How your brand affected your chances of meeting Stephen Mandel

I had a fantastic opportunity to share. I'm allowed to invite a select group of individuals to a coffee event with the incumbent mayor, Stephen Mandel. In order to make sure it's a conversation instead of a rally, we need to keep the numbers low. So I needed to be very selective in my invites. A diverse group was necessary, not too many people who would discuss the same issues. Only so many arts types, just a few film-people, only a couple small-business people. One digital media producer. No media-types. I would have invited many more but I had to keep the numbers down while being representational. It's a Facebook event and I had to pour through my entire list. How did I select who's getting invited and who isn't?

Very lazily...

Dinosaurs Thrashing in the Tar Pits

So here I am in a hair salon the other day, waiting to get a haircut for my show, Jailbait at Northern Light Theatre (opens on the 17th, runs to the 26th, plug, plug, plug...) and I'm killing time so I start flipping through an issue of GQ. I rarely page through a magazine, I usually browse the web on my iPhone or check the status updates of my friends on Facebook with the app. But my battery's dying and so is my tolerance for waiting. So I pick up the magazine and start flipping through. What I found, when looked at with a critical eye, was fascinating...

Who wouldn't want free milk?

A sea change is coming. It has to.

The distributors of media are in the middle of it. Book publishers, music producers, film and television makers. Even Seth Godin, international marketing guru who has made a tremendous amount of money through publishing a whackload of books, has decided he’s never going back to traditional publishing. There was a time that a creative person could only share their stories with a handful of people on their own. They needed a distributor/broadcaster/record label to share their art with the world. That’s no longer the case. Artists can reach their audience directly online. Even if they don’t want to.

Especially if they don’t want to. Because people are getting their content for free. Even if the artist is not distributing it for free. It’s a digital world, baby, and as soon as something exists digitally, there is a way to get your hands on it without paying. The thing is, no one can be blamed for this. It’s human nature. It comes down to the old maxim:

“Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?”