In this episode, I discuss influencer marketing, where to start, why it works and the different types of influencers.
I also cover ways to measure your influencer marketing results.
I then discuss a potential way an ISP can re-frame their pricing model so that consumers can better understand and value the service. I leave you with a simple, yet power tip that will differentiate you on social media.
During the Episode, I talk about the different stages of a buying funnel and how we'd attach different metrics to each stage.
Ep4: How do you decide what to charge clients for a services-based company ?
In this episode, I look at the BANT framework by IBM as a way to think about pricing your service, we discuss focusing on value and not falling into the trap of cost-plus pricing. I run through an adapted version of Peter Laurie's pricing model strategy, and finally, I talk up the benefits of project-based pricing.
In the second half of the episode I cover the classic 'adoption of innovation' curve, Simon Sinek's 'why' and a little time is spent on creating great copy.
I finish the episode talking about the false economy of not accepting Amex cards.
https://fractal.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FB-FRACTAL-PODCAST-4.jpg 788 940 Gerard http://fractal.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/good-times.regular-300x40.png Gerard2018-04-19 17:39:392018-04-19 17:54:57Ep4: How do you decide what to charge clients for a services-based company ?
In episode #3, we discuss the difficulties in building a double-sided business model and a trick that'll give you a fighting chance. We then look at how to hire your first marketing employee for your startup and finally, we discuss shoe brand AllBirds who are nailing their copy, humour and brand positioning right now.
Well, Scott, I mean, you've touched on probably one of those elements in a start-up business that I think is really common [laughter] and that's people who try to tackle a two-sided marketplace. And the problem with the two-sided marketplace is that it's such a desirable thing to try to achieve. If you get a two-sided marketplace working, if you can get an Uber, an Airbnb, eBay, if you get these things working, they're huge businesses. The problem is, is that this huge business actually becomes really hard to achieve. So it's like anything. It's kind of like a long odds horse. It's like 100 to 1 shot. If it comes in, great. You've got 100 times your money back. Chances are the 99 other times the horse runs it doesn't win. And that's what you're tackling here. I've personally had a lot of experience with this and a lot of experience not getting it right. So I can talk about my experiences directly because my business zippy.com.au that I founded had a very similar proposition. I was trying to reach small-business owners. I was trying to give them a proposition that would work and grow a business at the same time, a two-sided marketplace. So how do you do it?
Look, if you try to grow both sides of the equation, you've got a chicken and egg problem. Which came first? So you're growing that business, and you're going to struggle. The dilemma you're facing is absolutely true and there really isn't a quick fix if you try to grow the business in the organic way you imagine. The strategy I have really come to accept is the only way to really tackle a two-sided business model with any chance of success is actually to try to freeze one side of the model. So when you look at what you're doing with the business you know where you want to end up. You want to end up with a marketplace where you've got buyers and sellers, businesses and customers on both sides of that equation, and they're growing at the same rate. But we know that's really difficult to do. So what you need to do is freeze one side. Now, what you're basically achieving by freezing one side, and I'll get to sort of how we do that in a little bit, but what you're trying to do is say, "I'm going to focus all my effort on growing one side of the business." Now, in practice, of course, if you just grew one side of the business, and if you just focused on consumers, they're going to come to the business and realise there's no offers. So to freeze one side of the business you actually have to fake it. I've got a half-written blog post on this where I call it, "You've got to Wizard of Oz it." So this is where the wizard hides behind the curtains, and actually, it's quite fake. What he actually puts forward isn't the real deal. So how do you go about doing that? How do you freeze one side of your business model? Well, what you do is you basically need to populate– now, in your case where you're trying to put offers out to consumers, the consumers are really your product, right? Your customer is going to be the business. Your customer is defined as the person who's going to give you money, and the person who's going to give you money ultimately is going to be the business. Now, to be able to charge people, you need a product, and the product is going to be the consumers. So when we try to think of which side of your two-sided business model, we want to freeze we want to freeze the business side, right, and grow the customer side. So what we're going to do there is we're basically going to fake the offers that are on your business to attract the customers.
So the way we go about doing that is instead of actually going to the businesses and trying to convince that they need to pay you and upload the deals, you actually need to go out and find the deals. You need to find sources of deals that you can collate, publish, and share to consumers that adds enough value that they'll come to your service. At a point in the future where you're growing your customer base, you can start to seed in behind the actual paid offers and the real offers. So what does that look like? In your example and looking at your business, claim.io, I would be looking at doing something– and this is a phrase we came up with with my business partner when doing Zippy, but the concept of chalkboard deals. These are the deals that small retailers put in their stores. So these aren't the big sales. These aren't the vouchers that you can email around. This is the chalkboard deal at the pub. So this is where you look, and they go, "Wednesday night, buy one parmi, get one free. Pints from $5. This is the happy hour." So putting those chalkboard deals into a place where people are able to find them. This is assuming a whole lot of other parts of the business are working, but what you're trying to provide is the content that people will ultimately seek.
If the business proposition that you've got actually has a good chance of succeeding, then in theory, if you put all that content out there people will use it, and you'll be able to sell them. Now, what we're going to discover by doing this is if people aren't actually interested in what you're sending through, like if they're not interested in the offers you put up there without charging, well, you know that the business model actually isn't going to work, which is a good thing, right? We haven't gone too far in. We've only sort of spent half the money would have building one-half of the business model. On the other side, if you discover that people are using it, and you control that audience, the consumers, you can build up a critical mass. And whatever that happens to be– so I would highly, highly recommend that you just focus on one city. I live in Brisbane. Brisbane's a great city because Brisbane is effectively 10% of the Australian consuming population. So whatever you do in Brisbane you can 10X when you expand from there. But you're based in Sydney, Sydney being the biggest city, so you've got good concentration and a good population to go after. So I would just focus on that one area. Even if you can break it down into a suburb, break it down to an area. If you can get that critical mass, and you can get it, then you can realise you can replicate this model. So what we're doing there is we're nicehing down geographically. So we're not trying to do every chalkboard deal across all of Australia. In fact, we're not even probably going to try to do every chalkboard deal just in Sydney. What we're going to do is pick a little area that we can narrow down geographically so we can tightly control what we're doing and then– be another smart way to approach it would be to actually niche, in particular, areas.
So I used the examples of pubs before. I mean, you could just do pub based chalk deals. Obviously, you could expand that into restaurants, and hairdressers, and all other retailers, but we know that pubs use chalkboards so this concept holds true. Because what you're trying to do is prove your model in the smallest market possible so you get over that critical mass issue as quick as possible. You're faking the deals by loading it in. Look, you can go to Airtasker and just pay people to walk around taking pictures of chalkboard deals for you, pay them a bounty for each one, shoot that off to a freelancer.com style Philipines contractor base that'll be relatively cheap to process that information and push it out there. At least you're going to be able to test whether your model works. All that being said, it is a really, really hard business to get working, but if you pull it off then you're in a great place. So where do we end up? Ultimately, you're trying to freeze one side of your two-sided business model. You're trying to freeze the side where you're going to make your money because you've got to build up your product. Your product is the other side. So the people who aren't paying you or your product, so these would be the consumers walking around using your app and your website, you fake the business side of it because you know eventually you can get the consumers and you've got their eyeballs. When you control that audience that's the audience you're going to be able to monetize with the retailers and you can start charging them. What I would recommend if you get to that stage try to filter these offers in over the top. So do it a bit like, I don't know, Google search engine listings. You've got your organic, your natural listings, the ones that Google says through no payment this is the best result I can serve up, and then put the paid ads on top of that, and that's really what you're going to ultimately get to and you'll start to make money. And the goal would be for you that ultimately the bulk of your listings are controlled by the retailers and that a large slice of those are paying for premium positioning, but it's going to take time to grow that up. So I hope that answers your question, Scott. Like I said, I've got a lot of experience in it. I didn't necessarily get it right and you will not be the first or the last person to double side a business model that's not able to get that equation exactly right. But hopefully, if you freeze one side it's going to work for you. So the next question in comes from Ryan Stewart who's the CEO and founder at [Capisce]. So Capisce is a semantic keyword indexing tool, natural language algorithm tool. It's an amazing thing, but ultimately what it does and the way that I imagine it working is you know those net promoter scores, the NPS scores you get? If you think about the second question that runs behind that, that's where you ask why you gave the score. What Capisce does is help businesses actually understand why people then use that score. So it's great that you've got an NPS average score of nine, but why did you get it, and that's what these guys do. But getting to Ryan's question, which is what should a B2B SaaS company be on the lookout for their first marketing hire? What's the most appropriate way to measure the performance of that hire and what does the CEO need to provide that hire with everything she needs to succeed? Lots of questions there. I probably won't tackle all of them in a great amount of detail just because I think we'll be here for the full half hour just on those three questions. But, okay. So getting to the first part, what should a B2B SaaS company be on the lookout for their first marketing hire? Well, I actually am of the opinion that your first person you want probably isn't a full-time hire. I think what you really want is contractors to start with and specialists, and probably the first person you want to hire is the seasoned professional, the consultant, the person who's got 15, 20 years experience under their belt that's seen a lot, they understand most of the different techniques, and more importantly, they've probably worked for a couple of startups, so they're coming in hardened, they're coming into your business with experience, and therefore you've got a good chance of not having to learn what's happening. Now, you don't want that person as a full-time