say this), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet.
To be “incredible beings” in the very early days of this revolution, to not want to do something about it, to not want to go out there and take full advantage of the situation…
I just don’t get why some people would prefer to pass the opportunity up. You?
“The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its application Line2 approved by Apple — nearly three months after it was originally submitted. The powerful service allows business employees to assign two phone numbers to their iPhone: one that they can give to family and friends, and another that can be given to business contacts, with features that allow for call filtering and a professional-grade voicemail system. But it’s also notable for its many similarities to Google Voice, an application that Apple has kept out of the App Store for months now.
“The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban.”
It’s basically a second line for your phone– your iPhone, in particular.
I’ve never been much of a VoIP geek, so why did I get involved?
It was a simple little factoid that got my interest:
The Line2 service costs $14.95 per month. Not a huge amount, but costly enough when you consider that Google Voice is free. Line2 has a first month trial offer, which allows you to try it out for free. After that, they start charging. Fair enough.
So how many people start signing on at $14.95, once their free trial expires? Five percent? Ten percent? That’s what I was guessing…
Nope. Thirty percent.
Thirty percent! I thought that was huge. They must be doing something right etc.
The second reason is purely intellectual. As many bloggers have been spouting on for a while now (including me), we are in the early days of the largest communication revolution in the history of the planet. VOIP is in the forefront of this revolution, so getting involved should give me a front row seat. And we cartoonists need interesting stuff to keep our brains occupied etc.
I have no idea where this is going; I’m just along for the ride. Hopefully a Smarter Conversation will come out of it in the end. Watch this space. Rock on.
Late last year, Mike Natalizio, President & CEO of HNI (a medium sized insurance brokerage out of the Midwest) commissioned me to draw some “Cube Grenade” cartoons for the company.
It was a nice wee cartoon project; it went well.
We kept on talking, after that… we’ve been helping them with what a Smarter Conversation might mean for their business.
HNI’s corporate tagline is “Change The Game”.
The insurance business is generally known as a fairly staid affair– it’s relatively conservative game– no surprises there.
“Change The Game”. I like the premise, it gets me thinking:
I first started playing with the idea of “Smarter-Conversations” way back in 2004, the same year gapingvoid really started getting traction in the blogopsphere.
Though not something I talk about day-in-day-out, it’s always been there somewhere in the background, informing everything I work on. Here are some notes:
1. In the seminal book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, the great Doc Searls famously declared, “Markets are conversations”. If you buy that premise (and I do, wholeheartedly), then quod erat demonstratum, if you want your marketing to be smarter (i.e. more effective), you need to be having a “Smarter Conversation”.
2. “Conversation” is a metaphor. Making your product sleek, elegant and graceful while all your other competitors make their product look cheap, plastic and clunky is a smarter conversation. Not all conversations need words.
3. It’s not just what you say, its how you say it. Calling it the “iPod” is a smarter conversation than say, the “MZT-2300-B Electronic Portable MP3 Digital Hand Device”.
4. Smarter Conversations scale. That’s what I really like about it. Anyone can have a smarter conversation– from a mom n’ pop pizza joint to a Fortune 500 company. It can happen in a Superbowl ad or on printed on the back of a paper napkin. You can start one on a blog today, for free. Or on Twitter or Facebook. The tools don’t necessarily have to change, the way you talk to people has to change.
5. Deciding to have a smarter conversation isn’t a business decision, it’s a moral decision. Like I said in the last point, the barriers to entry are zero. While your competition treats their customers like idiots, you treat your customers like intelligent human beings. You don’t do that because your accountant told you to, you do that because that’s who you are.
6. The Smarter Conversation’s value comes from, I believe, not by yet more increased business efficiencies, but by its humanity. For example, take two well-known airlines. They both perform a useful service. They both deliver value. They both cost about the same to fly to New York or Hong Kong. Both have nice Boeings and Airbuses. Both serve peanuts and drinks. Both serve “airline food”. Both use the same airports. But one airline has friendly people working for them, the other airline has surly people working for them. One airline has a sense of fun and adventure about it, one has a tired, jaded business-commuter vibe about it. Guess which one takes the human dimension of their business more seriously than the other? Guess which one still will be around in twenty years? Guess which one will lose billions of dollars worth of shareholder value over the next twenty years? What parallels do you see in your own industry? In your own company?
7. If Smarter Conversations work, it’s because they help humanize the company. I wrote about this years ago in an article I called “The Porous Membrane”. To paraphrase: Ideally, you want the conversation between customers [the external market] to be as identical as the conversation between yourselves [the internal market]. The things that your customer is passionate about, you should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned. When you are no longer aligned with your customers is when the company starts getting into trouble. When you start saying your gizmo is great and your customers are telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment. So how do you keep misalignment from happening? The answer lies the cultural membrane that separates you from them. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between you and them, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both sides to adjust to the other, to become like the other. And nothing pokes holes in the membrane better than blogging.
8. Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen.That’s all. Why do some companies lose, while other companies win? Because the latter has a smarter “conversation” with its customers. Zappos had a smarter conversation about the power of customer service and the power of company culture. Peet’s Coffee came along 20 years ago and began a smarter conversation about coffee with millions of people within a very short space of time. Target’s recent massive success started from a smarter conversation about good design. Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon came along and, with his blog, had a smarter conversation about $4000 English bespoke suits. Lucky’s Juice Joint had a smarter conversation about fresh-squeezed. Big companies, medium companies and tiny companies, whatever– it was never about size, it was never about the choice of media (social or otherwise), it was all about language.
9. Social Media allows you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business– including advertising, PR and corporate communications.
10. Ask not what tools you want to use, ask how you want to change how you talk to people. All evolutions in marketing are evolutions in language. Those who can raise the level of conversation in any market, win.
11. Start today. It’s never too late to begin a Smarter Conversation. Like I said, money or time is not the issue. Making the decision is the issue, and only you can do that.
Somewhere along the the line I decided that embracing “Smarter Conversations” was preferable to prematurely consigning my career to the dustbin of history. I just wrote down some random thoughts:
1. Understand why what you’re offering to do for other people is interesting, important, meaningful etc then start telling people about it.
Think about this one. Hard. If you don’t know, then how will other people know? Exactly. They won’t.
2. Live like you know the difference between remarkable and unremarkable, like it matters to you.
The more “remarkable” matters to you, the more likely that it will appear in the product you’re selling. The more likely other people will notice it.
3. Seek out the exceptional minds.
This is my basic mantra. It’s a good one to have. Not everybody gets it. Their loss.
4. Start a blog.
Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you’re ignored. We big media folk just can’t seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one’s business.
5. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that “don’t get it”.
Yeah, you may have to turn down a few gigs, and that can really hurt when the rent is due. Still, anything that’s easy to get isn’t worth having.
6. Ruthlessly avoid working for companies that think they know better than you.
Luckily, if you get the whole “smarter conversations” thing, their “Yes, Buts” will just seem rather empty. Making them easier to “toss out like old furniture”.
7. Be nice.
Smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill. Lose it and die.
8. Be honest.
Again, smarter conversations are fuelled by goodwill etc.
9. Karma is key.
But you already know that. Or you’re stupid. No middle ground on this one, sorry.
10. Listen.
Tongues are dumber than brains, brains are dumber than ears etc.
Back in the mid-90s, when the Internet was still the size of a tadpole and TV was still the Big Kahuna, I was working in a large advertising agency that had many big, blue-chip clients.
We were given a brief to work on, a well-known laundry detergent.
All the other teams went away and came back with ideas for big-production TV commercials. Except me.
I had this idea about using GoCards, those free advertising postcards I started seeing around in all the trendy bars at the time.
