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Thoughts on OTA Sessions 2011

April 3rd, 2011

It wasn’t that this was a conference about marketing and creativity, because it wasn’t. Not at all. It’s billed as such, but that’s not the point.

It wasn’t that this conference had a slew of inspirational speakers, either, because to be honest not all of them were all that inspirational. Some of them sort of talked about themselves without offering any real insight, and others outlined their book for an hour, and still others tried hard not to drop names but couldn’t be helped.

But there’s something about OTA Sessions. Something pretty special. Something we don’t usually get in Sioux Falls.

OTA Sessions was about something and the speakers all offered context and though I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, that’s not really what these conferences are for.

I didn’t receive any knowledge. That’s cool.

In it’s place, I received rejuvenation. All offered through three overarching themes.

Embrace your differences

Like Sally Hogshead says: it’s up to us to be ourselves. To steer clear of becoming someone we’re not. To find our difference and own it.

Being the underdog works. No marketing bull here, please – living in South Dakota is a constant fight to overcome our differences. It sharpens our tenacity and provides us with opportunities to embrace a landscape and culture that no one else can make claim to.

Our teachers and parents always tell us to “be ourselves, don’t follow the crowd, etc.” and we brush it off knowing we’ll grow into fantastic humans if we just get into the right cliques but, surprise!, we find that the best ideas and greatest moments come from those wackos who, for whatever reasons, clung to who they are and refused to be stripped of the junk they were born with.

Don’t patronize the differences. Just find them and make them great. Do that, and you’ve suddenly become interesting. What’s more: you’ve given yourself the freedom to brush off criticism.

Own your location

In the Midwest, most look to escape as fast as they can. Good for them. Maybe they’ll find their muse elsewhere. They have all of my well wishes.

That being said, I’ve got no patience for Midwest haters: the arrogance, the dismissal, the trivial comparisons. We’re not New York. We’re not Los Angeles. We’re nowhere, and that’s why we’re great – undeveloped by trends, we’re blank canvases, where creativity and innovation rule not out of vocation, but out of necessity.

To fill in the spaces, we must create.

Ultimately, there are two types of people who grow up in South Dakota – those who move away, and those who have the strength to stick around and make something with what they’ve been given.

On Friday, the Orpheum filled with the latter. Inspiring on its own, without the speakers, without OTA. Just that fact made me want to be better at what I do.

Accept your inadequacies

Because, ultimately, there are still people who still struggle with making something great.

For example: imagine you’re at a conference, surrounded by hundreds of intelligent people, watching speaker after speaker discuss their successes and insight and goals.

Before long you realize how far you have to go before making a significant difference in the world. How much work it is to be good at what you do. How much harder you have to work to be one of the great ones. How none of this is easy.

It’s a rush of forced inspiration, like adrenaline during a bear attack. To get from A to B you need a dose of reality-based C: a kick in the saggy pants and a yell from your idols – “YOU’RE STILL NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH.”

Happens every time. It’s always just in time, too. For two years, OTA Sessions has been a constant dose of humble pie. With a side of whipped panic.

Ultimately, OTA – itself a twisted acronym that stands for “Originality + Action,” isn’t about creativity or marketing or social media. It’s about community. It’s about displaying the power of an active and blossoming community, filled with people who stay true to the region, who aren’t afraid to be themselves and aren’t afraid to break away from the typical cynicism of talented professionals and dive straight into a new project.

To make something great on the ground they live on. To celebrate their differences. To live thinking that “anything is possible” isn’t as ridiculous as it seems.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: On..., Sioux Falls, Words

This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat

December 9th, 2010

This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat.

lincoln's hat It’s unadorned. “It’s just a hat,” you’d think, if you saw it in the wild.

If you saw it in a museum, surrounded by other items, you might think it was just another dead person’s hat. You’d be okay in thinking that. It’s no different from that Monopoly guy’s hat. Or the hat of any businessman from the late 1800s.