hire. That person is going to be expensive. This person has worked for two or three startups that have actually succeeded. It's going to cost you anything from 160 to $260,000, roughly speaking, to hire that person. Not the kind of money you really want to be spending as a start-up. What you do want is 5 to 10 hours a month from that person to put you in the right direction. The terms of actually the first marketing hire is that you want a generalist. You want somebody who has got a wide, broad skill set because this person is going to be expected to do a lot. You want them to work under the guidance of consultant, that senior person, to give them direction, but you want this person to have broad shoulders. So if you think about the way– you can visualise– and podcast is not a great medium for me to get you to visualise [laughter], but if you can imagine skill sets, [inaudible] within a traditional digital agency somebody's skill set up to a certain seniority level is very narrow and very deep. So what I mean by that is– when I first started doing digital marketing I did SEO, and I had very deep knowledge. Like, that was all the experience I had. I hadn't done any other marketing. I was doing a marketing degree, but that's not experience. That's just regurgitating information out of a textbook. You can tell I'm probably not a fan of marketing degrees. But that's deep and it's narrow knowledge and that's not what you want as a start-up. What you want as a start-up is somebody who's more wide at the shoulders, so at the top end. So if you imagine the deep, narrow person being kind of like a very skinny rectangle and that represents their skill set– so it's very deep and it's not too wide. You then have the Jack of all trades, and the Jack of all trades is that rectangle turned on its side, so very wide. Done a lot of different things but they don't have great depth of knowledge. What you really want is somebody that's shaped more like a triangle, so quite thin experience on the outsides of the breadth but they've got the breadth, they've seen some things. So they've been involved with small companies, so that means that person might not have done PR but they've seen [inaudible] PR. That person might not have done copyrighting but they've seen copyrighting or they've been involved in touching it. So they haven't been locked away from different departments and different experiences, but they have been engaged in that, but they will have deep knowledge in some of the disciplines. Not as much as the complete expert in SEO, but that expert in SEO is going to be hired by the big companies and the big agencies who want the best person for a job. You don't need that as a start-up. What you need is somebody who has a good depth of [inaudible] experience, and they're not the best, but they can kind of move around. And the reason you want them to move around is because you're going to need them to do multiple jobs, and you're also going to change what you think is working for the marketing. So where do I get to with that in terms of skills? You probably want them to have a good knowledge of SEO. You're definitely going to want them to have some page search experience. Probably the most important area is going to be their social skills, not just the organic, but also the way they do Facebook and paid advertising. So you want them to be strong across Facebook. You're definitely going to want them to be across LinkedIn, especially if you're talking in a B2B company. You're going to want them to understand data. You're going to want them to understand CRM systems. You're going to want them to understand [inaudible] anything from Salesforce to Hotspot – probably a bunch of other tools – because they're ultimately going to recommend what they prefer working with. And then you're really going to want them to get content and retargeting. And I've covered that on previous podcasts, but content retargeting, B2B, and the [inaudible] is absolutely crucial. And if I was going to pick an area for them to be an expert in it's going to be around content and retargeting, and that retargeting is probably going to be centred around social networks. So how do you measure the performance? Well, look, you're a start-up business. You're metrics aren't locked in stone. We're looking for incremental gains here, so we're looking for soft KPIs, things that are going to lead us to– sort of give us a [inaudible] we're going in the right direction. We're looking to move closer towards break-even and profitable and scalable marketing [inaudible] you're not going to get there straight away. Definitely, if it's your first hire, this person's probably not going to be seeing you enough to carry you the entire way through. They're going to need a lot of support, particularly from you as a founder and anyone else who's involved with that product in sales, in engineering, in all the other elements of your business. But setting some KPIs, soft KPIs, that we're pretty confident are going to be leading indicators to successful business outcomes, that's probably going to be the best thing. I'd really focus on looking at your funnel, looking at the way you've got your business set up, so how you're tracking from impressions the size of the audience, the definition, who you're engaging with, and how that funnel's building. And just all the way through, look at what the conversion rate through the steps are and just always set yourself a goal and take a real growth hack mentality, which is to say, "Let's come up with an idea, a thesis to what we expect is going to happen, what success is going to look like, set a short timeframe, run something, test it, measure the results, and then iterate from that point." So lots of those small tests. If you can set up the support framework– and I guess this is more your third question. If you can put the network around them, so the programmers, the product people, the salespeople, to support what they're doing, and you all collaboratively work together to reduce each of the conversion points on that sales funnel, you're probably going to get some success out of it. What you don't want to be doing is leaving that person on their own and say, "Well, good luck. Do some [SEO?] and come back when it's working." That's never going to work for you. So look, I've lightly touched on each of those things. I think the most important part is to get that triangle-shaped skillset. So broad, experience most things, but a couple of areas of in-depth knowledge. And try to make that in-depth knowledge for B to B around LinkedIn social content and retargeting. If you can focus on that, all the other experiences will be beneficial. I think you'll be in a pretty good place.
So lastly on today's podcast, I just wanted to talk about a shoe brand that I've come across in the last couple of weeks and completely fallen in love with. And I've fallen in love with it not just as a consumer of the product, but I've fallen in love with the way these guys have managed to launch a shoe brand. There are some industries that are just hard to crack. You don't want to try to get into the flavoured sparkling water business up against Coke. You don't necessarily want to try to launch a car, even an airline. There's certain industries where it's just hard work. And shoes is one of those industries. You don't turn up in the shoe industry and just succeed. But this one company is just making incredible progress, and that company's name is Allbirds. So that's A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S. And I hadn't heard of this company. I was put onto it by somebody in the coworking space who sat across to me and just said to me, "You've got to get these shoes. These are the most comfortable shoes." And whenever you get those kind of product recommendations, you know that there's a brand that's onto something. This is where a brand's gotten to that stage where they're going viral. People are talking about it. They've got promoters. So this is if you knew what their net promoter score, I'm sure these guys are sitting at 9.5.
What what do I love about Allbirds? I think for me is that they seem to be really clear on their why. They've got a really clear mission. They've got a really strong brand personality, and they're carrying that into an audience. So they're really breaking into this young, young-of-mind. They're probably tapping into the start-up industry. But also, they've got a very sort of left-leaning sort of environmentally friendly, sort of poke fun at themselves kind of style brand. And the area where I think they've just recently launched a new range, and I love the way they launched it on Twitter because it was almost like they had gone and paid the creative agency to do the photoshoot. And they'd done the classic shots, the classic photoshoots. And then they, to use a very Australian expression, sort of took the piss out of themselves, where they almost make fun of the models and their sort of solemn look and the way that they're conducting themselves. And yet it's their ad. So I can highly recommend having a look at the Allbirds Twitter account and just having a look at the copywriting. Take a look at their website. Take a look at some of their emails that they're sending out. Whoever is doing the copywriting at Allbirds is an absolute genius. They've got their brand nailed. The copy is funny and witty. And if you read through the copy, at all points, you get a real idea that they're still selling the features. They're still selling the benefits of their shoes. They're light. They're environmentally considerate. They've got wool. They've got eucalyptus shoes. I mean, it's a very unique proposition. It's very different. And it's not cheap. And you've got to ship it from– I think to Australia, I had to get mine from San Francisco. But they're just this amazing thing.
And what's great about them is when you see somebody else that has Allbirds, there's a weird connection. So walking through sort of Brisbane City, and I just saw another person with Allbirds, and they recognized mine. And you're in that I'm in a niche little club. We're early adopters. We've got into this. We're importing our shoes. Are they the best for walking around? Probably not. They're kind of like– the woollen ones are kind of like Ugg boots. But there's something about it. There's something about the message, the brand, the positioning that makes you go, "I just believe in the company. I believe in the people behind it. There's something that you're doing that I just like and I align to that." It's not going to be for everybody. But have a look. Have a look at the way they've done their stock photography– not their stock photography. It's all very much bespoke. But have a look at the way the photography is being done. It's top quality, but at the same time, it's just on-message, and they're carving out a spot in the market just by being a little bit different. And I think it's a good example of how getting something completely on-brand, understanding who your customer is, really being clear on what your brand personality is. What's your voice? What's your tone? What's the image you want to portray? If you get it right, you can even break down an industry like the shoe industry, which is really hard to get after.
A workplace is a delicate ecosystem where success and culture ebbs and flows with the provision of home-made cake and water cooler chat; even more so in a co-working space.
In a co-working space, you have the same shared bathroom experience, but with the added dynamic of varied companies, agendas and business cultures – all under one roof.
Today marks my final day in such a workspace- a final day, I hasten to add, that has only come about, because of my own logistical challenges (school drop-offs, family time etc) and not at all a result of the experience!
1) Headphones are the co-working space equivalent to an office door. If the headphones are on, the door is shut. You can still knock, but the barrier is up. Note: if your co-worker is wearing "cans" consider the door opaque.
2) Ask for help. Seriously, I have been amazed by how ready, willing, and able my co-working space "colleagues" offer up help, advice and support. If you have held back from such an environment because you thought different ventures under one roof would create competitive or guarded space, think again.
3) Introduce yourself. That dreaded moment where the teacher makes you stand up to 'share a little bit about yourself' is a recurring nightmare for many, but in a co-working space there's no dedicated HR rep to walk you around on your first day for a meet and greet; so don't expect the world to come to you. Say hello. Introduce yourself and enjoy the friendships that you make in an environment where like-minded people have gathered for their own adventure.