It wasn’t rocket science. For pennies on the dollar, I reckoned you could try out a lot of different ideas– dozens of them, literally– and from tallying which cards were being picked up by people and which ones weren’t, you could could easily measure which ideas were working or not. Not unlike today’s Internet, the same way you can tell which blog posts of yours are working from the number of retweets they get. Stuff we all take for granted now.
Secondly, because the client was a laundry detergent, you’d really have to push the envelope to get people’s attention inside these trendy bars. It would force you to work your ideas faster, cheaper, better and harder. It would push you, it would push the client and the brand.
If any the ideas took off, I mean, REALLY took off, then you’d have enough info to go on to scale up the campaign into bigger media– TV, large magazines and whatnot.
Unlike most ad campaigns out there at the time, you’d would already have enough information to know that the campaign– the idea– was WAS ALREADY WORKING BEFORE your dear client had spent any real money.
It was cheap, it was disruptive, and… it was accountable.
The suits didn’t like the idea. My boss didn’t like it, either. Even my art director was a bit grumbly and doubtful. The idea never left the building. The client never saw it. The idea was killed in the first round.
The agency’s perspective was, they didn’t earn its money from “little” ideas. The agency earned its money for “BIG” ideas.… ones that cost lots of money and needed “a cast of thousands” etc. Superbowl ads and whatnot.
They had forgotten that all big ideas start life out as small ideas.
We’re incredible beings. And I want to make and sell art that maybe, just maybe, makes people think, even for a short while, that I’m not wrong, either.
[I can think of worse ways to make a living. Lord knows, we’ve all tried a few of those…]
So yeah, we’re incredible beings. But it’s not enough to believe it; you actually have to live it. Even if you’re going to fail. most of the time. That’s where the REAL work lies.
But hey, at least you tried.
Life is short, People. You’re going to be dead soon. So frickin’ go do something about it. Frickin’ go do something that matters. Seriously.
I don’t know if it was Brian Clark over at Copyblogger who first popularized the term, “Content Marketing”, but it’s he I most associate it with.
Content Marketing is exactly what is sounds like– creating content in order to more effectively market whatever it is you’re selling.
Copyblogger itself is a really good example of content marketing. It’s basically a daily advice column for anyone trying to do content marketing professionally. You get to read it for free, but hey, Brian and his team haveotherproducts they sell which are all designed to be interesting, useful and valuable to their core audience.
And Copyblogger rakes it in as a result; it’s now a seven-figure business.
Back in 2003, eons ago in Internet time, I remember talking to Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads.com. This was well before the huge advertising market emerged for large sites like Techcrunch, Gawker, Mashable and BoingBoing, back when even the largest blogs were far smaller and far more personal than they are today.
We were chatting about potential business models for blogs, short and long-term. This was still very early days, remember…
“As far as I can tell,” said Henry, “the most viable business model for blogging these days is for under-employed consultants to show off how smart they are.”
Consultants showing off how smart they are? Under-employed or over-employed, that is content marketing. Exactly.
You write a blog. You build a dedicated following. You leave a discreet, non-pushy trail of breadcrumbs to what your business actually does for money. If X percent of your readers take the bait and become paying customers, hey, you win.
Like the headline of this post says, it’s much easier to get paid work out of people if they’re already your fanboy.
What I like about this model is that it’s simple. It isn’t rocket science. And perhaps more importantly, it’s free from the tyranny of wanting or needing huge traffic.
[Warning– VERY rough math to follow:]English Cut can only make and sell about 100 hand-tailored Savile Row suits a year. I can only handle a small handful of Cube Grenade clients at one time. Same with James Governor at Redmonk or Piers Fawkes at PSFK. And if say, our blogs can convert one or two percent of our hardcore readers into customers, in theory, the total readership per blog only needs to be fifty or a hundred times that in order to make the business viable. A few hundred people, maybe a couple of thousand– very attainable (and sustainable) numbers.
