"Cheap beer, Rock n Roll?"
My friend, Gary, and I, sophomores at Syracuse in 2004, stood by the main campus bus stop from the late morning to the early afternoon handing out flyers for a concert I'd arranged until we had none left. In a playful - and terrible - faked British accent, Gary made each flyer recipient smile. At 8 o'clock that night we showed up to The Bunker on Marshall Street to a line of kids that ran from Manny's to Acropolis (Orange will understand). The band, Pharmacy (later renamed as The London Souls and onward towards success touring with the Black Crowes, Tedeschi Trucks, Slash) played a blazing set to a receptive crowd. The next night I had them booked at Sigma Alpha Mu. Another line down the block. Word had spread.
"Cheap beer, Rock n Roll?"
It wasn't the last time I'd do well promoting a concert. It wasn't the last great band I'd book, and it wasn't the last time I'd put a line around a block. But some 20-years hence it was the most instructive. As I've spent my entire adult life in what is popularly referred to as "digital marketing" I've heard every bit of jargon, learned all the acronyms, studied the AdWord hacks, the keyword secrets, the algorithm tricks. Yet nothing has been so informative as handing someone a cool flyer, making them smile and inviting them to a great concert. The flyer being cool (and informative), the smile, and the great concert make up the three essential ingredients of any effective advertisement. And whereas the contemporary marketing industry has siloed these three ingredients (flyer = advertising; handing of the flyer = marketing; the concert = product) I prefer a more traditional, Hopkins-esque (Hopkinsian?) approach which marries all three as one unified discipline.
If the ad stinks then no one will listen to your pitch; if your pitch stinks then no one will try your product; and if your product stinks then no one will buy from you again. The reason I mention Claude Hopkins is because his great breakthrough as an ad man came when he successfully synergized the three ingredients for the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company. His first endeavor with the company included a process whereby Hopkins designed a display rack for the brooms the company manufactured, a Christmas-themed display rack accompanied by signage Hopkins authored and designed, and solicited stores all around the midwest to install the displays in their stores. The campaign was such a success that Hopkins was able to convince Bissell to take on a more ambitious campaign.
This second campaign saw Bissell manufacture 250,000 new brooms that sported 12 unique wood variants. It was a marvelously aggressive campaign, but one which was predicated first on Hopkins' extensive audience research (that is, countless conversations with women who used brooms) and second on the success of the initial Christmas-sale campaign. Just like the initial campaign, Hopkins solicited retailers to use the display rack he designed with accompanying signage and within three weeks all 250,000 items had been sold.
The flyer. The smile. The concert. All conceived and executed in unison.
If you are a marketer in the digital age then you most assuredly get Instagram ads targeted towards you from people who can generate leads for your business. In the digital age, the concept of lead generation has come to typically identify a process which sources someone who is willing to spend 15-30 minutes with a sales rep learning about the product they are selling. More traditionally, lead generation can be viewed as being synonymous with audience targeting, and so there is, quite obviously, value in the process. But the value of the process terminates at the point at which the value of the product is presented to the potential customer. To repeat from several sentences ago, if the product stinks, all the advertising, lead generation, audience targeting and marketing in the world can't save you. And so lead targeting has intrinsic limitations.
Why the need for a paragraph on lead generation? Two reasons: First, it is a prevalent practice and one which is, if visibility in an Instagram feed is an indicator, good at earning money for the person selling the service. Second, it is because I have many years of experience with it, both as a lead generator and as a member of a company who used the services of a lead generator. Regarding the first reason, since it is a lucrative service, I might give my two cents that one ought to be careful that the juice is worth the squeeze when spending money on it. And herein lies the intersection of the first reason and the second reason. I've worked with some very capable lead generators and therefore presented many times to who they've identified as high quality potential users of my company's services or software. I have also participated in the reverse interaction wherein I have been identified as a potential buyer/user of someone else's product and had them pitch to me.
