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vialism · 6 years

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TWENTY ONE PILOTS’ CRISIS OF FAITH RESULTS IN “LEAVE THE CITY”

Not one to rest on his laurels, twenty one pilots mastermind Tyler Joseph ponders the existence of a higher power on the achingly melancholy closing track of new album, ‘Trench.’

Five records in and you would think that twenty one pilots’ Tyler Joseph would have gotten into a comfortable groove by now. You know, kick back and reap the rewards of all his and Josh Dun’s hard work. Spend some money. Sleep in until 3 p.m. And when he does descend into his home studio, maybe he can lighten up and write songs about how hard it is to be in a successful band.

Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Joseph’s art is fueled by his psychic quest for answers, reasons and possibilities about the travails of modern living. It was only a matter of time until Joseph would delve further into his psyche, examining a central core of his life.

“Leave The City,” the closing track from the recently released Trench connects the singer’s story of Trench to his Christian belief system in a way that is solemn and poignant. Packing the emotional devastation of a lullaby sung in a war-torn country and the deliberation of rebuilding a life after irreversible trauma, the song lays many of Joseph’s questions about God, existentialism and his place in the universe for everyone to see…er…feel. There’s not a song in TOP’s oeuvre that will bore into a listener’s heart the way “Leave The City” does.

“I really thought it was a great way to close the record,” he says. “Once I started creating [the song], I knew that I [wasn’t] going to name the place I’m going: I’m talking about the world I’m from; I’m talking about the world I’m traveling through, but I never really reach the place I’m trying to get to. It’s not because I’m holding on to some secret: You’re looking at someone who is still trying to figure out where that place is.

“[The song is] definitely about losing faith, which I’ve been working through on this record,” Joseph explains. “It’s something that may have moved the needle for me during the last record and touring cycle. Trench, is like, saying I found the sense that I was there. But [actually saying], ‘Guys, I know where it is, follow me,’ and you’re going to come to our show and I’ll tell you about it? I don’t have that yet. But at the very end of [the song], it says, ‘These faces facing me, they know what I mean.’ That’s me onstage, looking at them, maybe—at least for the record—that was the place I was trying to get to all along.

“I still think I am going to answer that question, and I’m going to know, and when I know for sure…what’s the end goal? Where am I going? Is there heaven? Is there hell? Is there a God? And the process I’ve been on [for] this record is the closest I’ve been to…” he pauses for a brief moment. “Entertaining a world where there isn’t a God. And that’s total transparency. And that is hard to say. It’s a new struggle for me. But I really want to own it.”

Joseph’s inner dialogue regarding matters of belief isn’t as controversial as, say, those belonging to some members of Underoath, whose personal experiences changed their spiritual points of view. There are both scholars and followers who openly admit that a crisis of faith is sometimes necessary in order to re-examine your relationship with a higher power. But Joseph’s raison d’etre has never been served by making ordinary armchair gestures. Which makes “Leave The City” even more poignant.

“I still believe in God,” he acknowledges. “I still want to call myself a Christian—because I am a Christian. I don’t know how to talk to people about it yet. And if I can’t talk to other people about it yet or if I don’t know exactly why I should talk to other people about it, does it really mean anything to me, then? If I don’t truly have the answer, shouldn’t I just be talking about that? But I have to get there first.”

Because Joseph has built a career out of eloquent articulation—as opposed to shock and transgression—both his profession of faith as well as its perceived shortcomings come off as a quest for knowledge and understanding. Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “With God On Our Side” discusses how cultures claim exclusivity to a higher power to rationalize war. Tyler Joseph doesn’t draw a line in the sand either way. He’s wondering if there’s a deity to lay claim to in the first place.

“It’s a completely necessary part of making this my faith,” he continues. “But I can’t totally see it—it’s just a stop along the way. Because hey, the days I don’t think about Him, I’m fine. It’s not like supernatural things are happening at every turn, and I think, ‘Well, I can’t describe that other than “it’s God,”’ and that didn’t happen the whole album cycle. We just got up and worked and created and moved on.”

While songwriters can reflect on a myriad of thoughts, stories, edicts and manifestos through their art, it does takes a patient soul to process possibilities that have the propensity to negate previously held values. This is not something Joseph will ever stop pursuing, regardless of whatever by-products of success he interacts with. Like he sings, “In time, I will leave the city/For now, I will stay alive.”

“Seeing the success in Blurryface: Is that something that changed in me?” he wonders aloud. “I can’t see it as a stop, because I have to fully believe I just might have to stay there. But once I live here more, when I make it out of Trench and I get to where I’m going and I know what the name is, I wonder then if I’ll be more bold in my faith and what our purpose is being here.”

- from ALTPress, October 8th, 2018

#never have i been so quoke #i'm #empty set empty set empty fucking set motherfuckers #this lines up with EVERYTHING i read about yesterday #abby where's abby #fuck me up fuck me up #tøp #leave the city #twenty one pilots

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hamiltonarena-blog · 5 years

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FirstOntario Centre

Create an unforgettable family experience at First Ontario Center

FirstOntario Centre is an exceptional location with a fantastic align of occasions throughout the year. We recognize the importance of valuing a celebration with your buddies. That's why, unless or else defined, all tickets marketed using this website are side-by-side. If you choose one of the most genuine possible bargains on tickets along with side-by-side tickets with your friends, guarantee you obtain your cards with the help of our professionals.

First Ontario Center Tickets

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First Ontario Center

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First Ontario Centre Events

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FirstOntario Centre Events

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FirstOntario Centre Tickets

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FirstOntario Centre

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devontroxell · 3 years

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Use Brand Storytelling to Develop a Personal Connection With Your Audience

What is a brand? When we are introduced to someone in real life, we seek to learn more about them. We ask questions that give us a brief overview of their lives and the type of person they are. We listen to their stories, ideas, and opinions. It’s a part of getting to know someone and becoming a part of their personal brand as we perceive it in our personal lives and business.

