Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 28 - The Ingenuity of Marketers
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Today, I learned about one of the coolest marketing stunts I’ve ever seen.
Now, you may or may not know there’s a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out. If you didn’t know, I don’t blame you, because I didn’t either. I never watched TMNT as a kid, and this is the sequel to the reboot directed by Michael Bay. I don’t like Michael Bay’s films, so it’s a double whammy.
Anyways, as part of the promotion, check out this AirBnB listing.
Yes, somewhere in New York, they recreated the Turtle’s Lair, and it only costs $10. They don’t let you stay the night, but you get free pizza, and there’s an arcade, and there’s a basketball court.
Ten dollars for pizza and an arcade is a pretty good deal, even if you’re not into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So obviously, they’re all booked.
This is an amazing, amazing marketing stunt. For one, it’s cheap enough to feel like something any fan could afford. And secondly, the internal decorating is on point. I mean, look at this, it’s ridiculous.
Look, this marketing campaign was cool enough that it marginally convinced me to watch the movie. Me! A guy who has no nostalgia about TMNT, and who expects the movie to be terrible.
(Warning: TVTropes link incoming, click at your own risk.)
There’s some weird kayfabe thing going on, where the listing pretends it’s actually Leonardo talking about the place. They don’t explicit say they’re advertising the movie, but it’s obvious they are if you read the listing in full. Maybe that’s a marketing trick I don’t know? Or at least, maybe it’s how good viral campaigns are made. Things that look too much like advertising don’t go viral. No one wants to look like a corporate stooge who let advertising hijack them. But, if you hide it just a bit, it doesn’t feel like you’re giving them exposure even though you are.
(For the record, I am not a marketer, I have read literally nothing on marketing, do not assume I know what I’m talking about.)
Sometimes, I forget that there are people whose entire job is to figure out how to social engineer as many people as possible to look at their stuff. People literally make a living out of this.
This is the point where some of you may say, “The market has a demand for this and these people can supply it.” Yes, I get it, but it’s not something I consciously think about. I don’t think about how many artists the art market can support, or how many people are employed to design new headphones. I only think about markets when I’m explicitly challenged to think about markets.
Okay, getting off topic, back to advertising. I actually can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a marketing stunt so interesting. I think part of it is that this was hosted on AirBnB. I spend most of my time around people who know the tech industry, and at times it definitely feels like a bubble. Not an economic bubble, a social bubble. (It might be an economic bubble, but I don’t trust my judgment here.) Everyone I talk too knows about Medium, Hacker News, Quora, and Palantir, which are four random tech industry things that are more obscure than you’d assume if you live your life in Silicon Valley.
I wouldn’t expect a marketing group to know about AirBnB, and even if they did I wouldn’t expect them to figure out a way to use it for advertisement. I’ll have to update my beliefs about this later.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 27 - Structural Tinkering
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
If there’s anything I like, it’s when people do something interesting with structure.
A good example of this is from the Firefly fanfic Forward. River’s thoughts are centered on the page, and will shift into bolds or italics.
Ra does something similar. Magic spells are written in monospaced font and a different color.
I like how toying with the structure reveals our implicit assumptions about that structure. By adjusting it in the right way, authors can reveal those assumptions, then push their boundaries to describe things without words. Done properly, it gives a sense of completeness - the text content gets tied to the medium itself, and neither can easily be separated from the whole.
When I write blog posts, I’m on the lookout for structural gimmicks. In yesterday’s post, I was pretty pleased with myself for finding a way to use “***” twice in a row, once to indicate how I use it as a section break and once as an actual section break. I’m also pleased I got to discuss section breaks right before using one in today’s post as well. The joke’s wearing thin, so I promise this is the last time I’ll use this gag.
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For a while, I was seriously considering writing a post made entirely from quotations. I would have cited quotes about plagiarism, using the structure to blatantly show I was copying from everybody else. At the same time, the structure would also show how organizing all the quotes together was itself enough to make it original. It was going to show the boundary between plagiarism and original thought by having elements of both appear in its construction. Look, I even collected some quotes I was going to use.