So if you get it right, you can just do your thing, delighting, thrilling (and selling to) the audience that you already have, without obsessing over which “A-Lister” is linking to you (or not), or how many new Twittter followers you’ve gotten (or haven’t) since last month. Nor do you have sleepless nights fretting over the fact that your blog doesn’t have the same number of readers as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired etc. Or whatever silly, energy-draining neuroses that so many other social media mavens seem to fall prey to.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, effective content marketing requires two things: world-class content and a world-class product. Harder than it looks. Life is unfair.
One of the main reasons I never really pursued corporate blog consulting as a career, even though I’ve had some definite opportunities in this department, is because of what I call “The Cleopatra Effect”.
I remember when I was a kid watching this old black & white movie about Cleopatra.
I can’t remember the name of the movie, but one scene always stuck with me:
Cleopatra is walking through the palace, when she’s suddenly stopped by the sound of pretty music, being played off in the distance.
She follows the sound of the music through the palace, till eventually she finds one of her courtiers in the garden, playing the harp.
“What pretty music,” she says to the courtier. “You play beautifully.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” says the courtier, obviously flattered.
“I would love to play music like that,” says Cleopatra. “Do you think you could teach me?”
The courtier, now that he’s feeling flattered, tries to win even more of her favor.
“Well, yes,” he gushes. “I’m sure a Queen as talented as you in so many things, would be talented at this as well.”
“Oh, good,” says Cleopatra, obviously delighted. “Here’s the deal. You teach me to play the harp. If I cannot play as well as you within one month, I will have you flogged. If I cannot play as well as you within three months, I will have you executed.”
The courtier’s face turns white. Cleopatra gives the courtier an evil smirk and then turns and walks off.
I believe that both our economic and spiritual future, good or bad, is directly related to our ability to unlock the latent creativity within us.
There. I’ve said it.
It’s been six years since I first started blogging what would eventually end up being my first book, Ignore Everybody.
The book didn’t really start off with a plan. Like I said at the very beginning,
“So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.”
That was it. One person’s ramblings. No big, authoritative volume with lots of practical how-to’s, case studies and academic citations.
Some people didn’t care for that. “I paid $23.00 for a hardback edition and I expect RESULTS, dammit!”
Results!
Ah. But I never said anything about results. There was no plan, you see. That’s because there is no plan. There never is.
Writing about creativity is a messy business because creativity is a messy business.
Even using the word “creativity” in conversation is going to get you in trouble from some quarters. Stick your head above the parapet for just a few seconds and watch the arrows start flying at you.
Yet somewhere in the back of our minds, we all know it’s too important a subject to ignore, too important a reality not to confront.
Why? Because when I first started writing Ignore Everybody, I was coming at it from a very personal angle. Confronting one’s existential need to be “creative”, to express oneself etc. Which is why the book did so well with teenagers, college students and young adults just starting out in the working world. That’s the time of life to be thinking about all that.
But now, six years later I’m a bit older and bit more experienced. Maybe a lot more.
And time and experience has led me to conclude that even if we hate the word “creativity”, even if it’s a nasty, annoying, sophomoric, hipster-dipster, New Age gagfest that really should have no place among the serious, results-orientated world of equally serious, result-orientated grownups…
It’s where all meaningful growth is going to come from, both internal and external, whether we like it or not.
I don’t believe creativity can be taught, not really, but I do believe:
That with a bit of prodding in the right places, individuals can train themselves to be more creative.
That with a bit of prodding in the right places, individuals working as a team can train themselves to be more creative.
That with a bit of prodding in the right places, companies and organizations can train themselves to be more creative.
That with a bit of prodding in the right places, societies can train themselves to be more creative.
And that if they can do this, the value they create will be off the scale.
I’ll say it again: I believe that both our economic and spiritual future, good or bad, is directly related to our ability to unlock the latent creativity within us.
