Another read worth seeing over at Heather Elder’s Blog.  It’s the answer to her open letter from last week.

Dear Rep. – An open letter from an art producer

Heather Elder

Heather Elder has an impressive group of photographers in her care; most notably (to me at least) is Andy Anderson. Her site is worth a visit just to look at her stable of photographers.

However, here are short segments from her post – you must go to her site to read the good stuff, sorry.

1. When you ask me what our budget is, usually I don’t have access to that info, or I’m given a number that needs to include so much more:
2. Personally, I don’t kiss and tell, er– divulge who folks are bidding against, until after the job has been awarded
3. I try to offer feedback about creative calls, and estimates, when I have time.
4. I will always let you know when I am asking for a third bid, and your photographer has little chance of getting the job.
5. I don’t ever want to be the art buyer you jokingly want to charge each time I  make you triple bid for the hell of it, or revise an estimate 20 times.
6. What kind of art buyer doesn’t tell you that you didn’t get the job?!
7. Are you kidding—portfolio shows are one of the best parts about being stuck inside this cube, and not out on production bossing everyone around!
8. I appreciate the email blasts to alert me who is doing what. Unfortunately, my in box is inundated with them– half are from sub-par talent, and repeating weekly.
9. I wish reps/photographers would market the appropriate audience, once a month or when there’s truly awesome new work.

So now … go here:  Heather Elder Blog to find the context and some other goodies.

I’m screwed. The flight is full. I need to go where I’m going but there are only middle seats. The guy in the middle is in no man’s land and no one wants to be associated with “no man”. Aisle seat gate keepers refuse to look me in the eye. The strategy seems to be: block the entrance with a briefcase.

No man’s land is a term for land that is not occupied or is in dispute between parties that will not occupy it because of fear or uncertainty.

You’re fighting for real estate with no ability to define your space. There are no clear boundaries; no arm rests dedicated to your seat. Action appears to be at the fringes but the fringes aren’t accessible on your boarding pass; you’re a middle seat guy for this trip.

Without a pass one can only play at the fringes for short periods. You can sit on the aisle but if it’s not indicated on the boarding pass you’ll soon get busted back to the middle. In the middle you are unrecognizable, uncomfortable, ignored, assigned token worth, or dismissed out of hand no matter how very good you are.

Some how you need to reserve that aisle seat; get in that exit row with A/B choices.  Ride the middle for a while but if your a traveler and get the middle seat on every trip, I may suggest you use the exit slide. You’ll need to create an authentic story of a fringe player and live it.

Here are some of the famous “middles”:

Middle America is beloved but horribly abused, misunderstood and misquoted.

Middle class is a proud group but one whose definition is unclear and shifty. My father was one and so am I, but there couldn’t be two more different people in the same category.

Middle Management, even the name sounds unimportant. “Hi, I’m a middle manager” – I can’t imaging a greeting more apt to inspire escape. Having been one once, I know what a lonely position this is. You have all the responsibility with none of the position power or ability to directly affect things on the ground.

Middle Name: It’s rarely used and less often recognized as you. Those without one don’t miss it all that much.

The Middle Aged are typically lost in a crisis of neither starting nor finishing. They’re stereotypically on a bridge to nowhere, upset by their aimlessness while lamenting dreams unfulfilled.

Middle of the Road has a firm reputation for boredom and a dead lock on the inadequately mundane result.

Middle Ground is impossible to defend, but then, no one will attack you anyway since you have nothing remarkable to offer. Well, that is unless you are in the way of some fringe element trying to cross your path.

Middle Passage: Synonymous with death to would be slaves. At the very best it meant months of torture followed by a lifetime of servitude.

The Middle Man is always in danger of being squeezed out; Rumored as worthless. There is even a word for eliminating him: Disintermediation [an economic term for cutting out intermediaries] and is considered a method for gaining efficiencies.

Middle Child: There is a syndrome attached to this position, one defined by a sense of not belonging. Need I say more?

Middle Urinal: As the middle airline seat is to travel, it’s the last resort for queued personal relief. There is an instant calculation upon entering a men’s room: “Which of the remaining spots is least likely to attract a neighbor?”

Everyone should know Seth Godin – there is no disputing he’s perpetually reserving an aisle seat.  If you haven’t seen his presentation from 2003 you must view it. If you have it’s worth a revisit – I’ve viewed it half a dozen times at least.  It’s seven years old but will remain fresh in seven more, with the possible exception of the Hummer – it may not be here but the message is still dead on accurate. He speaks of the middle brilliantly and is guaranteed to make you laugh.

When was the last time you surprised yourself creatively?

I recall a conversation with my Dad when I was 18; I simply couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to go to night clubs with friends because as I said then, “you never know what’s going to happen”.  His answer, “I think that’s just youth son, night club surprises don’t come frequently enough for me anymore.”

It’s no surprise that I’m not flummoxed by this as I was.  The scarcity of surprises increases with experience, or perhaps it’s a more accurate notion that surprises so abundant  progressively cease to surprise.

Which is it, scarcity or abundance? It’s essentially a scarcity shift. It’s as though we reside at the nightclub we once visited for the occasional surprise but now  it feels relatively ordinary as we live with noise and abundance; abundance that has created a shift in surprise scarcity.

I work with very talented groups regularly, but one particular encounter survives in me.  Out of nowhere our client said while viewing the daily images: “it always astounds me how you guys make ordinary things look extraordinary.”  It was true, the concept was potentially boring but not when we were done. We transformed it by tweaking the original concept so it had the likelihood of being extraordinary.

In another time, our finished photo was the scarcity we leveraged; today the finished-photo-value-curve points down.  Neither is a recorded song as valuable as a live performance; it’s hard to make a comfortable living selling your recordings so the performance had better be good.

In general, the scarcity shift is away from creative artifacts and toward creative performance. Can you establish the culture that creates, create the moment worth photographing, stage a performance that affects, or design the product that markets itself? What remains constant is that which begets great fishing not merely fish.

That enigmatic black box once so priceless to the creative supplier no longer serves us well.  No longer hidden behind a curtain, the value is what reliably turns the ordinary into extraordinary surprises.  Adding your value to the process should yield the performance surprises; it surpasses the original artifact expectation.

My point is a tweak away from “exceed expectations” but significantly so.  I believe scarcity is shifting toward those who not only exceed expectations but change the original expectations in surprising ways.  It’s because of new economic – we can find it when we want it -  abundance that the scarcity of extraordinary surprise is shifting upstream to creativity of performance and away from creativity of artifacts.

Kevin McKeon via StrawberryFrog.com

Your product launch offers awareness for its unique value. This accounts for most advertising.  Ok, now we know your product is there; you have my attention, educate me. It’s been repeated 1000 + times: “nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.” But I’ll change it a little for the internet age: “nothing kills a product like a bad product.”

There. I’ve summed up conventional advertising in one paragraph, and brought it into the crowded, abundant, consumer centric internet years. Now it’s all about ME, keep your damn interruption marketing to yourself, I’ll find you when I want something you got. Unless ….

Unless you give me something authentic of real value for free, like say … social equity? I’m my own broadcaster on the social network and I want social media love. I want to be the guy for whom others create a “bring back [your name here]” fan page if I disappear for a while.

With infinite choice comes a need to embed your product  into culture. If you’re really successful you become the culture, like #43 is to NASCAR. Hint: Start with quality.

In my campaign I’m going to give away personal brand equity – touch my brand and your perceived social value goes up in your tribe.  Touch my quality and you are quality – nice!   I know you want it – who wouldn’t?

A general guide:
1) Find out why they’re there and want to be associated with your brand?
2) Understand who you’re talking to and contribute to their experience by adding authentic value.
3) Remember that in the new landscape, everything is social – no one likes to be sold to, interrupted, or be the subject of a marketing prank.
4) And – now here’s the hard part – keep the social equity your giving prospects immersed in yours.

Repeat after me: real value, authentic value, social value.  Additionally, remember that the value is for your tribal prospect, not you.  In my tribe people come over to eat, not watch YOU eat, and they’re proud to have eaten my food.  Build personal brand equity for participants, immerse your brand into the culture to build advocacy within the tribe, and – if possible – add material reward that is portable all while generating real social brand equity for individual tribe members.

Fast Company Magazine has a nice simple article describing what successful and not so successful brands are doing to create advocates. “Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency” by Ben Paynter

1) Advocates Trump Followers
2) Context Matters
3) Not Every Brand Should Be Social
4) Social Tools are a Means Not an End
5) Gimmicks Marginalize Trust

Embedded is a short video with boutique ad agency, Strawberry Frog’s Executive Creative Director Kevin McKeon explaining why he considers everything they do to be social.

StrawberryFrog Creative Director: “I Consider Everything We D… – The funniest videos clips are here

Presented by AIGA Raleigh and PermissionToSuck.com

Recorded Version Online April 20, Eastern Daylight Time (USA)

The event will be held on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm (EDT) at Burns Auditorium in Kamphoefner Hall, NC State College of Design, Boney Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605

Sean Adams

[via AIGA Raleigh]
Join us for an evening of insight and inspiration with Sean Adams, as he discusses the evolution of the AdamsMorioka brand. He will talk in depth about their self-promotion practices and how that relates to business.

As he describes it, “This will be a frank and honest discussion answering some of the questions I’ve heard over the years. How did we start? Is it true we’re media whores? If so, how did we do it? How do we decide what to work on? Has Noreen ever abused me? And any other question you may have, but would be afraid to ask.”

Sean Adams has been recognized by every major competition and publication — from Communication Arts and Graphis to AIGA and the New York Art Director’s Club.

AdamsMorioka has been exhibited often including a solo exhibition at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sean is President ex officio and past national board member of AIGA, and President ex officio of AIGA Los Angeles. He teaches at Art Center College of Design, is a frequent lecturer and competition judge internationally, and has been cited as one of the 40 most important people shaping design internationally in the ID40.

For further details go to the AIGA Raleigh website.

“… the artists, idea merchants and marketers that are having the most success are ignoring those that would rubberneck and drive on, focusing instead on cadres of fans that matter.”  [via Seth Godin]

The entire post focuses on our “drive by” short attention span culture and how more and more content producers and companies are pandering to statistics that are so readily available online.  It’s easy to follow stats and change content to raise the number of visitors.

His point is an important one for Creative Professionals who wring their hands during tough economic times.  Our culture is getting faster and more shallow but in agreement with Seth Godin, those people successful in changing minds and moving culture generally don’t follow suit.

“In the race between ‘who’ and ‘how many’, who usually wins–if action is your goal. Find the right people, those that are willing to listen to what you have to say, and ignore the masses that are just going to race on, unchanged.”        [via Seth Godin]

In an oddly unrelated but relevant post, Edward Boches at Creativity_Unbound asks these questions: “So what is abundance doing to brand consistency? Will the proliferation of user-generated content make it unachievable? Does it even matter? “

My take is that by “abundance” he, and others in the social media space, are referring to the consumer’s ability to find and have whatever they want, whenever they want, and many times for free or near free.  Edward’s post brings with it some great points regarding brand and consistency.

My thought is that brand is not your logo mark, packaging, or ad design but is and always has been what you do and how you do it.  Great branding happens when you do everything else right, that is, everything your customer interacts with across all aspects of your product and services.  Great branding is about you and the deep relationship you create with the customers you have.  Design matters but brand control is not found in how you package your product but in the product itself.

Read more from Edward Boches here.

If one more person relates the K.I.S.S. principle like it’s a revelation I swear I’ll throw them in the middle of Time Square at rush hour and yell: “OK Smart-ass keep THAT simple.” Nearly impossible, Jason Fried would  do it.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37 signals, an open source web application company specializing in cloud computing. Their website from the late 90’s was super simple – small dots of navigation on an all white field if I accurately recall; the forefront of usability.

Contrasting a venture funded company to a self funded company, in another part of the Big Think interview, Fried points to the opening goal of the former is to spend while the latter is to make money. The skill set and priorities are straightforward from the start when self funded but more to the point, I think options are fewer; opportunities tend to be more focused when funds must be earned before spent.  Avoid the complex whenever possible.

Overwhelmed by big ideas, his advice for entrepreneurs is equally as valid for artists, writers, photographers or musicians – have a big idea, cut it in half. It’s easy to get beleaguered which – still easier – leads to half the excitement, half the message getting lost, or half your effort being wasted.  Do the small things well, make the smallest thing fresh and new, succeed at the basics and you’ve made a difference.

Jason Fried [via BigThink.com]
Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, the Chicago-based web-application company. He has co-authored all of 37signals’ books, including the upcoming, “Rework,” as well as the ‘minimalist manifesto,’ “Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application” He also helps to maintain the company’s popular blog, Signal vs. Noise, and is regularly invited to speak around the world on entrepreneurship, design, management, and software.

[via 2009 Creativity 50]

Saying goodbye to bloat is at the heart of 37signals, a software company that has raised eyebrows in the business world for its products—and philosophies—promoting efficiency in the workplace. Driving all this is the company’s principled and often outspoken CEO Jason Fried. His nine-year-old web-design-turned-software company has maintained a steadfast insistence on core principles of flexibility and simplicity, embodied in its manifesto, a 37-point straight talk about web design. Fried later elaborated on those ideals in a full-fledged tome on efficient application-building, Getting Real.

Just in case you were wondering about my opinion, Volkswagen is the ad winner – for my money (not that it has anything to do with my money) – of the 2010 Superbowl spots and here’s why:

1. It is centered around the brand showing its depth and breadth and not simply a funny spot where you remember nothing about the product.
2. It reminds their primary target how VW is immersed in our culture and renews an old road game; nostalgia is a powerful draw.
3. The slapstick keeps our attention and makes us laugh
4. Makes us tell stories among ourselves and enhances our love for the brand even if we’ve never owned one.
5. The spot was crafted well enough to make us want to test drive a VW; the cars looked beautiful.
6. The payoff was gratifying with Stevie Wonder and Tracy Morgan; two beloved celebrities.
7. The campaign is easily integrated across all media; its story is easy to share on Social Media and at the Water Cooler.
8. It has legs: visit Sluggy Patterson on Twitter and Posterous.

I can go on but you get the point.  Add to its draw is the fact it was superb among many awful ads we had to sit through this year.  My second choice was the Google’s Love Story ad but I’m still trying to figure out why they bothered, what did they gain exactly?

Go here for the video of Sluggy’s story and here for Punch Dub the game and on FaceBook here.

[update] Barbara Lippert’s Critique in Adweek gave the nod to Google and mentioned Betty White and the Snickers Spot. Both are solid in my opinion but Google on TV seemed gratuitous and without purpose; exactly what were they expecting, more awareness or increased user-ship? The Betty White/Snickers spot was a solid pick but we’ll remember their clever casting of Betty White and Abe Vigota before we’ll recall the brand name; it wasn’t “of the brand” the way the VW spot is.  Both spots – Snickers’ and Google’s – are more limited than “Punch Dub” in their integration across media channels as well.

FYI – Here’s how Stevie Wonder knows it’s a “Red One”.

Full Credits

Agency: Deutsch, Los Angeles

Client: Volkswagen

Director: Frank Todaro

Production Company: Moxie

When turning pleasurable pursuits into a profession there needs to be barriers to entry or exceptional value that adds economic scarcity; conceivably risk, distinctive talent or financial investment.  This is permanently true.   Your value-add – if not unique – requires higher risk, or supplementary resources, or less pleasure if your unwilling to settle for lower (or no) compensation.

In the 80 / 20 hay day [the 80% worth consuming is produced by 20% of the talent], creative professionals would rely on institutions like the recording industry, art galleries or advertising agencies to organize creative output.  Our institutions filtered talent, packaged product, controlled access and provided distribution.  Groups were organized, consumers and producers kept separate, and chaos avoided.

Lately, creative professionals are suffering the heartbreak of  fading uniqueness and coping with pressures to add value in other ways.  Clay Shirky gave his first TED talk in 2005.  His institution v. collaboration presentation must have appeared abstract to more listeners then than now, nevertheless, Clay’s talk hasn’t faded in value for those of us trying to recover our bearings in a once familiar profession.

The chaos of coordinated groups without institutional control is just beginning.  Creative professionals are faced with a massive increase in expressive capability beyond that of the printing press, telephone, recorded media (photos, sound) or broadcast (TV, Radio).  Consider this a call to discover new uses for the new connective media; acceptance is an imperative.

Photographers will find Clay Shirky’s example of Flickr particularly familiar. You can find Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody here.

(via Wikipedia)

Clay Shirky (born 1964^[1]) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University‘s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.^[2]

He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client-server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the U.S. Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation and the BBC.

Many of us are heartbroken.  We love artifacts of design: the photo, the logo, the brochure, the packaging.  As uncomfortable as change feels, our economy has moved away from industry or information and into ideas.  Design thinking will replace designing artifacts as the focus of our creative institutions.

Designers are moving upstream or risk being mistaken for floating fish.  It may be time to stop promoting objet d’art and rediscover our value to both emerging and evolving companies.

Fast competition makes you question who you’re going to be next.  Disruptive ideas with smart clear design thinking helps us with answers and understanding; it goes beyond the artifact but nonetheless tells a compelling story with real value to courageous forward leaning companies bent on survival.   - Bruce DeBoer

In part I of the interview for PermissionToSuck.com, David Burney begins to explain how he thinks design is changing.

Biography (via NEW KIND website)

David has nearly 30 years experience building and leading creative services organizations. Most recently, David served for 4 1/2 years as Vice President of Brand Communications and Design at Red Hat—one of the most disruptive technology brands in the world. David led the company’s overall brand communications strategy, including all creative communications functions.

Prior to Red Hat, David was the owner of Burney Design, partner and Chief Creative Officer at Capstrat, and Chief Designer at the NC Museum of Art.

In addition to serving as Red Hat’s brand executive, David also created an internal innovation program to drive the power of design thinking throughout the company. The program fast became an integral part of quarterly executive meetings. It was subsequently leveraged across the company worldwide to create departmental and individual goals that align with annual corporate business objectives.

David is an active and long-time member of AIGA, the professional association for design. He was a founding member of the Raleigh chapter where he has served as President. He has also served as the Chair of the National President’s Council.