Monday, June 25, 2007

Learning how to deal with the red eye...

So after the craziness of Vegas, most of my friends got to go home, take a sick day or two, and then try to physically recover themselves enough to make it back to work. I, on the other hand, being still a recent grad in the job hunt (the optimist's way of saying "unemployed"), had to experience the craziest week of travel in my life.

We left Vegas at noon PST on Monday, flew to Denver, sat there feeling hungover for a while, waited for our delayed flight, and then continued on to Northern Virginia. By the time I got my bags and had my parents pick me up, it was 2:30am EST, I had flown almost 3000 miles, and I passed out in my childhood bed at home within seconds of hitting the pillow. But there's no rest for the weary.

I woke up around 1pm EST on Tuesday, packed some nice clothes, and got in the car with my Dad to go back to Dulles Airport! That's right, I had a job interview. In LA! My plane was delayed 3 hours during thunderstorms (got a crucial nap in the terminal), but I finally flew out of Virginia and landed in California around 11pm PST, where I once again passed out very quickly.

I interviewed all day Wednesday in LA, and somehow, even though I hadn't felt that tired in a very long time, the interviews went really well! They gave me a tour of LA after my interviews, and then I got back on a red eye flight at 9pm PST to head back to Dulles again! Another 3000 miles later, my parents picked me up again, this time at 6am EST on Thursday morning.

But there was still one more leg of my ridiculous traveling. Luckily, I was at least done with the time changes. I woke up at 2pm EST on Thursday in Virginia, packed my bag with nice clothes one more time, and got on a train. Yet another job interview. In New York! I got into Penn Station at 10pm, took a train out to Hoboken and crashed on my buddy Brent's couch.

Friday morning, I got up, got ready for my interview, and then commuted in from Jersey into Midtown Manhattan. Somebody up above must like me, because once again, the interviews went really well! After the interviews, I was invited to hang out in New York for the weekend, but I had to turn down my friends. Between the lack of funds resulting from the Vegas trip and lack of sleep resulting from the 5 plane rides I had been on in 3 days, logic told me not to stay in New York and party.

I got on a train from Penn Station at 5pm on Friday, slept the whole way back to Virginia, and crashed again at my parents' house. I slept all day Saturday, then woke up and drove back to Richmond because I had to work a shift at my part-time job on Sunday morning. Luckily, there wasn't much going on at my part-time job on that particular Sunday, so let's just say I rested my eyes at my desk for a while.

Besides learning how to be articulate on no sleep (an area in which the Adcenter had trained me well), I also learned something that most traveling businessmen know very well: different airlines play the same crappy movies! Even though I flew on Delta one day, American the next, and back to Delta the next, I had to sit through the same movie 3 times!!

The name of that movie: Wild Hogs, starring Tim Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy, and Martin Lawrence. My own personal hell. But at least it was a movie that was easy to sleep through.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

What happens there...

This past weekend, I experienced Las Vegas for the first time. My buddy Dale gets married in a month, and he's also never been to Vegas, so he decided that his last fun thing to do as a single man should be to experience all that Las Vegas has to offer. While I will stay true to the tagline of "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" (by the way, an amazing brand-building tagline, one of the best of the last decade in my opinion), I will tell you about one thing we did while we were there.

Besides never having been to Vegas, the other thing that Dale (and most of us as well) had never done was....skydiving. That's right, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane for no apparent reason.

For the months ahead of the Vegas trip, I was absolutely psyched that I was going to skydive. As it got within a week or so before the trip, I started getting a little nervous, but still felt mainly excited. My friends started to slap their hands together and say "Splat!" whenever they saw me, which really helped keep me at ease. Luckily, the job search and traveling kept me from really thinking about the fact that I was jumping out of a plane soon.

It didn't really hit me that I was going to skydive until I was about to land on the big plane arriving in Vegas. I had the window seat, so I spent the entire descent looking down at the desert, realizing that in a little over 24 hours, I'd be seeing this same view again, but in a much smaller plane and with a parachute strapped to my back. Once we got on the ground, however, the events of our first night in Vegas were more than enough distraction to keep my mind off of the jump the next day.

On the day of the jump, besides the hangover that was easily fixed with a Bloody Mary and some Eggs Benedict, I was also feeling very nervous. We got in the bus around noon and started driving away from The Strip towards the desert, and it was probably the most quiet the 8 of my college buddies have ever been when in the same general vicinity. When we got there, we had to watch videos which explained the danger we were about to put ourselves in, which gave us all some nervous laughs. Then we got to sign our life away on a waiver that I purposefully didn't read a word of, since every line began with "In case of death or accident...".

