Let’s look at music for example – you can have one hit as a musician on an album with 20 mediocre songs, and you’re a success. An author can publish one great book a decade and be a bestselling author. A movie director or actor can make one great movie out of every 10 and be deemed a success.

You can fail spectacularly and still succeed – as long as you make an impact.

What would you rather have – 100 people who love what you do or 1,000,000 people who think you’re ok?  Let me ask that a different way, would you make more money if 100 people loved your product/service or if 1,000,000 thought your product/service was mediocre and forgettable?

If you chose the million people keep reading. If you chose the 100, good for you, but keep reading anyway so I can pitch you at the end of this post.

Mediocrity is death – a long slow painful demise into nothingness.

Having 1,000,000 people think you’re “just ok” is translated into having 1,000,000 people acknowledge you for one second and forget you the next second. You are in the noise floor, part of the background, lost in the crowd.

Last year I attended the Montreal Salsa Congress (I performed in it actually), and I remember 4 shows from the dozens that were showcased. I remember the 2 best performances – and I can recount the worst 2 performances – I have stories to reference both of them.

Everyone I know who went to that Congress can recall that same list of performances. All the other performances were good, but forgettable. But 2 failed spectacularly, and 2 succeeded spectacularly – and therefore both are memorable.

Look at Britney Spears, a come-back queen. She fails spectacularly more often than she succeeds – what’s the result? Millions in record sales and sold out concert tours.

Look at Paris Hilton, she built an entire career and millions in endorsements, fashion, even music sales (agh!) by literally failing at everything (except getting attention!).

One of my favorite advertisers, self titled The Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams, coined this phrase: “the risk of insult is the price of clarity”. I am borrowing it Mr Williams, and I’ll tell all my readers to buy your books in exchange (go buy his books please).

Memorize this: The Risk of Insult Is the Price of Clarity.

Achieving clarity is inherently risky.

If you run your organization with the #1 priority being risk mitigation (reducing risk), you are not hedging your success, what you are doing is failing slowly.

So how do you use this axiom, “the risk of insult is the price of clarity”? Well first, it’s the RISK of insult, it’s not actually insulting. Although that is a strategy that can work…

What this statement means is that you have to speak to your fans/tribe/followers/fanatics/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. You are never advertising to “everyone”; you are making ads that appeal to those who you want to buy your product/service – so you real prospects say “THAT IS AWESOME”, while everyone else might say “I don’t like that” or simply nothing at all. Your attitude should be Well fine, don’t like it, I don’t care about you anyway.

Look at companies like American Apparel, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger. Youth amorality, alternative rock, preppy sailer boy. Each one has a distinct polarizing brand.

Apple and Microsoft are another great example, the geek vs the nerd arch-types. Apple made the geek the cool version of the nerd. They totally polarized the audience and made them choose a brand association – ie. they made them choose a side.

These companies take risks to be great. There is another great book called “The Strategy Paradox” by Michael Raynor I highly recommend (go buy that book as well, it’s a heavy read, but well worth it).

The strategy paradox describes companies focused on mitigating risk simply put off their demise for a long time. They are shoring up their success and using their size and market leadership to beat down competition. They stop innovating because they stop taking risks. Basically, they are guarding what they have until what they have is innovated away from them – someone comes along and does it better, or different, and makes them irrelevant. Great example is the MP3 and the music industry…

Jim Collins in the book “Good to Great” outlines that most companies are great for short periods of time, but very few seem to be able to sustain “greatness” for very long. The bigger a company gets, the tougher it is to take chances, they just have so much more to lose. Dozens of smaller companies will burn out before one invents a technology or process that brings the goliath down. Smaller companies have much less to lose on an absolute scale, so they can take bigger chances.

What i’m trying to say is — whose side are you going to be on? David’s or Goliath’s?

Are you going to take the risk of being BOLD in your marketing and advertising or are you going to play it safe?

Are you going to only do what has been proven and you can find good case studies for and know others in your industry are doing or are you going to be innovative in your marketing and brand position?

If you want to help figuring out how to be bold, how to punch well above your weight class, how to find and aggressively market to your target audience, and how to do it all profitably and grow your business by an order of magnitude (10x!) this year alone, then get in touch. Do It Now.

