Hoboken's history (abbreviated)

From a 2001 inaugural program I created.

My Theory of Writing Efficacy

A comment in the original Gizmodo post of this 'key' artwork ("it's so satisfying to see it work") is, to me, revealing.

Years ago, when my marketing work began gaining traction and outperforming previous sales standards, I naturally began to wonder why. Since a good part of my job involved analyzing the strengths and weaknesses in previous campaigns for the same client I was taking on, I began looking at my own work the same way.

I concluded that human beings look for and respond to patterns. In the arts, we look for familiar patterns (attractive because they comfort and self-assurance), overly-familiar patterns (cliches – usually ignored), incomplete patterns (an important, powerful tack that engages our primal puzzle-solving instincts), and alien (unfamiliar, possibly unsettling) patterns (not so engaging as 'incomplete' patterns, but often similarly attention-getting). These patterns can be shapes and colors, or they can be concepts within a story, and combining the two (as a movie or comic book does) is powerful.

When I began creating political messages I combined my visual/textual pattern theories, and the effect was startling. My underfunded candidates, many of whom were the same folks who had been drubbed in previous elections, quickly moved to the front ranks and began winning.

The GIF shown here describes a pattern (the cylinders in disarray) moving to an expected completion (lining up), in much the way people expect a story to move to a completion. It is, as the commentator notes, a 'satisfying' process. In a book, people look for minor pattern completions (the end of a paragraph 'completing' the beginning, the end of a chapter closing out the premise of its opening) and of course major completions (commonly called the story arc, carried out over the course of the book).

This series of interlocking, or interwoven, patterns was carried out better in the first Harry Potter than in any book I have ever read. That is not to say Potter was 'the best book ever', but merely that it conformed to our brains' hardwiring better than anything I ever read. The subsequent books did more or less the same thing, just not quite as fully or well. (This is truly a Herculean and maybe impossible task over a long series of books, and would more or less necessitate writing the entire series at once. For many pragmatic reasons, this has never to my knowledge been done.)

Stories and song are more or less vital to our mental health, but we are bombarded a lot of 'fast food' stories (written for profit, serving a commercial agenda rather than serving a purpose) in our diet today, and that is a problem in our society. It has lead to a great deal of the social disconnect, alienation, depression, suicide, and so-called 'mental illness' that we see in abundance all around us today.

Not that a writer working for profit cannot also fulfill the more important and satisfying niche that storytelling fills in the human heart. Indeed, I would guess that the more of this need a story addresses, the more commercially-successful it is apt to be. For example, take Charles Dickens – as 'commercial' a writer who ever lived. He understood the nature of patterns in his commercial success, once observing that his audience did not care how far-flung and convoluted his plots became, so long as he bound them up with a neat bow at the end.

When Dickens wrote Christmas Carol (in about 6 weeks, and he self-published it, too), there was no such thing as a 'white Christmas', and in fact, Christmas was not widely celebrated. (When Scrooge grudgingly asked Cratchitt if he expected Christmas off, he wasn't being such an outrageous curmudgeon for the era in which he lived. Probably many employers at that time were on the fence about it.) But Dickens, probably subconsciously, had caught wind of ideas that had been building in the public's mind for some time. There had been a quiet trend towards growth in Christmas as a holiday of meaning and significance. What Christmas Carol managed to do was embody a spirit, if you will, that existed at the time, but which had no commonly-accepted cultural reference point the public could access. This is the most noble and socially-vital goal of all storytelling and art. 

Christmas Carol filled an an important social need. Dickens, though, did not entirely grasp what he had accomplished. He thought Christmas Carol's broad acceptance meant he ought to turn out a new Christmas story every year, which he did faithfully for a number of years after. But nothing came close to Christmas Carol, precisely because that story captured and gave voice to something that was already in the public consciousness. That is the real power of such a story. 

To a degree, even a purely commercial jingle can tap into the public ID in a manner similar to a Christmas Carol. 'Where's the Beef?' became shorthand for a widespread and deeply-felt dissatisfaction with empty (usually corporate or political) promises.

More recently, the author Lisa Cron took the same idea from a somewhat different POV (for me it was spirit, pschology and art, for her it is 'science'). Her book is a worthwhile read, and a further exploration of these ideas. 

My Online Portfolio

Links from my resume to examples of work reside in this blog.

VISA

Post re work for this well-known brand to come.

Direct Mail

Post to come re Direct Mail.