Even if it was labeled “Abraham Lincoln’s Hat,” you’d probably only give it a passing glance. Your eyes, distracted by everything else, would fail to grasp the importance.

But it IS important. This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. Abraham Lincoln. Yes. THAT Abraham Lincoln.

You place it on a pedestal. It begins to stand out.

You devote the hallway leading up to it to spelling out the importance of Abraham Lincoln. It begins to gain context.

You show images of Abraham Lincoln wearing the hat. It begins to develop its own history.

Finally, you light it, dramatically, handing out a lasting image to whoever walks by.

It goes from being just a hat to being Abraham Lincoln’s Hat. Capitalized. Important. Worth Looking At.

And, in that time, nothing has changed outside of how you presented it. You took something ordinary – because, let’s be honest, it’s still just a hat, though most certainly a hat worn by a famous President – and provided the context, visual cues and legend that can only be assigned to something worth remembering.

Taking the ordinary and making it beautiful. That’s why storytelling is important. Why graphic design is important. Why creativity is important.

“It’s just a hat.”

No. This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. Pretty impressive, huh?

Comments: 7

Issues Considered: Content Strategy, Marketing, On..., Photography

On our second favorites

November 14th, 2010

Think about that one band you listened to when you were beginning to mature as a person. The one you adored. The one you followed to the point of fanaticism. The one that changed your outlook on music so much that it bled into every facet of your blossoming musical taste until, looking back, it managed to influence everything you listen to even today.

It was The Beatles. It was The Replacements. It was Radiohead. It was Modest Mouse. It doesn’t matter who it was – it was someone.

You still listen to that band, I bet. You still love them. At least, you appreciate them – what they meant, how they changed your outlook.

But what about the band that ultimately came in second?

It was the band that you loved ALMOST as much as your favorite. It was the Built to Spill to your Modest Mouse. The Rolling Stones to your Beatles.

Chances are, you often forget about how good that band was.

We tend to forget our second favorites, not because they’re forgettable, but because their awesomeness is so closely tied to that which we are completely devoted to. They are dwarfed by our insistence upon choosing one clear winner: one clear band that is The Most Important and, from there, tracking our progress as sentient beings.

But the feeling – that feeling, you guys – when you remember exactly why they vaulted to “second favorite” and, at times, let’s be honest, were the frontrunner for a week or so – oh, man. That feeling. Is. Awesome.

You play the album. You remember the finer points of your youth. And you realize that “second best” had just as much to do with shaping your taste as anything else.

Watching the fences fall

October 31st, 2010

When we lived in our old house, we spent years turning it into our own.

Year by year, we added and adapted. The open backyard gained a white picket fence. The far yard gained a beautiful raised bed garden. A herb garden was planted. Quartz was dug up and re-appropriated as landscaping border. Perennials were planted. A fire pit slab was built out of slate.

Over time, we had everything perfected. This, ultimately, helped in selling our house. The yard work was already finished. All someone had to do is keep up with the plants and mow the lawn.

If only that were the case.

We drive by our old house on occasion. Over the past year and a half we have seen it regress.

First, the raised bed garden was torn out. Then, the garden bed was covered with sod. Soon, the quartz edging was taken out. After the summer, we noticed that the perennials had disappeared and the herb garden had been stripped away.

We were effectively watching our legacy in that home taken out, piece by piece, like burning copies of an author’s manuscript. The time and work and sweat and money we put into making the house beautiful was being disregarded, the current owners not privy to what emotional connections we still had to that garden, that border, those plants.

But what can I expect?

When we hand things over, we hand them over with the understanding that, in fact, it is no longer ours. That’s the deal. That’s what selling the house means. We built it up to pass it on, selling our dreams and selling out those gardens. In return, we were able to move to a new home, one that was filled with another previous owner’s dreams and ambitions – dreams and ambitions we too reverse and tear down and disregard.

That yard is no longer our yard. It never will be again. And we were the ones who made it that way.

So, as we drove by today and saw that the white picket fence – the first act of business when we moved in and the most lasting and recognizable piece of our involvement with that house – was being torn down, I had to bite back scorn.

