Mailchimp, as you know, is what powers my daily cartoon newsletter. With email newsletters, at least with Mailchimp, the average “open rate” is around 6%-8% i.e. for every hundred people you send out to, six to eight people actually open it and read it, as opposed to just sending it to the trash.
Our newsletter is 40%+. That’s amazing.
We were impressed to find out that Hugh MacLeod‘s MailChimp campaigns consistently maintain a fantastic 40%+ open rate. What does a cartoonist know about email marketing? Well, as it turns out, he doesn’t worry about all the typical “email expert” stuff like A/B testing, sending at different times of day, experimenting with subject lines, etc. Instead, much like Email Inspiration, he just sends a fun image, and the people love it.
“I think it’s because we keep it simple — a nice cartoon to brighten your day, delivered to your inbox every morning,” Hugh tells us. “People like getting that a whole lot more than, say, a daily, long-winded spiel about why y’all should give me your money, make me rich, yak, yak, yak…”
I highly, highly recommend doing the newsletter thing. More than the blog, more than Twitter, Facebook or Google+, these are the people who who REALLY WANT to support your business, who REALY CARE about your brand, who really want to interact with it. What Seth Godin calls a “Permission Asset”.
And best of all, with a good list, these people– the people who REALLY allow you to do what you do– are easy to identify, This makes your marketing A LOT easier, because the people who REALLY matter to your brand are RIGHT THERE in black & white, on your list. Nobody subscribes to a newsletter unless they really want to, unless they really think what you’re doing is important. Life is too short.
Exactly.
P.S. Yes, I highly, highly recommend Mailchimp as the service provider. They kick ass, they’ve been very good to gapingvoid. Thanks, Mailchimp!
When I first lived in Manhattan in December, 1997 I got into the habit of doodling on the back of business cards, just to give me something to do while sitting at the bar. The format stuck.
All I had when I first got to Manhattan were 2 suitcases, a couple of cardboard boxes full of stuff, a reservation at the YMCA, and a 10-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency.
My life for the next couple of weeks was going to work, walking around the city, and staggering back to the YMCA once the bars closed. Lots of alcohol and coffee shops. Lot of weird people. Being hit five times a day by this strange desire to laugh, sing and cry simultaneously. At times like these, there’s a lot to be said for an art form that fits easily inside your coat pocket.
[…]
An artist is quite a f*****-up thing to be, and to be honest I’m not sure if I would recommend it to anybody. Still, in my collection there are a couple of examples that, in some sick and twisted way, make the whole thing seem worthwhile. For the first five minutes, at least…
Anyway, for those who hadn’t seen it before, I thought it was worth sharing [Here’s the link again]. Again, thanks for all the love, and Godbless. Now I have some more cartoons to draw. Rock on.
[Yes. I know. We didn’t use my drawing style this time. The Factory is really about Social Objects, not about Hugh etc.]
One thing Seth and I always had in common, is that we both believe in writing short books. My personal rule is: All my books have to be short enough to be read on a plane ride between Miami and New York. And they are.
A book that makes you feel hopefully really inspired and really excited, that you close and put away satisfied, just as they’re dropping the landing gear, coming into La Guardia. It’s simple enough goal to aim for; certainly a lot less deluded than “Write the next ‘Sun Also Rises’ or ‘Ulysses’”.
Seth talks about his “short format” philosophy some more in a brilliant post, “Tracts and Books”:
The Communist Manifesto is 80 pages long. Certainly long enough to make an impact.
It has never taken me beyond a hundred pages to be persuaded. Sure, there are times when the pages after page 100 help me pile on, give me more depth and understanding. But a hundred (and usually fifty) is enough to get under my skin.
Or to steal heavily from George Bernard Shaw, “I’m sorry my last book was so long, but I didn’t have time to write a short one”.
It’s dirty little secret that most of my business-book author friends (and I have more than a few) will freely admit off the record: Most business books are lucky if people read more than the first hundred pages.
So why write more than a hundred pages? You tell me…
It’s never quite that simple, of course. There are as many ways to write a book as there are authors. If you want to spend the next seven years teaching junior college in order to be able to write the next Great American Novel in your spare time, that works too, go for it.
But if you’re just trying to get ideas to spread– if it’s the ideas that actually matter, not the book itself– I’d pay attention to what Seth is up to, very carefully.
