LNOYL

Spreading the word about something within the digital saturation is deceivingly tricky. It seems like there are a lot of opportunities, and if you get all your clicks in a row, you can spread all the words you want, and make some kind of ‘impact’ for what you are offering up. However, if you’ve been with us for a few months, you know that most of those opportunities are actually advertising and promotion ideas that have come out of the machine – the methods developed during the heyday of the marketing industry. Those strategies are experiencing new life online as people throw them your way as an ‘indispensable blueprint to promote your work”. They are strategies that try to put you in the drivers seat.

The main insight is this – if you have truly innovated in your work, then you have to be comfortable with destination unknown. You ain’t in the drivers seat, but along for the ride. People will sacrifice their time to experience your art form, and tell other people about it on their own terms. When we signed up for CDbaby (an organization that will broker your album onto Itunes), the months that followed found our inbox brimming with promises. Online services that bragged about maximize our exposure to hundreds of ‘relevant’ sites, including exposure to “industry professionals”. Sign ups for banner ads on websites that get a million clicks a day. Invites to web based artist platforms that proudly boast that they cater to “thousands of artists” and promised to distribute our music to everyone known to mankind. Publicity outfits that wanted to broker us to traditional mass market print media, mass media radio, and DIY info on how to make a “street team”. I think all of those things actually represent the way to stay anonymous to those that need to hear from us the most. The cultural conditions required for those methods to work are rapidly fading, if not already gone.

I was driving Jen to work a few months ago, and CBC radio broadcast a spot for a local band that Dareck and I had saw at the Mercury lounge in Ottawa. They’re similar to us in that they are a new, pre-critical mass group, probably on the verge of finishing their first album. We thought they sounded pretty good, and had a promising vibe especially when the female guitarist took some of the vocal duties. Anyways, it was a popular morning radio show, and they described the band a bit, played some of their songs, and advertised their gig, which took place later that evening. The spot ran at least a few times in the day. I wanted to know what the effect of this mass-media coverage was, to see if the ideas about spreading ideas that i’d been reading about held up. I also wanted to know, because if you go by first instinct, you’ll hear that radio spot, and feel like “we should be doing that too”, or you’ll start asking yourself “so how did they get on that show…”, and your mind has already stepped onto the path of wasting time and energy were it doesn’t need to go.

Here’s the quick and dirty analysis I did that morning. CBC radio Ottawa has a large potential listening base (close to a million people), given that the city is Canada’s fourth biggest urban location. Let’s assume a very small percentage of the population were listening…maybe ten thousand or so. So, what was the effect of mass media exposure, based on the bands measurable myspace online activity? That day, the bands myspace visit count jumped by fifty. Hey, fifty visits is fifty visits. However, if any money, significant time or effort was spent on that radio campaign, then it was probably wise to recognize that 50 into 10,000 gives a response rate of 0.5 percent. This number is typical for distraction based marketing. The hypothesis behind those kind of response numbers is that people have learned to tune out unsolicited messages. Obviously this isn’t a scientific analysis, nor is it intended to reflect badly on this band. We’d probably be trying at the same things twelve months ago, undoubtedly with the same result. Was there at least a persistent effect – did those 50 visits or plays on their website, regardless of an initial, dismal response rate, turn into anything else? The next day, the bands myspace plays dropped to three, which is a typical, baseline level of not much happening on myspace (I should know, because that’s where our own useless myspace site stayed for a long time after we set it up). In twenty four hours, their page visit counts returned to what they previously were before exposure to thousands on thousands of people.

So, I think Godin (2003) has got things right – the resources and energy previously placed into advertising and marketing art/literature or any creative work must now be funneled into creating innovations within it. This is essential, because if you are average or exchangeable, then you are effectively invisible. The idea is that you must take your innovative work of art, and connect with passionate people who are already looking for what you have (consciously or unconsciously). If you’ve got a few right people on your side, you’ve got a shot at creating an environment that supports the continued growth of your work, basically.