Brands go through the same steps when customers evaluate and get to know them. A prospect might find your website and become intrigued. Maybe your messaging really hit home with them. They check out your product, verify that it covers their most pressing needs, and then they begin the process of getting to know your brand- just like they would a person. The goal is to get to know the brand, its promise, value, and benefits on a deeper level.

We try to unearth the story of a brand. We prefer to shop with brands that share our values, beliefs, and concerns. We check out what people say on social media about those brands, their products, and maybe even their employees. We read reviews that other customers have left about a product or service. We read the brand’s blog posts and learn about its founders and executives. When you’re looking for a B2B partner, it pays to really do your homework before committing to an expensive solution, and individuals, as well as businesses, want to make sure they’re in good company and don’t end up with questionable acquaintances.

The secret weapon for building a brand that your customers relate to is brand storytelling. By sharing stories and anecdotes about your business, industry, product, and employees, you give your customers a window into your operations, your inner workings, and what makes you unique. By giving them a peek behind the ‘green curtain,’ customers and prospects get to know your business more intimately and get to understand the “why” behind what you do.

Your brand isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what everyone believes about your brand based on the signals that you send, both negative and positive. Brand storytelling is our tool for taking hold of these narratives and helping our customers see through the noise to see the qualities that make us love a company. We are all hard-wired to love stories.

What is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is any piece of content that shares a story about your brand in the broadest sense. Any story that you tell that relates to your brand in some way is brand storytelling. It gives your customers and followers insights into your company and creates more opportunities for them to connect with your brand personally.

Brand storytelling comes in many different forms. It could be a video case study that details how you helped a prominent client. When you describe your interactions with that client, you are telling a story about your brand. Sharing a story about your company’s early days, doing an interview with one of your employees, or giving your followers a video walk-through of your office — all examples of powerful brand storytelling.

Too many people try to put brand storytelling in a box, where you are expected to tell stories about actual events, without examining how they can creatively make those stories more impactful by packaging them in different ways. In the examples at the end of this post, you’ll see some high-level examples of brand storytelling that are a bit more creative.

Brand storytelling is channel-neutral. You can tell your stories through a blog post, social media updates, video, podcast, live speech – or even a comic strip. The medium you use to tell your story is less important than the story itself. Ensuring that you tell stories your core customers will connect with is important for building brand awareness and loyalty. Effective brand storytelling can turn happy customers into true advocates and promoters.

IMAGE: BuzzBoard

How to Make Your Audience Love Your Brand StoriesWhile, you can use no formula to create your brand stories. That said, reading up on proper narrative structures in your chosen medium helps you improve the effectiveness of your stories. In particular, I’m a huge fan of The Hero’s Journey. And once you start recognizing the various stages, it becomes addictive to discover them. Especially in Movies. In the meantime, here are a few tips you can follow to ensure that your content connects with your audience and hits all of the beats of a good story.

Say Something Unique

Think about the movies you love. A big part of why you love them is that they do something that you like that helps them stand out from the competition. Maybe it’s an unexpected plot twist, a quirk that they give the character, or how the relationships play out throughout the story. While most movies follow similar narrative formulas, no one wants to watch a movie that is a complete copy of another popular movie. The same is true for the content and stories that brands share.

Make sure your brand story has something unique to say in each campaign. If you are talking personally about something that happened to you, your company, or your employees, filling in the details should be enough to make your story unique. Nobody else can tell these stories, and you should lean on those personal anecdotes as a resource to make your content personally unique to you.

Design Stories for Your Audience

It may seem like common sense, but a quick look at the types of stories many brands tell might leave you asking — who is this for? If you aren’t designing stories for a specific customer persona, you are missing the mark. Don’t tell stories for your own benefit or the benefit of your employees. Ensure that you are telling stories your audience actually wants to hear because the story conveys some insight or guidance. Or maybe it’s just entertainment value. Either way – know your audience.

Mostly this means that your audience should be able to relate to your stories. Maybe your story centers around a particular business problem your key customers can relate to. Maybe it touches on a personal story on the sacrifices that you make as a dedicated professional. Your story can take any shape. But take a moment to consider what your audience and you have in common and try to touch on those points throughout your story.

Show, Don’t Tell

This is perhaps the most common advice given in creative writing classes across the world. In some ways, it’s over-recommended. Sometimes we do want to tell. Still, as it applies to brand storytelling, far too many creators get caught up in telling when they should be doing more showing.

If you were telling a story about how your brand helped a client, you wouldn’t end the story simply saying that your recommendations “performed well.” Instead, you’d want to provide data and statistics that back up your assertions. How did specific changes result in measurable outcomes for your client? Don’t just talk about your work. Show the results of the work you did in an illustrative and practical way whenever possible.

Consistency in Storytelling

Stories themselves should be self-contained and tell a complete story for your audience. But that doesn’t mean that each story shouldn’t be building toward a larger narrative. Before creating your first brand storytelling campaign, you should outline some of the main points that you would like your stories to make when taken together.

For instance, if you are running a company that offered several lines of all-natural and green skincare products and you really wanted to push the green angle — some brand themes that you might want to push in your stories might include:

Responsibility

Transparency

Mindfulness

Low environmental impact

Sustainability

These could be the overarching themes you could leverage to represent your brand. Then, you convey these themes with the actual stories you tell. For instance, responsibility and transparency would be well-conveyed in a story about how your founder traveled to the locations where your ingredients are sourced to ensure they meet your very stringent standards.

