Analog Adventure in Tokyo
Election season.
Day after day, hour after hour, crisis after crisis you’ve long since lost any sense of normalcy as your reality has been engulfed by your own volition into an endless cycle of work and stress.
Finally the wave of work crashes over you – a long building torrent of tension suddenly crescendos leaving worry, stress and sleeplessness to evaporate.
So for me there was no more logical choice to go on vacation far, far away.
I had a plan.
No beaches, cruises or tropical settings.
Instead I’d travel to Tokyo, Japan.
Really it was one large excuse to eat copious amounts of sushi and take voluminous amounts of photos.
But, somewhere along the way I discovered a love for film. My newfound affair started with a Rolleiflex T Type 1 medium format camera (circa 1958) and quickly expanded with names like, Velvia, Portra and Ilford (different types of 120 film).
The Rolleiflex is a somewhat brutal looking piece of German engineering. It’s a TLR meaning there are two lenses, one that allows you to view the image, the other for actually taking the photo. Their visage is such that they look the part of a STAR WARS contraption rather than a completely mechanical photographic masterpiece.
Yet the brutal machine is a romantic device – and film is a seductress. Everything is manual. You load the film, set it in place – push the shutter (nearly silent) and then turn the crank to advance the film. It feels genuine. There’s no digital metering, no autofocus, no instant gratification of seeing the moment in time you just captured on a LCD screen. Instead you have to be careful. You have 12 shots on a roll of 120 film – as opposed to more than a 1,000 shots using a 64 gig card in a DSLR.
The greatest sensation you receive when using the Rolleiflex is in composing your shot. You look down unto ground glass, where the image is reversed much like a mirror. Every reaction to the scene you make during composition must be opposite to what you see on the screen. It’s a hauntingly disconnected feeling, yet at the click of the shutter you feel like you accomplished a great heist, stealing a moment in time. It feels good.
So good in fact, that after several days of taking both the Rolleiflex and my Canon 5D Mark II on adventures around Tokyo, I gamely decided to let the Canon rest at the hotel.
It was a good decision. At the end of the day I shot 20 rolls of film – the results of which tell a far better story of Tokyo than the hundreds of digital clicks from the first two days of my trip.
Film is not without it’s traps and challenges. Operating a 52-year-old camera without a manual can be a bit of a challenge. I didn’t load the film properly on a number of rolls leading to scratches on the negative. But even with scratches the film still had beauty. Finding the correct exposure was the biggest challenge. I had to use a light meter and then many times just guess on my shutter speed and F-stop for a given situation.
Film is also complicated on the backside. You have to get the film processed with each type of film requiring a different development process (B+W Negative, Color Negative, Color Transparency). If you are truly enterprising you can develop the film yourself. Even after developing, you need to scan your film and then process it further in Lightroom just as I do my digital files. It’s a labor of love.
While I’ve dipped my toes into the realm of film photography, I’m still a staunch digital supporter in the field of motion picture. 35mm motion picture film is a truly majestic aesthetic, yet one unattainable for most budgets.
Over the last two years there has been an arms race among camera manufactures to produce digital cinema cameras that allow cinematographers to produce near film quality looks at dramatic cost savings. On the high end, the RED camera is an equal to 35mm film in resolution. The canon 5D Mark II has an aesthetic quality rivaling film because it is capable of greater shallow depth of film. This winter, both Panasonic and Sony will introduce new camera bodies that use cinema glass. Innovation is coming fast and furious.
Film versus digital is a grand rolling debate, in both the photo and motion picture world. But there are no right answers. They are just tools, different cameras, formats, processes and they all have their place. I’m just happy to have rediscovered the joy of composing using film while on a wonderful adventure in Japan.
Please enjoy a selection of photos I took using my Rolleiflex:
(The complete set can be found here.)
Velvia film yields amazing saturation of colors. The colorful face was part of larger advertisement in a long underground corridor running through Western Shinjuku.
Tokyo is a mammoth city crawling with people. I was particularly struck by how many salarymen just tend to wander around aimlessly engulfed yet isolated in a city of millions.
Shibuya station is a busy crossroads and social hub.
I was fortunate enough to capture this moment from a traditional Japanese wedding being held at the Meji Shrine.
This is Hideo Asano. He’s a former journalist who covered the civil war in Afghanistan, a novelist and a Haiku poet. He’s also homeless. We met in Ueno Park, this is his portrait.
A perfect moment. A large wringed crowd had gathered in Ueno park to see this street performer. I snuck towards the front to snap a pic and he spied me and struck a pose just as I did.
Cyclist in Shibuya. It feels as if the whole city is on his tail ready to swallow him whole.
