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Info You Can Use: Pixar Pitch

April 2, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Yesterday I linked to a recent post by Barry Hessenius about gatekeepers and he mentioned that Hollywood had developed a pitch system where people without the connections to get a real meeting were afforded a short time to pitch an idea.

Apropos to this, Daniel Pink made a short video about six new pitches for selling yourself, ideas, etc.

He talks a little bit about how email subject lines are really pitches and makes some suggestions about rhyming pitches (which I can see will be effective you if you don’t go full Seuss). He also notes that questions are much more active and engaging than making statements.

He uses the example of Ronald Reagan who famously asked if his listeners were better off now than they were four years prior. Pink notes that this can get listeners filling in the blanks to convince themselves in ways your statements can’t connect with them.

He takes pains to make the point that the word pitch may imply something is traveling in a single direction, but in reality pitches today are interactive. You invite someone else to have a conversation about something with you.

The pitch I liked the best was the first one he introduces, The Pixar Pitch. This one is most suited for the arts because it is all about storytelling. Pink says this is the formula Pixar uses while planning and plotting their movies.

It runs something like this:

ONCE UPON A TIME____________, EVERY DAY___________, ONE DAY____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_________________,
UNTIL FINALLY_____________________.

He notes that we don’t see life as a series of logical propositions, but rather a series of episodes and so making your case in this manner can create a powerful connection with your listeners.

This formula can be the basis for press releases and marketing materials. I took a look at the trailer for Pixar’s Finding Nemo and it follows this formula pretty closely. You don’t even need to know the formula to have your inner narrator describe the scene to you “Once upon a time there was a fish named Nemo and his dad, everyday they happily swam together under the sea until one day…..”

Obviously, newspapers would get a little tired of you if your press releases explicitly used this formula for every show, and if you can clearly see a more compelling approach to use, go with that, but the formula can under gird what you are trying to communicate about events.

If you are having difficulty getting your ideas to connect with people, don’t you think it is a good idea to check out Pink’s short video and see what might resonate with you?

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR, Working In The Arts

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I’m My Own Idea Czar

April 1, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

La Piana Consulting blog had a post a few weeks ago about how the dynamics of non-profits can crush new ideas and creative approaches to problems.

Their last suggested solution to avoid this is to appoint an “Idea Czar”:

“Appoint an “Idea Czar” from outside the senior management ranks. This person becomes a human suggestion box, an ombudsman for creativity. Anyone with a novel idea that might answer a current challenge is invited to share it with the Idea Czar, who periodically reports on what he or she has learned at management team or board meetings. Then use those reports to dive deeply into a specific question that piques the particular group’s interest or that the CEO would really like the board’s or management team’s best thinking on.”

I walked around most of today pondering whether this could actually work. I mean, it would require someone with enough seniority and experience to be taken seriously by management, but who also hasn’t been around so long that they are cynical about the viability of ideas. Even if the didn’t discount them immediately, they would need to be idealistic and energetic enough to effectively advocate for the idea in the face of a resistant board and senior management.

I recognized fairly early on that in my venue the idea czar would be our assistant theatre manager. (I am fairly idealistic, but she tops me.) This made me realize that it isn’t enough to appoint someone on staff into the position, if you really want to break out of a status quo, the hiring process has to involve actively recruiting people who possess idealism and strength of character to advocate in the face of a tendency to say No.

Apropos of this, Barry Hessenius posted this week about how one can be their own best/worst gatekeepers in terms of openness to “good ideas, new thinking and ways to actually be better managers, administrators and leaders; opportunities for new projects, collaborations and ways of seeing our world.”

Just as this problem of gatekeeping can manifest on both a personal and organizational level, the solution can probably be implemented on a personal and organizational level.

It probably isn’t enough to appoint a person to be the company idea czar if the board and administration are going to perpetuate an environment that is hostile to new ideas. Management and leadership should practice self-advocacy by setting aside time each week to entertain new ideas in the same way 3M, Google and Hewlett-Packard give employees time each week to develop new ideas and products.

Management and leadership might use this time to read websites they bookmarked, jot down what interesting ideas they have and then go back to ideas they jotted down in previous sessions. I think this last step is important because realizing you had forgotten some of the great ideas you had had weeks before serves to reinforce that fact you have the capacity to have good ideas.

Even if none of those ideas ever travel from the idea journal into practice within the company, the very act of engaging with new ideas, looking at them, turning them over a little, before putting them away, helps the mind practice accepting and handling new ideas rather than simply rejecting them.

Advocacy, creativity, Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

March 27, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Is It Against The Law To Pay Me More?

March 26, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

You may have heard about Dan Palotta’s recent TED Talk about how judging charities on concepts like administrative overhead ratios is hobbling their ability to solve huge problems.

He makes some persuasive points, though some of the concerns I had with his proposals when they appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog three years ago still remain.

Gene Takagi picked up on the talk and addressed legal considerations which would prevent non-profits from operating in the manner Palotta suggests. (Just to be clear, Palotta never suggests charities cleave to non-profit status.)

Takagi notes that charity pay scales are limited by laws governing 501 c 3s and so can’t compete well on salary if supporters show tolerance for doing so to attract the best talent. Expenditures are limited in much the same manner,

“If a for-profit spends 90 cents to make $1, it may be a perfectly acceptable profit margin, but if a charity spends 90 cents to make $1, it would be widely viewed as a terrible waste. As a result, many charities fail to properly report their fundraising expenses, and the IRS has raised the possibility of utilizing the controversial commensurate test, which addresses whether a charity is using its resource in line with its charitable mission…But this can’t be judged strictly on percentages, and charities should be allowed to experiment so if an honest fundraising and mission awareness-raising campaign fails, the charity isn’t slaughtered for it. The problem, however, is not the law, but the misguided public ideology of which Dan spoke.”

Charities are also often limited and discouraged from pursuing new revenue ideas by federal and state laws as well as popular sentiment.

I think the biggest question that this whole discussion raises for me is whether social attitudes are such that a for-profit company raising money for social issues will be tolerated. Given that people will give money to projects via things like Kickstarter without much consideration about whether it is non-profit or not, is the idea that non-profits do things that companies won’t due to lack of profitability and governments can’t/won’t due to lack of political will and expertise, over?

Currently I think there is a capricious element to Kickstarter campaigns that make it an unsuitable model for garnering long term support. However the very existence of such mechanisms may be shifting mindsets to a place where worthiness and overhead ratios are not mutually exclusive.

Business Models, Legal Topics, State of the Arts

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