I can sum up such experiences in brief: They are inefficient at best and illustrative of a failed product design at worst. In light of the latter, though, such methods - perhaps best considered "sales calls" - are brilliant for conducting intimate market research. Most such meetings will include the potential customer asking "Can your product for XYZ" and the sales agent saying "I will make a note of it and get back to you." This happens because no product meets all of the demands of all customers, and nimble, open-minded businesses will seek to return to the customer with some version of an affirmative response. We did this time and again at PANDA Interactive and wound up developing an exceedingly feature-rich platform that satisfied the requirements major sports leagues and media entities as well as non sports-specific clients. But we nonetheless bore the brunt of continually selling our product via long conversations. And since only a small fraction of potential customers will ever convert into regular customers (say 1-3% from a broad-brush, vertical-agnostic perspective), lots of time and resources (ie money spent on salaries for those spending the time to do the selling) are allocated. How to avoid this? Well, you offer a sales rack full of items that you know people want and advertise it obviously, briefly and simply. If your product won't allow to do this, you ought to conceive of a new product.
And at this point I believe we have returned to my thesis, that the traditional approach, that which incorporates marketing, advertising and product design/management into a single methodology works best. I carry with me nearly a decade's worth of guilt for not realizing this much sooner and then for not demanding its implementation far more aggressively. Sparing tens of thousands of hours of collective work-hour details accrued by my teammates and I at PANDA, suffice it to say that we had gotten very, very close to coalescing a Hopkinsian (I think that term works fine enough so I'll stick with it) strategy that might have brought PANDA to prominence in the marketplace, but it took us just a bit too long to allow me to see it come to fruition before my time with the company came to an end. Fortunately for us, our team was rich with intelligent contributors and so the company's ultimate value, which may yet be substantial, wound up residing in its intellectual property more so than in its user-facing product, but that's a story that I will tell another day. And, anyway, this is an essay about my decade in music from 2004-2014, not my time in technology from 2012-present.
After the Sigma Alpha Mu concert, I would invite Pharmacy back for another weekend in the spring during which they would play again at Sigma Alpha Mu and once more at Psi U. That same semester I booked several shows at other bars on the main drag and began cutting my chops. That summer I took several of the acts I'd booked at Syracuse to venues where I had connections - most of which were fortuitous, like, a high school friend started promoting at a night club that for some reason had a stage - and continued my first-hand education in concert promotion and production, learning about live sound and lighting by irritating the professionals who made the bands sound and look good on the stages I booked.
Growing up in the business in the early oughts meant that was once a promotional environment where handing out flyers and calling up radio stations was giving way to running ads on Facebook and selling digital albums, and the transition, in hindsight anyway, caused me to make a number of missteps. The most notable misstep was that I got lazy about handing out flyers. I replaced "Cheap beer and Rock n Roll?" with an endless array of Facebook advertisements. While I got really good at increasing CTR I was becoming increasingly alienated from the most crucial part of offering a product: Asking people if they wanted it or not. That's because CTR doesn't equal interest and it sure as shit doesn't equal the sale of a ticket or a beer or a tee shirt.
That doesn't mean that digital engagement is devoid of real world implications. Facebook Events were a marvel for those like me who were interested in how many people were likely to attend an event - and for those like me who were interested in how many people were likely to attend other people's events. From about 2006-2014 the Facebook Event was the ubiquitous method by which people found out about stuff going on and by which they built and maintained their social calendars. I called it a marvel because it was. But it went out of style, as most things eventually do, and concert promotion metrics returned to their nebulous origins, origins that gave people like me agita for not knowing what sort of turnout to expect for any given bill. That meant that it was hard to tell whether a bill ought to be booked at a 130-capacity venue on a Thursday night where a turnout of 75 overall was perfectly fine, or at a 250-capacity venue on a Saturday night where you really ought to attract 300-500 people to pay to see three or four bands. If I had maintained the "Cheap beer and Rock n Roll" process then I would have had a constant audience barometer at my disposal, and, what's probably more important, is I would have been forced to continually improve my hand-to-hand, IRL methods, which would have, almost certainly, increased my ability to sell tickets.
But! Though I just spent the past paragraph critiquing my work as a concert promoter, I also had many successes. One such success was The Shakedown. My word was that a success.
