The Aesthetic

So I’ve been up in the Bay Area for a while now, and I have yet to see anybody reading the Los Angeles Times. And this strikes me as pretty amazing. Despite the recent cuts, the Los Angeles Times continues to be a quality national newspaper, and is still the big kid on the block west of the Mississippi. But when people in the Bay Area want to go beyond the Chronicle or local Dean Singleton product, they almost always go to the New York Times. I don’t really want to get into the business of comparing one newspaper to another, but the L.A. Times’ coverage of California is as good or better than anyone’s. And while I would expect the Chronicle and the New York Times to be strong up here, it boggles my mind that no one — seriously, no one — in the Bay Area reads the Los Angeles Times. You can’t even find the paper here. You walk into a Starbucks in the East Bay and it’s the Contra Costa Times or Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Really blows my mind.

So, being the holidays and all, we’ve had a bit of Tchaikovsky in the house. And so we were struck by this bit of news on NPR that Tchaikovsky had left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use onstage, and that the company had of late decided to stop using it because it had become a distraction. Then we read this article in the Telegraph and realized that the Tchaikovsky in question was Andre Tchaikovsky, not Pyotr Tchaikovsky, of “The Nutcracker” fame.

One of the surest ways to make sure it doesn’t rain is to actually carry an umbrella with you, just in case.

I’m seeing and hearing a lot of ads for Constant Contact lately. And why not? As marketing budgets have dwindled in this troubled economy, people are looking to boost their communications to key audiences without added cost. The folks at Constant Contact are smart to take advantage of this, and as a result, I’m seeing more and more e-newsletters in my inbox. But this boom in email communications has revealed perhaps the biggest flaw in this strategy, and I’m starting to think that we’re seeing the end of the e-newsletter altogether.

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About the War on Christmas.

I guess people still do a lot of printing on paper. I certainly do, in my day job. No matter what people tell you about the growth of the Internet, print communication is still a vitally important part of any marketing and communications strategy. Maybe not as big as it used to be, but still big.

But one thing that people don’t talk a lot about then they talk about printing is how scary it can be. After all, printing is expensive. And once you’ve given the go-ahead on a print project, there’s no turning back. Unlike the web, there’s no changing a name or a phrase after the fact. For this reason, mastering the final printer’s proof is essential. I’ve seen people fired who didn’t catch mistakes in the final proof.

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I don’t know too much about the people behind this video, but apparently they are serious corporate marketing pros who left their day jobs to do marketing consulting for churches. Anyway, the points they make in this video are extremely perceptive, and not just for churches that want to attract more people:

That’s a really simple piece of advice I had to hear again this week to remember just how vital it is. In marketing and communications, we get very caught up in what we’re good at — be it earned media, advertising, publications, etc. — that we forget that our audience doesn’t necessarily adapt to our strengths. This is yet another reason why Obama’s outreach worked so well. He knew that many of the people whose votes he needed were not watching television or looking at their email. No, they were on Facebook and texting. So he went there, and he owned those vehicles. So for us in non-profit communications — or I guess any kind of communications — it’s important to remember that everyone gets their information somewhere, and that if we want to reach those people, we need to find out where that is. In other words, you can’t bring your audience to you, you have to go to where they it is.

People talk about how, despite the fact that they’ve lived in Los Angeles or California for 20 years, they refuse to drive cars.

Sure, I understand all the bad shit that the automobile represents, but let’s face it, this is elitist bullshit. It’s code for “I’m not a serious person.”

Set aside the fact that it costs billions of dollars just to turn the ignition on this vehicle, the Space Shuttle is one of the few things that your tax dollars fund that is flat-out cool to watch and doesn’t (intentionally, that is) kill anybody. So when it goes up at night, as it did today, it’s particularly worth watching. To that end: