Flotsam

The Art of Saying Less and Not Listening

Over the past month, we’ve been helping two start-ups working with one of our clients to refine their pitches, and make a compelling case as to why people should invest in them — in 6 minutes. 

It was an exercise in what the gurus around this place call “reductive storytelling.”

In a world where 130-slide presentations are becoming the norm, the art of taking things out is a dying one. A constraint like 6 minutes forces discipline and making choices.   

It was also an exercise in the importance of confidence and a strong sense of self. 

These start-ups were participating in a three-month program in which they made their pitches dozens of times to a rotating collection of mentors and brand name gurus.

If there’s one thing mentors and gurus are good at it’s giving advice. 

One of the companies knew who they were and what they wanted to do. They took some of the advice, and ignored other pieces of it. 

In other words, they knew when to stop listening. 

We worked closely with them, and helped them create a stellar presentation. I have no doubt they are going to make it. 

The other company listened to everything.

The barrage of mentors didn’t help them harden their vision. It made them question every decision. They re-wrote their pitch every few days.  

In the end, their final presentation was better than their initial one.

But their uncertainty raised lots of questions about their prospects for success. 

These two experiences mirror how pitches tend to go down.

You have pitches with a clear vision and strong leadership. And pitches that lurch from review to review. 

I’d recommend the former.

Tamales! Tamales! Tamales!

For the past few months, there’s been a woman selling tamales outside my subway station. 

When you get to the bottom of the stairs that lead out of the station, you can usually hear her, in her sing song, voice.

Tamales! Tamales! Tamales! 

She hasn’t been there all week. I kind of miss her.

This Is My 100th Post And It Is Below Me

Last August I started this blog, thanks to the encouragement of my favorite blogger and all-around mensch George Tannenbaum.

I’ve written slowly, if not steadily, and, lo and behold, this is my 100th post.

I haven’t promoted it much besides the occasional tweet.  (I still can’t bring myself to do the auto-triple Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter post.)

Yet I’ve always been tickled when far flung readers start following. So perhaps I’ll try the triple on this one. 

Anyway, this post, like the 99 that came before it, is below me.

I mean, aren’t there self-promotion slaves who can take my white board ruminations and write these for me? I am scraping the upper levels of middle management now.

I kid. But over the past few months, I’ve heard this complaint again and again. 

I met an interaction designer who doesn’t “do wireframes.” He’s a storyteller.

I’ve heard three different writers lament that some assignment was “below them.” 

And I’ve heard through the rumor mill that we didn’t win a pitch because the clients asked for something small and perhaps unglamorous and we went in and told them how we did so much more. They were concerned we wouldn’t do what they asked and chose someone else. 

I think it’s all part of the guru-ization of the business, if not the world.

How else can we explain job titles that obscure what people actually do? 

Everyone wants to be a guru. No one wants to do the work. 

At the risk of sounding like the Man, I tell my charges that this is kinda what the job is. More often than not, it will be below you. Your job is to do the best job you possibly can. And complain about it later, preferably over a rare Tunisian lychee martini spiked with three drops of bone marrow extracted from a dying albino llama.  

You’re Welcome

A month or so, I spent a few weeks on a major pitch for a major international client. The work was good, the process was grueling, as pitches often are. 

After weeks of we-won, we-lost, we-won-a-piece, we-won-nothing, we learned we so impressed them that we can pitch them again. 

That is, as we say on Long Island, a real kick in the stones. 

Needless to say, we’ll be there once again, with deck in hand a smile on our face, pretending the whole pitch process is completely reasonable. 

Truth

Tip of the locally sourced fedora to @SaadyaGellens

Badass

Earlier this week, we had a pseudo-pitch/first meeting with a new client.

It was, as they say, a great meeting. 

Funny happened, though.  The phrase “badass” was uttered four or five times, both by us and the client. 

As in it would be pretty badass if we could do X. 

And did you see what Y did? That was badass. 

Was it cool to say badass in a meeting? Nah. It was badass.

RIP: The Fourth Draft

The indefatigable John McPhee writes about writing again in the New Yorker. 

He talks about the importance of getting something down:

How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists? And unless you can identify what is not succeeding—unless you can see those dark clunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops—how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?

Then working and re-working it again and again.

He writes about how, during the 3rd or 4th draft, he puts a box around all the words that could be better. Then goes back and painstakingly finds better ones.  

In other words, writing is revision. 

Of course, this process applies to design or XD work as well. 

Too often in our business, we’ve compressed timeframes so there’s literally no time for revision. (Producers call it “timeboxing,” so we don’t “spin” and “burn hours.”) 

The work, whether it be a campaign, an app idea, or a social play, is inevitably a first draft. (The very idea of a 24-hour hack-a-thon is built on this premise.)  

Sure it’s faster, but is it better? I’m not so sure.  

It’s like work

This has become one of my favorite, and as of late, handiest expressions. 

We’ll be coming up with ideas for something, and someone will inevitably ask, well, can we — or you — do this? 

I say, sure we can, but it’s like work. 

They laugh, and ask again. No seriously, can we do this?

And I repeat myself, because I’m kidding. But not really. 

In the age of curating, scraping and auto-everything, we seem to have forgotten that some things require, well, work.

Craft. Sweat. Trial-and-error.  

It shouldn’t be a reason not to do something.

We should just acknowledge that it will take some effort.

That is what they pay us for, isn’t it?

The Moment of Moments

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a preponderance of the word “moments.” 

Perhaps moments are the disruptions of 2013. 

In a presentation, we say things like “that’s a really nice moment.” 

Or that would be an “amazing moment.” 

Instinctually, I’m against words like this that seep into our collective lexicon. 

(I’ve written many times about the abuse of the word “story.”)

But I kind of like this one, at least for now.

It sure beats “surprise and delight,” a phrase that no actual human who doesn’t work in this business has ever uttered without getting punched in the face. 

I guess you could say I’m having a moment with moments. Maybe I’m getting soft. 

Time to get back to work. There are moments to make.

Have we just given up?

I just read NY Mag’s profile on Buzzfeed: Does Buzzfeed Know the Secret? 

The secret being either what makes “content” go viral — or how to bilk marketers into giving them money for nothing. I’m not sure which. 

The most shocking — and perhaps depressing — fact is this: 

“Currently, BuzzFeed is running 38 ad campaigns, which usually consist of about a month’s worth of posts, and cost an average of around $100,000. If those numbers are accurate, and its sales stay constant, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests BuzzFeed’s ad revenues could be as much as $40 million this year. (The private company won’t release figures.) That would be about a fifth of last year’s digital revenues for the entire New York Times Company.”

One of their bigger advertisers is Virgin. Their “campaigns” get millions of views — and shares. 

This is their most popular article: 15 Cats That Need to Think Outside the Box. 

There’s a Virgin logo, but nothing actually about Virgin. (After readers “consume” this content, they’re served banners on other sites. Buzzfeed doesn’t do banners.)

At the risk of sounding out of touch, what does this do for Virgin? 

Sure, they’ve scored millions of well-priced impressions. But I haven’t learned anything. My brand sentiment hasn’t changed.

And, to be honest, as an ad person, I can’t help but feel like we’ve given up. 

One of the tenets of the digital age is to come up with things that “leverage existing behavior.”

While I agree with that as a general rule, what if those behaviors do nothing for our clients? Is it really worth the effort — or the money?

I love cat videos. I do. I would never, ever propose taking them away from anyone. I just think we should be doing something else.