Like I’ve said many times before about Media, we’re now living in the era of #CheapEasyGlobal. And thanks to that, I do honestly believe, it’s never been a more exciting time to be a writer.
Here we go. The insanely-bright Harold Jarche (who I really enjoyed meeting in Toronto a few months ago) gives a few reasons why/how blogging transformed his life:
1. I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. This Spring, I have four speaking engagements out of town (Montreal, Ottawa, Washington DC, Rome). Without my blog, I am sure that IEEE and many other organizations would not have invited me to speak.
Bingo. “Big-city wages, small-town prices” is a damn fine business model: I did it myself for many years when I was living in Far West Texas.
I live in Miami. I have no clients here. They’re all in places like Boston or New York or Texas or California or London. Yet most mornings I hang out on the beach.
Blogging allows me to stay creative and mobile… and like Harold here, far from the madding crowd, if that’s what I desire.
As you probably already know, I wrote a wee book, “Freedom Is Blogging In Your Underwear”, which just launched. It is my little love letter to the blogosphere.
Please click on it — it’s more than just a page about the book. It’s a movement, or at least, I think it should be.
I know for a fact, that a lot of you reading this found a similar freedom that I found through the Internet and blogging. Like me, you found a voice, you found a platform, the rest is history.Your stories are beautiful stories, so I wanted to create some free social objects that help you tell your stories… cartoons, animated videos etc. Simple, fun, stuff.
This week, in honor of the sentiment behind the book, I’d love for you to share your story of how blogging or the Internet has given you freedom. Blog, tweet, post on Facebook or G+… share your story however you want, on whatever platform you prefer. All I ask is that you include the hashtag #FreedomIsBlogging and if you can, email me a link to your post at “Freedom@gapingvoid.com.” I am going to be creating a commemorative print for the book, and everyone who emails me a link to their “freedom” post this week will have their name drawn in the print. I hope you will use these tools to tell your story. There’s beauty in all this, there really is. Which is why I wrote the book, anyway.
I can’t wait to hear your stories! Rock on!
- Hugh
[P.S. I am holding a “virtual book tour” this Thursday, May 3, at 6pm EST. You can sign up and join me, for free, HERE]
Thought experiment: It’s easier to be successful when you think of your business as a dialogue, rather than property.
I’ve been saying this for years: That all evolutions in marketing are evolutions of language.
In Cluetrain parlance, “Markets Are Conversations”. People talking to each other, metaphorically or otherwise.
When markets change, the conversation changes. People who change the market, change the way the market speaks to people.
Ergo, language changes. Language evolves, and so does the market.
People who want to change the market they’re in (in their favor) should think about this… how does your product “talk” to the market, how is the “voice” different from your competition?
In this era of everybody talking about the latest shiny app or the latest shiny billionaire, I decided to write a book about blogging, and why it matters: “Freedom Is Blogging In Your Underwear”.
[From the intro:]
In May of last year, my blog, gapingvoid.com, turned ten years old.
Having a blog, a voice, having my own media, utterly changed my life. Suddenly my career as a cartoonist wasn’t dependent on other people: the “gatekeepers” — publishers, editors, Hollywood executives, etc., etc.
Suddenly I had direct contact with my audience. They had direct contact with me. I could just do my thing, without having to wait for somebody else to give me the “green light,” somebody else to write a check. I didn’t have to wait around for somebody else to deem me “worthy” …
This gave me the freedom I spent most of my adult life searching for, the same freedom I believe we’re ALL searching for, in one way or another.
Careerwise, blogging gave me everything. Even in the early days, the benefits of blogging were so glaringly obvious to me that I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t doing it. Ten years later, I still can’t. So I decided to write a book about it; maybe I could help other people find this freedom, too.
Like I said, I’m a cartoonist. I don’t consider myself a “blogging professional.” I don’t consider myself a “social media authority.” That being said, I believe my experience as one of the very early visual artists to totally establish their careers via this wonderful new medium might help folks understand not only how powerful blogging is, but WHY it’s powerful and WHY it matters. And once you can understand this, I believe, your life will be quickly transformed, same as mine was.
[If you’re going to Twitter about it, please use hashtag #FreedomIsBlogging. Thanks!]