I read somewhere that 1 in 10 Japanese own a Louis Vuitton product. Tokyo residents’ materialism is ever-present.
Spying an acrobat through the crowd.
Julie Germany – the film scratches and backlighting are haunting but beautiful.
Self-portrait.
It’s Personal
During the battle over healthcare legislation, the Left frequently invoked touching personal stories and anecdotes to illustrate their points and bolster their positions. This is an effective tactic often overlooked by the Right.
Aside from the obvious benefits to messaging, utilizing these personal examples provides compelling motivation for action. This tactic can help move you from sound bites to rallies, from articles to donations, and awareness to votes.
Invoking Emotions
By personifying a policy, you can provide an emotional hook and human connection that will motivate people to be more deeply connected to your issue.
Providing Symbolism
Every cause needs a symbol. They provide a rallying point and unified theme that everyone can relate to. Everyone likes to feel like they are part of something larger than themselves. Symbols make that experience more tangible.
Articulating Policy
This is a useful tactic to explain particularly intricate policies. First hand accounts can show the importance and real-world impact of otherwise esoteric ideas.
Holding Attention
In the never-ending fight for people’s time and attention, memorable personal stories keep particular issues and topics top of mind. When these stories are illustrated in emails and videos (and distributed properly) they have the potential to go viral.
Driving Action
Organizers on the Left often rely on personal stories, and then immediately invoke them as part of a call to action. Again, this creates an emotional stir, and then immediately provides an outlet to express that compassion, anger, or excitement.
Not Political
When exposed to an overtly political message, most people literally or figuratively switch off. These stories capture and hold an audience’s attention because they are inherently about people, not politics.
As we set out under new leadership in the House and look ahead to the 2012 election, the Right must continue to assess the effectiveness of our message and how it connects with the everyday concerns of Americans. In order to continue the current momentum the Right must draw clear distinctions between their policies and those of the Left. More importantly, these stories help to keep focus on the real world, grassroots level where success or failure is ultimately judged.
A Smarter Response to the State of the Union Address
After the election, I saw several Republicans discussing who should deliver the SOTU response speech.
No one should.
First, any speech is bound to suffer by comparison to a speech before a joint session of Congress, with the Supreme Court in attendance. Republicans tried to capture some of the same spirit by having Bob McDonnell speak before a small crowd of supporters in the Virginia House of Delegates chamber, but if you can’t match the pomp and grandeur of the president, try to avoid a direct comparison.
Not only is the venue working against you, but the president is a nationally-elected official; no member of the opposition can have the same stature. Appearing to try to match the president’s status just plays to his strengths.
And finally, a speech, to be delivered immediately after the president’s carefully-planned opening move, puts the responder at a disadvantage. Since the response speech is written without knowing exactly what the president is going to say, what is supposed to be a criticism of the president’s speech or agenda is relayed in vague terms, not pointed responses. A prepared speech can only talk past the president, appearing deaf to what the president just said in the marquee event.
This precious free airtime could be spent dismantling the president’s argument, then pivoting to counterattack and providing alternatives.
How can the opposition do this?
Take advantage of the fact that they have fewer restraints.
First, make it a table discussion with more than one responder. As a suggestion, include at least one governor to remind the audience that there are independent sources of authority, laboratories of policy that should retain their power to handle local problems (a big-city mayor could also do), and also include a legislator representing the opposition in Congress to directly address the president’s agenda on the federal level.
This also takes the pressure off of any one person to speak for the party, and signals that the opposition is having a frank conversation, not speaking press-release style through the great filter of lawyers and focus-group-tested language. Make good use of stars like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie who have shown they’re champs at off-the-cuff communication and aren’t afraid to take on big issues. Bobby Jindal would have been far better suited to this than talking into a camera solo.
Second, use resources the president doesn’t have. The president is limited by the tradition of giving his speech in the chamber of the House of Representatives, which only affords him a microphone, a teleprompter and an audience. Instead of trying to beat the president at his own game, use a modern-looking studio, where the responders can make use of supporting staff and visual aids like charts and video.
And this extra content should come from a well-coordinated rapid-response team who provide ammunition for the response.
- The model for responding to a speech in progress is liveblogging. Certain people, by some mix of expertise, encyclopedic memory and quick wit, have proven they can tear apart a carefully-crafted speech in real time. Identify these people—bloggers, political operatives, think-tankers—and (with their advance permission) borrow their best arguments and lines.
- A media team would be responsible for matching the president’s remarks to earlier video and quotes from the president, his advisers and top congressional allies that contradicted the president’s SOTU message. Anyone with a good memory and a well-ordered catalogue of video and/or transcripts can do this. What could be more damaging than showing that the speech just delivered contained flip-flops?
