When’s a Good Time to Start a Business?

If you want to know my thoughts, check out the piece I wrote for IdeaCafe.

Designed to Fail

Yesterday, I was talking to a new employee about failure and risk taking, and the point I was making was that while it’s true that failure proceeds success, there’s a certain kind of failure that I can live with and a certain kind I cannot.

And I used a crazy metaphor to explain it.  So crazy, I thought it just might be worth writing about…

Suppose your goal were to climb onto the roof of the two story apartment building next to the Goldstar office in stately Pasadena, California, and a convenient, obvious solution (like a staircase) didn’t already exist.  Suppose further that you came up with these two solutions:

1.  Stale bread sticks and shellac.  The bread sticks are pretty thick and if we put them together with shellac, we can form a ladder that could hold one of our lighter team members, and up we go.  It sounds crazy, and we don’t know enough to say whether or not it WILL work, but we know that it COULD work.

2.  A 6 foot ladder.  Well, since the roof is two stories, that’s about 20 feet, so the six foot ladder simply CANNOT work.  It’s a solution that is designed to fail.

In other words, I can live with failures where what we try COULD HAVE WORKED, but ultimately didn’t because of something we didn’t understand fully.  I can’t really abide by failures where the solution never stood a chance because it was designed to fail, like our six foot ladder.

A good test is one where we don’t know if it WILL work, but we know that it could, if some of our guesses hold up.   A bad test is one that is doomed from the start.  If your online banner ad campaign needs a 2% click through rate to get the ROI you want, it CANNOT work.  If, like the concert industry, your business model starts with a fixed expense (in their case, legacy artist guarantees) that make the business fundamentally unprofitable, in the long run, it CANNOT work.  If your server has a maximum capacity of 50 concurrent users and you’re putting it in front of a demo that may have 100 people using it at once, it CANNOT work.  You could have done your ‘test’ on these things on your whiteboard, for free, in five minutes to see that they can’t get where they need to get.

So, yes, fail, but do so in service of learning if something that COULD work actually DOES work.   You don’t need to climb it to know that a six foot ladder will never get you 20 feet up.

American Idiot and the New Meaning of Rebellion

As I multiple posted and tweeted, I saw the premiere of American Idiot in Los Angeles last night at the fabulous Ahmanson Theatre, and it was well worth the trip.  Really very easy to enjoy, probably especially if you’re a Green Day fan, and there are certainly plenty of those.

A couple interesting things popped into my head watching last night though.  First, I recalled this article from a couple years ago about our friend Jordan Roth, who brought Idiot to Broadway.  It was about how Jordan was bringing this new attitude toward content to the stage.  Wait, what am I saying?  Not to the stage!  To the whole theatre!  Here’s the part I recalled:

“Meeting with the Idiot creative team as the show was preparing to move into the St. James, he did not blanch when Christine Jones, the set designer, outlined her plan to “American Idiot-ify” the theater’s posh architecture. In fact, it was his idea, and her talk of transforming the public spaces into an ad hoc club with VIP rooms and photo booths elicited oohs, exclamations of “nuh-uh,” and fusillades of prayerful hand-claps. “That’s really hot!”—Roth’s highest compliment—was reserved for her idea of covering the lobby’s Venetian plaster with paint and wallpaper that theatergoers could scrawl on with chalk and Sharpies. Though this later led one chat-room habitué to write, “Thanks, producers, for making the St. James a slum,” Roth is determined to “remake the theater” in all senses. After Jones asked about the sign at the bar forbidding patrons to carry food or drinks into the auditorium, he said, in keeping with Jujamcyn’s new policy, “Let’s take that down. It will never be true again.””

On tour, of course, that same overall atmosphere doesn’t travel, but Jordan’s idea about ‘storytelling not stopping at the proscenium’ is a point that I remembered and that I always want you out there to remember.  It is perhaps the key to the healthy evolution of live entertainment in the 21st century.

The second thing about the show that struck me is that even though it’s pitched as a “young person’s” show, it’s really not.  Billy Joe and the rest of the Green Day gang are my age, more or less, and while we’re not old, we’re not 25 either.  In many ways, Idiot is a show not about millennials, but about Gen X’ers.  The MTV style quick cut TV imagery in the background was the zeitgeist of OUR youth, not today’s youth.  The idea of 50 TV screens on stage showing the endless flow of crazy babble from cable TV is an idea rooted in 1994, not 2012.  The zeitgeist of today’s people in their 20s is not owning a TV at all.