Character-Driven & Personal

You wouldn’t want to read a story that was a bulleted list of the events that took place. That’s not even a story. That’s just a laundry list. Effective stories are character-driven. They draw on our emotions and help us relate to those characters. Brand stories should contain the same ingredients any great story does — a protagonist that overcomes challenges on their way to success (or failure), an antagonist (business problem), and secondary characters. Make sure that when you tell brand stories, you are telling them in full.

Tell your stories from the perspective of a single person to improve their impact. Speaking from the first person can help make stories seem more personal. First-person stories are generally easier to write, making them a good introduction to brand storytelling for first-time storytellers.

2 Real-World Examples of Effective Brand Storytelling

In this section, I want to share some high-level examples of brand storytelling. One of the aspects you will notice throughout these examples is that effective brand storytellers don’t just view the stories they tell as individual articles. Instead, they are chapters in a book – part of a larger strategy that helps dictate the way consumers perceive their brand. Ultimately, brand storytelling helps define their target market and position their brand within that market. Dannijo Uses Personal Storytelling to Drive Their Lifestyle BrandLifestyle brands are, more than most, in a position to benefit from brand storytelling. Customers want to see themselves living a specific idealistic life when they use products from lifestyle brands. Telling stories of how other customers have integrated their products into their lives can help show customers what their life could be like with those same products.

This fact isn’t lost on Dannijo, a brand founded by sisters Danielle and Jodie Snyder in 2008. From the very beginning, they embraced storytelling as part of their broader marketing strategy. In an interview with Fast Company, Danielle Snyder explained their focus on “creating narratives that are so compelling to consumers, they want to build your products into their lives.” That’s a perfect representation of the power of storytelling. Amazing stories make your customers want to make your company and products a part of their lives.

Dannijo’s brand storytelling has been immensely successful for the company. Today they have more than 176,000 followers on Instagram. That social platform plays a key role in their strategy. Here, Dannijo showcases snapshots of their team, their business, the lives of the people that wear their product, and the brand draws attention to its products by highlighting when celebrities use them.

They also take things a bit further as far as follower engagement goes. They often hold inspirational #ConversationPieces.Great hashtag. On that topic, check out our article on hashtag marketing for more examples. In these #ConversationPieces, one of the sisters interviews another influential person. Danielle and Jodie (and the other guests) use these chats often to share personal anecdotes and tell stories about their rise to business success as much as hardships in their personal lives. This content isn’t directly connected to their products, but it doesn’t need to be. It speaks directly to their target audience.

Zillow Uses Their Internal Data to Create Narratives

For the second example, we want to call out Zillow, a U.S.-based online real estate marketplace. In recent years, the company has become the frontrunner in online home sales. Today, their database contains data for more than 110 million homes, including data for value estimations, the square footage of each home, nearby attractions and amenities, location data, and aerial photographs. Zillow doesn’t let that data go to waste. The company has made it a priority to leverage the data it collects to help customers better understand their brand, the housing market and develop personal connections. Take a look at this post that shows where millennials can find affordable homes. Here, Zillow combined publicly available data about average millennial- wages with their own internal data on home prices in cities across the U.S.

Check out their findings:

In another example, Zillow used their data to determine the 20 Best cities for Halloween Trick or Treating leading up to the 2017 Halloween holiday. They determined these cities based on home values, how close the houses are located to one another, the city’s crime rate, and the size of the population under 10 years old. They then created an infographic that illustrated their results.

These are both great examples of Zillow taking what would otherwise be extremely dry user data and turning it into something interesting that still points back to their main product — a comprehensive real estate database. Zillow does an excellent job bringing data to life through real-world examples, featuring millennials, parents with trick-and-treating kids (and many more), and combining boring data and making it relatable, relevant, and interesting.

Brand Storytelling Drives Awareness, Interest, and Loyalty

Brand storytelling will help your business throughout all phases of the customer life cycle. Showing your customers that you are a brand that can solve their problems and share their beliefs can help facilitate your company’s initial awareness and products. As they learn more, that awareness develops into a genuine interest. Later, after they’ve become satisfied customers, those same traits that made them interested in you in the first place will also make them some of your most loyal customers.

Have you ever done any brand storytelling? How’d that work out for your business? Comment below!

This article was previously published on SocialSellinator’s Blog.

Use Brand Storytelling to Develop a Personal Connection With Your Audience published first on https://wabusinessapi.tumblr.com/

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personalcoachingcenter · 4 years

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Power Tool: Security vs. Insecurity

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/power-tool-security-vs-insecurity/

Power Tool: Security vs. Insecurity

A Coaching Power Tool Created by David Braun (Executive Coach, CANADA)

Insecurity

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity ― Dag Hammarskjold

Insecurity is something every human experience in moments or for long seasons. Most would agree it is apart of the human plight. Insecurity is experienced by the child on the school playground, the college student writing her final exams, the parent worried about paying rent, the businessman’s unease about the economy, the collective fear of a nation’s anxiety of potential war, catastrophe and the list goes on. Insecurity is known in every profession, to every age group, gender, race, and ethnicity. No matter whether it is a child, adult, or senior, insecurity can be quietly at work.

But what if feeling insecure, didn’t mean being insecure. What if the journey toward living through uncertainty didn’t have to be about lack, harm, or danger. What if it was about learning to choose honesty, acceptance, and love.

Definition: “Insecurity”: uncertainty or anxiety about oneself; lack of confidence… In short, insecurity means feeling anxious and fearful about yourself or something in your life.

Definition: “Security”: the state of being free from danger or threat; freedom from danger, fear, anxiety, from lack. In short, security means living in a state of being free from being controlled by feelings of threat.