I was having a long conversation with a friend last night about “Business Porn”:
Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it’s about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.
There are a lot of great marketing books and blogs out there. That being said, I still think the best marketing stories come from personal, first-hand experience.
Here’s a favorite one of mine:
Back when I lived in New York there was this fabulous, crazy-ass juice bar on West Houston called Lucky’s Juice Joint. I think it’s no longer there. I hear it’s moved.
It was the most out-of-place business south of 14th Street. Hard to descibe, except as a “hardcore hippie haven”. Just had this weird, crazy, psychedelic-rainforest vibe. But damn, it had the best juice in town. It was amazing stuff. Tasted like the fruits and vegetables were picked that morning. Fresher than anything else I found in New York. And yes, I had searched high and low for even better alternatives, but never found one. In New York, this was really it.
The boss was this crazy looking tie-dye wearing guy who looked and talked like he had done too many drugs back in the ’sixties. A big ol’ middle aged, acid-head teddy bear. One day we struck up a brief conversation. I complimented the hell out of his product. “Wow,” I quietly gushed, “Your stuff is the best. It really is…”
“Sure it is,” said the guy. “That’s because we make it with reverence.”
You don’t have to get a job with a famous company or hot-shot industry in order to have a spectacular career. You just have to do what you do with reverence.
“TREAT IT LIKE AN ADVENTURE. AN ADVENTURE WORTH SHARING.”
1. Now that Evil Plans is at the publisher’s and in production (Release date: February 17th), the newsletter and the art gallery chugging along nicely, I’m starting to think about my next adventure.
Some people live paycheck to paycheck. Some people live project to project. I prefer living “adventure to adventure”.
I reckon that if you can’t treat what you’re doing like an adventure, it’s not worth doing. You might as well be dead.
What’s my next adventure about? Haven’t quite decided yet. Something to do with Cube Grenades and the next book I plan to write. Plus the cartooning, of course.
It’ll all fit together somehow…
2. Here’s what I’ve always noticed about us humans: We all want the feeling of adventure. It’s just about the closest you can get to God while you’re still alive.
And often, we fail to heed the call. We’re too busy with IMPORTANT things. Cars to buy, bills to pay, people to schmooze and meetings to attend.
It’s not the American Dream if it kills you for stupid reasons. Sorry.
3. I wrote this little rant earlier today, while in a grumpy mood:
Fuck y’all.
You know who you are.
Your endless droning on about nothing, the endless tedium that is your career…
Well, it makes the CEO of your employer rich, but does little else.
Surrounding yourself with the overpriced, plastic baubles you learned about from TV, like anyone actually cares.
And you’re raising your kids the same way, raising them to be the same fine specimen of nowheresville. Lucky them.
You are boring. You are boredom. And that’s what you peddle.
Every day. To anyone who is desperate enough to listen.
An empty life, followed by an equally empty death.
Fuck y’all and good riddance.
My definition of “Mediocrity” is: A Triumvirate of small minds, smaller hearts and even smaller deeds. Usually with some lame-ass, entitlement power trip going on. One rarely has to look very hard to find it; it’s everywhere.
To have an adventure, is to reject that.
4. The Cube Grenade idea is all about making drawings about other people’s adventures.
This weekend I sent the final, edited draft of “Evil Plans” off to my publisher. It comes out in April.
A few hours later, a couple of people were asking me, “Why aren’t you celebrating? I’d be hitting the bars right now…”
Heh. Finishing the book is really not that big a deal. All it marks is the end of a massive, fairly tedious, weeks-long editing and “polishing” session, LONG AFTER you’re done with the meaty, creative, fun part.
To me, there are four really big moments in getting a book out. Finishing the book isn’t one of them:
1. Coming up with an idea for the book. That’s big. A big EUREKA moment that cuts through all the clutter like a sharp blade. The big initial flash of inspiration that gets the ball rolling. That’s all very exciting, but you never know how long you can keep the momentum going. It all might die out after a couple of days, it might last until you get the thing published and it hits The New York Times Bestseller list. You never know.