That’s not really a problem, just an observation.

In a similar fashion, isn’t it interesting that punk rock haircuts remain the eternal symbol of rebellion, without actually changing?  Compare Johnny Rotten in 1977 to Billy Joe a few years back, knowing that the characters on stage of this show are modeled, roughly, on his look:

And of course, Johnny Rotten (Lydon) could quite literally (and may in actual fact be for all I know) the grandfather of the young adults in the production last night.

What’s interesting about this to me is the cultural time warp we seem to be in where the symbols of rebellion themselves do not change.  If you wear a pink mohawk, now or in 1977, we get the message.

Is American Idiot successful at getting younger people into the building?  Yes, it is.  I witnessed it last night.

But it’s worth noting that they were there to hear the music and the message of a band made up not of their peers, age wise, but mine.

I posted a funny thing on facebook the other day (funny to me anyway) that came out of an actual experience of mine, taking my son to a late night rock show put on by one of his friends’ rock bands.  It was the typical wooden stage in a quiet part of town.  They played covers and a few originals.  They weren’t at all bad for eighth graders.

But paraphrasing what I posted, it was this.  If Baby Boomers had gone out late on a Friday night to see a friend’s band, they would have argued with their parents about it and stormed out rebelliously.  Gen Xers would have mumbled “leaving for a while” and walked out, and perhaps their parents would have taken note and said “Ok. Not too late.”

For millennials, it’s “Can you drive me to this concert?” And the parent says “Of course. I’m running the sound board. Should I bring my bass in case Noah can’t make it?”

In fact, there’s a similar moment in the show, where the main character mysteriously gets some money to buy bus tickets to the big city.  He says (paraphrasing), “I robbed my local convenience store to get the money…ok, I stole it from my mom’s dresser…ok, she loaned me the money.”  How big of a punk can you really be if your mom is financing your trip to freedom?

So is American Idiot a rebellion story?  Not really, and maybe it was never supposed to be.  But it does point out for me one of the subtleties about how the culture is changing and serve as a reminder that it’s easy to see visual cliches and make assumptions, but that under those assumptions is something deeper.

“Young people” are the victims of more assumptions about how they are and who they are than anybody when it comes to live entertainment marketing.  Idiot is a nice reminder that those assumptions are almost never safe ones, about anyone.

TEDxBroadway Videos-Session 3

(Session 1 and Session 2 also available.)

We started session 3 with Vince Gassetto, the Principal of Middle School 343 in the Bronx, who brought his whole school to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark a few weeks before. A truly moving moment:

Juan Enriquez, who has appeared on the TED stage several times, talked about the future of the life sciences and the importance of telling the resulting stories well:

Joseph Craig of Entertainment Research and Marketing talks about the demographics of Broadway and a comparison to Las Vegas:

Greg Mosher, formerly director of Lincoln Center, talks about the fallacy of thinking like a turkey the week before Thanksgiving:

And Joe Iconis and his musical family brought the day to a rousing close:

And that was that. A long and rewarding day of presentations!

(Shortcut to Session 1 and Session 2.)

TEDxBroadway Videos-Session 2

(Session 1 and Session 3 also available.)

Session 2 started with Matt Sax bringing us both music and poetry:

Frank Eliason, known to many of you for years as the man behind @comcastcares and now at Citibank, talked about customer service as an affair of the heart:

Kara Larson warned us to be careful when we try to predict the future, in one of the most entertaining talks of the day:

Steve Gullans, venture capitalist, professor, and innovator in multiple fields talked about the future of social media:

Damian Bazadona, President of Situation Interactive, told the group that Broadway is in a talent war that we have to win:

And Barry Khan, the mathematical genius behind dynamic pricing software Qcue talked about collaboration among ticket sellers as a source of future prosperity:

And that’s where Session 2 ended.

(Shortcut to Session 1 and Session 3.)

TEDxBroadway Videos-Session 1

Hear ye! Hear ye!  All the presentations from TEDxBroadway are now available on video.