After I graduated from Syracuse in 2007, I went hunting for bands. On MySpace. I found a band called The Shake, went to see them at The Lion's Den, approached them after the show, set up a meeting with them, and soon thereafter became their manager. The Shake had spent a couple of years playing out before I'd met them. They'd put out an LP called "Kick It" and had a number of songs from that album placed in movies and TV shows by an independent publisher, LoveCat Music, including "Let Me Take You Far Away" in the Robin Williams, John Krazinski movie License to Wed, and "Dyin' Ain't the End of End of the World" in HBO's True Blood. They were able to bring 50-100 people to see their shows and so I was able to get them Saturday nights at Pianos, The Bowery Electric, Cameo, and, eventually, Mercury Lounge. By late-2010 the band had established itself with all the talent buyers in the city and had put out another LP, "The Shake Go Crazy," for which I brought in producer Greg Lattimer (Albert Hammond Jr., Aaron Tasjan), and they wanted a rehearsal space they could call their own. The guys in the band found a spot in a tilted and leaky building on 24th between 6th and 7th nicknamed The Red Door, which was owned, and lived-in, by Giorgio Gomelski, one-time band manager for The Rolling Stones. The ground floor housed a raised stage and stage lights, a full sound system and board, fog machine, glow-in-the-dark paintings on the black walls. People threw parties there. And within a couple of weeks, we were throwing parties there.
We called it The Shakedown. It was a three-band concert which culminated in a headlining performance by The Shake. We created a members-only Facebook group. I cooked up membership cards with unique serial numbers, which were required for entry. We'd throw The Shakedown on the third Thursday of the month and promote it on Facebook by "going dark," which involved the band members, myself, that month's two supporting acts and as many willing Shakedown members as we could convince to make their profile pictures black squares and write a post saying "going dark." We'd make beer run to a distributor in New Jersey that morning; buy 20 bags of ice from the CVS down the block, each time assisted by a friendly young employee named - and this is the truth - Icey; stock up on whiskey, tequila, vodka, mixers; set up a complementary champagne station in the foyer; schedule the coke dealer's arrival; and throw the most raucous party one has ever attended. Sometimes we'd wake up at home, other times in the cold and damp recesses of The Red Door, unsure if we were waking up, dreaming, or dead. And then we'd clean up and count the money.
For a Valentine's Day show we painted an enormous curtain with a punk-style bleeding heart and rehearsed with The Shake the beginning of a show which would see the curtain drop just as the opening chord of their song "Galleries" was rung. We spray painted decapitated mannequins and hung then in the rigging above the stage. We made a massive "Shakedown" stencil and used it to make a backdrop that became the iconic symbol of The Shakedown. We printed and handed out flyers and stickers and, most importantly, booked awesome bands to join The Shake. Black Taxi. CHAPPO. X-Ambassadors. Hank & Cupcakes. Brick+Mortar. It was a scene.
This was the time when Todd P was the master of DIY events in Brooklyn, most notably at Death By Audio. My name never rose to his ranks, but having spent eight days a week at venues and concerts from Bushwick to the Bowery, Greenpoint to Greenwich Village, for nine years, The Shakedown was the best concert party ever thrown in NYC. The only similar such event that I ever heard of rivaling what we built at The Shakedown was Jesse Malin's Coney Island High. As fortune would have it, Jesse's Coney Island High parties were thrown in the very spot at The Shakedown, at Giorgio's Red Door (called The Green Door in Jesse's day), and I was soon to become Jesse's employee at The Bowery Electric.
Between 2004 and 2011 I'd made friends all over town, in particular, Jify Shaw at Cameo; Billy Jones, Steve Matrick, and Carlo at Pianos; Sebastian Freed at Bowery Presents; and Gillian Stoll and Diane Gentile at The Bowery Electric. Jesse Malin owned The Bowery Electric, Diane ran it, and Gillian was Diane's right-hand woman. When it was time for Gillian to move on to work as Jesse's manager, I applied for her vacated position. Why I wore a suit to the interview is a dual function of mystery and nervousness, but I landed the gig and spent the next two years working 70+ hour weeks in a basement office alongside my boss, Diane. Our responsibilities included:
Staffing, which involved the occasional uncomfortable scenario wherein we'd have to fire someone and dozens upon dozens of interviews with potential bartenders, promoters, sound engineers, security guards and interns;
Booking/Buying, a two-pronged process that involved utilizing our network to invite bands that were musically talented, a fit for the venue, and able to bring in a crowd, and the process of fielding requests from bands, managers, labels and promoters to book slots and nights. (I could write an entirely separate article - or two or three or more - on the scientific art of talent buying and so will spare such potentially forthcoming details for that article/those articles.);
Managing the venue, which required dogged attention to every detail of the physical space from dust in the joints of the bar to lightbulbs, bar-stocking to register accounting, drink tickets, bracelets, bar taps and kegs, bathrooms, stocking, musical and lighting equipment, signage, and the thousand items that interrupt your daily routine, thus rendering interruptions a part of one's daily routine.