4) Introduce others. So while I agree introducing yourself can be a little hard; take a load off your co-working space buddy and make sure you introduce them to the other people you know. Double points if you can give a quick CV; and straight to top of the class if you can find a common area of discussion. This is grassroots networking.
5) Find the quiet achievers. They're the ones who are head down, working away without anyone ever realising they invested in X, founded company Y or once worked on Z. While the squeaky wheel often gets the attention, not everyone is a natural self-promoter. You never know who is sitting next to you and what invaluable business acumen they actually possess.
6) Garner advice from the non-experts. This one sounds a little odd; but everyone has a story to tell and experience you can learn from. I've found that the collective experience of the co-working community is usually a good gauge of a general direction. Thinking about a double sided business model? By the time the seventh person winces, you start to get the idea it might be hard. Live and learn.
7) Pay it forward. Don't ask what your co-working space can do for you, ask what you can do for your co-working space. But seriously, give first, it might not come back directly, it might not come back at all. But all the old adages come into play here; be nice to the people on your way up, cos you might meet them on your way down; be the co-worker you'd like to have at the desk beside you; and as I find- doing good feels good. A shared experience goes both ways.
8) You are the culture. From friendly colleagues to bounce ideas off; to the celebration of a professional milestone, the people around you make the culture of the place; and you are part of that. Don't wait for someone to make it happen for you, you get out what you put in – even if you're a total introvert. Join the morning teas; go for a coffee; chat on slack or leave notes for people. Or if you're like me, join the Easter egg eating competition and go so hard you feel sick for the rest of the day – that's just part of being a team player, right?
9) Make up the numbers. If someone is going to host an event, talk, lunch, anything. Don't leave them talking to a room of three; If you can, go along and show your support. You'll be helping out a colleague, sharing an experience and who knows you might just learn something! As with the note above, if someone is helping build the community, help them out.
10) Be respectful. You will make your mark, in one way or another, so make it in a positive way. As with roommates; group holidays and traditional office setting s- do your dishes and don't stink up the office with tuna; keep the music in your headphones and your phone calls to a dull roar. Say good morning; and thank people when they help out. You might not be working for the same company, but you have the same goal= success and productivity in whatever form that happens to work for you. So do unto others and good luck to all.
* The lessons below depict the experiences of the author and may not reflect yours. The author's personal attributes, both physical and personnel have probably impacted the experience and the results of the egg eating contest.
Welcome to Episode #2 of the Fractal Startup marketing podcast.
We also cover the other common direct marketing variables and how to calculate them.
[music] Hi, and welcome to the Fractal Marketing Podcast. My name is Gerard Doyle. And on this show, I take marketing questions from listeners to provide answers so that everybody who tunes in can learn a little bit more about marketing and hope they find some ideas for their business. [music] So in today's episode, we're going to look firstly at calculating the cost of acquisition of your customers and other marketing variables like ROI and ROAS and discuss the differences between those two. After that, we're going to spend a bit of time talking about more complicated tracking models where it might require an offline sale or a long sale cycle and how to relate that marketing money that you're spending very early on back to that end sale and the customer value. And finally, we're going to spend some time looking at animation and the power of animation in video marketing and how we can deliver clarity of message through an uncluttered interface. So our first question this week comes from Cass from [inaudible]. And her question is, "How do you calculate the cost per acquisition if your primary acquisition method is profitable?" Good question, Cass. And I think it speaks to one of the problems with marketing is that and like all industries, I guess, is we have a tendency to create a lot of our own words, a lot of our own acronyms, initialisations, and things that just make marketing generally confusing when it need not be. I think back to some of the rules that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk employed in their companies. And they just started stopping people from coming up with new acronyms inside the company because it just made life really difficult. But we are where we are [laughter]. And to answer your question, look, it is still possible to have a cost of acquisition particularly even if you're profitable because it's only the cost of acquisition is only the denominator in the ROI calculation. So what I'm talking about there is if you're looking at the ROI of your marketing, you're looking at the cost of acquisition over the lifetime value of those customers. And that's what you want to be profitable. But it's still completely possible of course, and in most cases, you would have a cost of acquiring those customers. So when I look at that I think, "Okay, there's some really important variables there that we need to understand completely to get your head around marketing." So as an acquisition marketer, I live and die by these two numbers. And the first one is the CAC which is the cost of acquisition of your customers, so customer acquisition cost, CAC. This is probably one of the most important variables because it's much easier to get your cost down with your marketing. It's generally where a marketer is going to be measured. On the flip side, on the denominator side of this equation for the ROI, you've got the LTV, the lifetime value. Now, as a marketer, we can impact that. We can attract sort of better quality customers. In theory, they'll give us a longer lifetime value. So this is the total amount of value or revenue we're deriving from a customer who comes to our service or our product. So really though, generally speaking, that's going to be a product manager. And that's why when you think about growth marketing, a growth marketing or a growth hack team tends to involve both a marketer and a product lead as well as often a developer of the backend to help you. But that pigeon pair of a product marketer and an acquisition marketer is usually ideal. So that's pretty much the most important thing as a performance marketer to really be measured by. And the reason is that that typically for a startup, or a new product, or a business is there's an amazing moment. So this is after we have achieved product-market fit. We've found out customers. We've got 30, 50 happy customers or whatever we'll define that to be. But what we don't have yet is a really scaled marketing process and that's because at the moment when we start, we're probably spending $2 to get $1 back in. The amazing moment occurs when all of a sudden you can spend a $1 on your marketing and get a $1.10 back. And what that means is your CAC, your cost of customer acquisition, drops down below the cost of the lifetime value. And then what we're looking at is, okay, what's that payback period? Now, that ideally is instantaneous in the sense that you're selling a product, so the revenue you get back from a product is greater than the cost of selling it. For a service-based business, this is a little bit harder. You might be looking at 2, 3, 6, 12 months payback windows, and that has a big impact on the value of our company, the cost of raising capital, etc., etc. But really these are probably two of the most important variables to understand with your marketing, and then the variables that a marketer should on a daily basis be looking at to see how their campaigns are performing. Now, I've also mentioned in there the ROI, probably one of the misused terms marketers do. I had a client about a year ago, in a meeting [laughter] who stood up and said, "If another person uses ROI instead of ROAS, I'm leaving the meeting." And what he meant was ROI, return on investment is a very general [captural?] term, really refers to the whole business. This is whether the business is being profitable really. So I invest this much. Do I get more back? ROAS, on the other hand, stands for return on advertising spend, so ROAS. I told you it was a lot of initializations [laughter] and acronyms. And ROAS is usually the measure of what the market is doing, so this is where you say how much revenue am I getting? So I might be, for example, selling a couch. That couch might sell for $2,000. The actual profit on that might be 500, but I've also got other costs as well, be it staff or it could be facilities, accountants, general sort of management overheads. And all of these variables don't really appear to your typical marketer.