Hot off the press, my old friends Loic and GeraldineLe Meur asked me to do the theming for the Le Web this year. I’m especially honored as it will include their first London LEWEB which they announced yesterday.
“FASTER THAN REAL TIME”. Le Web London, June 19th-20, the # 1 European tech conference. Join me, Loic and all the gang at http://leweb.net
Having attended the first LEWEB, then called Leblog in 2004, it’s been amazing to see the event grow into Europe’s most important tech conference. It’s one of my favorite conferences (the other one being SXSW), and I’m really excited to be going again. The lineup of speakers is incredible; every year it just gets bigger and bigger.
I’ll be doing a talk this year, and sketching on stage. It’ll be nice to be in London again.…
LEWEB has kindly offered a GBP 100 discount to our friends. If you’d like to buy a ticket, just enter GAPINGVOID at checkout to receive the discount.
I love the purple cover… it’s kinda appropriate: It was after reading Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” that the idea of writing books occurred to me. “That looks like fun, I can do that, I want a piece of that” etc.
The book is a love letter to the blog, of sorts. I think blogging matters, I think having your own piece of online real estate THAT YOU OWN YOURSELF (not Twitter, not Facebook, not Google+ etc), on YOUR OWN SERVER that YOU pay for, is important. But it’s an idea that’s kinda been lost in recent years. BLOGGING MATTERS.
It was a little twelve word copy competition. We thought we’d get 20 or 30 entries. But ended up with well over 200, a great result and a giant “thank you” to everyone for entering.
Once we compiled the comments and emails, judging began. Hugh put together his short list, Laura did hers, Jeff put in his five cents, even intern Darrick piped in.
And then, what started as a bit of fun, turned into a free-for-all. Kicking, screaming, name calling. Everyone had their favorite, and no one agreed.
Tumult aside, we’ve decided to change the rules. Since there were so many entries, it seemed fair that there will be more winners: Three to be exact. And, you guys get to decide the ranking. Just watch the vids above, leave your comments below and we’ll compile and announce later this month.
Regardless of who comes out on top, all finalists will get a framed, signed print of their choosing (conditions apply), and more importantly, the credits which will be seen by millions of people. The winners lives will be transformed and they will be showered with internet riches beyond their wildest dreams, etc., etc., etc.
To make voting easy, we had our crack team create animations with each of the finalists’ tag lines. Watch them and tell us your choice for the king of all exploding head tag lines!”.
7. Being in the same room while Babson’s President, Len Schlesinger interviewed CNN senior political analyst, Dave Gergen in Boston a few months ago. Gergen’s advice to students? “Learn how to invent.”
8. A tweet I made earlier: “I’m not sure if America is ready to be a second-rate nation quite yet”.
A lot of people worldwide are relying on America not becoming, like I said, a second-rate nation. Even some of the people who don’t particularly like America.
And how is that going to happen, exactly? How are we going to remain at the top of our game, or at least, make a damn good show of it?
The same way we’ve always done it: by creating new, interesting products and ideas that people need, want, value and are inspired by.
PART TWO: THE PREVIOUS TWO AGES OF EDUCATION.
To massively over-simplify, there were two main phases in the history of education, pre-industrial and industrial. The first meant only the clergy and the sons of the elite were properly educated. Then along comes the second, industrial phase, which meant universal education on a mass-scale, that emerges along with the “Age of Reason”, the industrial revolution and the whole modern era.
As Seth Godin famously likes to talk about, in this second, industrial phase, schools became little more than factories, churning out young people educated enough to work in bigger factories one day. Whether we’re talking blue collar or white collar, it didn’t matter, it’ still a factory job, basically. You’re still a cog in the factory machine, basically. This factory-model was perfect for when the factory was still the cornerstone of the industrial economy. A factory-centered model for a factory-centered world. This was true whether in elementary school in Iowa, or Harvard Business School in Cambridge, your reality was the factory because your career was the factory. Own the factory, work in the factory, live near the factory, become the factory. Factory, factory, factory…
And of course, this factory-centric model which worked fine for a hundred-plus years is now broken. We can no longer compete long-term that way. Just owning a factory doesn’t give us the same edge it used to, the same economic security, as anyone who’s ever tried competing lately in the global economy has been finding out.
A new model is needed.