- To respond to specific policy proposals and claims, have a team of stat junkies, economists and others who can call up relevant charts and other visuals to help the responders on-screen.
This kind of rapid counter-offensive would be much more entertaining than the president’s exhausting, conventional address, giving viewers a good reason to stick around afterward. And it would be much more effective than current efforts like sending out fact-check emails and post-speech press releases, the contents of which are read by only a tiny minority of people who saw the speech.
Don’t play to the president’s strengths. Use your own, leveraging all the media available to you that the president doesn’t have.
Shakedown
CRAFT is proud to showcase the work we recently produced for The Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research. In conjunction with the release of Steven Malanga’s newest book Shakedown, we set out to create a mini-documentary, telling the story of this timely subject.
Shakedown dissects the unchecked growth of the public sector unions and non-profit groups at a time when our country is frustrated by the lack of fiscal responsibility at the federal level and fearful of what mounting debt and deficits will mean for our future. Debt at the state and municipal levels, budget busting pension obligations and unwieldy union power are at the heart of this hydra-headed issue.
This video provides a glimpse into the story Malanga explains so well in Shakedown.
Rule #17 – Be a Hero
(This is the final installment in a five part series looking at the living dead that infect your email list. You can find the whole series here.)
So now you have run your reactivation campaign. You have saved all you can from the zombie apocalypse. It’s time to deal with the horde – that stubborn subset of the living dead who refuse to engage.
Selling your boss on the idea that you want to stop mailing 50% of your list may be a daunting challenge. He loves that “two million” number more than life itself. How do you convince him it’s just not worth it?
In the soon to be classic movie Zombieland, our hero, Columbus, lives by a set of rules. One of the most important of these is number seventeen – don’t be a hero. Without giving the story away, he’s forced to reconsider that.
Similarly, you should see it as your job to be the hero. Here’s how you do it.
First, you should keep those addresses in your database. Make sure they can be easily suppressed from regular mailings, but stop sending them mail on a weekly basis. This will afford you two nifty benefits.
The first benefit is saving money that could be better used elsewhere. You can mail them occasionally as new ideas for reanimation pop into the brains they are no longer munching on. You may think of a creative way to reach them. Go back once a month with a message to draw them in. If they make up half of your list, and you mail weekly, you’re still reducing your monthly costs by 37.5%. Multiply that by 12 months and you have a good cost justification you can give your boss.
The other benefit is you can still count them as “registered” subscribers. Your boss can still cite them as part of the “two million supporters” he likes to throw around because they still get mailed regularly. However, your mail reports will no longer include the dead weight. Your open, click-through, and conversion rates should rise significantly. Your boss will see numbers that are consistent with “active” supporters.
If you can convince your boss to raise your acquisition budget equal to what you are saving on mailings, you can also focus on attracting more active supporters, rather than spending that same money on the undead.
The net benefit to you is significant.
Your organization saves face by not having to lower its reported list size. You have freed up resources for new acquisition (so the organization doesn’t have to find the budget for it). Your success metrics are more in line with reality, and not bogged down with Zs. Finally your ISP is no longer suspicious and your messages sail through with few deliverability issues.
You have done yourself and your employer a favor, and saved the world from the ravenous appetites of the Living Dead. Go pour yourself a cold drink and enjoy life among the living… just be sure to keep that cricket bat handy. You never know when you will need it again.
Reanimating The Dead Is Always Harder Than It Looks On TV
(This is part four of a five part series on the Living Dead that infect your email list. You can read the whole series here.)
Your email list is full of the Living Dead – email addresses that don’t bounce, but never open, read, or respond to you. Zombies are threatening your deliverability, driving up your costs, and threatening your job.
So what do you do?
Before you grab that shovel, axe handle, or baseball bat and start bashing Zs, you have to make an effort to reanimate some of the dead. This should take the form of a reactivation campaign. Try what you can to revive the undead before writing them off.
Your specific tactics may vary depending on whether you’re a corporation or a political organization, but they all boil down to getting the attention of, and fanning the interests of, your subscribers.
Everyone loves free stuff.
If you are in a position to offer some sort of tangible benefit to subscribers for affirming their participation in your list, by all means do it. That could be a discount for commercial mailers, a bumper sticker or t-shirt for campaigns, whatever. The idea is to get them to respond, and hopefully to provide a fulfillment address you may not have as part of doing so.
In turn, you now have better information than just the email address and zip code you asked for when they signed up. You can use that information to connect them back to voter files or consumer data. The next message will be better targeted to the individual, and ideally they’ll stay engaged.
