December 10th, 2009
Over the next few months, I am going to take a departure from the normal tech and business musings to post some of my favorite moments in film. I love and am inspired by movies of all kinds. I am also very forgiving of imperfections, often ignoring myriads of faults because the movie does one thing perfectly.
It is rare to see a truly perfect film, and when it happens it never goes unnoticed. But films which are often not perfect sometimes hold the most remarkable gems, and I’ll be focusing on some that perhaps others have missed.
To me, a Great Movie Moment is not merely a “good scene”, but one that is pivotal to the entire purpose of the film. Not only that, to be a great moment for me, that pivotal moment has to work perfectly, even if the rest of the film may not. Many of my choices are turning points, or moments which are the culmination of the drama that has been crafted up until that time.
So, I hope you enjoy these and I’ll try to include as much commentary as I can. Note that lots of these are spoilers! So, if you haven’t seen the film, and want to see the moment for yourself, watch and come back later and see if you agree with me.
December 10th, 2009
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) is a stage play on the screen. The props are backdrops for a well-acted drama where the characters are thrust into a situation so we can see them wrestle with their emotions, convictions, and relationships.
Directed by Robert Aldrich, Phoenix starts with a plane crash in the desert. The survivors, lucky to be alive but stranded hundreds of miles from nowhere, can see no hope except an increasingly remote chance of rescue. Jimmy Stewart plays Frank Towns, the pilot, guilt-ridden about the crash but realizing that he has to remain a strong leader. Richard Attenborough is his co-pilot Lew Moran, and the two of them put forth such strong performances it is a marvel to watch.
Days after the crash, when hope is diminishing, Heinrich Dorfmann (played in the best performance ever by Hardy Kruger) proposes that they can rebuild the plane from parts and fly out of the desert. To Towns, this “proposal” is completely disregarded along with the many mad ravings of the survivors he is trying to keep under control. But, when Dorfmann reveals to Moran that he is an aircraft designer, Towns and Moran begin to consider that any cause, even a hopeless one, may lift the spirits of the desperate group.
The film is long. For two hours we watch this drama unfold as the survivors, under the harsh and critical leadership of Dorfmann, disassemble and reassemble a new plane. While it seems incredible at first, the film, though it’s strong characters, convinces us that it may just work. Dorfmann could not have been better cast. The film exploits every German stereotype that Americans prejudiced by World War II would have in their heads. Towns hates his arrogance, and feels sometimes they are wasting their time.
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When they are approaching the completion of the plane, there is a scene that is the turning point of the film. It is a quiet scene where Dorfmann, Towns and Moran are inside the cabin of the old plane. The scene is not only perfectly written and filmed, but it is the start of the ultimate test of the three main characters. Dorfmann reveals, only when he is asked, and almost as if it didn’t matter, that he is a model aircraft designer and has never designed a real plane. I am sure that you could have heard a pin drop in the theatre and it is worth 2 hours of watching for me to sit on the edge of my seat and watch this perfect moment of performance and storytelling.
(There is a horrible remake of this film starring Dennis Quaid. Please watch the original and don’t even consider the remake.)
December 8th, 2009
Joe Gideon is an obsessive and brilliant choreographer who takes life huge gulps and cares only about art and women and living life to the fullest no matter what the consequences. Is creative energy is intoxicating. We still love him, just like his women do, even as he heads for self-destruction. The film is All That Jazz, starring Roy Scheider. A quasi-auto-biographical masterpiece by director Bob Fosse.
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Two thirds of the way through the film. is wheeled into the operating room for open heart surgery, temporarily suspending work on his upcoming broadway musical. Meanwhile, investors and their insurance advisors calculate the investment so far in the show. They have already lost confidence in Gideon, believing that the musical has evolved into a sexually-charged piece that will alienate audiences. Larry Goldie, played by actor David Marguiles delivers a cold accounting of detailed figures invested so far, right down to the payroll taxes. As he reads, Fosse intercuts footage of actual open heart surgery, creating a jarring transition between the operating room and the boardroom.
At the end, it becomes obvious that Gideon’s death would likely yield more profit from the insurance payout than they expect the play to achieve.