It’s out of our hands. And we’re all healthier when we recognize that point.

Ira Glass on good taste

October 27th, 2010

I just spoke at SDAF’s Student Day, which is always sort of inspiring and totally humbling.

And then, an hour too late, I read this little thing from an Ira Glass video on storytelling (via Brian Gilham):

Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me, is that if you’re watching this video you’re somebody who wants to make videos, right? And all of us who do creative work like, you know, we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste. Do you know what I mean?

Like you want to make TV because you love TV. You know what I mean? Because there’s stuff that you just like love, OK? So you’ve got really good taste and you get into this thing that I don’t even know how to describe but it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.

And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short, you know, and some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves.

But we knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing what to do is… Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. You know what I mean? Whatever it’s going to be. You create the deadline. It’s best if you have somebody who’s waiting for work from you, somebody who’s expecting work from you, even if it’s not somebody who pays you but that you’re in a situation where you have to try not to work. Because it’s only be actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

Hell yeah. I wish I could have imparted that kind of knowledge on the ad kids today.

I guess I’ll be happy I didn’t make any fart jokes.

Candy

October 23rd, 2010

All candy is not created equal. The Halloween Advisory Board would probably dispute this, insisting that candy is candy and it’s all fantastic and you should appreciate each kernel of candy corn just as you’d appreciate a full bag of Milky Way.

But come on. It’s a lie. I know it. You know it.

It’s obvious. On one hand, you’ve got candy. On the other: CANDY. All caps, serious candy.

Sorting candy on Halloween isn’t an act of taste as much as an it’s act of classification and comparison. When we were kids, we’d all dress in different costumes and we’d all stalk different neighborhoods and we’d all return to different homes but, in the end, we all shared one common experience.

In the end, we all dumped out our pillow cases and orange pumpkin buckets and began mentally ranking the haul.

To a kid, choosing candy is an exercise in competition. We visualize the Baby Ruth lining up alongside the Starburst to be mercilessly examined, our decision releasing them from their cardboard cell and into the freedom of our stomachs. Like the BCS, we weigh wins and losses and, ultimately, place one candy brand atop the others.

It’s a candy power poll, and in developing this ranking we each focused on different attributes. A friend of mine, for instance, chose candy based on its sophistication, as if eating a Snickers would somehow help him develop chest hair and a deeper voice. Another friend was less specific, seemingly relying on wind change and moon phases.

My comparisons ran along two lines: fruit flavor and longevity.

The first cut dropped most traditional candy bars out of the running. No chocolate, no nougat, no cay-ra-mell. The next cut separated the suckers from the rest of the fruit-flavored candy because, let’s face it, I was eight and suckers were for BABIES.

Ultimately, it came down to which candy came with the most pieces. I chose Starburst. I chose Skittles. When I was feeling daring, I’d buy Now & Later. Most of all, I chose Mamba, an exotic seeming alternative to the traditional Starburst flavors.

Since that day, the fruit factor has been devalued, as has longevity. Now, Butterfinger tops the list. The candy bars I once saw as sophisticated now crowd the top of the standings. What’s more, I haven’t eaten a Mamba in more than a decade.

The champion is dead. Long live the champ.

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Inspired by Jason Santa Maria‘s fantastic Candygram guest posts.

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Issues Considered: On..., Vilhauer

On becoming a demographic

October 13th, 2010

Oh, man, I was just watching television and this Subaru commercial came on and then, for a split second, I felt this odd mix of fear and appreciation and awe at the fact that they managed to push all of my buttons at once because, you see, that’s going to be me someday, watching his little girl grow up and drive cars and go away to college and do things I won’t even know about and, I’m serious, I’ve never been so proud to own a Subaru.

Then, just like that, it hit me.

I’m that demographic, you guys. My buttons were pushed because people who have the jobs that I gave up managed to push the buttons in the most perfect way.

Damn it.

And bravo.

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Issues Considered: Marketing, On...