PART THREE: WE ARE READY FOR THE THIRD AGE OF EDUCATION: THE CREATIVE AGE.
Personally, I had a pretty good formal education, where I learned the basics– reading, writing, math, a bit of science, history, languages and a wee smattering of the arts. I learned to study and pass tests. Like most students, I learned how to learn, basically. I leaned how to work in a foctory, basically.
I don’t think that’s enough anymore, as the THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of under-employed and unemployed university graduates with good grades in Europe and America will testify. They passed all their tests fine, they all ticked off the right boxes… and yet, look at them now, poor things.
Kids in the future are simply not going to leave school with this big, bumper crop of plum jobs waiting for them to fill, not like they used to. In the future, kids will leave school and increasingly be expected to create their own viable realities.
Like David Gergen alluded to, these young adults will be expected not just to do the work, but expected to ACTUALLY invent something. Create something, not just obey orders, not just fulfill some sort of social role.
And somehow, we have to teach our schools how to teach our kids exactly that. It’s not going to be easy.
4. HOW DO YOU BEST PREPARE FOR THE CREATIVE AGE?
As I see it, there are basically two ways, at least if you go at it from a college-age, entrepreneurial, startup mentality. One is the more risky path advocated by my wonderfully lucid friend, Jason Calacanis, to forget college and instead, “Spend Your College Tuition on Being Mentored and Starting a Company.” That’s probably what I would have chosen for myself, nowadays. That, or apprenticing for a master at something, the way English tailors learn their craft, or how the advertising legend, Dave Trott used to hire kids right off the street in London and give theme a chance at writing ads (Hence the earlier Jiro/Mastery reference]. Learning on the job, as it were. The street-fighter’s approach. Tough, brutal, intense, but nonetheless a first-class education in the University of Life.
The second way is what I see Len Schesinger trying to do at Babson.… shaking things up… evolving the idea of school (business school, anyway) as not just a place of learning, but also as a place of DOING.
Where. Stuff. Gets. Done.
In the real world. Here and now.
Where students don’t just learn about running businesses, but are expected to actually start running businesses and making them viable. All while still getting good grades. It’s a pretty intense curriculum, but hey, the best students seem to thrive at it.
Michael Dell’s company was started in a dorm room. Ditto with Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, my cartooning career was, too.
This is the idea of a college as not just a seat of learning, but an incubator, of sorts.These days, business schools like Babson aren’t just competing with Harvard or Wharton, they’re competing with Y Combinator and 500 Startups. The most talented kids in the country aren’t waiting around for the grownups in the ivory towers to get their act together. They’re already inventing their own futures; they’re in a hurry.
I don’t have all the answers. All I know is that it’s already happening. It’s already begun, the genie is already out of the bottle… and it’s damn exciting to watch.
[PS: This blog post only took me a short morning and a couple of hundred words to write. Ideally, it would’ve taken me a couple of years and enough words to fill an entire book. I’m sorry if it’s incomplete, I’m sorry if there are massive holes everywhere. It’s a vast minefield of a subject that’ll take the cleverest people in the land more than a few decades to work out fully. But like I inferred, it still damn exciting to think about. I just hope we’re all up for it.]
A movie about an increasingly taboo subject in this vapidity-worshipping society of ours: Mastery.
“Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” is a documentary about the world’s greatest sushi chef, 85-year-old Jiro Ono. What’s striking about Jiro is not that he has reached such greatness, but how he reached it.
Instead of the usual celebrity chef schtick– TV shows, cookbooks, fancy restaurants franchises in all the world capitals (including the mandatory Las Vegas casino location), he kept it REALLY simple: a single, TINY, 10-seater restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo.
Why did he do it that way? Because he wasn’t interested in money, he was interested in the MASTERY of his chosen craft. The bigger he made his restaurant business, the less time he would have to spend on his TRUE calling, making sushi.
Which is why the restaurant only serves sushi. That’s it. No appetizers. No side dishes. No tempura or yaki soba. No non-sushi entrees. A tiny little underground hole in the wall with only a few stools and even fewer tables. That’s it. And yet people have been known to make reservations a year in advance.
He wasn’t in it for the money, he was in it because it allowed him to strive for perfection.
In a world that often rewards money and office politics over mastery, maybe more mediocre people get to drive fancy cars, live in big houses and wear a lot of bling, but something is lost in the process. And we are the poorer for it.