Devastation of Insecurity

There are times when temporary insecurity can be helpful. It can warn us of potential danger, of ways we need to change course, or opportunities we need to self-improve to achieve. However, when insecurity becomes fixed and habitual, its effects can traumatize the mind and body. Studies have found the following:

99% of people remember where the origin stories of their long-standing insecurities began;

The most common chronic insecurities people report are related to physical appearance, personality traits, group acceptance/ rejection, and future provision;

Living in prolonged insecure relationships may predispose people to later health problems such as cardiovascular disease, stroke or ulcers;

End of life studies of the elderly finds insecurities as root causes of some of the people’s regrets for their missed opportunities and lack of risk-taking.

Insecurity can paralyze our thinking and keep us from moving forward when we shouldn’t be standing still. Furthermore, because insecurities are often rooted in traumatic, difficult, or uncertain past circumstances and experiences, they present us with a warped view of ourselves, our strengths, abilities, and personhood.

Common Symptoms of Insecurity

Some of the symptoms of insecurity include the following:

We always worry about what other people are thinking.

We avoid meeting new people.

We feel the need to make others around us feel uncomfortable or insecure.

We regularly feel compelled to boast or make sure others see our goodness, competence, or achievements.

We struggle believing we are good enough, smart enough, or worthy enough to succeed.

We find ourselves putting on masks around particular individuals or groups, not being true to who deep down feel we are.

We often struggle to trust or relying on other people, including relying on ourselves because we have a looming sense of failure or disappointment.

We often look and expect the worst to happen. Thus, we tend to play it safe, procrastinate, or make excuses when challenge opportunities come our way.

Security

There is no real security except for whatever you build inside yourself. Gilda Radner

The Power of Security

People who feel, believe, or act out of security, live more productive whole lives. Studies repeatedly show job security helps employees contribute, collaborate, and take risks, adding to an organization’s bottom line. Similarly, social security requires us to relate to others with emotional integrity, being self-aware enough to proactively deal with our fears while growing self-love. Emotional and relational security has big impacts on our health. Studies reveal that isolated people are 50% more vulnerable to premature death verse individuals with healthy secure relationships. Finally, studies show insecure individuals are less likely to monitor themselves toward a chosen goal, leading to the lowered achievement of personal or professional aspirations.

Although everyone confronts insecurity, only some recognize it in themselves and struggle with the work to establish personal centeredness. Living out of security can occur in the middle of a crisis. However, learning to “be secure” is a process. Being secure as a state of being coming from making choices on how and what we focus on, how we act, or what we believe.

Building Security

Goal-setting is important and helpful to make progress in our lives. However, it is easy to believe that once I’ve achieved the perfect relationship, job, or business, I will feel secure. This is called “outside-in” living. When our goals are rooted in ideals, values, or standards outside of ourselves we are giving our energy to change away. Fool’s gold security is based on things outside of ourselves beyond our control.

True security begins with our choosing an “inside-out” approach to life. What does this mean? We learn by exploring our thoughts, feelings, and actions in every area we feel insecure. Once we identify what we believe or think about issues around our insecurity, we can choose to accept and build more powerful thoughts. The same is true with feelings and actions. Upon recognizing our feelings around insecurity, we can examine our thoughts and actions connected to this insecurity. We then can choose to build different actions and feelings around the insecurity we are facing.

Feelings

When we feel insecure, we have an opportunity to explore what our inner voices are telling us about ourselves and the situation. Through coaching and other types of support, we can choose to re-orient our self-concepts and narratives about the insecurity source in ways that empower us to behave differently.

Thoughts

There are a variety of thoughts or beliefs we can entertain called biases and/ or fallacies. Often these become habits of thought we may rely on to make sense of issues causing us insecurities. As an example, a couple is listed below:

Confirmation Bias: we accept only data which confirms our beliefs which pre-determines us toward continually feeling insecurity

Arrival Fallacy: a belief that once I’ve attained a future outcome, it will make me happy. This belief activates our brain’s reward center so that over time, we are continually changing our ideal future and never finding satisfaction. This cycle breeds insecurity by reinforcing what we don’t have.

Action

Many of our actions are based on unconscious roadmaps, freeing up our conscious minds. Unfortunately, if some of our actions are historically based on insecurity, they reinforce the feelings of insecurity. Breaking this cycle means choosing different actions. World-famous basketball star, Kobe Bryant shared it like this, “I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have a fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”

There is an interchange between our thoughts, feelings, and actions. As we chose a change in one area, the other areas change as well. In some cases, we may have to choose changes in a couple of areas to shift toward being secure. Whatever the case, this journey is a learning process that takes time and intentional effort.

As we learn to withhold judgment against ourselves that we are“insecure,” we allow ourselves to explore a better way. This learning process enables us to choose more powerful thoughts, feelings, and actions, leading to being secure vs. feeling insecure. During this learning process, the following are a few examples of enriching benefits:

We are able to determine what our mission is—our “why’s” for what is important.

We are able to understand clearly what our personal values are—enabling us to value the journey or process versus only the results.

Redefine what success is to us by learning to cultivate an attitude of gratefulness for what we have.

My Reflection

For most of my life, I’ve viewed myself as a secure person. However, I discovered the importance of establishing choices toward being secure in myself when I left my career path and transitioned into starting my own business. When I made my decision public, I was surprised by the social pressures of leaders, family members, and team members of the organization I led.

The misinformation passed around by others, the threat I perceived to my reputation and my fears for my family’s future provisional needs revealed my insecurity. There were seasons of time where my thoughts and feelings were plagued by other people’s expectations and negative perceptions. During these times I struggled with my health, eating, sleeping, and exercising responsibly. I avoided people, meetings, and relationships.

I grew into being insecure in the middle of an insecure environment by learning to shift my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward who I was on the inside. During this time I’m thankful to my family and my faith for providing the support I needed to grow through this learning process.

Coaching Application

There are many applications for this model. Insecurity is an ongoing growth opportunity for everyone. Of particular value, this power tool could be useful for anyone moving through any type of transition or change in their personal or professional life. As well, this tool could be helpful for anyone struggling to find the courage to confront basic unmet human needs—belonging, provision, protection, and significance.

