How Does It Sound? Podcast ep. 1

Ladies and Gentlemen,


It's been an exciting and enriching semester. I had a ton of fun in my Radio/Podcasting class and got to produced, edit, and engineer my first (hopefully of many) podcast. Our final project for the class was a 3-segment episode and I decided to tie it into my blog and share some thoughts about where I think music is headed.

Give it a listen.




Want to check out Sara's music? Check out:

• Her BandCamp website
• Her Myspace page
  

Branding Salvation

I learn from those that have come before me.


As an advertising student, I learn from the successes and mistakes of media campaigns in the past. I find inspiration in work that creates new cultures and perspectives while disparaging the copycats. As creative business strategists, we work to understand the primal desires of large groups of people. We study consumers' behaviors and attitudes in order to better understand their needs and desires. After our work is done, we're able to engage with them in the most effective and persuasive way.

Recently, I've found inspiration by looking through history at the most successful campaign of all time: Western Christianity. Though their methodologies today are very different from one another, both modern advertisers and the Catholic Church devote enormous efforts and resources to creating enticing experiences that either unconsciously or well knowingly engender emotional participation and the creation of new cultures. Madison Avenue owes its dues to the Church.

Today, we’re all connected through technology and we learn and grow as one larger community. But before YouTube or Twitter, how did we share original ideas? Way back before the Internet, the telephone, or personal publishing, there was no framework to hang our experiences on and general knowledge was very scarce by today’s standards.

That framework came in part through religious unification in the Western world. In ancient Rome, we can thank Constantine for founding for what would become humanity’s largest and most powerful tool of governance throughout history. After issuing the Nicene Creed in 325 A.D., Constantine and a think tank of religious officials began to lay the groundwork for the Catholic Church by identifying what half of all advertising today spends countless hours and millions of dollars crafting.

We talk in our Account Planning classes about user emotions and buying states. More simply, my fellow Ad students and I comb through culture and media to understand how people feel towards certain ideas and products, and what frame of mind they’re in when making purchasing decisions. As a result, at the root of any Ad campaign is a way to alleviate one of two innate human desires. Modern advertising assumes that either:

A. People will always want more love
Or
B. People will always want more money.

Think back to any commercial you’ve seen, print ad you’ve read, or billboard you’ve driven by. Think about the messaging they’re telling you and try and guess which of the two wants they’re trying to massage.

Viewed from a business perspective, the Catholic Church sits on even footing with today’s corporations. Neither can survive in a social vacuum and both rely exclusively on the patronage and involvement of participants (either customers or believers). Anyone in business understands that humans and cultures are always in a state of flux and thus, the Catholic Church is subject to the same pressure at attracting an ever evolving consumer base and adjusts it's beliefs and practices as dynamically as companies do.

After establishment, the Catholic Church made the strategic decision tackle both: offering a way for their followers to better their lives by finding more love while increasing the Church revenue through monetary donations. By subscribing to their movement, believers were promised eternal love in exchange for exclusive church loyalty. By providing an answer to the human obsession with the afterlife and filling humanity’s oldest market niche, the Catholic Church made a decisive move that has since secured their status as a market leader in the minds of the faithful. In a similar way that millions of technology enthusiasts look to Apple to pave the future of technology, billions of spiritual believers look to the Christian Church to help guide their hearts and minds. After establishment, their user-friendly belief system spread feverishly through concerted and grandiose artistic campaigns, and the Catholic Church began to become recognized as the authority on the afterlife and salvation.



Artistic commissions greased this machine and as more and more impressive works were created, the Church began to earn a commanding status in society. Not far from the Church’s seat of power in Rome, Italian artist Masaccio stunned viewers with his work, the “Holy Trinity” in the Santa Maria Novella church in Florence in 1426-27. Masaccio was a pioneer in his time and by collaborating with architect Brunelleschi, he applied some of the first ideas of perspective into his artistic works.

The use of lines and math to convey three dimensions on a two dimensional surface makes the fresco come to life, and the imagery of Christ’s crucifixion seems almost lifelike in its time. Today, we’re so visually disillusioned that it takes complex computer graphics to impress us. So to imagine that the churchgoers screamed and had to touch its surface to realize the illusion seems laughable.

Nonetheless, Masaccio was the first artist to fully appreciate what advertisers now understand as media environments: the relationship of a physical space to a visual message and how both affect each other. Using mathematical calculations, he integrated the church’s natural light sources into his painting and was recorded to have sat in the church all day before starting, as to observe how natural light moved through the windows over time. Setting the course for modern art directors, Masaccio discovered that it’s not only what we see that convinces us, but also how and where we see it.