As a marketer, I might be doing Facebook marketing. I've got no idea what the overheads of the company are. I also don't know where the other investments have gone, so what I'm calculating is the ROAS. So that's the total value of the sales, particularly if it's e-commerce, then I know I can get that back. I know I've sold $2,000 worth of goods. However, I might also know that I've spent $500 to get it, but typically that ratio's going to be much higher in needs, be much higher in ROAS because it doesn't take into consideration all the other cost of the business, so you'll have a client or it could be your business, and you can still have a ROAS goal. It's just that rather than it being $1 and $1.10 back, it's more likely to be $1 in and $10 back, so hope that clears it up. If nothing else, there's a few new acronyms in there for you to learn. CAC, customer acquisition costs. LTV, lifetime value of those customers. Knowing that is absolutely important. Again, working with the project manager, working increasing that value, makes a marketer's life much easier. Obviously, if that lifetime value goes up, you're able to spend a bit more on marketing. And secondly, looking at ROI, return on the investment and how that differs from the ROAS which is return on advertising spend. Absolutely crucial that you get that right. There's nothing worse than presenting to a client, or a manager, or a boss, or shareholders and getting those two numbers wrong because you just end up looking a bit foolish with your campaigns. The second question today comes from Tim from [inaudible]. And Tim asks, "How do you manage the ROI on marketing spend when the signup decision is not impulse driven but rather a slow burn that takes time to filter through the client's bureaucracy? I justify it now by calling it brand awareness, but there has to be a better way to make data-driven marketing decisions. Great question, Tim. It's strange more and more this is the sort of the area of questions I'm discovering as I talk to business owners. And that's because the two biggest marketing engines available at the moment particularly online but even generally across the whole world is Facebook and Google, and both of these tools are absolutely fantastic for measuring [inaudible] online. They are able to track someone through the whole purchase, but when that sales cycle is a bit more complicated, when there is more involved, it becomes really hard. So to answer your question, look, it's not easy and it's kind of the point where marketing consultants step in and really help set a framework for your business. But I'm going to break it into two broad approaches for you, the first one is around post-impression platform tracking and the second is using correlations of indicating variables which is a little bit softer. So I'll cover the first one which is post-impression tracking first for you because that's the one I prefer to get to. So what I'm talking about here is normally in marketing campaigns and acquisition campaigns, what we'd like to measure from is a click. A click is that magical moment when you know that someone's definitely engaged in your ad or your content and come through to your website. At that point, you are able to use whatever tools you'd like to track somebody through to an end purchase and ideally, that purchase happens in the same session but it might happen two or three sessions later, but it makes it quite easy to calculate. If that window is short enough, usually a few days, you're in a pretty good place. Now what happens is, more and more the way we engage with media isn't see an ad, click on an ad, make a purchase. So originally ad technology was all based around cookies and cookies were great. Cookies run this ability to [drop user?] a one by one pixel to drop a little text file on a computer or users computer and then if that person came back we could read the browser, recognize that our cookie was there, identify who the person was and go, "Ah. They were the person who clicked on the campaign a while ago." Now what's happened over time is that the actual cookie tracking technology has become less and less robust, lots of people are blocking it, but more than that and I think probably a bigger impact has actually been the use of dual devices. People have not only their home computer, but they have their mobile phone, their tablet, and their work computer. So often people are interacting with content at work, going home, sitting on the couch and then purchasing through an iPad. All that means for us is it's much harder to track and this is where the platform tracking tends to be the easiest for most businesses. Now there are more robust tracking solutions out there but at that level, you're normally spending enough money that you've hired a full-time agency to deliver them for you. So what you do if you are an owner-operator in a small business and you want to achieve this? You ultimately have to leave your marketing in a platform channel. So I'll talk about– so Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google. And what you're doing there is you're looking at post-impression sales. So post-impression means somebody who has seen an ad and then goes through and makes a purchase. So this is kind of the next easiest level to track. There's a big difference there. The intent isn't clear. If I run a Facebook ad and somebody clicks on that ad and comes through to my website and makes a purchase, I'm pretty confident my ad drove the sale. On the other hand, if I show my ad to somebody who it appears in their Facebook feed, they don't click on it but then they go through and make a purchase. Well, did that ad drive the purchase? What impact did that ad have? It's not as clear but the great thing is that the person doesn't actually have to have an interaction. Because you're on Facebook, you can be on your work computer looking at Facebook, you see an ad on your work computer, Facebook knows who you are, you go home, log back into your tablet. Facebook still knows that that tablet belongs to you; you are the same person. So if you then go through and make a purchase or sign up or do whatever action we want for your business, Facebook is able to identify that and say, "Ah. I know, even though you're on a different device on a different network in a different location, you are the same person because this is the same Facebook account." So what we've been able to do there is achieve two things by using Facebook post-impression tracking; one, we've been able to track between two different devices and two, we've been able to track even though somebody didn't click on an ad. Now Facebook also has some kind fantastic options in there like people who watch videos. It can be a fantastic tool to measure engagement and say, "Well, if somebody watches X percentage of a video, then they must be more inclined to have engaged." That's very different to an ad just sort of scrolling past somebody. Now, there's no hard-and-fast rules. Ultimately, you have to define, as a business owner or a marketer, exactly what you're comfortable with. But if you're looking for a rule of thumb, usually, with Facebook, their default settings, I believe, are– post impression tracking is normally set at one day. So in other words, you need to perform some form of trackable action within a day of seeing an ad. Otherwise, we're not going to attribute it. Whereas, post-click, we're normally looking at anything from 7 to up to 30 days to say if you've clicked. That's the kind of window we're willing to consider attributing that person back. Now, attribution modelling is a whole other podcast, so I won't get too far into that. But to get an idea of how you can measure these things. You can obviously extend that post impression, but it becomes harder and harder to actually decide what's going to be working. So my advice to most small businesses is use each of the platforms, Twitter, Google, Facebook, whatever you happen to be using, LinkedIn, and do look at post impression as a way to see if your content or your ads are engaging people and they're converting. If you want to get into attribution modelling, I'll wait for another question on that. But probably the easiest way to do that is to have a look at what's built into Google Analytics. Their solution's actually quite good, and there's some great models pre-built. So the second, I guess, answer to your question, and this is probably I think where you're really coming from, is what about if we don't really have that kind of control? What if I'm doing marketing that might be writing an article on a news site or newspapers or press or radio? All these kind of very normal things that you know are doing the right things for your business, and they're building your brand as you say in your question. But is it really driving my business forward? Well, the sad, I guess, fact is we don't know. And that can be tough for people to sort of, I guess, deal with as a business owner because you do want to know where my money goes– where all your marketing money goes.
We've kind of been spoiled as we've been moved into this digital marketing age where we got used to the idea that, "I know exactly what I'm getting back for my marketing money." Well, we've kind of gone past that now, and we actually have to go a bit old school in the way we think about things. So by going old school, what I mean is going back to that point where– the famous quote that says, "I know that half of my marketing's working. I just don't know which half." Well, this is where most large retail brands find themselves. So traditional advertising through TV, radio, press, PR, there is no direct line of ROI or [ROE S?] that someone's able to calculate. You ultimately have to go with gut feel. And that's why sort of the old-school marketers if you like, they're still a talent out there that needs to be fostered and preserved. And I think, to a certain extent, that skill set's being bred out of us by this digital age. And it's only now that, for a lot of industries, the competition's so tight that skill set's coming back into its own. So what are we looking at here? Well, we can probably work at how we need to tackle this by thinking about the way that TV advertising has traditionally been measured and people have made their purchase decisions. And to get this right, you really need to go and understand who your profile of your target customer is, the persona, who you kind of imagine that person would be and spend some time looking at where they're likely to be. Now, old-school TV, you typically use offline survey-based metrics, like it might be Roy Morgan surveys, build profiles, get an idea of where that person is and what kind of media consume and how they do it, which is great. But for the purposes of being a startup or a small business, that's usually well outside the range of what you're able to do. My suggestion is always to look at Facebook. Digital marketer [first?]. That's where I'm going to go back. But the data that sits behind Facebook these days is absolutely amazing. If you've installed the Facebook insight Pixel onto your website, you can start to get an idea of who the people are, looking at their interests, their age, their demographic. You can look at the other kind of pages, the celebrities, the interests, the restaurants that they might like. This kind of data is available as marketers. So my tip there is definitely install the Facebook insight pixel, and you can get an idea what's happening. Getting back to your question, when it actually comes to buying that media, when you're doing a media planner for TV, you actually start looking at things like [inaudible] all the breaking points. And this is kind of like how many people are watching your show, but media's purchased in TARPs. So this is target audience rating points. And what we're talking about there is the media buyer who's working to a plan for a marketer for a big client is actually are interested in how many people are watching your show who are actually their target customers. So what I mean by that is they don't really value– there might be a million people watching your show, but if only a hundred thousand of those people are their potential customers, then they value the media by the hundred thousand, not the million that they're actually seeing it. Why is that important? Because ultimately, the marketers have done their research on who their customer is. They've done their research on where they might be looking, what kind of consumer information, what media they're consuming. And that's where they place their ads. Now, there's a lot of [inaudible] behind that. You really have to follow your instincts and see what's happening. That in itself is probably going to be [laughter] hard for you just to reconcile with yourself. So the trick at this point is to start putting soft KPRIs in, leading indicators in that we start to draw correlations between end business outcomes. Now, go back a few years. And generating likes on Facebook was seen as being very much like a vanity metric. However, where it really resonated and why it took off with businesses and why they built up Facebook audiences is it's a general recognition that people who interact with your brand, people that see that, it's a leading indicator. So it is possible to say that the number of fans on a Facebook page is in some way correlated to the size of that business or the audience or potential size of that business anyway. That's one variable, and it's a bit of a weak one because it's kind of being bastardised by people sort of buying likes and becoming fixated on how many people are liking their Facebook page. But we can look at other elements like what's the total number of minutes or hours our videos are being consumed on YouTube or Facebook or any other media? What's the total number of clicks we're getting, the number of impressions we're seeing, the brand mentioned? These are all indicators that say what we're doing is going the right direction. One of my favorites is actually tracking the number of brand searches to your website through Google. So to do that you might say, "I know that my brand is increasing, getting more interested in the marketplace the more people who