Resources:

What are the origins of insecurity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918896/

Insecurity:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/dealing-with-insecurities-might-get-easier-as-you-age-survey-shows

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201511/4-signs-someone-is-probably-insecure

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-things-insecure-people-that-slowly-destroy-their-lives.html

Quotes:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/insecurity

https://www.wiseoldsayings.com/security-quotes/

https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/insecurity-quotes

Emotional Integrity:

Are You In A Healthy Relationship?

Loneliness:

https://www.inc.com/amy-morin/americas-loneliness-epidemic-is-more-lethal-than-smoking-heres-what-you-can-do-to-combat-isolation.html

https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/HealthyLiving/Strong-relationships-strong-health

Video:

The Importance of Feeling Secure

Job Security:

Job Security & Employee Engagement: Managers Can Make a Difference

Arrival Fallacy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2016/08/22/why-reaching-your-goals-can-surprisingly-make-you-less-happy/#4c7c6614b880

Effects of Perception of Time on Goal Setting:

https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/life-goals-and-the-perception-of-time-do-it-now/

Overcoming Things Which Stop People From Achieving Goals:

https://www.inc.com/chris-winfield/the-3-things-that-stop-most-people-from-achieving-their-goals.html

Goal Setting & Insecurity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5364185/

Power of Being Secure:

Feeling Secure vs being…

The Importance of Feeling Secure

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/rediscovering-love/201801/insecurity

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/power-tools/david-braun-security-vs-insecurity/

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our-legacy-rp-blog · 7 years

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MADS has been accepted for the character GEORGIE VAUBADON

We are SO very happy that you applied for Georgie, Mads, your writing is fantastic, you made Georgie come alive, you made her your own, she is bound to be a very interesting addition to the roleplay! Welcome to the roleplay, and be sure you fill out the checklist HERE.

OOC name & pronouns: Mads, she/her Age: 25 Timezone: CST

IC INFORMATION

Character’s name: Georgiana Delaney Meissa Vaubadon, known to all as Georgie. When Eva Vaubadon discovered she was pregnant, she immediately knew that her child (if it was a girl) would have the name Delaney somewhere on the birth certificate. Eva read a story about a trickster named Delaney, who used her wits and her wiles to outmaneuver even the most dangerous opponents. That skill is what Eva wished for her child above all: not beauty, not charm, but wiles. Of course, with Orion as the father, the pair could not agree on a single name for their child, and so Eva also tagged on Orion’s favorite name: Meissa. Although Meissa is a star within the constellation Orion, Eva didn’t mind allowing her daughter to bear that name; after all, Georgie was a part of Orion.

FC choices: Juno Temple

Position request: None. Georgie finds that fitting into Hogwarts’s “preppy positions” is too demeaning. After all, why try to keep first years in line when rulers were meant to be broken?

Birthday: November 1st. Eva went into labor on October 31st, and labored for 13 hours to bring Georgie into the world. Ever a superstitious bunch, Georgie’s maternal grandparents, Alistair and Isabeau Vaubadon, looked at their only grandchild’s star signs to see what fate held for her. Georgie’s zodiac sign is Scorpio, a sign known for its passion and aloofness, and with the planet Pluto as the greatest influence, Georgie was destined for ambition, power, and an ability for manipulation—everything that the Vaubadons hoped for in their heiress.

Wand: 9", pine wood & dragon heartstring. Taken from Pottermore’s wand analysis website, pine wood means the following:

The straight-grained pine wand always chooses an independent, individual master who may be perceived as a loner, intriguing and perhaps mysterious. Pine wands enjoy being used creatively, and unlike some others, will adapt unprotestingly to new methods and spells… The pine wand is one of those that are most sensitive to non-verbal magic.

Patronus: It’s difficult for Georgie to summon a corporeal patronus, although it’s not from lack of trying. With a family involved with such Dark Magic, it’s started to taint Georgie’s ability to cast the Patronus charm. She can still summon her patronus, but it takes most of the young witch’s concentration. However, her patronus is the Coyote. According to the Patronus analysis, the Coyote “can be seen as power hungry, and their ambition is what fuels them”; they can “also be considered selfish, and may come off as cold individuals”.

Boggart: Georgie’s boggart is herself and her family, stripped of all power and casted out in the world, their wands broken and beyond repair. The Vaubadons, although dabblers of Dark Magic, are Georgie’s family, and she would do anything to make their names greater than those that doubted them. When Georgie sees her boggart, it shakes her to the core, but instead of letting the fear overcome her, she doubles her efforts and trains even harder.

Headcanons:

Georgie has multiple scars on her knees and the palms of her hands from her childhood. She’s had the chance to have Healers remove the scars, but she refuses each time out of stubborn pride; she can tell you how she earned each mark, with specific details on the spells or adventures that caused it. She’s particularly fond of a zigzag scar, about an inch long, on her right (wand wielding) hand. When she was twelve, Georgie created a new spell that would infuse enchanted silver into wand tips. When she tested it out with her mother, the wand she’d been using reacted, and sent out a bolt of heated silver onto Georgie’s hand. Although the first trial was a failure, the second trial produced one of the best selling products in the Vaubadon shop—all thanks to Georgie. Eva told her daughter that each mark is one of success, and Georgie truly took it to heart.

With such an unconventional family structure, Georgie has very nontraditional views on marriage, family, and sexuality. When she lost her virginity at the end of her 5th year, Georgie didn’t feel ashamed or afraid; she welcomed her sexual awakening. She’s slept with three others since then—one even being a female classmate that was as curious as Georgie herself—but she’s found that she’s more attracted to men than women. She didn’t hide her sexual activity from her parents, and they both counseled their daughter about the importance of protection charms and potions. Georgie doesn’t believe that marriage is important to create a family, and she’s entertained the thought of raising her own future children like her parents raised her. She’s never felt unloved or unneeded; quite the opposite, actually. Her family has always shown her support and love, even in her darkest endeavors.