There were three sessions in the day, and I’m going to create separate posts for each session, starting with Session 1 here.  (Session 2 and Session 3 also available.)

Ken Davenport gave some framing comments for the day:

And we led with Jujamcyn President Jordan Roth, who talked about the true meaning of originality:

And then Randy Weiner, producer of “Sleep No More” in NYC among other unconventional and amazing things, took the stage with some friends:

Patricia Martin then took the stage and created some of the emotional high points of the whole day with her discussion of the Renaissance Generation:

And Session 1 ended with a rousing performance of The Whiskey Song by Joe Iconis and his musical family:

And off we went to the break…

(Shortcut to Session 2 and Session 3.)

You Can’t Kill Demand for a Product by Giving it to More People

Imagine professional basketball as a business that is exactly the same as it is now except that you couldn’t watch a game if you weren’t in the stadium when the game happened.

What would that be like?  Would it make the live product more valuable?  Would the teams suddenly make a fortune charging for tickets, merchandise, food and beverages?

Or would it be a business constantly flirting with financial disaster, looking for ways to “build its audience”?

Bet on the latter.  With live competition alone, the NBA would be a smaller, poorer, less culturally relevant institution.  Chances are, many of the arenas that they play in wouldn’t exist at all.  Why would you build a Staples Center for something a few thousand people turned up to see a few dozen times a year?  You would have no idea who Lebron James was, and for all we know, Lebron James, not ever stumbling across basketball as a child, may have found some other interest, or perhaps he never would have developed an extraordinary talent at all.

But let’s be more optimistic.  Lebron spends hours and hours in the gym, getting good at a game that has a passionate, niche following.  There are plenty of  ”basketball geeks” who can hardly go a night without going out to the gym and seeing whatever teams are coming through town.  After a win, Thomas Cott, editor of You’ve Cott Game, a popular daily collection of links to stories around the web about basketball, emails Lebron to ask him what keeps him motivated.

“Obviously, you don’t get into professional basketball for the money,” Lebron writes.  ”We do it for the love of the game.”

Absurd?

If the NBA only had live revenue, it would be a marginal business instead of a multi-billion dollar enterprise.  Not only would it be smaller because it only had the live product, but the live product would be smaller than it is now.

What makes me think that?  Because every other way in which the NBA can be consumed drives interest in, the consumption of and the value of the live product.  How do I know I want to be in the arena for Game 7 of the finals?  Because I see so much great basketball on TV that I want to get the premium version of that experience whenever it’s possible for me.

But this isn’t a piece about the NBA.  It’s about theatre and the performing arts.  Thomas Cott (the real one, not the basketball one above) sent out a fascinating set of links today about an issue that’s been on my mind lately: the broadcasting of theatre and other performances.  Furtive moves are being made in the direction of broadcasting plays and shows, but there’s a fear that by doing so, the value of the live experience will be lessened.

History does not suggest that this is the case.  At one time, musicians thought records would destroy the value of live performance, but they didn’t.  Then, record makers thought radio would destroy the value of records, but they didn’t. Movie theatres thought VCRs would destroy movie sales, but they didn’t.  In all of those cases, and many others, the greater and more freely available access to these products made people want them more.

Go back to the basketball example.  If the NBA didn’t exist  and it were being started today, would TV be an important part of the business plan?  How about downloadable content on the Internet?

Because the ability to open up multiple ways for people to get access to the same content has two magical benefits:

1.  The extra revenue means you can invest more in the product and the people making the product, and

2. More, maybe millions more, become aware of how great your product is.

So in my view, starting now, but developing in years to come, theatre and performing arts venues should find ways of making the content available in multiple ways.  Forget about “protecting the business model.” The history of business shows us that the main danger is in missing the opportunity by protecting the business model too much.  The recorded music business finally did lose value because instead of finding a way to use and profit from file sharing, that business fought it, badly and clumsily.  And the result was Napster, and the legacy of Napster is that it’s pretty darn hard to sell recorded music.

Is there a Napster lurking in theatre’s future?  I don’t think so.  The dynamics are different.  The four walls of the building can be used as a firewall of sorts, but the cost of using them as a fire wall is that those walls could become a cultural prison.  In the end, it looks like a permanent state of flirting with irrelevance, insolvency and decline.

And really, what fun is that?

So here’s the challenge to a generation of entrepreneurs in theatre and the performing arts: find ways to distribute the content to as many people as possible, as easily as possible.  Build that fan base, create those secondary revenue streams to create the profitability that allows a virtuous cycle of building on success.

It can be done.  The NBA wasn’t always the NBA as we know it now.  As late as 1980, some playoff games had no TV broadcast at all.  Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point scoring game wasn’t even filmed.

Sound crazy?

Yes it does, but it’s worth stopping to reflect that great performances happen outside of basketball arenas too.  Quite a number of memorable moments, lost forever like Chamberlain’s 100, happen on stages every night, serving no one’s best interest.

TEDxBroadway 2012 Reflections

It’s been a few days, but I’ve been traveling, recovering, and handling all the stuff that went to the back burner in the run up to the event.  Since last Monday in New York, I’ve had plenty of time to think about TEDxBroadway 2012, and I’m finally sharing those thoughts here.

My bottom line is this: it was a great day.  We achieved our primary goal with flying colors, which was to have a Broadway conference unlike anything else anyone had ever seen.  The theme (“What’s the Best Broadway Can be in 20 Years?”) was designed to get people thinking big and in broad strokes, and that’s what we got.  I loved, loved, loved the crowd and the energy you all provided through the course of the day, and of course, the speakers and supporting companies were huge heroes in getting this thing off the ground too.

Nevertheless, there were pros and cons to the day.  There were things I loved and things I didn’t exactly totally love, so let’s talk about both.

I loved the speakers.  We asked some really interesting people to do something very difficult, which is to go onstage and try to say something about a world that doesn’t exist yet.  By and large, I thought the content was very good and nicely varied between insiders and outsiders to the topic of Broadway.    Some of the presentations were truly exceptional, and more people will get to enjoy them when they go online later this month.  Next time around, we’ll start earlier and focus even more intensely on identification, selection and curation of outstanding talks from a really wide array of interesting people.  Although this was a big focus this year, we lost some opportunities to have some really interesting people on stage because we didn’t give it enough time, so next time around, that will be different.  I can’t mention any names there, but trust me, it’s a shame we lost a few of our speakers.

I loved the music!

I loved the location.  The New World Stages is an ideal setting for something like this because it’s a top quality performance venue and because the whole place is built with social spaces and functions like ours in mind.  The staff there is absolutely terrific as well.  I read a comment that it was ironic that TEDxBroadway was in an off-Broadway house and speculating that it was a cost issue, but nothing could be further from the truth.  We weren’t doing TEDxBroadwayHouses.  We were doing TEDxBroadway, the neighborhood in Midtown, and that includes all of it.  NWS was our first choice, bar none.

Like I said, I loved the crowd.  Not only was the place  packed, but the energy and appreciation of the crowd was great.  TEDx events aren’t for everyone and they’re not typical conferences.  As a multi-year TED attendee, my goal was to bring as TED-like an experience to this TEDx event as possible, and that’s less about taking on specific issues that are going to help you be 3% more efficient this year and more about broadening minds.  On the whole, I felt the group that gathered really understood and relished that.  I saw a lot of people who are eager to think in terms of designing the future rather than assuming that we’re fated to continuing the present, but with better iPhones.

I loved the coverage of the event.  This thing got talked about everywhere!  We’re delighted by the interest and hope that it translates into more and more people thinking about the issues the event was designed to raise.

I also loved the fact that we’ve got the germ of a community to keep this conversation going in a number of ways.  I can’t say anything much about that right now, but in weeks to come, I hope to.  People have been raising their hands to help since the event, and that’s very exciting.

We had a couple of logistical hitches, but given it was our first time out, I thought we handled them just fine and they didn’t put a major dent in the day.  I also wish we had gotten to show you some of the great TED talks we had chosen, so I’ll post those later in some place where people can see them.

Finally, I loved the amazing work of the people on the Situation Interactive, Davenport and Goldstar teams.  As I said on the stage, everybody working on putting this thing together also has a full-time job, but still managed to deliver a great event that I know is changing perspectives and influencing minds, based on the feedback that I’m getting from all over the place.  There was a ton of work getting this show together, and my metaphorical hat is off to the people who made that happen.