search for me on Google." So for example, you could run a Google Adwords campaign just bidding on the keywords [inaudible] or mispellings around that, look at the number of impressions that your ad's being served up to. It won't cost you much for the click. In fact, it's probably a good thing to defend your brand and control that path. But what you're going to collect is insights into the number of people that are searching for your brand even if they don't click on your ad. Those searches will indicate brand power. So that's a really cheap and easy way for you to look at whether your brand is taking off. Now, can you correlate that exactly to new business? No. But it tends to be a great way that you can measure potential future success. Other areas you might want to look at is obviously indicators like visitors to your website, brand mentions on external websites. They're all soft KPIs, but what we're trying to do is map these softer KPIs and say, "Well, this is leading through to a greater business discovery." And you'll get more faith in the model the more confident you are that where you're placing your brand is in front of the right eyeballs, the right– all the people that you're actually trying to target. So it doesn't give you a perfect answer, and I don't think there is a perfect answer for this. There's a lot of [inaudible], and there's a lot of belief in what you need to do. But the more you can establish robust soft KPIs, indicators, whether it be leads or phone calls, all these element and so you're [inaudible] to website visitors. These are all the soft KPIs I'd like you to build in– for you to build into a model to build some confidence that yes, okay, you might only be doing three or four enterprise-level sales on a monthly basis. I don't really know what that is. So you need higher volumes and higher numbers to sort of get some statistics behind. So these are all the kind of KPIs you should be looking at. The other key area I'd add is anywhere you're able to grab data and that data being sort of broken into three broad buckets. You've got primary data which will be email addresses and phone numbers. If you're collecting those, they're primary data points that mean that you can identify a unique person and also find them again on the web at any different place using custom audiences. The secondary level of data is people who like or follow. So this is your likes on Facebook. This is your followers on Twitter. And the tertiary level of data which is the least robust is the anonymised cookies, the anonymised pixels, and people who've clicked on ads in Facebook. But if you start putting these three levels of data down and you start to consider these data points to be crucial value-add variables and KPIs in your business or assets to your business, that's when you're going to get a really good idea of, "Okay, I'm definitely growing my audience that I'm speaking to." And whilst it might not represent a pipeline in the traditional sales sense, it does represent an audience that is willing to listen to you and you're able to reach in another way. So if you think about those pixels and those three different data points and you value them differently, they can be great ways for you to indicate future revenue and growth of your business. So I hope that helps. Really tough question, I'm not going be able to answer it absolutely perfectly. But hopefully, I've given you a few nuggets and ideas there. And rest assure. You're not alone. Every business that's out there that has a slow sales process is wrestling with those ideas because they can't track end to end. But there are proven techniques from old-school offline marketing that work. And the good about it is it's not as cut and dry as pure online acquisition marketing. There's a bit of art. There's a bit of [inaudible] there which yes, makes a bit harder, makes it a little bit more uncomfortable. But if you get it right, there's a lot more value in your business. And it's a lot more dependable as a brand position. So finally, I just want to have a quick look at the idea of using animation in your online videos be it ads or explain the videos. I was inspired to sort of look at this today and [inaudible] question but by searching through LinkedIn during the week. And I saw an article on LinkedIn Pulse written by Sheldon of Big TV– sorry, BigFish.tv is the head of content there. He's got a great post, and I'll link to that in the show notes where he's talking about the power of using animation in your videos. And I think he touched on a really interesting point which is this idea that you can get quite distracted when you do a video when you use real people. I don't think this is exactly his point, but this was my take away from what he wrote. As humans, we've sort of evolved around this idea that we make general assumptions, and we sort of say we recognise people. We have that sort of inbuilt human brain that learns from previous experiences. And what that means is how we relate to people is often how they look in all the information around them. So a traditional video, I've got background, I've got noise, I've got lots of movement. I've got these wonderful little idiosyncrasies that could be in the person that they're interviewing in the video. It could be the subject of that video could be an actor. And the thing is my subconscious is amazingly powerful at interpreting the sort of the hidden message behind those people. And that hidden message in what they're saying particularly if they're an actor might not be entirely compelling. Now, on the flip side, animation doesn't suffer from that same problem. Animation is able to deliver visually simple stories that are easy to understand. So all of a sudden now I can't look at this like turn up in the eye and wonder if the person's being a little bit sneaky or whether they're holding back some information or can I tell if there's something going on there? I'm actually looking at animation which is naturally going to be simple, but I'm able to focus on the audio a lot more. And the audio still portrays emotion. The audio still has the message in there. But the video, in a weird way, keeps my brain engaged visually enough so that I'm really listening to what's coming through. And there's a fantastic example that Sheldon puts there of a video that he created for the Queensland Ballet. And the emotion behind it is really clear. The animations are quite simple. I'm not distracted by costumes or the people. I understand what ballet is, I can see the movement, I can see the story and it's coming through. The background and all the other colours that are flying around the screen are far more engaging. And I think this is something that we're seeing more and more. If you're like me, you're seeing a lot of videos, influencers on LinkedIn holding cameras. And the problem is, there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of noise. You tend to judge the person, rightly or wrongly, by what they look like, how they're acting, how they're moving around, whether they're paying attention. And animation doesn't suffer from that problem.
The other great thing about an animation is it's so much faster to produce. You don't have to do as much with lighting, you can do a lot more in editing. And I can still do a shout-out here for one of the clients and one of the companies I work with called Biteable. And this is exactly the space that Biteable operates in. They create amazingly beautiful and simple animations for explainer videos that allow people who sign up to it to tell their story in a really simple way. And that's often the case; the simplest stories can be portrayed in just a few letters, a few words. And the animation is a way to engage the person's brain and keep the audience paying attention. The words can be quite simple. Sheldon's example, they use spoken word over the top of the animation. Biteable more uses text, a bit like Twitter. You think you're being restricted down to a small amount of text. But I think the amazing thing is the way that what would seem like a limitation actually empowers you to tell a much more powerful story. So I'd really recommend checking out both Biteable and some of the videos – you can get a free account there, it doesn't cost anything to try that out – and also head over to Bigfish TV and have a look at a couple of the animations they've got.
The ballet one is hugely– so that's [inaudible] bigfish.tv. The Queensland Ballet is quite an emotional and easy piece. And then there's a second video they've got called Family Law Systems Exposed. That one's much more emotional. And I think the power in that one is that you're able to hear the voice. You can hear the person who's narrating's voice breaking as they struggle with the pain of the story that they're telling. The animation isn't of them. I don't know what this lady looks like. I can't see her face, but I can hear her voice, and that makes it easier for me to relate to because I don't have the ability to judge her physically. I don't get to look at her and make some assessments about who she is or what she might represent. I'm just listening to her as a person and I'm seeing the animation that brings that story to life. So if you're struggling with how you're going to tell your story, if you're struggling with your website and you're running copy and there's lots of information there, I think animation is a fantastic way to explain a message or basically to tell a story. Definitely take a look at it. There's obviously varying levels of it. You can go hire a great agency to produce top-notch work or you can go use one of the free online tools.
But I think there's a rising use of animation and if you want to look at the best examples of that it's just the rise and rise of Pixar movies and other animation studios, and how well those movies are now grossing because people are able to identify. It doesn't matter what country you're in, you can relate to two monsters that are blue and green because they're animated. They're not real people. Whereas any other movie you might like to shoot with actual human actors, there's always going to be that slight judgement that occurs. I'm taken to a thought of a movie recently that came out around the Great Wall of China, but with American actors in it. It just grates you the wrong way. Well, grates you anyway. So take a look. Have a think about how you– what story you want to tell. And maybe think about using animation as a way to get around that need to hire talent and have along production crews and big overheads in producing what really should be something that's fairly cheap to produce.
[music] Thanks for listening to that latest episode, guys. I'm just got two quick favours to ask of your here right at the end. Firstly, if you have any questions, please shoot them through. This podcast only exists because I answer questions that listeners send in. So if you head along to fractal.com.au/questions, that will redirect you to the latest episode and you can drop your questions down there. Those questions you submit become the basis for each episode. So if you've got a question around SEO, paid search, growth hack marketing, PR, brand positioning, market segmentation, anything you might like to know and it's going to help your business, drop the question down there and I'll try to answer on the next episode. If you don't have any questions, that's absolutely fine. The other thing you can do is head on over to fractal.com.au/subscribe. Subscribing to this podcast not only delivers each episode straight through to your smartphone, but it really helps me reach a bigger audience all the time. That subscription really helps me out. So if you can do that, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks a lot for your time, again, and see you next week.


Bike Surgeon finds a home in O'Fallon.
Bike Surgeon was originally founded in 1974 by Mark Robinson, internationally famous for his hospitality to cyclists on the Trans America Trail.
In 2004, Jon and Emily Greenstreet purchased the shop, and it continued to get bigger and better. By 2006, Bike Surgeon was one of the leading shops in Southern Illinois and constantly looking for ways to improve and grow.
In 2009, with a focus on continued growth, the decision to relocate the shop to the Metro East area was made and in the Spring of 2017, the Bike Surgeon relocated to downtown O'Fallon. This move proved very successful for Bike Surgeon; now nationally ranked as one of the Top 100 bicycle retailers nationwide.
A strong focus on the customer experience and on building the community of riders has led to this success. With a team of national caliber bike FIT professionals, an industry leading team of mechanics and techs (FIX), some of the most FUN events in regional cycling and a destination worthy store experience, Bike Surgeon is the bike shop you need to check out.
O'Fallon welcomed another new hotel to the City – Hampton Inn broke ground on November 8, 2018. The new hotel will open in 2019 and will add 100 new rooms to the O'Fallon Hotel Market. The new hotel will be attached to the Regency Conference Center.
The best way to get started is to reach our City Development Office.
Call (618) 624-4500 x4 or contact us.


Lot 30 - The Cameron Plan - a true ranch with 3 bedrooms on the main floor. Located in the Maintenance provided area at Chapel Ridge. Home features hardwood floors, island in the kitchen & knotty alder cabinets. Lawn Care and snow removal included with the $130.00 monthly HOA. Community Pools, clubhouse, trails and lake.
152 to NW Hampton Rd, South to 75th St, West to Damon Dr, Chapel Ridge Maintenance Provided entrance. Agents - use 7210 NW Hampton Rd as a GPS location for directions.


A California energy company is removing some expensive gear from a Binghamton power plant it shut down a few days ago.
Wellhead Electric Company officially closed the gas-fired facility on Charles Street in the First Ward on January 9.
Wellhead pulled the plug on the operation only three years after the plant was reactivated. A company executive said the facility wound up losing money. It was only profitable to generate electricity during times of peak power demand, typically during prolonged cold spells.