Jiro reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can achieve mastery, or at least aim for it, if you decide to.
But only you can decide that, of course. Only you can decide what kind of example you want to be for your children.
A beautiful mediation on “Mastery”. A beautiful meditation on “Small is beautiful”. A beautiful meditation on “Meaning Scales”. I loved every last minute of it. I would urge anyone who actually cares about what they do– the process, not just the result– to go see this movie: It’ll change your life. Rock on.
The new business cards have arrived.… Very cool.
I’ve been saying this for years– a business card is not just “content”, is not just “personal details”. A business card is not just a social object; it’s a form of schwag, if you think about it.
So you have to treat it like that; you have to think to yourself, “How are people going to interact with this, when I hand it out?”
[Today’s guest post is by Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group.]
It’s inevitable that I will get the question. You’d think by now that I would learn to expect it…that I would prepare for it…or have a response that would be purely second nature. But I don’t. I’ve no standard answer that automatically inspires anyone in the moment to take action. And, to this day, I neither expect the question nor do I have a rehearsed or standard riposte committed to memory.
So what is “the question?”
The question faces those who see disruption all around them. They believe survival requires change and they aspire to fight for transformation. But, at some point in their quest to pursue a new course, a direction in which they deeply believe, they will ask reluctantly, even desperately, “How do I convince others to see what I see” or “how can I get those in control to recognize the importance of what’s happening around us so that we can move forward in the right direction?”
While my response in each moment always attempts to zero-in on the individual circumstance, the truest, most genuine answer that I can share is that…to bring about change does not take technology, it takes courage. And, this is why change is not a commodity. Change is not easy nor is it formulaic. But I can say this with the utmost conviction, change.is.inevitable and it is yours to define.
We live in disruptive times. As such, everything we know transcends into everything we once knew. How we communicate, connect, discover, learn and share is changing. New and emerging technology is becoming increasingly relentless and it is forcing evolution or complete transformation. And, it touches your personally and professionally. In our own way, we each are gravitating toward dissonance or disarray and it can be distressful. As students, parents, role models, employees, managers, entrepreneurs, artists, or some or all of the above, we will at some point collide with disruption. And in that moment, we will have a choice to make. We either fall down, choose to embrace change, or we will see the possibilities beyond what’s immediately apparent to pave the way toward a more meaningful outcome.
But again, it takes courage. It takes courage to see what others don’t or do what others won’t. It takes courage to push forward when pushed back.
Courage is the ability to do something that frightens one, yet it is the very thing that all leaders share. See, courage takes great strength to stand in the face of pain or inevitable grief and without it, your vision, no matter how brilliant or essential, is merely a masterpiece painted on a napkin — a promise that is never fully realized.
We stand today upon a foundation of uncertainty and apprehension. Everything is changing. What is constant however, is the absence of clarity, direction or answers. To tell you that there is an easy path toward transformation or that there are a series of “top 10 ways” to help you change the perspective of leadership or those around you is, well, misleading or a complete falsehood.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no rules for revolutionaries…just as there are no leaders who don’t continually strive to earn a position of leadership. It takes courage to be a change agent, to rise up and lead the way when others are filled with fear. It takes courage to walk in a different direction when others walk along a contrasting path. Most important, it takes courage to drive persistence to overcome resistance…to find comfort outside your comfort zone when the promise of reward is ambiguous. For, it is the vision to see where you need to go and the conviction to shepherd the march toward relevance that earns the greatest rewards of all, leadership, significance, and advocacy.
This is your time…
“Courage is grace under pressure.” — Ernest Hemingway
Besides the main sentiment of the cartoon, #SmallTeamsBigImpact is something that me and the tem at Social Object Factory can really relate to. Of course we can…
[“Social Object Factory’sJeff Sass put together this video of Hugh drawing on his Samsung Galaxy Note (provided by Samsung) as part of Hugh’s participation in the Samsung #BeNoteworthy campaign. Cool!”]
Of course, when an ad man promises a golden age of anything, I’m going to be suspicious. Still, IT IS a pretty good article. OK, so it reads a bit like a sales brochure, but hey, a lot of my blog posts do as well. It has some good, tasty bites, regardless.