After 9/11 (a Documentary)

Post to come.

Stevens Institute: Fundraising

Post to come.

Stevens Institute: Planning

Post to come re communications designed to facilitate planning meetings.

Stevens Annual Reports

(Click image to enlarge.) Full post to come.

Stevens Institute and the Importance of One's Own Story

Post to come.

Symposia Bookstore

About the Symposia Bookstore and local stained glass (post to come).

Hoboken City Seal

I recreated Hoboken's City Seal from documents found by a local historian, after the 2001 election. The city had been using Xeroxes of Xeroxes for many years up to that point. It's amazing what a positive impact this had on the city's self-image.

To Achieve Great Things, Politicians Must Be Great Communicators

Post to come re local government communications after the watershed 2001 elections.

2001: An Incredible Year

Post to come re: Major upheavals in public power, the 9/11 attacks, and I picked THAT YEAR to leave a straightforward marketing job and venture out into uncharted waters.

The Patriots of Mars

Post to come: Why I took time to pursue a personal project, and the resultant benefits for new clients.

Marketing for Entertainment Clients

Post to come: The expanding and changing range of needs re clients in the entertainment business.

Marketing for Educational Clients

Post to come re the nature of marketing for clients in higher education.

How Publishing Has Changed

Post to come re what marketing, for publishers, once was and how the dynamics of the publishing business has (rapidly and irrevocably) changed.

Student.com

This was a somewhat unusual and urgent situation.

The client needed a 'social media' boost (recognition and site traffic) quickly, because they were a dotcom startup in need of a second round of funding. Without good numbers, new funding was just not going to happen.

In this case, rather than attempt to drum up traffic online, we went directly to the website's target audience with an inexpensive (no media buys were required, no mailings were needed) guerrilla-marketing print campaign.

It worked – Student.com got noticed, and they got funded.

Kate's Paperie (Soho, NYC)

I did a variety of projects for Kate's (click image at left to enlarge - and more projects for this client will be posted soon). But the most important work I did for them was to demonstrate how to cultivate media superstar Martha Stewart, so she could be persuaded to incorporate in-store demonstrations and Kate's products in her many and widely-varied domestic projects. (The store's marketing director at the time and I pitched her ideas regularly for half a year before she began to respond positively.) The introduction of Kate's by Stewart to her audience had a huge impact on the recognition of Kate's brand, and on their internet sales. (Products mentioned by Martha Stewart launched sales spikes, easily viewed on the store's website. These spikes began the moment Martha mentioned certain Kate's products on TV, so the link was undeniable.) Kate's had done no in-store demonstrations or broadcasts previously, but today it is used as a broadcast background on a regular basis.

This effort began well before the onset of social media, but a similar approach today using Facebook, Twitter, and other online tools, can yield similar results.

Reader's Digest Video Mailer

Reader's Digest had owned the rights to market these four 'Hallmark Hall of Fame' productions for years, but sales were languishing. The mailer I created (click image to enlarge) shipped in a regular business envelope, and opened like a road map. Each unfolding showed a different aspect of the four products and told a different part of their story.

This mailer revived these properties' flagging fortunes, and was reprinted for years.

Collage of Political Work

Here is a collage of work I've done for various New Jersey political campaigns. Click to enlarge.  Here is some background on this work.

Phyllis Spinelli Campaign

In 1999 I created a political marketing campaign that was a local and, possibly, a national landmark.

Tired of deeply-corrupt Hudson County political practices, and wanting to test my marketing theories, in 1999 I approached a perennial also-ran Hoboken 'reform' candidate. I promised to give her, at no charge, a political message that would lift her City Council campaign into contention. My only price was that the campaign materials be created as I saw fit. Short on cash and ideas, and up against a mayor so deeply-entrenched that few ran against his (Anthony Russo's) chosen candidates, Phyllis Spinelli agreed to my terms.

The campaign stunned Hudson County. It did not win, but the independent campaign beat a well-funded local Democrats' campaign to unseat the mayor's candidate, and took him to a runoff. Emboldened by this attempt, another candidate asked me shortly afterwards to provide him with a message to take on another Russo-backed candidate. This campaign won, and shortly after that I created still another campaign that took down the mayor (who was indicted shortly after being forced from office).