A crane was used Wednesday to remove the turbine from the plant and lift it onto a tractor-trailer. The equipment will make a four-day cross-country trip to California, where its expected to be kept at a similar Wellhead-owned generating facility.
Late last month, Binghamton city council voted to accept a donation of the plant from Wellhead.
It's unclear whether it will be viable to reactivate the generating site in the future. Mayor Richard David has said the city will consult with experts to explore possible options. He said there are "many different scenarios or directions that we can go on this."


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Far Corner
www.far-corner.com
Review by Josh Turner
This is unbelievably accessible for avant-garde. As far as instrumental music goes, it's as catchy and experimental as Kopecky.
Far Corner - Live at M.A.R.S., June 2007
I have seen William Kopecky five times in person: twice with his band Kopecky, another two with this band Far Corner, and a third time in line to meet Chris Squire. We just happened to be at the same place in the queue, and it turns out Squire is his hero too.
Far Corner - Live in Milwaukee, WI, September 2005
While Kopecky was the main act, I actually came for Far Corner. I've seen Kopecky play live on a separate occasion.
Interview by Josh Turner
Interview with Dan Maske of Far Corner from 2005
Kopecky
Interview with Joe Kopecky of Kopecky from 2006
Pär Lindh Project - In Concert: Live in Poland DVD
I had heard of Pär Lindh for a while, but had yet to hear him or this group. Well, the wait is over and it's a shame I waited this long.
Kopecky - Orion
There is a form of instrumental guitar dominated prog that seems to almost share as much in terms of influence with the old surf bands like Dick Dale and the Ventures as it does with King Crimson and other prog outfits.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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A Deeper Dive Into the Marvel Universe: It's All Geek To Me
I'm so fangirl.
We just got home from seeing The Avengers (in 2D... 3D often makes me barfy) and all I can think about now is how badly I want to read and eventually see Black Widow's and Hawkeye's origin stories.
To put it lightly, I fucking loved Avengers. It had Jossy elements all over it (witty dialogue, homage to origin stories) plus extra man-meat (142 muscly minutes!) and extra explosions. I was nervous about Mark Ruffalo replacing Ed Norton as The Hulk, but he played Dr. Banner in a very nuanced way, complete with a deep appreciation of Hulk's pure unadulterated smashiness. And I could just objectify the Chrises all day (That's Evans and Hemsworth) - reprising their purely noble Captain America and Thor characters with plenty of abtastic ass kicking and no small amount of pontificating on the moral quandaries in which they find themselves.
Oh, and added bonus: Robin Scherbotsky is Nick Fury's right hand lady! She did not, despite us waiting through two after credits scenes, tell us who the mother is.
Spoiler: there is no mother, and these children have been dead the whole time.
But back to the non-supers. I've always enjoyed the pure vigilante superhero stories - Batman is first on any list of greatest non-super vigilante types. He has arguably the most extensive list of media credits (several tv series, countless film reboots, etc) and I don't want to presume, but I think we can all agree the Christopher Nolan Batman saga currently ongoing is some of the best superhero silver screen material ever.
I had to remove Mystery Men from competition to ensure a level playing field.
But I'm aching for more of these two (new-to-the-big-screen) vigilantes. I admit, before Iron Man 2 and Thor, I didn't know Black Widow or Hawkeye at all. Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye had maybe two lines in Thor, but he stole his scenes. Scarlett Johannson's Natasha Romanoff was more instrumental in Iron Man 2, and her role as a central SHIELD operative continues in The Avengers. In The Avengers, we get several allusions to her backstory (she was forced into servitude as a spy from a very young age, and potentially "deprogrammed" in order to train her in her "specialized skill set"). We get less from Hawkeye, but he is integral to the success of the team here (no spoilers).
A quick primer on these two.
Hawkeye/Clint Barton
Introduced by Marvel in 1964, Clint is an orphan who runs away to join a traveling carnival. He becomes a master marksman as a carnival attraction. It's actually Iron Man who inspires Clint to become a masked hero. In his first heroic outing, however, he's mistaken for a criminal and spends his first several comics as a reluctant villain. Additionally, he falls for Black Widow, then a spy for the Russians, and blindly follows her - thereby raising his villain cred. Yada yada, she abandons him, he realizes his folly, and decides to follow the straight and narrow from them on. So, potential for a super villain love story between two really attractive people?? I'm in. Please make this movie.
Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff
Black Widow's origin is a little muddier, and actually there have been at least three different Marvel characters carrying the Black Widow moniker. Natasha was the first, introduced by Marvel in 1964. As noted above, she starts out as a Russian spy villain, taking on Hawkeye as her smitten sidekick. The Russian government actually supplies her first costumes and weaponry, but she defects to the US in 1966, becoming the 16th member of The Avengers.
Whoa, wait... 16th? That's right - the original Avengers team introduced by Marvel in 1963 included Iron Man, Ant-Man, Wasp, Thor, and Hulk. Even Captain America (the First Avenger, remember?) doesn't get revived from his ice block until the 4th issue.
I don't care much about truth in film to comic books, really. Most of these stories have several versions, several characters have multiple origin stories, and a single superhero moniker is often owned by several different characters. It gives the film creators a lot of license to choose story elements from different parts of the Marvel Universe and piece them together to make a compelling movie. I'm only pointing out the difference in The Avengers because it makes me super excited to know that as this particular film franchise grows, we might get a whole lot more super and non-super heroes in the mix.
Like Ant-Man. He can make himself very very tiny in order to solve mysteries. He's the Rick Moranis of the Avengers.
All this to say, More Hawkeye and Black Widow, please! I might even order have already ordered the comic books featuring them that are actually available. This also gives me an excellent reason to stalk the comic book section at Comic-Con other than to get some breathing room. (Sad but true: On the exhibition floor at Comic-Con, the only place you can put your arms out and turn in a circle is by the comic books).
Am I going to start reading comic books at the ripe old age of 28? Ummmm yes. And since it took me until about 22 to start reading graphic novels, watching anime, and playing video games, we'll just count this as a continuation of my geek education. My nerducation. My pursuits in geekademia. My studies in geekology. I could do this all day.
Enjoy The Avengers!! (And stay all the way to the very very end, even if you think you've seen the after credits.)
Posted by A Most Ingenious Paradox at 7:04 PM 3 comments:
Labels: Ant Man, Avengers, Black Widow, Captain America, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, comic-con, comiccon, Comics, Hawkeye, Hulk, Mark Ruffalo, Natasha Romanoff, Robert Downey Junior, Scarlett Johannson, The Avengers, Thor
A Deeper Dive Into the Marvel Universe: It's All G...


Desroches Island Resort is a colonial-styled retreat in a far-flung corner of the Seychelles. With a distinctly European air, contemporary feel, good range of activities and excellent food, it's a justifyably popular spot.
Desroches Island Resort is situated on the beautiful Desroches Island.
Video about the beautiful Desroches Island Resorts.


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February 20, 2013 at 3:45 pm EST | by Steve Charing
Md. rally focuses on trans rights
Sen. Rich Madaleno spoke at a rally in Annapolis this week. (Washington Blade photo by Steve Charing)
A diverse crowd of nearly 200 gathered at Lawyer's Mall in Annapolis on Monday to rally behind SB449, the Fairness for All Marylanders Act of 2013. The bill, if passed, would ban discrimination in employment, housing, credit and public accommodations based on gender identity or expression. The Maryland Coalition for Trans Equality sponsored the event and organized the subsequent lobbying efforts for individuals and groups by district.
"We must put our foot on the gas pedal until there is equality all over the state," Carrie Evans, executive director of Equality Maryland and who emceed the rally, told the crowd.
Sen. Rich Madaleno (D-Montgomery County) attended the event. He, along with Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-Montgomery County), introduced the measure on Jan. 29. Madaleno expressed confidence in the bill's passage by telling the crowd, "We are on the verge of this last big victory in Maryland," noting that 23 senators sponsored SB449 and 24 are needed for passage. "I think all of the stars are finally in alignment," he said.
Last year, a similar bill was passed in the House of Delegates by a margin of 86-52 only to die in the Senate. This year there is much more optimism given that Senate President Thomas V. "Mike" Miller is supporting the bill. Therefore, it is likely to pass in the Senate as well as the House if it can make it out of the Senate's Judicial Proceedings Committee. The JPR is scheduled to hear testimony on Feb. 26 at 1 p.m.
Owen Smith, a transgender man employed by Equality Maryland, led the crowd in chants of "Our time!." "It's our time because broad-based organizations have made this a priority. We know it's our time because our legislators are ready to listen."