The performances are unremarkable. Five people meeting in a boardroom discussing facts and figures. There are production flaws and imperfections. But in that 3 minutes of film, Fosse shows us the extremes of creativity and greed portrayed as polar and extreme opposites hitting one another head-on. It is a singular moment in film.
November 26th, 2009
I loathe time management. Keeping time sheets and records of my time is one of those tasks that I have never done very well. It’s probably because I am lazy and enjoy the “unstructured, high-energy, creative work environment” of entrepreneurial companies. But, my better, rational half, knows that I am just bullshitting myself. Accomplishing a lot in the precious few hours we are granted each day takes discipline and careful attention to how one uses one’s time.
I was reminded of this by the truly excellent article by Rob May called “How to Be an Effective Entrepreneur”. Rob spins Drucker’s The Effective Executive into a set of guidelines for effective entrepreneurship, and does it well. To my horror, the first rule in Rob’s article is “Know They Time”, and he begins with a quote from Jean de la Bruyere:
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
Ouch!
So, I put my tail between my legs and realized that being more effective will need to start with me trying to battle some age-old prejudices about time management. And, when faced with a new problem that needs to be solved, there is only one effective approach: find a new toy!
Eternity: Weekly time log chart
Hardly a toy, I found an extremely useful iPhone app called Eternity Time Log from Komorian. Most time logging applications are designed to address the problem of billing clients for parcels of time, and there are dozens of them. But, Eternity is designed to help you understand your time better, plan your time better, and adjust your habits.
Quickly and easily I set up a set of categories of tasks and within minutes I was tracking everything easily using my iPhone. Some of the features I found most useful were:
- Easy set up of tasks
- Ability to “fill in the gaps” easily when you have some activities on the clock and others missing.
- Amazing “instant” reporting, including graphs, that give you a feel for how your time is being spent.
- The ability to “slide” in two directions with graphs to see how your time was spent today, yesterday, this week, or this month. Amazingly simple and useful.
Within a week, I know am zeroing in on some time-wasters and realizing (as Druker knew so well) that what I thought I was spending time on isn’t really what I am spending time on at all!
If you are looking for an app to manage your billable hours, this isn’t it. But, if you are thinking about your effectiveness, and trying to improve the way you work, Eternity is a useful and powerful tool. If you are a gadget person like me, and need a bit of a “push” to start manging your time better, try Eternity.
November 24th, 2009
Like many online video companies, we have been plotting, planning and scheming about revenue models. Trying to create compelling models by sorting through the hype, mis-information, and data of limited reliability is daunting. Sometimes, it’s tempting to resort to the business strategy dartboard instead of even bothering. But, the latest buzz about Microsoft buying the news from News Corp. has had some surprising side-benefits. Primarily, it is causing the smoke to clear and people are talking about their numbers in more specific detail.
Through some number crunching hocus-pocus, the Columbia Journalism Review estimated that the Wall Street Journal probably gains no more than $12 million per year in advertising revenue derived from Google traffic, which represents 25% of their traffic. Think about that for a moment! According to BtoB, The WSJ has a paid circulation of 2.08 million subscribers and 25% of their online traffic is yielding them only $12 million dollars? Gosh, no wonder this stuff has been in the news so much lately. Seems like a crisis!
But, for as much as I respect a lot of the bloggers and analysts out there, I think they often miss the point. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic describes the problem like this:
The central struggle of monetizing online news is that ad rates for web pages are significantly worse than the print ad rates that once buttressed newspapers. So for a newspaper publisher like Murdoch, big online traffic helps, but it doesn’t pay for a sprawling roster of reporters and editors. Somebody’s gotta break the tyranny of revenue-light banner ads, eventually.
Derek is missing the point. There is no tyranny involved here, and banner ads are not “revenue-light”. They cost what they should given their effectiveness. Derek’s way of phrasing the problem illustrates the collective denial prevalent among those who have built their fortunes and livelihoods based upon traditional advertising models. What we are seeing is not the inequity of web-based advertising, but rather what economists call “creative destruction”: the displacement of an economically inefficient mechanism with a more efficient one.
What is “traditional advertising” and why is it dying?