BUT IS IT TRUE, I hear you ask? Is the Golden Age really upon us?
As somebody who worked in the ad business at the very tail end of the pre-Internet, Mad Men era, I would say “Yes”. For all the reasons Matt mentions. Being a Mad Men-era person was actually a lot less fun and interesting than TV makes it out to be.
So the next question is, how is this new “Golden Age” actually going to happen? What will they actually have to DO, for this Golden Age to actually exist?
The answer, of course, isn’t about the “Media”, social or otherwise. It’s about the “Make”.
It’s about what you’re going to have to create at the granular level.
And what you’re going to have to create, of course, are Social Objects.
[PS: It’s also why it’s such a HUGE opportunity for PR firms like Edelman and Weber Shandwick to STEAL business away from Madison Avenue. But I’ve been saying that for years…]
“Because the world needs more Awesome, the world needs more Startups.”
Exactly.
What astounds me is how quickly we turned it around. A couple of days from getting the first phone call, in the can. BOOM! Just like that.
Compare that to the traditional ad agency model– it would’ve taken ten times as long and cost ten times as much. Not to mention, a lot of strategy meetings and endless Powerpoint slides.
We live in incredible times…
Congrats to the team on a splendid effort! Rock on.
“I’m not passive aggressive, I’m decaffeinated.”
Energy, passion, enthusiasm… these are the things that often drive one’s creativity.
They are also the things we can share to help inspire and drive the creativity in others.
When we share an idea we yearn for it to be met with one or all of the above. We want our audience of one or many to respond to our work with energy… with passion… with enthusiasm. When they don’t, we take it as commentary, or worse, as criticism. But sometimes their less than amazing reaction has nothing to do with us, or our stuff. Sometimes your audience is just too tired, or just too distracted by their own stuff to give you what you want. They’re not being mean, or trying to cut you down with their silence. Their cup is just too full at the moment to make room for you.
The fourth thing I meant is that there is an ‘aggression’ of conceptualisation. I have written elaborately in the past on memetic branding, along with Mike Cayley and also on brands as producers of connectivity. In Hugh’s mind brands simply become ‘Cannons’ puffing out memetic cannon balls… the visual language removes the need for analytical and captures the essence of the idea. More importantly, it is a productive, energetic and kinetic image, which makes brand owners feel as if they are in control.
Fifthly I was evoking ‘commitment’. Hugh’s basic concept here, as I see it, is to move away from a typical agency focus on the production process, and also to move away from a consultancy focus on outcomes. Instead he confidently assumes the outcomes and trusts his track record for the production process, and focuses instead on the ’stuff’ itself.
Thanks Tim, though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the name, “Social Object Factory” was really Jason’s idea (gapingvoid’s CEO).
We were trying to evolve the business away from just “Hugh, the cartoonist” and all that “Personal Brand” crap, to something larger and more interesting, not to mention, scaleable and sustainable.
Besides that, Tim’s commentary is pretty perceptive and incisive about what we’re trying to create, here. Worth a read. Thanks, Tim!
Hugh drew today’s cartoon in connection with a talk earlier this year for the members of socialmedia.org, Andy Sernovitz’s great cabal of social media heavy weights.
It’s a cute little reminder that no matter how big your business is, your business is not really all you want to be talking about on social channels. It’s the idea of brand as platform. Finding interesting aligned ideas to talk about. The challenge is to create lots of cool stuff to launch into your social networks through your brand.
Take a look at the logo on the bottom right of the image. It’s the logo of Social Object Factory, our new little startup, still in beta, which is in the business of making those cannon balls. Little morsels of powerful content that will explode out of your social channels spreading mojo everywhere. YAY!!!
Yes, now you can have gapingvoid cool to deliver to all your peeps
gapingvoid has been creating and evangelizing social objects for years, for ourselves, for our friends and for our clients. Now we’re turning it into an official business.
Social Object Factory. We help businesses kick ass.
Feel free to click on the link to find out more. Read the manifesto. Apply for a job. Hire us. We’re looking forward to kicking ass with you. Rock on.
To those who don’t know us well, gapingvoid just appears to be in the business of selling Hugh’s cool illustrations. Over the years, Hugh and I have gone through the often-tortuous self examination required in the journey of finding our true purpose. Nearly every day asking ourselves: “What can one do with a cartoon?”