After the waivers, we each got our jumpsuits. We didn't get to pick the color of our jumpsuits, which proved to be a nice moment of embarrassment for me as well. Everyone else was getting black suits, blue suits, green suits, brown suits.....I got purple. I'm not talking about dark, Minnesota Viking-style purple. They gave me My Little Pony-style purple. I put on my bright purple jumpsuit, and of course, laughs burst out throughout the room. Even though the laughs continued, I pretended not to let it bother me, and countered their heckles with "I'm confident in my sexuality, and I'm about to do the most manly thing I can think of, so bring on the purple suit! I'm cool with it!"

After that was the waiting. It takes a half an hour to make each parachute, and there was only one guy making chutes that day. He started before we got there, but with 8 guys going, we still had a good 2 hour wait before even the first group of jumpers got to go. We passed the time by nervously watching the Borat movie, then Batman Begins. Then we finally got to start going. We went in groups of 2, and my partner was my buddy Drew. They put the camera in our faces and asked us if we wanted to say "goodbye...oops! I mean hello" to anyone back home, giving us one last freak-out, and then we got in the plane. They taught us where to place our hands and legs during the jump, and then we were off. This plane was the scariest contraption I've ever seen. Every little tiny gust of wind, and we blew across the sky. I started getting that dry mouth feeling that you get when you're really nervous, and we kept climbing in the sky. Then, all of a sudden, we were at 6000 feet, and it was time to go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-9oJoC9dVA

It was by far the coolest feeling ever. It took me at least 15 seconds of that jump to remember to breathe, because all I could see was the ground getting closer and closer. Once the parachute opened up, I received 5 of the best minutes of my life, just looking out over the Nevada desert with Vegas in the distance on one side and the Rocky Mountains on the other.

The one thing most people don't realize is how fast you are really going even after the parachute opens. All the parachute does is slow you down from 120 mph to around 20 mph. You still are coming at the ground pretty fast! I didn't realize this until I was about 100 feet from landing, and I had one last freak-out moment when I thought, we're going to slam into the ground! But the "put your feet up and slide in" technique worked perfectly, and it was a completely safe landing. When I got up, it took a few minutes to remember how to walk, because my entire body was in pins and needles mode, but after that, I felt the best rush of adrenaline of my life.

It took all the patience in me to wait for all of my friends to finish their jumps before we could get back to The Strip. Again, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but let's just say that 8 college buddies full of adrenaline and excitement hit the town that night.

The rest of the details of the trip will have to stay locked in the 8 groomsmen's heads forever. But I will tell you this. Skydiving is one of the best memories I will ever have. I highly recommend it.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

An amazing 5 minutes of film...

Everyone has their opinion on the Sopranos series finale. Some hated it, some loved it, some wanted to wring David Chase's neck, some wanted to bow at his feet. My opinion? He knew what he was doing the entire time, and I respect the hell out of him for it. The Sopranos is not only my favorite show of all time, but it is the most well-written and original show in the history of television.

***IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST EPISODE, STOP READING THIS ENTRY!!!***





At first, I was shocked. The screen went blank, and it was over. Then I got mad. How could he end it like that??? Nothing was resolved!!! What happened to Tony??? What did that mean???

But then I started thinking about it. Even though the show is in the 3rd person, and not the 1st person from Tony's point of view, the entire show and its audience revolves around Tony Soprano. Therefore, if Tony was to die, the show would cease to exist, since the audience's point of view would be gone. Therefore, I'm sure that Tony is dead. I won't get into all the details of the last scene (which would take at least 10,000 words), but here's a link from an incredibly smart TV writer explaining the intricacies of the last scene, basically proving Tony's death. I highly recommend reading the entire article. http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/.

I guarantee that David Chase knew from the very beginning that this was how it all would end. "Wow, what if there was a mob show that ended with the main character getting killed, but it just ended with a blank screen?" Brilliant idea. It's as real as can be. When someone gets shot in the back of the head, everything just stops. It's over. There's no fairy tale ending like most modern cinema. There's no wrap-up whatsoever.

Think about it. There were many knew storylines that were started in the series finale! That's as true as it can be to real life. If you were to be walking down the street today and someone shot you in the head, there would have been many new storylines that had started in your life that very day! Since real life doesn't wrap everything up nicely, neither does David Chase, since the philosophy of the writing from Day 1 was realism at all costs.

David Chase sat around 15 years ago and came up with the ending. Then he started filling in the pieces. Amazing. To the very end, he continued to surprise his audience. Bravo.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

"No-money fun" helps create youthful, happy cities...

To quote comedian Mike Myers talking about his childhood when asked about the inspiration for Wayne's World, "The best kind of fun is no-money fun." In school, we learned about internal brand leadership within a company, and how memorable rewards are great ways of building the culture of your company around the brand's values. I think the same concept can be applied to cities that want to attract young people to settle down in an area.