Other speakers at the rally included Rev. Larry Brumfield, Maryland Black Family Alliance; Mara Kiesling, National Center for Transgender Equality; Blake Wideman, Black Trans Men, Inc.; Del. Luke Clippinger (D-Baltimore City); and Darlene Nipper, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
AnnapolisBaltimoreCarrie EvansDarlene NipperEquality MarylandFairness for All Marylanders Act of 2013Jamie RaskinJudicial Proceedings CommitteeMara KeislingMarylandMaryland Coalition for Trans EqualityMaryland SenateNational Center for Transgender EqualityNational Gay and Lesbian Task ForceNCTENGLTFRich MadalenoSB 449Thomas V. Mike Millertranstransgender
Steve Charing


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By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Posted Thursday, September 5th, 2013 - 2 Comments »
Wilmington on DVDs: The Great Gatsby
DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
THE GREAT GATSBY (Four Stars) U.S.-Australia: Baz Luhrmann, 2013 (Warner Bros,)
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning —
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The Great Gatsby")
I. Razzle Bazzle Dazzle Frazzle
Baz Luhrmann's often dazzling, sometimes excessive, frequently fascinating film of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby—a movie that has been trashed by a number of critics—is not only no disaster. It's one of the best movies of 2013. Predictably crammed with cinematic excess, and done in Luhrmann's (Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom) high style, it's a stunningly imaginative, sometimes madly enjoyable show. At it's best, it makes a classic of literature come alive again on the screen in startling, voluptuously entertaining new and old ways.
To be honest, some of it (not a lot) is over the top, self-indulgent and no doubt annoying to literary purists (and some impurists)—but not so much that it cancels out, or even seriously diminishes the many pleasures that this Gatsby and its superb source, marvelous cast and first-rate technical people have to offer. I saw the movie twice and reread Fitzgerald's novel again—and, between them both, I've rarely had a better time in or out of the movies all year. Mulling over how much pleasure The Great Gatsby in both forms gave me, makes me sad that people were steered away from it.
Luhrmann's new movie is not the Gatsby I envisioned as I read (and re-read) the novel. But I didn't expect it to be, and you shouldn't either. This film may not capture all the aesthetic brilliance and sexy allure of the book. (How could it?). But it gives us plenty to enjoy, and I enjoyed most of it: including the Luhrmann-Craig Pearce script, which keeps intact a lot of Fitzgerald's lyrical narration and fizzy icy-liquor dialogue. This Gatsby is often as much Luhrmann's—and his wife, production-costume designer Catherine Martin's—as it is Fitzgerald's. But it has a lot of the book in it, and the resulting mixture is snazzy, beguiling, Smart, exciting and marvelous to look at. And, of course, courtesy of Fitzgerald, it has a great story, which, contrary to what you may have heard, has not been botched and debauched out of all recognition.
To the contrary. Though Luhrmann's stamp is all over the movie, it's still a quite faithful version of the book (more so than the three previous Hollywood versions): a literary adaptation that preserves much of the original text, but is also encased in a dreamy, show-bizzy musical romp and an ultra-romantic Roaring Twenties movie-movie style that keeps going off in wild stylistic riffs.
There's something admittedly kitschy and pop-operatic and even pop-grand-operatic about Luhrmann's style here, even when the music isn't playing (which isn't often). It's as if Verdi, while composing one of his Shakespearean operas (Falstaff or Otello), had also been able to include a lot of Shakespeare's original spoken text and dialogue as well, and threw in "O Sole Mio" for good measure. In this Gatsby though, the arias are usually Fitzgerald's prose poems, spoken (very effectively, with a kind of morose reverie and regret) by Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. So we get the novel's jewel-like words and phrases writhe across the screen in dancing subtitles, a tribute to Fitzgerald's gorgeously alive prose.
In any case, I don't think Luhrmann's audacity with this material should be held against him—as if he'd committed some crime against art by not making the super-faithful, painstaking BBC miniseries version or respectful theatrical film that we wouldn't expect from him anyway, and that somebody else can make later on. This is something different, a romantic musical Gatsby, a Gatsby for the new millennium. That's part, of course, of what the movie's detractors objected to. Perhaps because of all the hype, they've decided that Luhrmann is an ego-tripping revisionist show-off and that the book has been buried under the spectacular rubble.
But Fitzgerald's classic novel is still the great animating force, inspiration and artistic structure behind the film and all its flights of fancy. Luhrmann so obviously loves and admires the book and wants to give it his best, that his Gatsby becomes not only a beautiful movie and the best Gatsby film adaptation of the several made so far (1926's with gruff, glum Warner Baxter, 1949's with suave Alan Ladd, and 1974's with golden boy Robert Redford), but a sometimes truly fabulous entertainment, exploding past the book's original, beautifully filled boundaries, shooting off like a black sky full of fireworks over a blazing dance floor packed with intoxicated revelers.
II. The Jazz Age
If ever a novel seemed perfectly matched to the movies, it's Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." The plot seems born for MGM or Paramount in their glory silent years. Even as you read it, the lustrous, glamorous images burn into your memory. and the characters whirl and dance in your mind while they flirt and kibitz and drink gobs of expensive liquor—gyrating and Charlestoning their frantic way through parties and assignations on the lawns and beaches and vast mansions of the fictional Long Island domains of East Egg and West Egg.
Romance and sin and drama and glossy décor and beautiful people and huge, mind-boggling wealth and other cinematic mainstays are there, and so are some great, provocative literary themes and characters. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is about the glamour and evil of money—as many movies were, especially in the Jazz Age—and it's also about the glory and anguish of romance —as many movies are still, although usually they have happy endings and
(EXCUSE ME: SPOILER ALERT: roll over to reveal)
Gatsby, famously, doesn't.
END OF ALERT
The central characters are not just rich, but super-rich or famous: Gatsby himself (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a performance of poignant splendor), pretty fragile belle-of-the-ball Daisy Fay Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), her wealthy, brutish husband Tom (Joel Edgerton) and her semi-androgynous golf pro crony Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki)—as well as the more modestly moneyed "poor boy" Wall Street bond-seller Nick Carraway (Maguire) who acts as the tale's ironic, grieving, poetic observer and narrator. (Only in a story as plush and rich, yet openly critical, as The Great Gatsby could a bond-seller from a well-to-do family be regarded as a poor boy.) And there are the others, even poorer than Nick: Isla Fisher as Tom's crass juicy mistress Myrtle Wilson and Jason Clarke as Myrtle's hapless and haggard husband, gas station owner and car guy George.
Both book and movie are about affluent, selfish American hedonists like Tom and Daisy who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money," "careless" spoilers who live in posh East Egg, Long Island, and who seduce (and maybe diminish or destroy) people like Gatsby, the one-time Western plains poor boy who's risen to the New York City heights, and who foolishly wants to be like them, and to win at their games.
The story is narrated (in both novel and movie) by the character often described as Fitzgerald's literary surrogate, Nick Carraway, who has moved into a cottage next door to the estate of society titan Gatsby—and who becomes Gatsby's friend and confidante after Jay learns that Nick is the second cousin of the great love of Gatsby's life: pretty Daisy of Louisville, Kentucky, whom Jay met and fell in love with before he went off to World War I. (Daisy, a character both real and deeply fallible, is at least partly modeled after Scott's own radiant, emotionally disturbed wife Zelda—a novelist herself.)
In movie as in book, flashbacks (or revelations told to Nick) keep carrying us back into the past Gatsby wants so desperately to recapture, the nights of love and courtship in Louisville, Kentucky with Daisy—and the film revels in this fluidity of time. Then, after we learn of that devastating meeting and parting of Gatsby and Daisy—one of those intense romantic conjunctions that we never forget and never get over—we also learn the rest: how the lovers lost touch during the war and Daisy married rich all-American footballer/tennis/polo player and racist libertine Tom Buchanan (whose wealth is inherited and whose infidelities are legion), and moved into a mansion in the old money East Egg area on Long Island, just across the lake from what has now become Gatsby's estate (and Nick's cottage) in the new money West Egg area—far away, but close enough so Gatsby can see and tantalize himself with the haunting view off his pier of a flashing green light on the Buchanan estate, and Nick can tantalize himself with watching Gatsby watching it. In the rest of the story—which has one of the great American plots, besides being written so beautifully it stuns you—Gatsby woos Daisy again, and they all face the consequences.
Luhrmann's movie is, as we said, faithful to its source. And where it deviates —as in having Nick writing the novel as therapy in an asylum where he's being treated by a psychiatrist named Perkins (played by Aussie movie legend Jack Thompson) for, among other things "morbid alcoholism'—it has fairly good reasons and sometimes interesting results. That includes, amazingly, the use of a score with contemporary hip-hop music by executive producer Jay Z: an idea that disheartened me when I first heard about it, but which I accepted quickly on screen. (Perkins, by the way, was the last name of Fitzgerald's—and Hemingway's and Thomas Wolfe's—legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins.)
We get a lot of Fitzgerald's writing in the movie (sometimes in those writhing little scripts on screen) and that's another of the film's strengths. Nick's narration and most of the dialogue come largely out of the book—as opposed to the many film adaptations of major, narrated novels (like Mark Twain's or Charles Dickens' or Henry James') that simply, and, I think, mistakenly, jettison the original author's words and prose, even though the words and prose are a large part of what made us love those books and writers in the first place. Rob The Great Gatsby of Nick's painful, poetic, intoxicated reveries and you've lost much of what makes it great. That doesn't happen here.
In DiCaprio, the movie also has, in its title role, one of the best Gatsbys (if not the best) imaginable: the star of Titanic and The Aviator and The Gangs of New York playing what now seems a nearly perfect part for him, and playing it perfectly. DiCaprio has a great look as Gatsby. He's an Arrow Collar guy with wary eyes and a softly vulnerable smile, and his most frequent salutation, "Old Sport," spoken in a deliberately artificial stage accent, is an almost touching pastiche of the British aristocracy and the American pseudo-aristocracy. The movie's Jay Gatsby, a mystery man and an ultimate 1920s romantic, is a heartbreakingly sweet and reckless character and DiCaprio makes him a believably sweet and reckless soul—an eternal love-torn boyish climber who won't let go of the past and is hell-bent on winning back Daisy.
