Cherub is Go
Episode one of Cherub: The Vampire With Bunny Slippers, Season 2 is now up and available at Caution Zero.
Check it out. It’s a goodun.
c
And Scene
Just finished up a lovely 20 minute conversation with Lisa Haneberg of the Management Craft blog. We chatted about focus, yoga, choice and how to defeat self doubt and the empty page syndrome.
Lisa will be carving our little conversation into a podcast sometime after 7/4. Watch this space for details.
That’s one smart doctor
Over on the Biznik blog, naturopathic doctor Hannah Albert just put up one heck of a post about intimacy in business.
And she quotes me. So that’s kind of cool.
Check it out: Intimacy in Business.
Losing by Winning OR “What you gonna do with all that junk?”
Ugh. There’s nothing quite like waking up to find an overflowing crate of chatty plastic parrots, erotic board games, horribly ugly action figures and dangerous and sharp bits of industrial metal sitting square in the middle of your living room.
Except for maybe tripping over said crate and having to remember how you got it in the first place.
Friday night Megan Groves and I went down to the home of Beth Yockey and Scott Jones for a rousing night of “Junk Poker”–which can be quickly summed up as “Poker where you really, really want to lose.”
I packed up a duffel bag with a bunch of stuff that had accumulated around my apartment. You know what kind of stuff I’m talking about. Stuff like that bike-tire codpiece I wore in that really bad play 4 years ago. Or a pair of bright red boxing gloves. Or the random and mysterious bars of lead that have been sitting in my closet for as long as I can remember. You know, junk.
And let me tell you, I suck at poker. I can’t bluff to save my life. I have no idea what cards I should hold onto and I have a tendency to let my lower lip quiver madly when I’ve got a good hand. I was absolutely confident that I’d be coming home empty handed. Confident and maybe even a little bit cocky. I went down there knowing that I was going to lose.
“And the river . . .it’s a 9 of hearts!”
“GAHHH! NO! NO! Oh, come on! This isn’t funny anymore.”
“Your pot, Haddad. Take it and weep.”
By the end of the night I was a just about buried under bad books, lacy things and Hulk comics. It took two trips just to get out to the cab. I was a . . . gasp . . .winner. . . and I’d never been so miserable.
Which brings us to today’s topic:
Losing by winning.
You ever know somebody who gets everything they ever thought they wanted and it drives them absolutely nuts? I knew a guy back in college who dropped out two years early and got his dream job running the account side of an advertising agency in San Francisco. He was making piles of money with piles more responsibility and it made him fat and angry and burned out at 23.
And I’ve seen too many small business people win big contracts that they fundamentally don’t want to do and that, fundamentally, lead them down the absolute wrong path in their life.
Or, heck, folks who win the lottery just to end up broke and friendless 3 years later.
Or. . .well, you get the idea.
Sure, we all want to be winners.
But before you throw your money on the table, make sure you know what game you’re playing. And make sure it’s a game you actually want to win.
10 Days
So, strangely (and shockingly) enough, I’ve got a life outside of sales letters and websites and overall marketing wonkishness.
For the last ten days I’ve been putting in long hours playing “Roger Pipebomb” on the set of Cherub: The Vampire with Bunny Slippers. The show is sort of a “Guerilla Sitcom” mashing up parodied characters from Joss Whedon’s old vampire show “Angel” with a lot of monkees/f-troop/police squad kind of humor. In other words, it’s silly as all get out, exhausting to produce and probably some of the most fun I get to have. I wrote two episodes of the upcoming season and, as an actor, got to show up to work covered in oil, dressed as a pirate and wearing a massive Trump-style wig.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that somehow along the way I managed to contract a nasty case of strep throat. I got into the doctor today and am four pills through a shiny orange bottle of antibiotics, but let me tell you, trying to act chipper and charming on set when it feels like someone is stabbing you in the throat? Not so fun.
We should be getting press in Wired online and The Stranger over the next month and then season two launches just before July. Viva la revolucion! Viva Caution Zero!
Everything I know about Copywriting I learned from being on a film set.
Bone tired. Exhausted. That’s what I am. Since Thursday night I’ve been filming season two of Cherub: The Vampire with Bunny Slippers.
And like I said, I’m exhausted. I feel like I’m about to fall right off this chair and curl into the fetal position for a six-hour nap.
Best part? I’m back on set at 6 tonight and will keep right on keeping on right through the weekend.
But there’s an upside. And that upside is this: When you’re acting in a film, you get lots of time to think. Granted, most of that time is spent thinking “Shoot, do I know my line?” and “Man, when is crafts services getting here?” and “I wonder if I look fat in this pirate costume.”
But sometimes, as you’re sitting there on take 15 trying your darnedest not to trip over your three each boots, you find yourself thinking something useful. Something like “Huh, on a film set you really have to pick and choose when you should make some sort of witty comment and when you should just keep your mouth shut. And that’s just like a marketing piece. That’s just like sometimes you’ve got to just clam up and let your prospect do what they need to do to make the sale.”
It was like an epiphany. Only shorter. And did I mention the pirate costume?
Quick Wrap Up
I stumbled out of the Market to the Max conference with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket, some good ideas in my head and a fist full of business cards. So all in all, I’d say it was a good–but exhausting–day and well worth the time, money and effort.
Not to mention the popcorn. The popcorn was really, really good.
Running out of power, running out of time.
Tim Armstrong from Google is just finishing up. There’s a big picture of a cow behind him. Over the cow’s head it says “Collective Wisdom.” What did I take away from this talk? That google really will rule the world.
And we’re back.
Brian Tinter from Drugstore.com is talking about customer personalization. He’s a smart guy. He’s figured out that demographics re often bunk and that personalization is about a lot more than giving customers what they think they need.
I’ve also had a massive lunch and won a $100 in the raffle. Not a bad day so far.
I wasn’t able to sit down and blog during it, but my pre-lunch session was Jane Shanklin from Starbucks talking about “Brewing the Starbucks Brand.” It was a packed room–over packed actually. And she gave some good insight into how Starbucks (and Starbucks in-house creative in particular) does their marketing.
Big takeaway? When you’ve got 97 percent brand awareness you can do some pretty funky stuff.
No wi-fi in the lunch room, but I’ll get this posted asap.
Well, darn
Nothing like typing out a 500 word post and then having it disappear when you close the powerbook lid.
I’ll go for summary instead:
I’ve been to two sessions since my last post. One was by a woman from Starbucks. She talked about the big S’s way of rocking and rolling on the creative end of things. My favorite bit was when they ran a tube from a Starbucks way up to David Letterman’s office so he could have coffee whenever he wants.
Lunchtime was a tremendously guy named John from Drugstore.com. Key takeaway? Demographic targeting isn’t worth much. One to one marketing isn’t the same as personalization. I’ll need to dig through his notes more when I get home.
And now I’m in “What do you stand for and how do you talk about it?”
It’s ethically delicious. I love it.
Oh, and I won a hundred bucks in the raffle.
Yay!