A colleague, Jeremy Kuzub at Jufa Intermedia, recently sent me this video featuring the Wired creative director espousing the virtues of new digital delivery platforms and Wired’s approach to these.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1813626064?bctid=66775419001

As summarized by Jeremy when he sent me the video “Wired’s approach is not optimal. In the video you’d think they were enamoured by the iPad/Pod touch-style interface and navigation. However, the main point holds true: people expect their content should to be available to them anywhere in the best possible format for that time and place. This content is no longer static, either; the concept of a monthly magazine that stays the same after it is printed simply does not hold true when distribution is digital and people expect social interaction with their content and their community. Wired also cites “new-to-print” features which have been a core-part of web sites for 5-10 years.”

Jeremy is spot on. Sure the experience on new touch-type devices is more tangible and feels closer to print (touch and flip) then a keyboard-mouse interface, but all the “new” features of having video, social media sharing capability, rich interfaces, etc. have all been standard on the web for years. It’s a slicker interface, sure, but is that enough?

One interesting comment made in the video is by the Editor in Chief (Anderson), “we can reset the economics. If people value the experience enough, they may be willing to pay for it”. Well I’m not sure I get that statement, since ads fund magazines generally, not subscriptions or cover sales.

The problem with the economics of web content publishing is 10-15 years ago the print publications gave away their digital real estate to advertisers FOR FREE. They basically pushed the web to consumers to get eyeballs, then they turned around and told advertisers “pay for our print ad, and you get X web impressions for free!”. They basically shot themselves in the foot right from the beginning.

Is a new interface or consumer “experience” enough to compel a consumer to pay for the content through a subscription? Will the perceived value of ad space escalate x100 fold because of you’ve changed the interface?

Now let me add my experience to this mix. I happen to have had a few clients with the print-to-web problems. What “problems” do I speak of? Well, the transition of eyeballs from print to web translates into a loss of 100:1 in revenue (every dollar earned for a print eyeball, is worth 1 penny on the web). That’s the biggest challenge, of course there are a myriad of others I’ll get to.

What was the solution?  I pitch several – including diversification of revenue sources from pure ad-sales to include other forms – a sort of “Parthenon” monetization principle – meaning that you want to support your organization with multiple revenue-generating pillars. Imagine holding up a ceiling with 1 pillar, it would have to be huge. But 4 smaller pillars can do the same job, and losing one of those doesn’t necessitate immediate collapse of your roof!

Unfortunately I have had very few clients actually implement any of my proposed solutions. Why? 3 main reasons…

1. The new business model is more complex than the simple ad sponsored content model of the past.
2. It requires a significant up-front capital investment to deploy new collaborative focused infrastructure (half the budget usually devoted to strategy to figure out exactly what to do and the other half to execution).
3. To maintain and support the new models (both content and revenue generation) requires new skill sets and new ways of thinking about the business – its actually a whole new business. As Jack Welch once said “it’s not enough to have the right bus going in the right direction, but you need the right people on the bus..”

I attended a conference in Toronto about a year ago that was focused on the publication industry (magazines and newspapers). The main speaker was showcasing The Economist and its approach to the digital divide. Great lessons to be learned from that case study. However, I toured the room and spoke to a dozen different types of publication owners in the room and they were much more scared then excited. They understood, intellectually, the issues, but none of them had the emotional capacity to carry out the changes they needed. They knew they were dying a slow death and effectively didn’t have the capacity, skills, or courage to do something. They were all working on an “approach” that was effectively tip toeing into a tidal wave. They knew it wouldn’t work, but they were all hoping it would. It was a very very sad room.

The web is a total disruption – a cataclysmic “E.L.E.” type event. Its one of the few times you can use the term “paradigm shift” and not sound like a hack.

Digital media doesn’t change the old ways, it ignores every aspect of them – from revenue models to skill sets, to approach – publishers find themselves on a bus where the paved road they’ve known for years has turned to gravel and full of bumps they don’t know how to deal with. They don’t just need to reshuffle the bus, or change the tires, but completely abandon the bus, buy some hummers, split into smaller teams, learn how to drive in the new terrain, and then punch the gas and go. To bury a hatchet in this analogy – it’s the difference between rally racing (new) and nascar (old). The rules have changed dramatically.

My final point is this — print is not dead.  Print is just one medium beside many others.

MIT Technology Review (one of my favourite tech/science magazines) abandoned its print publication about 2 years ago in favour of a pure digital delivery format. After being a loyal subscriber for 5 years I dropped my subscription. After a year they abandoned their pure digital model and went back to a publication, instead of 6 issues a year, they were now printing 4 thicker ones (though that may have been tuned up since). But they realized, as Jeremy pointed out well above, they needed to deliver on multiple platforms, and that print was a highly prized platform, even by one of the technoratti (me).

So what do you need to do if you are a print publication with an eroding revenue base? /

Hire me and find out.

Bruce