The Survey
If you can’t afford a premium, consider something that plays to their sense of personal value – ask for their opinion.
You would be surprised at how rarely email campaigns (especially in politics) ask for something other than money. We’ve all received the “give me just $3” email. A better tactic for non-donors is to ask them for something more valuable to them, their input.
Personal Appeals
One of the best reactivation emails I have seen was a personal note from the person sending these messages on behalf of the organization. It said they were fighting with their boss over his insistence to purge their list. They were fighting to keep you on, but the boss was sure you would never reply and wanted to get rid of the dead weight. The challenge? Prove the boss wrong. Who doesn’t love sticking it to the man, right?
Whatever your tactics, do what you can to save your list.
If you aren’t already A/B testing your messages, start now. Take a small subset of the Living Dead. Come up with two or three variations of reactivation messages. Try them out, and see what gets you the best response. Apply your best messaging to the larger mass of zombies and see how many you can save.
Being candid, however, I will tell you that much of your list will never be saved.
Once you have done all you can to reanimate the dead, it’s time to deal with the rest of the horde.
Zombies Are Not Rapid Responders
Day Three – Zombies Aren’t Rapid Responders
(This is the third installment of a five part series looking at the impact the Living Dead have on your email list. For the rest of the series, visit our Guide to Protecting Your Organization From The Living Dead.)
In zombie flicks, it always seems the military and police are overrepresented amongst the undead. While uniformed first responders may constitute a fair chunk of the horde, there is nothing responsive about the Living Dead on your list.
We’ve looked at the threat to your list from blacklisting and costs of delivering email to the living dead. Today we’re going to look at the threat to your job.
Back in the day (which was a Wednesday, by the way), your boss was probably concerned with one number – how big is our list. That’s still the 400-pound trucker zombie in the room, but we’ll get to that.
Today, however, your boss may have learned phrases like “open rate”, “click-through”, “conversion”, “bounce rate”, and “A/B Testing”. They are paying more attention, but often may not understand the intricacies of those terms.
Your boss looks at reports, sees a very low bounce rate. “Great!,” he says, “We’re reaching all two million of our supporters!”
Then he sees a low open rate. Your click-through and conversion can be really strong, but only a very small portion of your list is opening the message. Actions are a good size piece of a very small pie.
He loves throwing that “2 million supporters” number out to the press, and can’t understand why 2 million subscribers works out to 200,000 opens (on a good day).
This is where the zombies become a threat to your job.
Unless you can educate him on the finer points of email deliverability, in his eyes you have just provided evidence that your email program is a failure. After all, the Living Dead aren’t bouncing, they just don’t find your brains all that attractive.
The guy he met at the cocktail party that says he is the world’s foremost email marketing expert suddenly seems appealing.
You and I both know there are a million things that make an address go stale. Your boss, however, probably has no such knowledge, nor does he care. Welcome to Zombieland! Population? You. The next thing you know the Zs are munching on your skull. You are out of work and find yourself living on a steady diet of government cheese, living in a van down by the river.
Running a reactivation and purge campaign may provide two benefits –boosting your active subscribers by engaging some members, and raising your response rates by focusing only on people who show a tendency to interact.
The upside to you is your boss will see numbers that are more realistic. Rather than judging success based on “registered” supporters, he will see success based on “active” supporters.
As we noted yesterday, delivering email to the undead can eat 50% or more of your budget. At this point, you can suggest your organization reinvest in active recruitment the money you would have spent mailing Zeke.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the reactivation campaign and some suggestions for ways to execute it. We’ll conclude the series on Friday with some tactics for making the case to the boss when you finally decide to take a shovel to your list and start bashing zombie skulls.
Zombies are Killing Your List: Day Two – The Cost of Survival
(This is the second installment of a five part series looking at the impact the Living Dead have on your email list. For part one read “Reanimating the Dead: The Zombie Apocalypse and Your Email List”)
The Living Dead have infected your list.
Email addresses that don’t bounce, but never open or respond to your messages are the marketing equivalent of the undead. In part one of this series, we looked at the long-term impact of zombie addresses – ISP blacklisting.
Today, we’re going to look at the sunk cost of care and feeding for your zombie.
In some zombie fiction, there are survivors who fundamentally believe in a cure. They are positive that someone will be able to reverse zombification and bring their loved ones back (minus an arm or a kidney, I suppose, but alive just the same.) My favorite of these is the final scene in Shawn of the Dead where Shawn plays video games in a shed with his former friend, now a pet zombie.