2. Landing the publishing deal. That’s what every aspiring writer dreams of. It’s a HUGE moment, especially the first time, though the euphoria doesn’t last long. Once you’ve signed the contract and cashed the advance check, within nanoseconds all that excitement is suddenly replaced with the heavy weight of “Damn, now I have write the bloody thing.” And the better job you’ve done convincing the publisher what a rockstar you are, the heavier the weight is.
3. Releasing the book. Seeing it hit the bookshelves. All those months and months of work, put to the test. That’s quite thrilling, especially the first time, though if your book bombs (and if it bombs, it bombs quickly), that can be devastating.
But the biggest moment for me, happens about halfway between Numbers 2 and 3:
4. The moment you realize that your book isn’t going to be shit, after all. That moment when you realize that, “Hey, this is actually going to work, after all”. That moment when you realize that the publisher didn’t waste his money giving you an advance, after all. That moment when you first realize that all the work you’ve done up to that point, wasn’t in vain. The moment you realize that all the people who had put their faith in you in getting this book of the ground, also didn’t do it in vain.
That’s the best time to hit the bars, if you ask me.
During our conversation, while I was moaning and groaning about the relentless day-to-day pressure of being a small-time entrepreneur, Jerry, in his kind, generous, lucid and laser-focus way, reminded me that in spite of my trials and tribulations, somehow in the past year I had managed to morph from a “marketing consultant” to full-time artist.
I guess that’s exactly what has been happening. I don’t quite know how I managed to pull that off– although long hours, low overheads and a superb business partner certainly helped.
Jerry then talked about his own career evolution– from successful New York venture capitalist, to private business coach with a thriving practice.
Jerry told me that he simply creamed off the part of being a VC that he liked the most– i.e. helping good people make a difference– and forgot about the rest.
During this conversation, I suddenly realized that I’m now trying to do EXACTLY what Jerry has already managed to do for himself. Take the cream off the top, leave the milk behind.
I can think of worse ways to spend the next couple of years. You?
If the answer is no, I’m sorry to hear that. Wakers are my favorite people.
A waker is someone who is very good at waking other people up from their metaphorical slumber.
Some people just have the gift. Being around them or their work just makes you feel more alive, more inspired, more motivated, more awake. The best wakers will make you do crazy-ass things, like quit your boring job and start your own business, write that song, move to Thailand, forgive that someone who once hurt you, or finally tell that girl that you love her.
A waker reminds you on a constant basis, just how alive you really are. Just how much human potential you really have inside of you. And there’s something about their influence that makes you utterly unable to go back to “sleep” ever again, in spite of your best efforts.
Wakers can be great artists– Jeff Buckely, Picasso, Harper Lee, Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Leo Tolstoy, Tilda Swinton, Louis Armstrong, Ralph Steadman, Saul Steinberg etc– but they don’t have to be.
Wakers can be great spiritual leaders– Jesus, Gandhi, Mohammed, Buddha, The Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Joseph Campbell etc– but they don’t have to be.
Wakers can be great public figures– Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, Simone de Beauvoir, Diana Vreeland, Carl Sagan, John Peel, Susan Sontag, Alistair Cooke, Margaret Thatcher, etc– but they don’t have to be.
I know great wakers who are bartenders, bus drivers, teachers, receptionists, plumbers. Theirs is a gift, not a job title.
If you are a waker, I’m happy for you. There is no better way to spend one’s life than being a waker, I truly believe that.
The human race needs you, like flowers need sunshine. The human race would die out within three generations without you. Thanks for being here. Seriously.
If you’re not a waker, don’t you think you should be? Serious question.
[Moleskine drawing from 2009: “Tried Meaningful”. 
gapingvoid has landed itself a new client. 
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