Bill's Blog

Building your own Personal Brand Part Two

I started writing for publications in the early 90’s. At the time I had just started working in the new and niche world of high end 3D animation. One day I noticed that one of the sales guys at the company I worked for had an article published in the main trade journal. Using his name as a way in, I called up the editor and pitched them a story. The upshot was they agreed to keep it in their files as an “evergreen” story, one that could be run at anytime and if they had space to fill, they’d use it. Of course, no money was offered.

A few months later I received a solicitation in the mail about subscribing to a new publication called 3D Design Magazine. I called them up and said: “I’m not interested in subscribing, but I’d love to write for you.” My background, plus the fact I had already placed an article with their competitor, proved a winning combination. I was offered a job as a columnist and two days later they called again to say their technical editor had left and would I be interested in that as well. And so I started writing monthly columns on 3D and eventually pitched them on the idea of a series on a new 3D for the Web technology called VRML. My writings on VRML made me a VIP in the early world of rich media on the web and led to one of the first really great gigs of my career: VRML Evangelist for SGI and put me at the birth of rich media advertising for the web.

Rich Media SIG

The Rich Media Sig

Early on I discovered a very interesting thing. Very few people will raise their hand, but many people will follow and help those that do. Case in point is how I created the Rich Media SIG back in 1999. The term SIG stands for Special Interest Group and I was very familiar with the term. An organization called the ACM (Association for Computer Machinery) had a series of special interest groups under its wing including one called SIGGraph, which stands for Special Interest Group Graphics. This was an organization that was focused on people interested in computer graphics and at the beginning of the 1990’s, there just wasn’t a cooler place to be associated with. The SIGGraph conference became known (especially at the advent of 3D animation) as one long party where the coolest, most interesting people hung out. SIGGraph became the meeting place for movie producers, scientists, researchers, artists, and computer programmers. It is where you went to see the first clips of Terminator 2 or Titanic, the latest Pixar experiment. And it was the place movie studios went to wine and dine animation talent.

And this confluence of different minds and interests was the number one force behind the revolution in computer animation and graphics. I thought something similar was needed for the interactive advertising industry.

In 1999, the Rich Media Advertising industry was struggling. There was a lot of misinformation, lack of information, technical challenges and requirements and competing technologies out there and one day I was reading an online forum. A poster was stating how bad Rich Media was, using what I knew to be incorrect information. Right then and there I posted a follow up saying that I was going to start a non-profit organization to educate marketers on the powers of Rich Media advertising, with the idea of creating a community that allow for the rapid maturing of the technology much as SIGGraph had done for computer graphics. I called it The Rich Media SIG. Literally in minutes I had volunteers offering to create a web site for me, help me organize it, and sponsor. Within a week I had a check from Intel and other companies to get it launched.

I had raised my hand, and that was all that was needed. Everyone else was happy to do the work.

Building Your Own Personal Brand Part One

Building Your Personal Brand

One of the questions I get from folks who are not entrepreneurs is: “How did you have the guts to start your own business. How were you able to take the risk?” I always answer with a question of my own: “How do you the guts to work for someone else?”

For me the only way to guarantee your income is to run your own business. After having worked for many organizations, I feel much more confident in my ability to go out and sell something and make it work than many of my “bosses” at the organizations I’ve worked for. When you work for someone else, you are always at their whim. Your future and security always rests on someone else to make the right decision (and usually they make the wrong decision) and your sense of security is elusive: you have no control over your own destiny.

One of the best ways to protect yourself is to build your own personal brand, something that I’ve been pretty successful in doing. And the number one way to do that is to write. Becoming an industry spokesperson is easier than you might imagine. And I’ll let you know just how I got started in an upcoming post.

Apple TV

I sort of snuck a little non-email related commentary in my Email Insider’s column this week. It is all about my current love affair with my AppleTV. I’m also convinced I was one of the first consumers to have one, since they were officially released on a Saturday but I was able to convince the manager of my local Apple Store to get me one from the back room on the Thursday before.

Unlike the purported use of the product, to allow the download and display of television shows via the AppleTV (an thin rectangular box that in essence is an Ipod that receives streaming content), I purchased the product to stream my music collection, which I’ve been diligently downloading to my Itunes library. CD’s get scratched, are hard to find if your music collection is as large and eclectic as mine, and even with a jukebox type CD player, are hard to quickly shuffle through. There is nothing I like better than to juxtapose Blind Boy Fuller blues track with a Glenn Gould Bach fugue followed by Miles Davis’s So What. I’ve been hoping for a product like this for quite a while.

The early review is that I’m in love with it. And so is my family, who have been tired of trying to figure out my Rube Goldberg method of getting music to play through my 5 foot Magnaplaner speakers. My wife can now actually find what she wants to play because of the elegance of the Apple interface design, and the product works, right out of the box, as advertised.

I’ll admit that as far as my kids were concerned, they really liked watching Terminator 2 on the Apple TV, the one movie I downloaded to try out. The picture was great: DVD quality in fact much to my surprise. Another benefit: I was able to download a single episode of the first season of the Alfred Hitchcock show that wouldn’t play on my DVD boxed set that I got for Christmas. I can see where, once there is a decent selection available (which there is not now), downloading of movies and tv shows will replace my DVD purchases.

But as I mentioned in my article, the biggest surprise is how it has brought the family together to listen to radio (via podcasts). Instead of podcasts being a solitary activity with buds firmly placed in ear sockets, the Apple TV brought our favorite Public Radio shows to the family entertainment area. There we were, all sitting around listening to Fresh Air and This American Life together and commenting on the action just we would hunkering down to American Idol or House.

Whether or not this will spark a trend of shared radio listening since we haven’t experienced since the 1940’s is anyone’s guess. But I can see a good business bringing back some of those radio serials and marketing them as family entertainment. Could a new Golden Age of Radio be upon us?

Starting a Company, Part One.

This is the first in a series of posts about the launching and building of Email Data Source, my company. I hope that this will be valuable to other entrepreneurs who are looking to start their own company.

Email Data Source was a true garage start-up and was actually my 4^th company. In the early 90’s I had a small company called Quartet that produced computer games, or at least produced the concept of video games. We got started just before the video game crash of the early 90’s, just before the Internet really took off and right about the time Dreamworks was formed. This was significant in my memory because I actually can blame Steven Spielberg for the demise of my company. We had put together a deal for Digital Domain to do the actual graphics for the game, called Dreamland, and Microsoft to distribute. We were all set to fly to Redmond to sign the papers when we were delayed for a week. The boys from Dreamworks were visiting and would we mind postponing our trip by a week? The next thing we knew, Dreamworks put a deal together to have Microsoft distribute their games and in exchange Microsoft would shut down their games division. Bye Bye deal.

That led to a series of adventures: pitching games to other publishers, getting interested in 3D on the Web – the early stages of things like Second Life, all done in a technology called Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML. I became one of the experts in VRML and wrote a monthly column on the subject for 3D Design Magazine. Eventually I was approached by Silicon Graphics (SGI) and asked to move to California and be their VRML Evangelist.

My job at SGI was to promote the use of VRML and this naturally lead to online advertising, where I produced one of the first Rich Media ads for Pepsi: a full motion 30 second Web Banner animation that took up only 12k of space, a big deal when everyone was on a slow dial up connection.

But soon it all fell apart. SGI was going down and our little VRML division was going down with it. A year later I was back in New York. But now I was the Rich Media Interactive Advertising guy. And I took full advantage.

Next: Starting my second company - The Rich Media SIG.

On Being an Entrepreneur

Every book on entrepreneurship I’ve ever read starts with a self test. Take the test and see if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur! I have failed every one of those tests and yet for the last 15 years, I’ve called myself an entrepreneur. Before that, I called myself an artist.

My father never started a business and never took a risk. In fact he worked the same job he got right out of college till the day he died. He was not a Type A personality. And I never had a paper route or a lemonade stand. By the time I was in college the thought that I would end up in business would have been laughable. I was a musician, an actor, an artist. Business was for those Management Majors with their white shirts and pocket calculators.

It wasn’t until later that I realized, after talking to hundreds of other entrepreneurs, that we all had a pretty similar background. I’ve never met an entrepreneur who went to business school, and if they did, they dropped out pretty quickly. Almost all of them where involved in the arts in some way. None thought they would be running businesses one day.

It took me a long time to figure out that what we all had in common was an overpowering need to create. That is different than an overpowering need to succeed, or an overpowering need to manage. That is why eventually, once the business reaches a certain size, the entrepreneur steps down and lets someone else (the suit) take over. Because at that stage of a business, the original vision has been set, the imagination it takes to launch a business is secondary to growing it.

What I found out is that the creativity and imagination it takes to produce a work of art is the same creativity it takes to build a company. And the traits of an artist and an entrepreneur are the same: they need to do the thing they need to do. And it doesn’t matter what the odds are, or how many people told them they were crazy. I’ve found that for every person who told me I was crazy when I launched a business like Email Data Source, there was another person telling me “Why didn’t I think of that” once it was launched.

And that is another thing that separates the “businessman” from the entrepreneur and artist: they need to make actual the thing they dream of. Whether it is a Spiral Jetty or an email tracking tool, it ain’t done till it is realized.

And so the real answer is (if you ask yourself the question, should I be an entrepreneur) is the same answer my old acting teacher told any student that asked: do I have what it takes to be an actor. The answer is, if you have to ask, you don’t. Because it is so rough, so tough, that only those who can’t do anything else succeed at.

So don’t take a test on whether you should be an entrepreneur, just be one. Better yet, toss all those books away. The book of entrepreneurship is in the doing.

Bill's First Post

Welcome to my first post. My name is Bill McCloskey and I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Email Data Source. The other day I was reading a blog post that referenced my blog on my company’s site: a blog that I had not updated in over 6 months.

The reason I hadn’t updated it was that it wasn’t a true blog after all. When we redesigned our site, our CTO did not have the time to implement a true blog: imagine, he thought getting our products out was more important than making my daily blatherings available to my beloved audience! And so I finally took the bull by the horns and created one myself (which hopefully I’ll get him to link to).

As many of you know, I write a weekly column on email marketing called The Email Insider for Mediapost and I also host the Email Insider Conference. The purpose of this blog will be to not only talk about email marketing and to expand on themes raised in that column, but to also talk about things I could not talk about there – other things on my mind other than email.

And of course I’ll be talking about my company Email Data Source and our products Email Analyst and Email Analyst Brand Edition.

But that is enough for a first post.

More Later.