See you in 2013 or sooner!

A Vast Churning River of Hoary Old Cliches? Do Tell, Trevor

Once again, I’m happy to have Trevor O’Donnell, an arts & entertainment consultant who’s developed successful marketing/sales initiatives for Disney Theatrical Productions, Cameron Mackintosh, Cirque du Soleil and many others, as a guest poster on Live 2.0.  He’s got a new book that’s just out, Marketing the Arts to Death: How Lazy Language is Killing Culture, and he’s been kind enough to share a excerpt with us here.  With no further delay, Trevor O’Donnell, ladies and gentlemen.

A Vast Churning River of Hoary Old Cliches

When I do copywriting workshops for arts pros, I always make a point of asking the group this question: “How many of you have ever used the word ‘celebrate’ in a promotional campaign?” And invariably every person in the room raises a hand.

Then I ask: “Would anyone care to describe the strategic thinking that went into choosing the word ‘celebrate’?” And all the hands quickly drop down again.

Yet I press on.

“When you suggest that people celebrate, what exactly are you asking them to do? How does that word work in the message you’re crafting? What happens in the minds of potential patrons who read or hear the word? Can anyone describe a rational causal connection between use of the word ‘celebrate’ and a customer’s impetus to get up off the couch and buy a ticket?”

Of course they can’t. There isn’t a connection. The closest they can come is to say, “It creates a sense of excitement around the product,” which in itself raises a host of interesting questions: “Does it really? How do you know that? On what evidence are you basing that assertion? Who gets excited? Why? And even if they do get excited because you told them to celebrate (which is doubtful), what’s the causal link between the sense of excitement and the thing the customer must do in order for ‘celebrate’ to achieve its intended effect?” And finally, “Did using the word ‘celebrate’ motivate people to buy, or would any similarly upbeat but unintentional copy choice have achieved the same result?”

Crickets…

No, dear friends, “celebrate” is not a strategic messaging choice; it’s fluff. It’s the sort of automatic language arts pros use when we don’t know what else to say or when we haven’t bothered to ask what needs to be said. It’s a benign, innocuous, reasonably friendly but ultimately inane substitute for strategic communication.

And “celebrate” is by no means alone. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of similar expressions and images floating around the arts marketing lexicon. These quaint, comfortable, stale but handy helpmates surface repeatedly in various guises then sink away only to pop up later in someone else’s season campaign. Given how little original material actually makes it into the canon, it’s not entirely unfair to describe the history of arts marketing as a vast churning river of hoary old clichés.

If you’ve ever used an artsy pun, a Shakespeare quote, a shot of a tuxedoed performer, the word “experience” as a directive (i.e. “experience the magic”), the phrase “set against the backdrop” or the word “anniversary” in a marketing campaign, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

“But, Trev, isn’t this what arts marketing is? We’ve always done it this way. We use these words and images because they describe what we’re selling. And don’t we have to be eye-catching — or at least interesting? I mean, is it really so bad to speak a comfortable language that our loyal audiences understand?”

No. Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with using overwrought clichés when they work. Back when there were a lot of people who cared about the arts, they worked very well. It didn’t matter much what we said or if we said it in a frivolous, nonsensical or overly cute, coy, clever way as long as we got the information in front of the right people. For a long time, because it didn’t actually have to sell anything, the language of arts marketing was little more than a stylistic device that was there to get attention or dress up information that people were already prepared to respond to.

The question we have to ask today, though, is what happens when those pre-motivated people die and their heirs aren’t sitting around waiting for the next season brochure? What happens if younger fence-sitting audiences don’t understand the language or, worse, do understand it but think it’s goofy or hopelessly out of touch?

That if the language we choose has to do more than just fluff up the message? What if it has to actually convince people that it’s in their interest to buy the product? Can we really afford to keep repeating the same mindless, non-strategic clichés when they’re at best benign and possibly doing more harm than good?

Believe it or not, it is possible to create messages that contain causal links between the language we speak and the action we want to impel. We can choose words and images that work in specific, predetermined, predictable ways to bring about the results we expect. Businesses do it all the time. If we choose to do so in the arts, we can develop language that motivates non-avid audiences to jump off the fence in our direction.