Matthew T Grant

Are you planning on going to MarektingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer to be held in Chicago on October 21 and 22?

I know that’s just around the corner, but it’s not too late to register (and, just between you and me, get a $200 discount off full conference registration if you use the following secret code: DMBLG). It’s also not too late to get a cheap-ish flight (under $200 round-trip through Orbitz if you aren’t too picky about departure times and lay-overs).

Of course, saving money is never a good reason to do anything, so here’s my [full disclosure] sponsored* plug for the mixer.

I’ve attended two of these events here in Boston, once as a panel moderator and once through my affiliation with a corporate sponsor. In both cases, I found the experience personally and professionally rewarding.

First of all, I got to meet a lot of cool people with cool ideas doing cool stuff by leveraging emergent technology and finding new and novel uses for marketing technology that’s been around for a while.

Second of all, I got to know more folks from the MarketingProfs community, all of whom have very high standards for the quality and applicability of the information generated by said community and many of whom were quite candid about the presentations and conversations that met those standards and those that fell short.

Finally of all, I was able to make a number of business contacts which opened up a number of interesting opportunities and have led to actual business! Ironically, I didn’t attend these events with business development as an express goal, but that was one of the tangible results.

In summation, cool people, cool ideas, and cool opportunities await you at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Chi-town. And, as if that weren’t enough, I will be awaiting you there as well. Join us!

*Full Disclosure: Since I don’t want myself or my friends at MarketingProfs to run afoul of the FTC’s new guidelines on blogger endorsement, let me clearly state that, in exchange for this plug as well as additional posts on or about the event itself, I will receive a pass to the conference and, if any of y’all actually register as a result of my efforts, I will also receive some ducats.

For a long time it’s kind of stuck in my craw that marketing “thought leaders” seem less like marketing professionals than preachy proselytizers of the human potential movement.

I was thinking specifically of Seth Godin and was grumbling that I would have to dig through his blog to find an example of the aforementioned proselytizing preachiness when, lo and behold, a random Twitter followee pointed me to a post he wrote for JobDig’s What Would Dad Say.

To whit, in a piece entitled, “Don’t Try to Get a Job,” His Seth-ship admonishes us with the following: “Don’t you dare. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that the act of trying to get a job corrupts you. It pushes you to be average, to fit in and to do what you’re told.”

Aside from the problem of telling people what to do (or what not to do, as the case may be) while criticizing a “do what you’re told” mentality, the word that jumped out at me was “corrupts.” Specifically, how did we move from the pragmatic issue of looking for work to the moral peril of falling from purity to corruption?

I understand that, upon our exile from Eden, we were cursed to toil by the sweat of our brow and that, since that dark day, work has been stigmatized as a punishment. I understand also that, in petit bourgeois dreams of small business success, telling people what to do is a mark of honor and indication of membership among the Elect. Nevertheless, I would like to offer an opposing, even dissenting, view.

When we work for someone, we are providing them a service and must of necessity, and within reason, bend our wills to theirs. This is the case whether we are tasked with specific duties within a larger enterprise or whether we are attempting to sell the fruits of our self-directed labor on the open market.

In the latter circumstance as in the first, if not exactly “doing what we are told,” we must at least “do what others want,” and if a source of corruption nests in the one, than it must assuredly be just as at home in the other.

In other words: don’t hate the player (the job seeker), Seth, hate the game (the system in which everybody needs a source of money if they want food, shelter, healthcare, etc.).

Or, to quote the late, great Curtis Mayfield: “If there’s a Hell below/We’re all gonna go.”

Image Courtesy of geraintwn.

Speaking with my friend, Rando Calrissian, about a woman who used to work for him, quoth he, “One great thing about her was, if she had something to do, she always did it right away.”

I often think of Rando, and this lady, whenever I’ve got stuff on my plate and I have the option of putting it off or just doing it. The sad truth is that, if I don’t do it now (whenever that may be), there is a strong chance that it won’t get done at all.

If you have made this same experience or are in any way like me in this regard, I strongly urge you to DO IT NOW! RIGHT NOW! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR???? C’MON! IT’S NOT GOING TO DO ITSELF!!!!

Got me?

Better a debtor than pay with a coin that does not bear our image!
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve never been motivated by money.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I have been motivated by money to the extent that having money, or a relatively constant source of it, was necessitated by the need for food, shelter, and a modicum of creature comforts.

