The Little Rebellion

The Turkish Steps in Sicily

The Greek theatre in the daytime

My wife

A couple of guys live broadcasting the the opera, Carmen, outside the Greek theatre.

Opera in a 3000-year-old Greek theatre above the sea. Fully acoustic.

Attraction vs. Promotion (a parable for short attention spans)

Attraction vs. Promotion (a parable for short attention spans)

Created on 2015-06-18 14:19

Published on 2015-06-18 14:19

Picture yourself in a mall at Christmastime. You are walking by a large department store, let’s say Macy’s, and a person with a manufactured smile and a Santa-hat thrusts and stabs at you with a glossy flyer announcing some kind of sale. The flyer has pictures on it of more smiling people in Santa-hats.

Not only are you not interested in finding somewhere to recycle this piece of lacquered schlock, but this person has taken your attention away from a thoughtful gift idea you just had for your Aunt Jackie and forced you to blurt out the requisite “No, thank you” (because you’re more polite than they are). Now you’re distracted and confused. You feel a little bad about rejecting this person. Then you feel ridiculous for feeling bad about rejecting the person who was rudely invading your mall-walk; you, who were just keeping to yourself, minding your own business, being a good citizen, and for what? To try to get you to give them your money. Oh, hell no. Now you’re angry. You wish you hadn’t been so polite. This is not the Christmas spirit. Aunt Jackie is getting a gift card, and it won’t be from Macy’s.

This type of promotion is done all the time, so it must be effective in some bottom-line way, but let’s picture a different scenario:

You are walking through the same mall at Christmastime and you pass Macy’s. There is a person standing outside the store, handing out freshly-baked, still-warm chocolate chip cookies. “Merry Christmas from Macy’s! Want a freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie? They’re still warm.”

Now, whether you accept the cookie or not, you can’t help but feel pretty good about Macy’s.

Today more than ever, audiences are tired of being promoted at. We hear a lot in our industry about a modern, much-lamented “lack of attention span”, but this is a self-soothing myth. There’s no lack of attention span when people binge-watch five seasons of a television series over a long weekend.

It isn’t that modern people lack attention. It’s that we’re more selective with it. As well we should be. We are bombarded with media all day long, everywhere we look. Why should we care about your thing? Why should we give you three minutes? What do we get in return?

We urge our clients to think more about what their audience wants to watch, and a little less about what exactly they want to show them. And our experience is heartening: When you take this approach, giving rather than trying-to-get, attracting rather than promoting, audiences can sense that, and they will meet you halfway. They will intuitively appreciate that you are thinking of them.

And when you take into consideration the design of that flyer, the photoshoot with all the pretty Santa-hat people, and the printing, it probably would have been cheaper to just bake the cookies.

Every sunny morning the Philly skyline turns golden for about 5 minutes.

We’re South Philly homeowners.

Everything is lies.

Christmas Bolex

Don’t look like Black Friday here.

What is going on that my cellphone can shoot 240 frames per second.

You can’t tell here, for obvious reasons, but the color is stunning.

35mm taco party

Plattering The Wizard of Oz.

70mm film you guys

Last day in olive land.

Professional oil tasting with scientists wearing lab coats.

Here’s how you shake olives out of a tree.