Thanks to our friend, Mark Earls, we think a lot about the notion of Purpose Idea, and spend a lot of time helping clients wrestle with the beast as well.
So, we have come up with our purpose, and much of it is around the idea of inspiring others.
Here is an excerpt of what we consider our Purpose – note that it is a work in progress, and always subject to change as we grow, morph and reinvent ourselves.
*We live in incredible times.
*Every single person on this earth has the capacity to make a difference… the ability to lead, and leave their mark.
*Every business is driven by forces far more powerful and profound than money.
*We help businesses discover and articulate their purpose
*We help people make a difference,
*We help leaders lead
*We help businesses kick butt.
*We create social objects that transform organizations, start conversations, and spread ideas at lightning speed.
*We live in incredible times, and as long as there is one person on this earth who does not agree, there is still work to be done.
One of the highlights of this year’s SXSW for me was, creating a stampede over at the Rackspace stand on the first day of the trade show.
Rackspace printed up 2,500 gapingvoid t-shirts to give away. When the doors opened at 10am, we had 50 people already waiting in line. We ran out of shirts by day’s end.
Get your awesome on, indeed…
We like creating schwag. Schwag is fun. The challenge is to actually create something that transmits REAL MEANING to people. Otherwise you’re just adding to the slush-pile.
And it’s the slush-pile that kills most businesses in the end, schwag or no schwag.
My friends at Samsung gave me the Galaxy Note to play with at this year’s SXSW.
It’s a sort of tablet-meets-phone. A smartphone with a HUGE screen and little drawing stylus.
I drew the cartoon above on the Note. No, I really did. With the little stylus that comes with it (You can alos use a regular-sized Wacom styles with it as well, if your fingers are to big etc). Fun!
Besides that, it takes pictures, which you can THEN DRAW OVER on the spot. Here’s a picture I did yesterday here in San Antonio (I’m here visiting with my clients at Rackspace):
As an artist, this Android-powered device allows me to do stuff on the the go that my iPhone simply doesn’t. That is HUGE for me.
Here’s another one; this time at a Texas Hill Country Beef Jerky place 100 miles West of town, yesterday morning:
I’ve had nothing but fun since I got it. I understand other artists were given one to try out at SXSW (Follow their campaign hashtag, #BeNoteworthy), so we’ll see what kind of collective interest can be gotten over the weekend there.
My take? Frankly, I’m delighted by it. I’m not saying the Note is the new “iPhone Killer”; that being said, it’s quite reassuring to know that the iPhone is no longer the ONLY game in town. As a traditional iPhone user, I was accustomed to thinking that Android was just a poor man’s iPhone. And then the Note comes along and proves me wrong. Dead wrong.
I hope to be posting more photo-drawings as my busiest weekend of the year progresses. Thanks to Samsung for the great opportunity. Rock on.
Using cartoons to communicate about serious subjects is always an interesting challenge– and one that we deal with every day.
Where is the line that can’t be crossed? How do we communicate about something serious in a way that is memorable, whimsical, makes a point but isn’t frivolous?
We’ve proven 1000 times that cartoons are some of the most effective pieces of communication in existence — and we’ve been playing with animating my cartoons for some time, so when the folks at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Security contacted us, we thought, “Hey, why not do a little animation about ‘enterprise security…?”
Let’s face it, enterprise security is pretty dry stuff. Their customers are governments and giant corporations… perfect for a whimsical little animation about finding risk — kinda Pac Man-ish, it makes the point: You need help identifying all the risks to your data centers. With the nemonic binoculars (representing HP’s Enterprise Security Platform), one is able to see the big picture threats, and the threat levels they represent.
I love the little HP geek with the pocket protector. I dunno, it just works, somehow. Also check out the logo for our new venture at the very end.
We’ve all failed at some point or another in our lives, but the question is always; “what do you come away with?”
For me, it always inspired me to do better, somehow. I never gave up. So this kind of adversity-induced inspiration sorta became my “muse” after a while.
I’m getting to the age where the kids I grew up with who “Never made a mistake” are starting to plateau careerwise.
“Doing everything right” meant only dealing with known quantities, known outcomes, the opportunities of the unknown were never embraced.
None of them became cartoonists, that’s for damn sure…
When I attended Ted Global last summer in Edinburgh, one of the people I ejoyed meeting the most was this English-Pakistani guy called Maajid. He did a really good TED talk on how to fight religious extremism, based on his own experience as a reformed member of radical Islamist groups, himself (How radical? Radical enough to have spent time in Egyptian prison for it…).
Fast forward to the present, the other day he emails me out of the blue. Terrific! He wanted to commission a Valentine’s Day gift for his sweetheart. Nice!
So I went with something fun and colorful to brighten up a dark, English February, taking my inspiration, on his suggestion, from Pakistani bus art, which is crazy-amazing stuff.
He’s a lovely, gracious guy, Maajid, and was a pleasure to work with. Go check out the extremism-fighting organisation, Quilliam that he’s head of– interesting stuff.
It’s a simple enough idea: If they can own a new idea of what entrepreneurship is, or at least, be a prime mover in the conversation, then people will go to them to get a piece of the action. Good for the students and faculty, good for the brand and good for the stakeholders. Exactly.
Of course, the meaning of the word has been redefined over and over many times already, from in its origins in the Industrial Revolution of yesterday, to Silicon Valley today, to India and China and Africa tomorrow. Language is organic and fluid, after all, and to hope to come up with the all-encompassing, definitive wording for it, isn’t going to happen in our lifetime. The word already has a million definitions, anyway.
But as I pondered this, more and more, I started thinking that the really interesting question isn’t, “What is entrepreneurship?”, but “Who is an entrepreneur?”
As Reid Hoffman declared in his wonderful new book, you can still think like an entrepreneur and hold a job down in a large company. In fact, it’s now pretty much essential for survival that you do so.
So I quickly drew the t-shirt idea above: “YOU ARE AN ENTREPRENEUR”.
The idea is not a “BIG STATEMENT” per se, but designed more as a conversation starter.
When people see the message, the people who already see themselves an entrepreneurs will think, “Yeah, so, I know that already.”
They’re not the people needing to hear the it.
But the people who DON’T see themselves that way, THEY WILL question why somebody would think they’re entrepreneurs.
Which could start a lot of conversations right from the get-go. Imagine what your favorite Starbucks barista would say about the t-shirt. Or that guy you know who works at The Gap. Or your college roommate, Dan who works deep in the bowels of Zappos’ call centers.
Or think about the fourteen people you now have on the payroll, and how you’re going to convince them to think of their time with you as more than just a paycheck.
Aren’t they ALL entrepreneurs? Shouldn’t they feel that way? And if not, isn’t that a problem?
I think it is.
I mean, we’re talking about actual flesh-and-blood livelihoods here, surely that’s something worth giving thought to?
T-shirt-as-conversation-starter is far more interesting that T-shirt-as-advertisement, don’t you think?
This cartoon actually began life out in 2007, as an idea for a wine label design.
Something humorous-aspirational. Fun and witty, without being too downmarket etc etc.
Though it never got as far as production, it broke the ice with a few major supermarket buyers, so it earned its keep in the end, many, many times over.
The idea was and is always, how can you extend the meaning of your product… make it more interesting. A label, a free prize inside, whatever.…
I was creatively “stuck” on a cartoon I wanted to get drawn, one about “Productive Stupidity” that I was doing for our client, Babson College.
So I decided to “open source” the problem to my buddies over on Google Plus, to see if their input could help me.
Hola, Jason here (CEO of gapingvoid etc etc)… For all you gapingvoid newbies, you may not know that we publish a daily email every Tuesday – Saturday. It always contains one of Hugh’s cartoons with a little narrative and sometimes an exclusive deal on gapingvoid goodies.
We’ve been playing around with animation and the one above is a little eight-second promo that we want to use to call attention to the daily email. Although it works great as is, we’d like to add some copy to it, and so, Fearless Readers, we are going to have a little competition for the best copy as judged by us.
Here is how we are going to do it:
Simply suggest the copy to go with it, in twelve words or less.
In other words, we need 12 words to go with the video, to explain what the story is.
The winner will get a free framed cube grenade of her choosing, signed and inscribed by Hugh (a $200 value) and if you have a blog or site, we’ll link back to it AND give you a mention on the actual video, etc.
Normally, this is the kind of things we’d do ourselves, but what the heck, sometimes “open source” is more fun for everybody.
