THINK SETH GODIN JUST FOUND HIS NEW BOOK

(We are big fans of the writings of Seth Godin. We don’t always agree, but generally speaking Seth’s mind is a well-oiled machine whose output is common sense and smart thinking. Today he posted something that we felt compelled to re-blog simply because we are in complete agreement with everything he says. In fact, we kind of hit upon a similar theme a while back in reference to creativity. And no Seth, we are not accusing you of plagiarism. We will leave that up to our lawyers. We’re kidding! Kidding.)

The hierarchy of success

I think it looks like this:

1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Tactics
6. Execution

We spend all our time on execution. Use this word instead of that one. This web host. That color. This material or that frequency of mailing.

Big news: No one ever succeeded because of execution tactics learned from a Dummies book.

Tactics tell you what to execute. They’re important, but dwarfed by strategy. Strategy determines which tactics might work.

But what’s the point of a strategy if your goals aren’t clear, or contradict?

Which leads the first two, the two we almost never hear about.

Approach determines how you look at the project (or your career). Do you read a lot of books? Ask a lot of questions? Use science and testing or go with your hunches? Are you imperious? A lifehacker? When was the last time you admitted an error and made a dramatic course correction? Most everyone has a style, and if you pick the wrong one, then all the strategy, tactics and execution in the world won’t work nearly as well.

As far as I’m concerned, the most important of all, the top of the hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What’s your bias in dealing with people and problems?

Some more questions:

* How do you deal with failure?
* When will you quit?
* How do you treat competitors?
* What personality are you looking for in the people you hire?
* What’s it like to work for you? Why? Is that a deliberate choice?
* What sort of decisions do you make when no one is looking?

Sure, you can start at the bottom by focusing on execution and credentials. Reading a typical blog (or going to a typical school for 16 years), it seems like that’s what you’re supposed to do. What a waste.

Isn’t it odd that these six questions are so important and yet we almost never talk or write about them?

If the top of the hierarchy is messed up, no amount of brilliant tactics or execution is going to help you at all.

(PS: Put your email in the wee box on Seth’s blog and get his posts sent directly to your mobile device. for free!)

Uncle Seth is right.

Huge fan of The Seth Godin. Read his blog daily. He’s an idea machine. I also love thinking about media and society. and the interplay between the two. he likes thinking about that too.

As he points out in this post, ye olde post-TV cognitive surplus is a bear that has been roused from its slumber. it’s a powerful beast whose behavior is still developing. and one that hasn’t been kind to the post-war forged-by-TV-ads brands whose enjoyed a very symbiotic relationship with the TV and Cable Networks. The Green Giant ain’t so jolly about the internet.

TV really was like a mild sedative on the masses. The hippies were right in that respect! But it wasn’t a grand conspiracy. it was just a unique opportunity to create the biggest audience ever. And profit from the creation of it. TV was where it was at for a very long time. and old habits die hard.

the internet is a very different kettle of fish. it is resoundingly not dependent on advertising for its existence. and in fact it is kind of allergic to advertising. advertising doesn’t really belong there. we have to force our way in.

most brands aren’t cool. they’re functional. nobody cares about them. nobody talks about them. and quite often they come from cultures who may be stuck in the past organizationally too. in a sense the whole operation is predicated upon carpet-bombing their brand into the public consciousness via TV ads. these are the ones that are most adversely affected by the diversion of consumers’ attention away from the TV screen. they’re in a bit of a bind. their cultures quite often militate against doing the right thing in the current media landscape. they are bound by what worked in the very different recent past. but that’s OK! everyone over the age of 15 is in transition mode to some extent. the rate of change has been crazy. let’s not forget that.

Like we have pointed out, the internet is great for selling Irish bagpipes. Seth similarly uses the example of the Best Made Axe company. ultra-niche brands who can now talk to the whole world. they win online. meanwhile nobody cares a fig about the poor not so Jolly Green Giant online. he was a TV creation.

i have worked in the media/ad biz for 20 years now. and i’ve been lucky enough to have been in the eye of the storm for a lot of those years. i worked on big brands with big media budgets. and i got the opportunity to innovate. and i like to think that i took chances whenever i could.

and here’s what it all feels like to me. it feels like i was floating down the mississippi for years and suddenly the river started to get narrower and narrower. and narrower. how many people will read this? maybe 300 in one day. that’s about 80 million less than watches the superbowl. advertising is only as good as the audience that sees it.

I have no media bias except this one. The bigger the audience the better i like it. This post was brought to you by OfficeMax who urge you to check out their great back-to-school deals and unequalled product selection. Thank you!

Seth Godin commented on our blog

You can find it here. And of course the spam filter rejected his comment like a jaded nightclub bouncer in a 1950s movie. “Sure you’re Seth Godin, and I’m Victor Mature. Beat it pal!” So I only just found it yesterday by chance.

Seth commented in reference to a post i did about a post that he did on his blog. Let me be clear. I am a huge Seth fan. bought the books. heard him speak. the man talks a torrent of common sense. and common sense is always in short supply. I subscribe to his email list. which is how i came across this post. in it seth disses the very notion of somebody being able create a viral sensation. which, to me, is like discounting the possibility of having a string of hit movies. in other words, it’s not easy but that isn’t to say that it can’t be done. and i took issue with that in my counter-point blog post to his blog post.

telling a creative person that they can’t do something was bound to get my dander up. but as long as i’ve been in advertising i’ve been creating videos that seem to tickle the public’s fancy. i think mostly because that is exactly my goal at all times. and i have put enormous energy into doing it. and one thing i’ve noticed over the years is that there is a tendency out there among some to disbelieve that that I, and quite a few others, can in fact summon up a hit commercial at will. simply because they cannot imagine it, it must not be possible. I have actually had people tell me flat out to my face that it’s not possible and it’s all a fluke and…you get the drift.

i will now share with you Seth’s original post, my rebuttal, his comment and my reply.
And leave it to you to decide if i was being snarky or not.

(seth’s original post)
Making commercials for the web

TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media.

The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.

Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.

1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.

2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground.

Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.

3. Length doesn’t matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?

4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching.

Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.

Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content… anything for an eyeball.

Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can’t. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.

The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.

(my counter-blog post)
Seth Godin hasn’t made a lot of videos
April 28, 2009 · 6 Comments

From a recent post (i subscribe to his email list) it’s obvious that the Great Domed One hasn’t shot a lot of film. Not that this stops him from telling people how to do it. I love that about internet ad guru types. Never let not actually having experience of doing something hold you back from holding forth on it.

Let me tell you how to create viral video. First, spend years studying what people like and don’t like and what works. Then spend years shooting a TON of all sorts of things to learn the art of film-making. Because film is a very executional medium. It’s art. And art is hard.

There is no short cut to great content. Unless you happen to have a lion somewhere that you raised as a cub and that’s just dying to be reunited with you years later. like now. or you happen to have a sneezing panda in your basement.

There’s an old cowboy saying: never mistake a clear view for a short distance. just because you’ve watched a lot of video doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at creating it.

Here’s my tip: hire someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

(seth’s comment on my post)

6 responses so far ↓

*

Seth Godin // April 28, 2009 at 7:50 pm | Reply (edit)

That was a pretty snarky post, I think, and undeserved. Of course it’s important to hire people who know what they’re doing. And tell them what, precisely? Tell them to shoot you a TV commercial? No, that won’t work. Tell them to make you a commercial just like Numa Numa? Won’t work… it’s been done.

Being a client is just as difficult as being a creative or a director. Lousy executive producers ruin as many movies as lousy directors, right?

Be well. Sorry that I annoyed you.

(and, finally, my reply to his comment)

Seth,

your comment got snagged in my spam filter for some reason. it couldn’t believe it was actually you i guess. sorry about that.

i don’t think my post was snarky. irate perhaps.

i remember your post rubbed me the wrong way because i know what you’re saying to be untrue.
you’re saying something isn’t possible just because you can’t imagine it to be so.

“Tell them to make you a commercial just like Numa Numa? Won’t work… it’s been done.”

You mean it’s been tried and been a miserable failure a million times? Yeah it has. So what? that doesn’t mean it CAN’T be done. and i would argue strongly that experience is invaluable here. but of course if you have no concept of success in this area i can see how you might have difficulty imagining it.

but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

(end of comments)

So, you tell me. who’s being snarky and who is right? as much as i respect seth i respect actual experience of what you’re talking about more.

Seth Godin hasn’t made a lot of videos

From a recent post (i subscribe to his email list) it’s obvious that the Great Domed One hasn’t shot a lot of film. Not that this stops him from telling people how to do it. I love that about internet ad guru types. Never let not actually having experience of doing something hold you back from holding forth on it.

Let me tell you how to create viral video. First, spend years studying what people like and don’t like and what works. Then spend years shooting a TON of all sorts of things to learn the art of film-making. Because film is a very executional medium. It’s art. And art is hard.

There is no short cut to great content. Unless you happen to have a lion somewhere that you raised as a cub and that’s just dying to be reunited with you years later. like now. or you happen to have a sneezing panda in your basement.

There’s an old cowboy saying: never mistake a clear view for a short distance. just because you’ve watched a lot of video doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at creating it.

Here’s my tip: hire someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

Seth Godin tells it like it is

once again, we are in complete agreement with the great domed one.

not every medium is suited to advertising. and anyone who has any experience of actually * trying to harness the internet for advertising purposes knows that while it has created exciting new opportunities, it does not rely on advertising for its existence.

and anyone who has worked in the traditional media knows that, creatively, not all media are equal. TV for example is a much better medium than radio. you can show and demonstrate things. you can create exciting little films.

so while facebook attracts a huge crowd, there isn’t much opportunity to create a meaningful brand experience. how many of banner ads on facebook have you clicked on? exactly. does anyone get excited about the prospect of creating a banner ad for facebook? exactly.

now we are not ruling out someone potentially conquering the world via a facebook app or banner ad, and ideally it would be us! but we aren’t holding our breath for it.

check out Seth’s brilliant post.

*as opposed to just blogging about it. winking smiley face.

Seth Godin, please stop ripping off our blog!

It’s exciting really. (And no, we don’t really think The Great Domed One reads this blog, much less rips it off. we’re not that delusional) But, in his latest post on his blog, Seth (as we’d like to call him) makes the point that nobody owns the internet and that it doesn’t depend on advertising for its existence. So consequently, marketers can’t just bend it to their will. A point we made on this very blog just months ago. It was one of our first posts.

Good to know we’re not alone in our thinking. Great minds think alike etc.

You know what this means, don’t you? It means our blog is just as good as Seth’s, if not better, and that his readership should all just migrate here en masse.