There is nothing new under the sun.
(Ecclesiastes)
Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”(Lobachevsky by Tom Lehrer)
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
(Isaac Newton)
Eventually I abandoned this project. I still like it conceptually, but the reward-to-effort ratio is way too small to justify writing it. I tried a quote-heavy post in Memorable Quotes and called it a day.
I know of one other person who came up with a similarly convoluted structure, and actually went through with it. That person would be Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: the Gathering. He writes weekly articles about the design of the current sets, and sometimes about game design as a whole.
Way back in 2004, he decided to write an article on Elegance. It is the most divisive article he’s ever written. I haven’t kept up with MTG very closely, but I doubt anything has matched the backlash or praise.
The structure is completely insane. The article is a home page of 50 words. Each word is a link to another 50 word snippet. It’s conceptually beautiful, but it’s also horrendously difficult for the reader. The fanmail got crazy enough that he ended up spending another article responding to the reader response to “Elegance”.
I’d recommend reading his response article by itself, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Rosewater’s key point was that elegance was a very difficult concept to explain. It was so difficult that he felt the best way to explain elegance was to have the article itself be elegant. He wanted to highlight the gap between elegant concepts and elegant executions, so he wrote an article that showed how one didn’t imply the other. The disconnect between the elegance of its structure and its readability was the whole point of the article. The words themselves were less important.
Personally, I got sick of “Elegance” around the 7th link, but after reading his response, I have a lot of respect for the idea. It’s a fantastic example of how structure influences communication.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 26 - Titles Are Hard
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
When I look back on the posts I’ve been writing this month, I notice I’ve been using a lot fewer section headings than I did in my previous posts. Instead of making up a section title, I’ll add a divider like
***
And move on to the next topic. I wonder why?
***
One reason I’ve been doing this is that making up titles is hard. No, really, it’s awful. Fun fact: back when I first set up a personal site on Blogger, its title was actually “Titles Are Hard”. This was back when I indulged in recursion and self-reference a bit more than I should have. (I blame The Monster at the End of This Book for awakening that part of myself.)
Now, it may not have been a good blog title, but at least it was accurate. It is really hard to create a good section title, especially when I’m writing by the seat of my pants. When I use a title, the implicit promise I’m giving to the reader is that the title is going to be related to the upcoming section, possibly in some pithy way.
This is so hard to do well! Look, here’s how my writing has gone this month. First, I come up with some seed topic. From there, I let the idea germinate into whatever it wants. I then prune the extra leaves to make it appear like I had a plan of what to write all along. But, when I place pressure to produce more quickly, I don’t have time to do lots of pruning. To continue this tortured analogy, I allow the plant to grow with no constraints, realize I’m running out of time, trim the most blatant errant leaves, and reveal what I have so far. Then it’s on to the next plant.
For me, writing is this gradual process where I realize what I want to write after I write it. When the topic is always shifting under my feet, it’s hard to pick a title that matches the ideas I’ve been talking about. This blogging gauntlet is focused on raw output. That means there are no incentives to go back and decide on good titles, because that takes time, time I could spend writing more material instead.
Whatever cleanliness there is in my writing is simply the byproduct of whatever I find acceptable on that day, nothing more.
An Ending of Sorts
While I’m on this topic, you know what else is terrible? Endings. I have without fail hated my ending on every first draft. If I had the time that day, I would rewrite the ending again and again until it was acceptable. More commonly, I left it the way it was.
Much in the way that it’s hard for me to come up with a pithy way to sum up a section, it’s hard for me to come up with a nice way to end the post as a whole. Conversations don’t have a fixed ending, they continue until the points naturally die. In writing, the standards are different. People expect to read something to take home.
On the other hand, I’ve read several blog posts that also didn’t have a good conclusion. They simply stopped at the moment they said everything they were planning to say.
Maybe that’s okay after all.