A delusion? "You can't bring back the past," Nick warns Gatsby, (No you can't, but that's what movies routinely do.) Gatsby, radiating that "hope" and 'romantic readiness" that Nick will sadly celebrate, answers buoyantly "Of course, you can." Of course…You can buy anything. Why not the past? Or the future. (No you can't.) Or even the present. (No. You can't do that either —unless you move in the right circles.)
As for the rest of the cast, Edgerton, as Tom, very knowingly and powerfully incarnates the sometime cruelty of great, unearned wealth. Debicki is a properly saucy Jordan, Fisher an amusingly and sadly trashy Myrtle, Jason Clarke a hapless George (a man of ash living near the story's famed valleys of ashes) and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has an anachronistic, dashing take on Gatsby's patron, Meyer Wolfsheim (supposedly the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series).
The one casting problem for me was the Daisy of the usually admirable Carey Mulligan. The difficulty with this part—and Betty Field in 1949 and Mia Farrow in 1974 had similar problems with it —is that Daisy is someone loved unto death, beyond all reason, and even if we feel Gatsby is wrong to feel that way (and we probably do), we have to know why he does. We have to feel some part of what resonates so enduringly in his hopeful heart. Carey Mulligan is a sometimes-superb actress (as in An Education). But she's more a brainy and sensitive gal than a heart-piercing or regal beauty (a Kidman, a Paltrow, a Wasikowska), and she (or maybe Luhrmann) have also chosen to have Mulligan play the part without enough of the high intensity, spark, and incandescence that would have made her more of a magnet. I should add that Mulligan gives a fine performance anyway. She's just not as perfect a match with the part as DiCaprio with his. Or as Maguire, whose Nick seems initially a well-contained, almost diffident witness and chronicler, the one rational guy around, but who also conveys a held-back yearning for Gatsby's approval that almost suggests Gatsby's intense feeling for Daisy.
III. The Green Light
Finally, The Great Gatsby has a great look: a spectacular visual realization of the Roaring Twenties in New York, and the time's orgies and gestalt. (The movie's most compelling image, like the book's, is the giant painting of bespectacled eyes, on the abandoned optometrist's billboard, near the Wilson gas station. The eyes of an absent God?) That fantastic style showcases CGI and 3D in highly creative ways—especially in the show's great gaudy centerpiece, the first big Gatsby party that Nick attends, with both period 1920s songs and hip-hop blasting way, and people in snazzy '20s duds jumping up and down to the music (which ranges from Jay Z to Fats Waller to George Gershwin's crashing, soaring "Rhapsody in Blue," accompanied by fireworks), all bobbing like apples and candies and colored lights in a moonlit tide.
Together Luhrmann and Martin (and the company) have created their own little world of artifice and nostalgia, set in a dreamy fabrication of 1922 Long Island and Manhattan (actually shot in Luhrmann's and Martin's native Australia), a romantic-fantasy domain that knocks your eyes out again and again. It's a world that, especially in the party scenes, makes you feel happily drunk—a feeling that fits, since the story is taken from a novel (like Dashiell Hammett's 1934 "The Thin Man") about people who drink too much, written by a self-indulgent genius of a writer who drank too much—and though The Great Gatsby's narrator Nick Carraway tells us he's only been drunk twice, we may find it hard to believe him, at least without taking a few snorts ourselves.
This is Luhrmann's Gatsby (yet Fitzgerald's also). But the novel's original qualities shine though as well. It becomes not only a beautiful movie and the best Gatsby film adaptation of the several made so far, but for me, an instant classic.
So why has the film been so vehemently attacked, so nastily axed? Maybe because it's an adaptation of a book now routinely selected by people with good literature credentials as the Great American Novel, or at least one of them (with "Huckleberry Finn," "Moby Dick," "The Portrait of a Lady" and a few others), and many serious movie critics like to prove that they're not seduced by a film's literary pedigree into giving a good review, and also maybe that they've read the book and are appalled at the cinematic havoc wreaked.
And maybe because Baz Luhrmann, now routinely savaged by some as the crazy Aussie madman of the movies, has the kind of go-for-broke technique that either mightily entertains you or just plain rubs you the wrong way —a flamboyant, dare-anything style like Orson Welles' in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, which was a film a lot of the original preview audience certainly thought was over the top, off the edge, and out to lunch. Now we think it's magnificent. Maybe some day too, as with that F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that was rejected back in 1925, we'll think the movie Gatsby is great.
2 Responses to "Wilmington on DVDs: The Great Gatsby"
The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, and yet I'm struck by something almost no one seems to mention: the subjunctive.
The movie is steeped in the subjunctive, in what could have been. Throughout, Gatsby is telling a false narrative of his life, of who he might be, and in which he tries to fit the narrative of those he deeply wants to emulate. At one point, in a pivotal moment right before Daisy changes her mind, Gatsby tells her, true to the novel, "If it wasn't for the mist, we could see your home."
For those who did not attend boarding school or an Ivy League college, this is a giveaway, a tell-tale sign Gatsby is not, "one of us." His improper use of the subjunctive (he should have said, "if it 'weren't' for the mist") indicates he did not attend Oxford and that he is not who he claims to be. DiCaprio captures this perfectly. I don't know whether he, or the director, really knew the importance of that particular line, but it was done to perfection.
The movie was a rare instance in which a great piece of literature is nearly matched on screen. With a novel like this, it is not possible to truly live up to expectation, but Luhrmann has done the best job possible given the challenge of converting such a tremendous piece of literature into cinema.
Carrie Mulligan says:
I really liked it. Some didn't like the soundtrack. I liked it. It added its own flare to the film. I think it also helps introduce the book to the new generation. The acting is superb, the script well paced, and the directing was great. Still, the crown jewels of this visually stimulating drama are the cinematography, set design, and costume design. When I looked at the beautiful organ at the Gatsby mansion, I heard in my head: "And the Oscar for best production design goes to: The Great Gatsby!" The story picks up on Nick Carraway, who is undergoing rehab for his alcohol consumption in the risqu? and wild parties of Mr. Jay Gatsby. He tells the story of his partying and eventual drama in the roaring twenties to his therapist (and the audience) in the form of a book he's writing. It starts when he goes to visit his cousin Daisy and her unfaithful husband Tom. His house is right next to the large mansion of Jay Gatsby, who is famous for his large parties, to which nobody gets invited, but everyone shows up. He one day gets an unusual thing: an invitation to one. He immediately falls in love with the partying and wild life of the rich upper crust. He starts to discover more and more about the mysterious Gatsby.


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A Jewish Life on Three Continents
The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden
Translated, Edited, and Annotated, and with Introductions and an Afterword by Lee Shai Weissbach
SERIES: Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
History / Jewish
This remarkable memoir by Menachem Mendel Frieden illuminates Jewish experience in all three of the most significant centers of Jewish life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It chronicles Frieden's early years in Eastern Europe, his subsequent migration to the United States, and, finally, his settlement in Palestine in 1921. The memoir appears here translated from its original Hebrew, edited and annotated by Frieden's grandson, the historian Lee Shai Weissbach.
Frieden's story provides a window onto Jewish life in an era that saw the encroachment of modern ideas into a traditional society, great streams of migration, and the project of Jewish nation building in Palestine. The memoir follows Frieden's student life in the yeshivas of Eastern Europe, the practices of peddlers in the American South, and the complexities of British policy in Palestine between the two World Wars. This first-hand account calls attention to some often ignored aspects of the modern Jewish experience and provides invaluable insight into the history of the time.
Lee Shai Weissbach is Professor of History at the University of Louisville. His previous publications include The Synagogues of Kentucky: Architecture and History (1995), and Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (2005).
"The full annotations and the general introduction of the translator-editor along with his perceptive and objective introductions to each chapter make the text comprehensible to readers without familiarity with the topic. Frieden was not a leader or an important personage. Precisely for that reason, it is a window into how intelligent and committed ordinary Jews interpreted some of the key developments in modern Jewish religious life. The translation is extremely smooth, and this could easily be used as a source for student research as well as a basis for class discussions. The descriptions of Jewish life 'on three continents' make this book a useful addition to collections with strengths in modern Jewish religious life."
—Shaul Stampfer, Religious Studies Review
"Frieden's memoir is a fascinating and useful narrative about Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the United States, and the Land of Israel, and his literary skill will help to make this memoir accessible to non-academic readers. Weissbach has made a significant contribution by adeptly translating and making this illuminating historical source available to the English-language readership."
—Gil Ribak, H-Judaic
"Freiden's memoir is a rich source for detailing many aspects of Jewish life in a small rural Jewish community in Lithuania, the Hassidic yeshivot and customs in Latvia and Belarus, the awakening to Western culture of traditional young Jews, the influence of American Zionists on the modern yishuv, and on the 1948 Israeli war of independence, among others."
—Roger S. Kohn, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter
"This rich memoir captures the tumultuous historical epoch through the prism of individual self-reflection, laying bare the havoc wrought on the Jewish world by processes of migration, adaptation, and nation building a century ago. Indeed, it highlights the transnational character of Jewish life in the early twentieth century."
—Rebecca Kobrin, Columbia University
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