Every summer on Brown's Island in Richmond, Virginia, there are weekly free concerts on Friday afternoons from 5pm-10pm. The event is called Friday Cheers. Brown's Island is one of the most beautiful parts of Richmond, where you can lay out on the grass and look out on the James River, which runs right through the downtown area of the city. Whether you are working in the Financial District or Shockoe Bottom (the "creative business area", which includes the Adcenter, the Martin Agency, and many design firms), when Friday at 5pm comes along and you're ready to unwind, you are only a 5 or 10 minute walk to Brown's Island. When you get there, you get to enjoy listening to some pretty big name bands such as Keller Williams, The Black Crowes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and others, and you don't have to pay a dime. (Of course, mostly everyone buys a few beers and some food, so the vendors and the city make some revenue, which I'm assuming pays for the band).

I guarantee that the city of Richmond loses money on this every week, yet they have had Friday Cheers for many years, and it has become a staple of summertime in Richmond. This is a great example of "internal brand leadership" for the brand of Downtown Richmond. Richmond wants young workers to be attracted to the city so that the job market stays competitive and the local economy can continue to thrive. Richmond also wants these young workers to live in the city, not the suburbs, so that the quality of life in the city remains young, diverse, and crime-free. Finally, Richmond wants all workers to stay in the downtown area on Fridays after they get off work so that the restaurants and bars can make money, helping the local economy as well.

Friday Cheers is a great answer to all of these questions! If I'm a music fan (or I just like to unwind on Friday afternoons in the summertime), I would love to go to a free concert with my co-workers and friends that is within walking distance of my office. And after the show ends at 10pm, I'm not going to go all the way back home to the suburbs to change clothes and/or end my night's fun. Instead, I'm going to take the 5 minute walk back into the downtown area to a restaurant or bar and go catch a late dinner and drinks. If I know that there is all this fun in the downtown area, I'm going to want to move downtown so I can be near everything, instead of having the hassle of going out to the suburbs with only the possibility of coming back to meet my friends later.

If Friday Cheers even cost $5, they would only get half of the crowd they get now. Only the people who actually were fans of the particular band that day would come. Everyone else would go home or just go to happy hour for an hour before heading back to the suburbs. But Richmond decided that it could excite its citizens by rewarding them for a hard week's work with some no-money fun right downtown.

Last summer I went almost every week. I love living in the city, and not the suburbs, because things are always happening. I just enjoyed my first Friday Cheers this past Friday when Keller Williams was in town. I'm looking forward to some great times having no-money fun on Brown's Island all summer. And I love Richmond for it.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Applying what we've learned to a Pig Roast















My family loves being the party-throwers. Starting with my oldest brother Chris and his friends back when they were in college, our family has been involved in the coordinating and hosting of 6 pig roasts. If you've never been to a pig roast, it's like a barbecue, except much more exciting. Instead of burgers, dogs, and sausages, there's a whole pig spinning for hours, making everybody's mouth water in anticipation. It's so exciting that people take pictures next to their future meal. Who takes pictures of the burger on the grill that they are about to eat? Nobody! But when there's a 75-pound pig spinning, it's photo opportunity time.

We threw a pig roast this past Saturday in honor of my graduation from the Adcenter and my brother Geoff's graduation from Virginia Tech's MBA program. It was a blast, and went off without a hitch. 150 of our closest friends ate, drank, and were merry. But there was one difference with this pig roast that the former roasts didn't have. This pig roast had an ad campaign.

We decided that it would be entertaining to the guests if we took some of the strategic planning and advertising tools we had learned in our respective schools and applied them to the planning and advertising of a pig roast. Geoff made a work flow diagram that started with the mission of the pig roast and went all the way down to the tactical initiatives needed to throw the party. Coming from the Adcenter, it was my job to "brand" the pig. With the help of my brother, we created a brand essence pyramid for the brand Pig. We looked at it from the point of view of a pig and what he would value for his personal brand (if he were able to think). The strategic work flow diagram and Pig brand essence pyramid are below.
















Once we had the strategic plan and the brand essence, we needed a logo and a tagline. After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with the tag: "Celebrate the Sacrifice." The great part about the sacrifice is its double-meaning: the sacrifice of hard work we made for our degrees, and the sacrifice of the peaceful citizen (the innocent pig) for the sake of our stomachs. The logo and tagline are below as well.



















Once we had our brand, we started branding everything. Cups, balloons, t-shirts, everything. We went all out. It took a lot of hard work, and we didn't sleep much for the few days leading up to the event, but it was worth it. To see people come in the front door, greeted with a branded welcome sign, and then be handed their souvenir branded cup to take home was amazing. I'll never forget it.

It also shows that what we do as marketers doesn't just have to deal with brands. We can use our skills in much more than just advertising. We can plan events, throw parties, and get people excited about just about anything. Anytime that there is a message that's trying to be said to a person or a feeling that is trying to be evoked in a person, marketing can work wonders.

I love the field I have chosen. The wheels in my head are already spinning for Pig Roast VII.














By the way, my niece might have found her calling as a bartender. Good pour, Katie.