The campaign may have been significant for another reason. Before this well-designed and well-written campaign was launched, political messages were ugly. In fact, I met resistance from the very people on whose behalf I worked because my work did not look ugly enough. It did not look the way a 'real' political campaign was 'supposed' to look. But I did notice, in the wake of my work, that the look of political campaign messaging began to improve rapidly, reaching a peak in the first Obama campaign. I cannot say if these ads changed anything, or if I merely happened to be ahead of the curve of a larger trend that was forming anyway.

AAA Direct Mail Campaign

AAA needed assistance.

They were bleeding membership, and unable to convince existing members to try the new services (such as credit cards) they were rolling out. They could not understand this. On the advice of various marketing gurus they'd hired, they had upgraded their marketing and graphics. Not only had the changes not produced the desired growth, they were losing traction and did not know why.

I convinced them that their problem was that they had buried their greatest asset – the AAA story. They had forgotten that they had risen to prominence on the growth of the American highway system, and were known as an integral (and comforting) part of what made the romance of the road possible. I explained that this was not only the story their existing members needed to be reminded of, but that new members would be attracted to it even if they were too young to recall AAA's heyday. Romance, after all, is romance.

The campaign shown here (click to enlarge) was the beginning of a change in direction for AAA. Not only was it a huge success (this mailer was reprinted for at least a decade), but AAA was moved to go 'back to basics' in all its marketing materials.

Graphics, Illustration & Typography

I conceived of and executed the graphics in this collage (click to enlarge) for various clients. Further examples of this sort of work may be found here.

Analytic & Strategic Skills

In the marketing/advertising business, I have sometimes been called upon to write 'white papers' analyzing a particular market or an approach to that market. In the worlds of politics and institutions, I have been called upon to analyze conditions and suggest strategy.

In creating political messages, the first rule is similar to Hippocrates' 'first do no harm' medical oath. That means crafting your message in such a way that it cannot be used against you, because if an opponent can do so, they will. (You might be surprised at how many politicians shoot themselves in the foot in exactly this way.)

The institutional and corporate worlds are often surprisingly unaware of the dangers lurking outside their walls. The newspaper clipping shown here is a case in point. Stevens Institute (based in Hoboken, NJ) was being blackmailed by the town's mayor (Anthony Russo) to participate in a real estate scheme. Desperate for help, the Institute appealed to a couple of area politicians. The move probably seemed logical to the Institute's politically-naive president (Hal Raveche), but when these pols ran a campaign to oust Russo, they made this private meeting public knowledge. This put the Institute very much at risk (Russo held supreme power in Hoboken at that time), and the deeply chagrined Raveche was forced to publicly disavow all knowledge of such a meeting.

Russo was eventually ousted from office (in a campaign I orchestrated) and subsequently indicted on various counts. (It is usually only after losing power that a politician can be indicted in Hudson County, NJ.) Stevens hired me as a consultant shortly afterward, and I advised them on such matters.

Conceptual Skills

It is often important that we approach a subject from an unusual angle. Sometimes this is because a certain approach has been tried so often that the public no longer pays it any mind, sometimes it is because the wrong approach will not yield the intended result. This is what I mean by conceptual skills.

Example: I worked for Stevens Institute, located just across the Hudson River from the former World Trade Center. The Stevens Community had an unusually good view of the 9/11 attack, and the Institute felt a pressing need to offer some closure and solace to those who had witnessed it. The challenge was, how to approach the subject in a way that would offer some comfort rather than reopening the wound?

Stevens commissioned me to make a documentary, and my approach was to focus on the attempts already underway at a grass-roots level to come to grips with that difficult time. I created a film incorporating the music and art that had taken over the streets of lower Manhattan after 9/11.

I have an early test strip of the documentary on my Facebook page. The full piece may go online later this year. It was originally intended for the Stevens and Hoboken communities only. (I can arrange private showings – it's on a DVD – for anyone interested.)

For its intended purpose of bringing some measure of healing to a shocked and saddened community, the After 9/11 documentary was a great success.

In the marketing world, and particularly in direct mail, many of my pieces have become client standards. That is, their efficacy exceeded previous marketing attempts and were allowed to run until they either wore out their welcome (overexposure) or (rarely) were replaced by new attempts that exceeded their high-water marks.

In politics, my campaigns changed the way political marketing campaigns were handled in Hudson County and, eventually, nationally.

Writing

I believe that every project has a story behind it, and that stories are powerful. More on writing approach and theory here.


Writing and project samples are linked below:

AAA

The Story of Katrina

Reader's Digest