An account planner in his day was patron Bishop Bernward from Germany . Bernward fundamentally understood the inclusion of past cultural practices for a strategic goal. By borrowing Roman architectural styles, his commissioned the church of St. Michaels in Hildesheim, Germany built from 1010-1033, which piggybacks onto the Roman reputation of superiority and dominance and exalts church members associated with it. In addition to the clear Roman influences in the arches of the church, St. Michaels attempts to widen its base of appeal by including Islamic zebra striped elements of interior design. By commissioning this church, Bernward combined unlike elements for a completely new and remarkable user experience.

When I sit back and look at art history books alongside Communication Arts magazines, it’s clear that both advertising and organized religion are two diverging tips of the same iceberg. Both groups create persuasive messaging to help establish opinions and grow their group of followers. Either through branded consumer goods or religious iconography, both organizations create social badges (like logos or spiritual symbols) with which people can display their tribal allegiance or group membership. Take a modern day Evangelical and a fanatical Apple user, ask them about their dogma, and you’ll get somewhat similar programmed rhetoric about their beliefs.

Some might read this comparison and reply that the Church isn’t anything like an advertising agency. You might make the case that:

“Churches are straightforward about offering love. Churches aren’t anything like agencies because they’re honest about what they do. Advertisers aren’t.”

Just as there are scandalous or fundamentalist Christian churches that preach hate and discrimination (going against the general reputation of good will and brotherhood), there are countless advertising agencies that dedicate their talents towards preserving the environment, creating material for small non-profits, or advocating social responsibility (against the reputation that ad men are money-driven scoundrels).

“There’s no Buyer’s Remorse with Religion”

The inclusion into smaller intimate social circles is a primal human desire and one that Religion greatly benefits from. However, just like becoming a member of a church can identify you as a part of something greater, in today’s cultural economy, people use consumer goods to a similar effect. In the industry, we call it Tribal Consumerism and we look at how anthropological and psychographic trends can be followed along different brand lines. Simply put, people tend to hang out with other people that buy similar stuff.

Lastly, people often make both sides of the argument that the other is inherently evil and will ultimately cause the demise of humanity. I’m less inclined to believe the sky is falling because while I acknowledge that both groups have been used for dastardly intent in the past, both organizations yield incredible control over a significant percentage of the global population. While organized religion has been used to justify sectarian violence in some groups, it’s also brokered peace and emotional solidarity to others. Likewise, advertising has sold lots of useless junk in the past, but as business continues to drive our society, advertisers and marketers hold the unique power to influence and steer our culture towards environmental stewardship and conscious consumption.

Thus, it seems that both organizations stand at a crossroads. Conventional advertising is failing as old mediums such as print and television are loosing effectiveness. Meanwhile today's Church is reinventing itself for the modern believer, who is exposed to many more competing religions than in years past, and whom also has begun to use commercial goods as a way to establish cultural identity. Advertising and marketing is moving towards an economy of mass customization and religion might stand to take a tip from its former follower.

Perhaps the future of the today's churches revolve around a similar idea, as they find ways to use their expert knowledge to better the lives of individuals instead of entire congregations. Some contest that people don’t need the Church as a go-between with the divine, so perhaps new fortune lies in positioning themselves like spiritual personal trainers: providing a custom tailored way to get emotionally unstuck and help you to discover ideas that you wouldn’t find on your own. After all, the Catholic Church is subject to the same pressure of attracting an ever evolving consumer base as modern companies are, and adjusts it's beliefs and practices as dynamically as modern day brands.

How does that sound?

Sandra Hong Revisited... Live!

More music is coming from the Jackson Street, mega-hit studio.

To ease the heating pressure of final presentations, projects, and papers, Sandra stopped by today for some more music. We're writing/ forming the shape of a song that I wrote this summer, and it's coming together really well. Can't wait to share.

As for now, enjoy the videos below and comment with your thoughts.

Forgive and Forget in the Age of Google

I’ve put things behind me before.

And, after misunderstandings or social blunders with my friends, part of being a higher-level communicator is working through things and starting fresh. We turn over new leaves every day and within our various groups of friends, and are given grace. But it’s harder to forgive and forget when your misunderstandings stare you in the face, and are digitally archived and always accessible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about communication accessibility in the context of friendship building in our digital age. I’ve been thinking about how we connect to each other and how the different mediums of communication (both digital and interpersonal) build friendships in their unique ways. Our human relations are built on interactions and the way that we interact has changed more in the past 5 years than it has in the past 50 years. We text message each other instead of actually talking and hearing each others voice. Emails have replaced letters and postcards and sometimes, I video chat with my friends in the same city, as it’s faster and more convenient then trekking across town for a quick conversation. But having actual face-to-face time is completely different than face-to-screen time (even if the spoken conversation is the same), and thus builds the relationship in a different way.

Think of your friends like onions. Communication theorists Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor are responsible for conceiving the “Social Penetration Theory”. They liken our personalities to onions in depicting our multi-layered personalities and explain that through discourse with each other, we peel away layer after layer of personal information, moving from surface-social facts (like biographical info and cultural preferences) to deeper, more revealing information (ideas of self identity, religious views, deeply held fears). We socialize from the outside inwards.

Think about the day you met your best friend. Chances are you started on the outside first (“Hey, what’s your name”) before delving deeper (“What’s your biggest fear?”). For our own social safety, we let our guards down gradually to stave off humiliation while at the same time figuring out how to interact with someone new on-the-fly. All relationships have life cycles and we tend to ebb and flow between closeness and distance with the people around us. Friendships naturally fizzle out and people tend to move on to make way for new social growth. But what happens when you start to bottle up the sea of communication and save it for later? Does digital discourse make it harder to let go of things and move through the natural life cycle of communication? When we interact through our screens, how does it affect the friendship knowing that both parties could save the discussions for later review? How different is social forgiveness when everything is archived and never forgotten?

One idea that I’m currently working through is how digital communication throws a monkey wrench in this natural life cycle. Like modern embalming, most digital communication is perfectly preserved in our inboxes, so that we can revisit any conversation at the click of a button. As human beings, this makes sense as we tend to hold on to relics from our past to establish cultural identity, show the stripes of our experiences, or simply just to “remember the good ole’ days”. But as we go through the messy misunderstandings that come with friendship building and tuning into each other, Google (and with most other digital communication brokers) sits back and keeps score. In the years to come, are we to be burdened by ghosts of all of our past friendships staring at us from Facebook walls, Inboxes, Chat transcripts, and Twitter conversations?

I wonder about how things have changed, since the times of having a small group of close, in-the-flesh confidants (usually about 2-3) to now having a digital network of 1000+ online friends. Depths of your relationships aside, when everything is saved and squeezed into the same inbox (mixing a long email from your close friend with a mass message about an upcoming party), how do we sort things out? When our communications get muddled, is it harder to prioritize our relationships? Advertising superstar agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky touched this nerve with their “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign last year: Remove 10 friends from Facebook and get a free Whopper from Burger King. When we quantify our friendships digitally, is that what the exchange rate works out to? Gross fast food?

I’m still figuring things out and trying to find the right balance between a digital social life and a physical one. It’s impossible to renounce digital interactions these days, so I think a worthy goal is being conscious of both A) who we're talking to B) how we're talking to them and importantly C) where we're talking to them. I don't want to forget all of my secret handshakes.

How does that sound?

Thanksgiving Caloric Intake ≤ Calories Spent Hiking in the Cascades

I needed a breath of fresh air.

And flying to Eugene, OR for almost a week for Thanksgiving, was exactly that. Lots of good food, beer, friends, and laughs around Zack's house near the University of Oregon campus, where he's currently camped out, working on a PhD in Chemistry. Lots of breath-snatching, stupefying, strenuous hikes through the Cascades made for a complete and successful urban detox; a necessity when living in the bowels of a big city like SF.

Here are some photos from the trip. If you've not yet made you way out in the Pacific Northwest, pack your bags and bring some good hiking shoes.

Less is More

I am savvy.

I surf cultural waves; an insight gather. I am above the tricks and gimmicks of marketing and am the master of my own economic destiny. Rather, I'd like to believe that I am.

In the US, it seems that we're changing evolutionarily. "I think, therefore I Am," has been refunded for "I buy therefore I Am". We use goods and services, brands and commodities to define our role in American culture, sort us into likeminded groups, and express of views. In the age of over-choice, you vote every day with your wallet. At a workshop that I attended last year at Neutron, Marty Neumeier's brand consultancy here in SF, we learned about Tribes, and how people tend to buy goods in groups (for ex: Nike, Apple, and VW and how the same kind of consumer tends to worship all three). But I don't define myself though what I buy. Rather, I'd like to believe that I don't.

I've been saving a pile of foil Yoplait yogurt caps on my counter after breakfast every morning. I don't have any particular loyalty to yogurt brands so I size everything up equally when I shop for breakfast food. Yogurt is full of me-too products (different bands that are all more or less the same) and Yoplait differentiated itself with the age-old philanthropic supplement: giving $0.10 to Breast Cancer Research for every pink foil cap mailed in. From a gimmicky perspective, the strategy is genius. Like any rebate, the promise of money refunded is just persuasive enough to bias consumers, yet the commitment is small enough that it doesn't require any real action to feel satisfied that we got the best deal. As I filled my fridge with pink topped yogurt, I wondered about the data for actual caps refunded versus how many additional units sold due to the marketing strategy. I'd like to believe that I'm being a responsible consumer, earning money for causes that I support through purchases that would ordinarily benefit nobody. But the fact is, after leaving the checkout isle, we rarely follow through.

I'm determined to get Yoplait to make good on their promise of reward for my loyalty. $3.70 total might be minuscule, but it's more a defiant message to marketers to get creative with adding real value to the lives of people. Ironically enough, I've started shaping my view on Advertising by reading some websites detailing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment and a reduction of the importance of material goods. I'm currently trying to brainstorm ideas for how to reduce what we use, keep what we have longer, and be more content with life, while at the same time, creating a way for businesses to engage with people and use their specialized expertise to add value to the greater good. Can companies advocate not buying new things and get rewarded their efforts? I think that as brands become more interactive, personal, and compassionate, I hope to see less manufacturing of wants and desires and more creative ways to enjoy and appreciate what we already have.

Think it's a crazy, counter-intuitive idea? Nobody used to believe that a penny would make any real economic affect until someone discovered the wonders of $0.99.

How's that sound?

Creative Planning

Being in Art School studying advertising, we're not measured in right and wrong so much, as we're taught to focus more on possibility and feasibility.

For those who aren't familiar, in an advertising agency, the account planner acts as the liaison between the creative department and the client, and is responsible (among other things) for the cultural research and strategic planning that directs any given media campaign. Schools like the University of Texas and the Brand Center at Virginia Commonwealth University are pumping out business grounded planners to fill these positions in a more conventional way. But the American business landscape is in serious flux right now and I question the relevance of any marketing education that's taught out of a text book these days, or is framed in a completely left-brained way.

As things change over night in the age of digital commerce, how can one succeed by continuing to subscribe to the religion of Adam Smith? Cameron Maddux (the Associate Director of Account Planning in our Advertising department) is currently experimenting with us to build what he calls "art school planners". By schooling us in things like Art History and Color and Design theory, an Art School planner is used to thinking in colors and culture rather than data and demand curves. We're inspired by stories of societal revolution brought about through artistic expression and are taught to find what makes us passionate and work from there. We find strategic directions in a similar way that painters find the perfect color to convey their message.

We're encouraged to absorb things outside of advertising and business, to go out and experience new cultures and practices. We're pushed by our teachers to go and explore the unknown, to take time away from our work and do interesting things. I think it's important to understand that it's the experiences you have as an individual that builds your personality. Intake life, filter through the Brain's unique wiring, output your worldview. By being in San Francisco, a nexus for interesting personalities and practices, my outlook on life is constantly absorbing, adjusting, reframing, rediscovering. My ideas are frequently a work in progress and often reflect the insane diversity of this city.

A really cool pursuit of design thinking comes from New York City-based art director Justin Gignac. To illustrate the power of package design in framing our judgments about products and goods, he collected street trash to arrange in a well-designed container. People actually buy garbage and feel good about it because of the way it's composed. His second series that I'm impressed by is the "Wants for Sale" series he's done: Screen prints depicting various objects of material lust as well as physical needs, sold for the actual price of the corresponding object. Pretty cool idea, great execution.

I'm wrapping up the semester and continue to learn so much in all of my classes. Two things from this semester that I'm looking forward to exploring on this blog is A) how we live in both the physical world and the digital world through technology, and how our real and digital behaviors are affected and interwoven in the two environments. Another thing that I'm currently outlining (for my final paper in Art History), is how elements of my education in advertising, branding, and strategic planning can be traced back to the world's first modern day ad agency, the Catholic church.

Lots of exciting things being learned out here on the West coast. Can't wait to share.

Here's some of Justin Gignac's work.