I hate to use a phrase like “traditional advertising” that is bandied about so frequently without being a bit clear about what I mean.
Traditional advertising has been with us for a long time, and is based upon the idea that, by exposing large numbers of people to a message, some percentage of those people will be influenced and some number of them will spend money on the products being advertised. With traditional advertising, you pay to have your message seen, regardless of whether it actually leads to purchases of your product. The advertiser is thus one level removed from achieving their actual goal: sales.
This is a weak proposition at best, but advertisers have been trained well over the past century to believe in it. The various advertising pseudo-sciences of Madison Avenue have convinced advertisers that promoting a product is a “numbers game” and that large exposures lead to sales.
As an example of how completely engulfed in fantasy traditional advertising models are consider that a one page ad in the Wall Street Journal currently costs $277,646, with no guarantee that even one customer will buy your product, visit your website, or provide you with their email address or phone number! For more than a quarter million dollars you actually get nothing. Maybe you get a warm feeling of hope. Certainly you get nothing you can measure unless you spend even more money on your own resources to track and analyse the outcome of placing such an exorbitant ad.
Contrast this with Google AdWords. With Google, you pay nothing for exposure. If your ad is seen by 10 million people, you pay nothing for the privilege whatsoever. What do you pay for? You pay when interested people click and visit your website. You can measure the value of that and you can see exactly what you have spent your money for, and since they clicked, you know you already have their interest and have culled through millions of eyeballs to zero in on the one that is worth spending time on. If your website is effective, you can drive that visitor toward sales.
Paying for exposure is inefficient, high risk, and unpredictable. Paying for actual visits by interested potential customers efficient, measurable, and low-risk. AdWords is damned effective, and Google has found a way to make it affordable.
If you think about Derek’s claim that somebody “needs to break the tyranny of revenue-light banner ads”, you can see how ridiculous it sounds. Indeed the opposite will happen. Instead of people paying more for banner ads, more technologies like AdWords will begin to predominate. Improvements will be made and they will become even cheaper and more effective. Companies who measure their advertising dollars wisely will see that spending money for exposure is a waste of money and gradually more and more dollars will move to mechanisms which assure customer engagement.
At some point, even traditional billboards and other offline exposure-based advertising models will suffer. Why spend money on exposure when you can assure that everybody with an iPhone or other mobile device has access to what you have to sell, and you end up paying only for those people who actually call you or visit your store? True, it may be a while before the genius of online methods like AdWords graduate to mobile platforms to create this “pay only for what you need” model. But, my guess is it will happen sooner than we think and even companies who never considered the web important will see that “digital” is the only answer.
Advertising: Even the concept itself is in trouble
We have been brainwashed into believing that advertising is the method used to reach customers with new products. Remember when that was true? In 1988 I introduced a new product for my company and I remember vividly that advertising was the only method we considered for growing our market. We advertised in Dr. Dobbs and other publications, eventually we advertised in PC World and PC Week. It worked!
Today, things have changed. If you have a new product, there are myriads of ways to tell people about it. You can blog, Twitter, get involved with online communities where there is a need for your product. You can exploit every free avenue online, including news groups, forums. The more you believe in your product, and the more dedicated you are, the easier it is to find dozens or even hundreds of ways to get the word out. You might even, as a last resort, advertise. But, if you do, you will measure your dollars carefully against all the free ways you have been using. Only truly effective advertising is going to appeal to you.
This drastic change is often completely ignored by traditional advertising “thinkers”. The idea that the world could survive and economies could grow without any advertising at all is blasphemous. Yet, if you think about it, maybe it’s possible that advertising, as a concept, is in as much trouble as the Compact Disc.
People still buy, people still sell
Some things never change. People still love to buy products. Companies still create products to sell. Today, there are more ways to inform people about products than ever before. Advertising is no longer the only way to reach people, it is just one. And most traditional advertising is stuck in an age-old model that costs much more than it needs to and is fueled by a myopic ignorance of what makes economic progress occur.
So, the next time you read about “the crisis of advertising”, please don’t lament the passing of traditional models. There are better ways for customers to find and buy your products. Eliminating a wasteful and inefficient means to connect the two isn’t a crisis. It’s progress.