Similarly, there are some who will advocate for continuing to email The Living Dead. These generally fall into two camps – the optimists who believe they’ll spontaneously reanimate, and the pessimists who simply don’t want to do a list purge (for a number of reasons that we’ll cover later this week.)
The fact is, zombies as pets can be very costly. Unless you are using an in-house solution for mailing, you’re likely paying for email sends through a formula like this
[# of email addresses] * [number of messages sent] * [price per message] = [your monthly bill]
Some platforms try to cover the cost of bandwidth, as well, by charging you based on the size (in bytes) of the message.
Lists vary, but it’s not uncommon for large and older lists to see zombification rates moving north of 50%. In other words, perhaps as much of 50% or more of your mailing costs are being wasted.
Survivors firing heavy machine guns at the advancing horde soon realize that Zs keep coming until you hit the head. As a result, that barrage of bullets is a) unlikely to stop them unless by accident and b) requires a wheelbarrow to haul that much ammo around.
Does your organization have wheelbarrows full of money it can throw at zombies? If the answer is no, you need to better target your fire, and use a weapon with less recoil.
Think about that number again… Zombies could account for half, or more, of your email costs. You could shave 50% off your email budget by reanimating what you can, and purging the rest of the Living Dead.
Later this week we’ll get into specifics discussion of how to do that. Tomorrow, however, we’ll continue making the case for combating zombies when we look at their impact on the response rates you share with your boss.
Until then, I’ll leave you with a preview of AMC’s upcoming zombie series The Walking Dead:
Reanimating the Dead, The Zombie Apocalypse, & Your Email List
Day One – The Outbreak
Zombies in movies bring about the end of the world, the complete breakdown of society. They do the same to your email lists: costing you money, lowering your response rates, and eventually resulting in the apocalypse – blacklisting from ISPs.
Make no mistake: The living dead have infiltrated your subscriber rolls and are eating your list from within. If you don’t think that’s true, ask the person who manages your email program to give you a count of the people on your list that have not opened any of your last ten messages? Or any messages in the last 6 months?
These subscribers are the living dead. Their email addresses don’t bounce, but messages to them are never opened. They have long since stopped responding to any effort to reach them. Like their namesakes from the George A. Romero films, they amble along on your list, shuffling their feet and groaning, but they are oblivious to the world around them – your world.
In some zombie flicks someone might suggest keeping the zombies around until a cure is discovered. That never works out well (see Survival of the Dead or The Walking Dead graphic novels for example).
Invariably the zombies get loose and attempt to wreak havoc on the survivors.
The living dead on your list are much the same. Someone will suggest that you keep those people on the rolls – that you continue to send messages to them in the hope they’ll be cured of their apathy.
So they sit there. They sit there quietly. They don’t make a sound. Then suddenly they strike.
Maybe it is a bad day at the office. The inbox is filling up fast. They have a hundred deadlines. Their boss is screaming for deliverables. In the midst of all this chaos, your message arrives.
They have seen your “from” address dozens of times – generally skipping over it – but no this time. This time they take swift and decisive action. Do they open it up, scroll to the bottom, click “unsubscribe”, complete your verification process and await the confirmation of their removal? Nope.
They hit “Mark as Junk” or report your message as spam. It’s simply easier than the often cumbersome unsub process.
Now you’re infected.
The ISPs start to look at you with the same sense of dread and concern the survivors show when they think one of their own has been bitten. As more of the living dead hit that breaking point, and flag your messages, the more the ISPs distrust you.
Pretty soon the infection fully takes hold, and you are having trouble getting any messages through. Your only recourse is to spend considerable effort trying to show the ISP there are no bite marks on your arms, legs or neck.
Hopefully your ISP isn’t the jumpy sort. Just like in the movies, it’s often easier to shoot you dead rather than wait for your list to turn. When that happens, you’ve been blacklisted.
The sad moral of this story is your deliverability problems could have been avoided.
Over the next week, we’ll look at the impact zombies have on your list, and ways you can fend them off. By the end of the week, you’ll be able to spot the living dead, try to save the ones you can, and bash the rest with a shovel.
Until then, try not to get bitten…
Web Video is the Future
CRAFT partner Brian Donahue recently did an interview with ClickZ on Republican investment in web video and CRAFT’s work for the RNC:
People there have said there’s a really good story that needs to be told, and, “Can you guys produce this in a Web video?”
If you look at some of the pieces that they put out during important [moments in the news cycle]…they used to use press releases or story pitches to media outlets for those in the past.
Now it seems that you can release a very creative video piece that that would get covered by traditional media, but in the worst case scenario, you use your blog networks and your online networks to get it out.