When Georgie first discovered that someone could make his or her own spells, it changed her world forever. She could cut her own trails, forge her own craft, and find different ways to make the world bend to her will. She was only eight years old, her magic already showing itself through flashes of fire and overwhelming shadow. The Vaubadon household took to constantly carrying the water spells and siphoning spells on their lips, but Orion and Eva couldn’t express the level of pride they had for their daughter’s magic. Georgie’s grandmother, Isabeau Vaubadon, especially encouraged her interest in spell crafting. Not a stranger to the art herself, Isabeau would demonstrate what made a spell strong: the minute motions of the wand work, the tempo and cadence of the incantations, and the intent behind the casting. The craft enthralled Georgie, and she never thought about the consequences of making spells for the Dark Arts.

The young Vaubadon is extremely talented with her wand work, and her professors see that she could do exceedingly well in school, but she doesn’t put forth the effort. To her, Hogwarts is a means of finding potential clients and rivals, nothing more. However, Georgie earned three ‘O’s during her O.W.L exams: potions, Charms, and Transfiguration. She received an ‘A’ in Defense Against the Dark Arts because she was too busy studying how to cast the curses instead of blocking/nullifying them. You don’t even want to ask her what she earned in her Divination class (hint: she got a D) simply because she didn’t want to go to the exam. Going into her sixth year, Georgie realizes that she needs to focus on some of her NEWT level classes if she wants to further her own spell making goals.

Unknown to most everyone outside of the Vaubadon family, Georgie is very proficient at wordless, wand-less spell casting. She tries to keep this quiet, as she will often practice her newest creations wordlessly on any school mates that get in her path.

History:

Chiaroscuro: an artist method used to make something three dimension by playing with light and shadow.

A more apt description of the Vaubadon clan could not be found anywhere, and in fact, the Vaubadons themselves accept this as an explanation for their family’s history and values. From the beginning, the founding members of the pureblood family would admit that they do not shy away from the darkness, or shun the light: the Vaubadons have, and will always, straddle both worlds. They stay neutral, not because they’re scared of either side, but because neutrality has proven prosperous for them—why fix what’s not broken? However, the Vaubadons also have a strong sense of self-preservation and know when to wield the darkness that they’ve tamed.

Enter Alistair and Isabeau Vaubadon, second cousins who married to strength the family’s magic. Like most pureblood families, Alistair and Isabeau did not mind intertwining their bloodlines if it meant that their children would be the purest among the Wizarding community. In Alistair and Isabeau’s case, true affection came along with the arrangement; they were both passionate and ambitious people, devoted to furthering their family’s goal of becoming powerful and that combination made for a good match. The two Vaubadon heirs worked diligently to make their family’s aide indispensible at a time when suspicion could have anyone killed or imprisoned: just before the Second Wizarding War. The Vaubadons knew that the War wouldn’t wait for children, so they knowingly had conceived during the turmoil. Twins Lilith and Eva entered the chaotic world and understood from an early age that the Wizarding community needed both dark and light to survive. Their youngest sister, Kaliope, born two years later, did not have the exposure that the twins did. Alistair and Isabeau aided both the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix without any qualms, taking the money all the same, never fully committing to either side but whispering sweet assurances into each side’s ears. While the twins grew up under a self-serving umbrella, none of the war’s tears fell on their charmed lives, and they enjoyed the prosperity. Eva, especially, basked in the attention and flitted easily among the Dark Lord’s followers and Dumbledore’s alliance. At the close of the war, Alistair and Isabeau took a portion of the family fortune and invested in their own shop in Knockturn Alley, naming it Oscuro.

Although born to privilege, as Eva aged and went through Hogwarts, she discovered another path to power: the Auror office. With a knack for spellcasting and a deep understanding of the dark arts, Eva felt that she could infiltrate the Aurors and become a double agent—if one had the coin, of course. Most of her professors eagerly supported the young witch’s career choice, and with the clientele that Oscuro hosted, Eva knew she would get into the elite program. A month before her auror examination, Eva went out drinking with her best friend, Orion Laurier. An easy friendship, built on genuine respect, Orion and Eva had spent many nights partying together without any concerns—until that night. That night, Orion and Eva slept together, and in their drunkenness, they forgot to use a protection potion. When Eva discovered she was pregnant, she immediately recognized that her dreams of donning an auror badge were invalid—but she didn’t begrudge her baby. She turned that energy into creating a space for her child to learn and grow, devoting herself to her baby as she’d once devoted herself to her career plans. When Eva told her parents about her pregnancy, the elder Vaubadons saw another opportunity to grow their power, and insisted that Eva and Orion marry. The pair firmly fought against the arrangement—Eva because she still wanted her independence, and Orion due to the fact that he didn’t romantically love Eva—and finally convinced both sets of families that they would find a way to successfully co-parent their child.

Georgiana Delaney Meissa Vaubadon graced the world on November 1st. Eva was only 19 years old, Orion the same age, but they knew from that moment that their daughter was the love of their lives. Eva and Orion decided to give their daughter the Vaubadon surname in the hopes that it would shield her from some of more unsavory characters that Alistair and Isabeau dealt with, but the naming seemed to mantle Georgie with purpose instead. She grew up knowing that her family had power—not inherited power, but power forged from a dark creativity, which in Georgie’s opinion was the greater of the two. Georgie played among potions full of quicksilver and wolfsbane, and used werewolf bones as makeshift arrows, quickly accepting that her family’s hands weren’t the cleanest. Even as she played among the weapons and potion workshop, Alistair and Isabeau kept their granddaughter away from the spellcasting area—although they didn’t ever lie about what took place there—from fear that the challenge would exhaust Georgie’s magic.

When Georgie’s magic manifested, it did so in a typical Vaubadon fashion: full of shadow and fury. She conjured a blaze that Orion somehow managed to contain, only to then douse the area in complete darkness. Eva and Orion were proud of their daughter, and encouraged her to work on her skills until her acceptance to Hogwarts. Georgie loathed leaving her family—her Aunts Lily and Kali, her grandparents and her parents—but once she arrived on the school’s grounds, she quickly forgot her hesitation. With her thirst for knowledge, Georgie fit perfectly into the Ravenclaw house—although the Sorting Hat did make a good case for Slytherin’s ambition—and soon settled into school life. She knew that her skills were above her classmates’, but she made an effort to use her skills for tricks and jokes, and it worked for a while, until Georgie started losing interest in making friends. As she went through school, her curiosity grew, and she began to put aside her schoolwork for her own interests. During the summer between her fourth and fifth year, Georgie finally shared some of her crafted spells with Eva. Impressed with her daughter’s innovations, Eva encouraged Georgie’s work, and even snuck her into the spell workshop when the elder Vaubadons were otherwise occupied. Georgie Vaubadon was not a witch that would follow everyone else; she would forge her own way, using chiaroscuro to form her path.

Now:

With tensions rising between the werewolves and wizards, Georgie senses changes in the air. She doesn’t particularly care which side wins, as long as she can peddle her spells and study their effects on victims. In fact, she’s been working on spells that would drastically harm both sides: a spell to infuse werewolves’ blood with silver, and a spell to temporarily freeze a witch or wizard’s magic. So far, she hasn’t perfected the spells, but she’s thrown herself into the crafting.

While Georgie’s time at Hogwarts is ending, she still wants to utilize her remaining years and find more buyers for Oscuro’s products. She slips among the debates of pro and anti werewolf groups, listening to what they have to say and filing it away for later. She doesn’t outright say that she doesn’t care, but when asked, she’ll pacify anyone who pokes the subject. Georgie does what she wants without little remorse or guilt, and she doesn’t care if she offends anyone while doing so; she once told her professor off when the adult said that only traditional family structures mattered. Georgie is progressive and open minded, which is sure to serve her when she takes over the family business.

#accepted

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santaragione · 7 years

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2013 Interview for Lee Witney (never published)

1. Why have you chosen to create with this medium, what are you trying to communicate and why is it important to you?

The answer is a complex one, because what we end up doing in our lives is often a result of many different experiences. The obvious, uninteresting answer is that we've always been fascinated by games and video games, as most kids are. As friends (we met when we were 17 and 20, respectively) we were enjoying discussing our different play experiences, analyzing them, and imagining how we'd have done things differently. It started as a fun exercise of thinking "what if” we had a voice in the making of our favorite games, and as naïve sense of discovery about how things work. When we grew up and began to feel like we had something to say for ourselves, games were naturally the medium we had invested lots of thought in, and we had matured a genuine belief in its expressive potential. We decided to actually start making games with the intention to create something that wasn't catering exclusively to the games world, but was also aimed at a non-gaming audience, who share our sensibilities for themes and aesthetics. We are interested in seeing how things that are typically communicated with other media look through the medium of games and video games (like politics, for example, in our 2013 game http://finalcandidation.it that we designed for the Italian elections).

2. The term 'Game' seems quite limiting for a tool that allows a person to interact with another's ideas. Do we need a word that articulates the medium accurately, that embraces protean experiences, if so could you suggest one?

It could be argued that words like "game" and "play" are not limiting in themselves. They accommodate many different meanings that keep changing based on locations, players, social interactions, narrative content, and more. Games may be perceived as puerile, because they represent concepts and actions that are deeply rooted in our human nature, but are typically experienced for the first time during infancy. We've found that trying to define the meaning of the term "game" or "play" could be as hard as defining the meaning of the term "art". We like to consider play as a behavior and to think of games as tools that enable a play behavior. This way we do not have to think in terms of restrictions such as goals and rules. Instead, we focus on what, to us, are more important design challenges like “inspiring actions”.

3. It is important to respect history but not be constrained by it. In the mediums inauguration developers innovated because they basically had a blank canvas. Where are we now, are we bound by our history or enriched because of it?

As you say, in art, history certainly has this dual effect -- it simultaneously restrains and frees the artist. This might be true for every medium, and it might simply depend on the approach. Surely, games themselves suffer from an excessive dependence on the history of video games. We wonder if it is because game-making was for so long only relegated to engineers. On the other hand, even people with different backgrounds today choose to make “retro games”. For instance, pixel-art is extensively celebrated, often merely out of custom or tradition, without considering the implications. There is nothing inherently wrong with making games about old games, but it is a little saddening when this celebration is all that creators are interested in participating in. Imagine if every movie was like Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist”.

4. How can you sell diversity to risk averse consumers, especially when the work of the imitator is embraced more than the risk taker?

There was a very interesting talk by Nathan Vella at GDC China in 2012, called “Perhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworcery” that explains how Capybara Games managed to have a successful product by relying on a completely niche market. If the question is about surviving while making the games we want, then Nathan’s talk possibly has the answer: there is always a niche market large enough that shares our mindset, and fortunately, contemporary distribution models enable us to reach them. We, personally, do not worry too much about the “risk averse” consumers. They will eventually turn to things they are more interested in as they develop their passions and taste. What is more important is to reach people that are interested in diverse entertainment or culture that resonates with them. The interesting part is that these people may not be familiar with games, or may have never considered that games can satisfy their need for low-fi, political science fiction worlds, and the challenge is to reach those people.

5. What responsibilities do consumers have? Their demands for the videogame to be respected contradict their buying habits; which support the same immature themes over and over again.