More precisely put, I’ve never been motivated to undertake a particular course of action or engage in a particular pursuit because it could potentially or even reasonably result in the acquisition and/or accumulation of wealth. I’ve just never cared that much about having money or having the more luxurious and extravagant things the enjoyment of which money so famously facilitates.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always viewed money as kind of hassle, albeit the kind of hassle that you have to deal with because, eventually, you run into other, bigger hassles that require money for their ultimate or timely alleviation. Put another way, money is the “ur-hassle” (which may be the source of money’s status as the root of all evil).

The strange thing about money, of course, is that it isn’t really anything. It has the kind of being that the philosophers and theologians refer to as “contingent.” Money, which in this era of floating exchange rates and electronic funds transfer has even lost its traditionally material substance and standard, depends on a host of non-financial entities to retain the appearance of value and fungibility. In the absence of these entities – rule of law, a functioning state, an implicit social contract, etc. –  money is quite literally not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Now, you will frequently hear folks say, “Money is the only way we have of measuring value.” While I tend to bridle at the simple equation of money and value, I get the point. If someone is willing to give you money for a good or service, you know it is worth something, as opposed to nothing. If, on the other hand, they would take it if it were free but pass it by if they had to pay, we can safely say that whatever value they may ascribe to it is so capricious as to be negligible.

Closer to the truth is something a CEO I once knew used to say, “For businesses, money is like oxygen: oxygen isn’t the point of life, but without oxygen, no life.” This fits my own notion that the most basic goal of any business is to stay in business. Money can help you achieve that goal, which is why people frequently confuse it with the goal, but it is not the goal.

This sentiment was reiterated by the Joker in The Dark Knight when he said, as he set a towering stack of bills alight, “It’s not about money; it’s about sending a message.” This spoke to me because I’ve always valued the currency of language, thought, and sentiment above all else and have thus been drawn to prize the achievements, or at least the efforts, of writers and musicians, thinkers and teachers, firebrands and demagogues.

To my cost.

Image Courtesy of jondresner.

A job-seeker recently told me that a local public radio station explicitly asked applicants to SEND THEIR RESUMES AND REFERENCES VIA SNAIL MAIL. This set me to thinking.

While email has made communication faster and easier, it has also lowered certain barriers. Applying for a job in the old days, when you had to type up a cover letter, print out your resume, and then entrust your career ambitions to the postal bureaucracy, meant that the application process itself served as a filter. It was a hassle. You had to really want the job in order put in the effort.

Nowadays, applying for a job is just a question of pointing and clicking, a fact that effectively devalues the act of applying itself. (The additional fact that companies let machines scan resumes for keywords before forwarding them to a human being is one potent indicator of this devaluation.) By making applicants jump through an out-moded hoop, the radio station erected an initial screen and therewith cut down on the number of frivolous applications from the unqualified and the quasi-interested.

Now, consider reverse-engineering this move and, next time you apply for a job, actually print out a cover letter, etc., and send the whole dang thing off. Although there was nothing differentiating in the past about this approach – it was the main and most common way to apply for jobs – it’s quaintness will now distinguish it from the torrent of digital applications.

Just an idea.

Image Courtesy of uzvards.

“When you’re a project manager, everyone’s your client,” says Sheila D’Aniello, a web project manager represented by Aquent’s Chicago Office.

After initially launching her career in the world of broadcast journalism some years back, Sheila increasingly found herself taking on project management roles across a range of industries. She eventually entered the web/interactive realm in 2000, when Monster/TMP hired her to manage a variety of projects, from producing CD-ROMs to the development of high profile, customized corporate and university job-sites.

Along the way she learned an important lesson: the project manager is “client facing” wherever she turns.

“Aside from internal and external clients, account directors and account services people, my team is my client – in many ways, the most important one. The team is looking to me to manage communication with all the other clients and they have to trust me. They have to know I’m on their side. And, when something happens, they should feel like, “Sheila’s going to take care of this.”

Really just make it happen.

Web project managers are “managers,” but they are also mediators and facilitators, and that poses interesting challenges. “You’re managing people,” Sheila explains, “but you really only manage their time and their resources – that is, on top of managing the project budget, the time-line, the scope of the work, and all that.

“You manage them, but you don’t give people their reviews or have hire-fire power. This means you can’t get caught up in personnel issues. Your attitude with your team needs to always be: ‘How can I help you?’ and ‘I’ll make it happen.'”

My posts on Aquent’s blog sometimes got kind of philosophical. Here’s an example which should help you dodge the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” It first appeared on September 20, 2008. – Matt

About twenty years ago, after I had stopped out of grad school, quit my job at SuperShuttle, and was so broke that I made all my family members collages as Christmas presents, my father sat me down for a fireside chat. The gist was: Dude, you got to get it together, figure out what you want to do with your life, and just do it. The problem was, as he put it, “You don’t seem to do anything.”

Was I a lost soul at that point? I suppose I was. My band (Spanking Machine) wasn’t going anywhere, I was unemployed, and, frankly, very depressed. When I returned to San Francisco from that demoralizing holiday in Los Angeles, I got a temp job (thus launching my current career, oddly enough) and wrote my father a letter.

Aside from the fact that the main point of the letter was to ask him for money so I could fix my car (yes, I did that), I also took issue with his criticism of my do-nothing lifestyle. On the one hand, as I pointed out, I did actually do stuff like write page after page of mad-cap, beatnik musings, play music, and hang out with my friends. I also reminded him that there were quite a few cultural and spiritual traditions that emphasized doing nothing over doing something as the true goal of life and enlightenment and that I was not unsympathetic to such views. Moreover, the idea that our lives and the world at large were there as a resource for us to do something with was symptomatic of the Zeitgeist, as Martin Heidegger explained in his essay concerning the question of technology.

Here’s where it gets deep (so watch out). To this very day I bristle at the existential imperative, whether in secular or religious garb, that says you have to do something with your life. There are so many things that are wrong-headed about this notion that I don’t know where to start (or finish), so I’ll just highlight two logical inconsistencies that dog this everyday ethical commonplace.

In 2007, I interviewed Minh Nguyen who was working through Aquent’s San Diego office. He had built his own web design studio from scratch and was kind enough to share with me lessons he had learned along the way.

As part of my work with Aquent, I interviewed a number of the many talented people who work for that company. I posted these interviews as a way of spotlighting the aforementioned talent. This interview with web designer Jon Billett first appeared on February 12, 2009.

Jon Billett is a designer represented by Aquent’s Philadelphia office who has spent the last several years making the transition from print to web. Of the work he’s done that you may have seen are a set of banner ads featuring Regis and Kelly which Jon created for TD Bank.

I asked Jon a few questions about his career, the process of moving from print design to interactive design, and the key to creating effective banner ads. Here’s what he told me.

You started your career as a graphic designer, right?

Yep, my background is in print design. It’s what I studied in school and it’s what gave me my foundation in layout, aesthetics, and making things look pretty.

So how did you build your interactive chops?

After I graduated, I basically taught myself at first and then networked with as many people as I could to learn from them. I made an online Flash portfolio and was fortunate enough to land a job through Craigslist with 3601, the internal ad agency at the Wachovia Center here in Philly.

What sort of stuff did you do with 3601??

This was back in 2006 and they really hadn’t done too much Flash or web stuff themselves, so they hired me to create banner ads, put together the web site for the agency, and things like that. I also worked on the design of the iWalls that they have installed there. These huge displays allow fans to interact with hi-def timelines dedicated to the Flyers and the Sixers. It’s really great to see people on TV playing with them, and being a fan myself, I had a lot of fun creating them.

Was it challenging to be “the web guy” on the team?

In a way. I was the only person who knew how to do this stuff, so when I had problems, there wasn’t anyone in the office that I could turn to. I had to reach out and find other sources to get answers.

What sources did you find?

I got a lot of help from TechnicalLead.com, which also runs LearnFlash.com. I joined as a member so I could have access to their tutorial videos but the best part of the service was access to mentors – experts who have really mastered this technology. Having a specific person you can tap for help is ideal, though you really need to be at a certain level to make the most of mentoring.

I realize that banner ads are just part of what you’ve done, but what would you say is the key to a successful banner ad design?

A banner ad can’t be distracting, but it still has to attract attention and be intriguing. You have to put enough in the ad to pique someone’s curiosity and get them to click without making it too busy (and not just because you want to keep the file sizes down). Aside from making the ads entertaining and engaging, I like using the format to throw in new animation tricks I’ve learned.

Last question. Who are your influences?

On the print side, I would say that my biggest influences have been Saul Bass, David Carson, with his “type as image” stuff, and street/urban things like Shephard Fairey. On the web front, I absolutely love the work being done by AYC Media.

For several years, I wrote an “Ask the Expert” career-advice column for the American Marketing Association. This post grew out of that. It was originally published on Aquent’s Talent Blog February 27, 2009. – Matt