My time at The Bowery Electric was intense, it was physically unhealthy, exhausting, and it was the most in-depth education a young person could receive in running a business of most any sort. Diane was the definition of a no-bullshit kind of woman and no mercy kind of boss. She taught me more in 20 months than I've learned in the 10 years since my departure. All due respect to my partners, colleagues and superiors at PANDA Interactive, TBL, USA Today Sports Media Group, the NFL Players Association and so on, but Diane Gentile was the best boss I've ever had. When she told me she was going to "fucking kill [me]" (twice) it was for good reason. And I learned from it. When she had me dip out of work early so she could take me for a VIP experience of a Lucinda Williams show at Bowery Ballroom, it was because I'd earned it. And I learned from it. While I haven't got much of the tough-as-nails yell-at-a-person gene in my psychosocial architecture, I sincerely hope the days of bosses chewing out subordinates are not over. Jobs are there to be done and done correctly. When you screw up at work, you need to know it and not repeat the mistake. And when you do well, you need to be rewarded. A thick skin is a good skin.
During my time at The Bowery Electric, I'd inherited two crucial promotional responsibilities: One was to update the weekly full-page ad we'd run in The Village Voice, and the other was to run our email marketing campaign. As regards the former, my dad got me my first version of Adobe Photoshop (3.0) in 1996, and so I was able to apply small but substantive updates to the template that made the venue's management, particularly Jesse, happy. As regards the latter, I labored long into many a night to develop a reactive HTML template that revolutionized the way the venue utilized and profited from email campaigns. Rather than a haphazard mailing schedule that sent what were equivalent to digital flyers for individual concerts, we sent strictly-scheduled, beautifully presented, neatly organized, tightly branded calendars that included every band on that week's docket. The number of weekly clicks went from 20 or 30 to well into the thousands. I'd initially gotten myself in some trouble with management because our ActiveCampaign bill came back far higher than was typical, but it only took me a moment to explain the reason.
I soon thereafter created a blog, The Daily Electric, which tied seamlessly into our email campaigns. When Jesse made the bold and initially-unpopular move to open a second, very small stage on the ground floor (the main stage was on the basement level) we have the promotional infrastructure to get the word out about. Tickets sales increased. Walk up increased. Bar revenue increased. I think I even got myself a little raise. But I was burnt out and an opportunity to work with my dad heading up a new digital division of his merchant bank arose, and so I quit, but not before I meticulously penned the B.E. Bible, a step-by-step detailed guide on doing every last task that whoever took my position would need to do, including HTML tutorials so the email campaigning could be continued by someone with no coding experience. Any time I'd visited the venue to say Hi or see a show, I've been welcomed backstage into the old office and been very glad to see my position filled by a team of spirited young people, the wheels of efficiency well-greased.
While my time in the music industry had come to an end, my time in music had not, and surely never will cease. As I'd mentioned, I'd gotten an opportunity to go work with my dad at the intersection of technology and merchant banking, which would soon give rise to HearPlay, a music-oriented social game for which we attracted support from Sony and Universal. I would also commit myself to making music, starting a band called The Motor Tom and later setting out on a solo endeavor calling myself Cheerry Red. But to put a bow on this essay, I want to return to the beginning. "Cheap beer, Rock n Roll?" For all the success that I had booking concerts either as the Oz behind the curtain of CitizenMusic or at The Bowery Electric, I time and again came up short when it came to street teaming. For those unfamiliar, a street team is the term applied to folks who hand out flyers and put up posters. I'd investigated putting together street teams or partnering with existing ones countless times, but never had either the wherewithal or commitment to bring a street teaming campaign to fruition. Huge miss. If I could turn back the clock, I would haunt the NYU campus until I'd amassed an army of low-wage teenage hipsters and I'd have them fill each dorm with my promotional materials day and night. And I'd make sure to spend time with them so I could steal as many of their ideas as possible, snatch up any band they were starting to get into, and grift off their effortless knowledge of what is cool until I'd started to make enough money to turn them from low-wage to medium-wage and send them off to recruit the next wave of low-wage teen hipsters to join our ever-expanding concert promoting army.
Maybe someday...
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