It is tempting to say that consumers have a responsibility. When people keep buying the third or fourth chapter of the same game with more than two hundred updated guns for $69.99, well, it’s very tempting to point fingers. But developers have really as much of a responsibility -- to do whatever they can to make the games they want to make, without starving. Let’s face it: nobody is in the game industry because “it’s an easy job”. It isn’t. Crunches, sacrifices are way too common, and it is mind boggling how so many devs are willing to go through that to work on games they dislike. Some of them might be trapped in some financial loop where they are stuck in producing the most profitable game possible, but that can’t be the final goal for people that want to express themselves through games. Another responsibility game creators have is to enrich one’s own life with enough diverse experiences. It’s hard to be original in making games if we do not have personal, deep, original experiences to draw from. Finally, it’s really disheartening the amount of sexist, misogynist, overly violent, homophobic, and transphobic content there is in games and it is our responsibility to do better. We face the problem of an audience approaching gaming as pure entertainment and not as a medium capable of convey meaning, and we, as developers, should focus on ways to change that.

6. As new concepts are explored surely critique needs to evolve, especially when trying to define experiences that do not fit into our current forms of measurement. Is there an alternative to how games are currently evaluated?

The technical focus, for instance, could shift to accessibility. Instead of telling us if this or that game is making the best use of a technological expedient, critics could tell us whether it was built with a degree of accessibility appropriate to the audience the game is addressing. It could also be interesting to see mention of relevant media to contextualize the overall experience offered by a game. If you are playing a game about fairy tales, how does your experience relate to different works by Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm Brothers? Why are these themes treated aesthetically differently in the game with respect to early 20th century illustrations? The tendency to evaluate games only from the game prospective and not refer to the rest of human culture and history can be limiting.

7. What happens to an idea that could advance the medium but fails to tick the boxes under our current review system. Is it left in obscurity or maybe refined by someone else. If so what is the originators role; a sacrificial stepping stone for others?

I like the idea of failures as sacrificial stepping stones. We've been inspired by our own past failures as well as by various unsuccessful game productions from obscure developers in the '90s. There’s nothing wrong with failed projects and going back to see what was good in them. It would be unfair to say that projects fail just because they don’t tick all the review or feature boxes -- there are so many factors to a game’s success.

8. Please explain your definition of quality? Does it reside in a score, an accolade, sales, mass consent, personal opinion or is there something else?

This is a tricky question. It is helpful to distinguish between what we consider a successful execution of the design we set out to realize vs how well-received the final product is. In the first case it is really a matter of scale. Not all projects are born equal, and we always put this into perspective when evaluating the quality of what we create. What was the budget? How much time did we have? The quality is the ability to forecast the scope of the project based on these values and do the best you can under the circumstances. If we couldn’t have made anything better (or, should we say, more interesting), within those constraints, then the project is successful. If, instead, we are discussing success in terms of “enabling us to work on more projects through sales”, for us success can be measured based on whether or not the revenue will allow us to work on a bigger project than the one we just finished. This is especially true now, because we are very small, and we feel we still do not have the funds to work on projects with a big enough scope to let us experiment in the ways we would like. For example, we would love to hire artists and engineers to work with us and add their vision to our projects.

9. The crash of the videogame in the 80s was due to excessive poor quality and saturated plagiarism. Do you think the market could fall again and would that necessarily be a bad thing, especially given that the videogame could be reinvented without the limitations they face today.

Back when video games rose from their ashes, the industry welcomed a new approach to game development, championed by Nintendo, that set the standard for the modern industry until this generation of games. Around this time, the whole developer kit and seal of approval model was invented, in part, to prevent plagiarism. It created a safe environment where customers could finally have fewer but better games, but it also made designing games prohibitively expensive from the start (the sky-rocketing royalties to print cartridges and the cuts Nintendo would take from the sales). The result was fewer, better games on the market but also a culturally sealed world, with not much variety of exp. Today, easily accessible platforms and big online markets like Steam or App Store, things are similar to the 80s somehow, but the medium and the consumers are open to developers with different backgrounds. Meanwhile, thanks to new accessible frameworks like Unity, Game Maker, etc, the barrier to entry is much lower. New generation consoles so far also seem to go further in this direction. The difference might be that we now have the capacity to create independent networks that filter or curate content for end users in efficient and particular ways, so that the public won’t be as lost as it was in the early 80s.

10. How do we pursuit other forms of emotional content if there is always this expectation of fun? What is the most significant hurdle in creating work that might not be accepted commercially or critically?

The separation between “fun” and “emotional” content is not always so clear cut. Many recent games find spaces between these two areas, where interesting, elevated, or even touching content can be experienced through an entertaining series of interactions. Of course there are productions that try to distance themselves from “fun” as much as possible. But there are also many productions that stay somewhere in between these two extremes and could serve as a bridge for players from one type of content to the other. It is also fundamental to understand that fun in itself is not intrinsically related to “laughs” or “delight”. Greek theater was undeniably a form of entertainment, hence “fun”, but its themes go certainly beyond those of comedy.

11. What needs to change in the developer/publisher/consumer/critic relationship to encompass new ideas. Does any one group hold more influence than the others?

Yes, consumers have the biggest influence, as well they should. They are spending their hard-earned money, as they say, and they certainly have the right to get what they want. It is our job to reach out to consumers, critics, and publishers that have a sensibility akin to ours. If publishers and critics are responsible for slowing down the maturing of the medium, it is because they are sometimes slower at capturing the new trends, the new needs of the consumers. Some game experts can fail at seeing how a certain phenomenon, apparently non-game related, is eventually going to radically shape the way games are made. It took a while for everyone to understand, for instance, the potential of tablet/portable/mobile games as a legitimate, expressive platform for games -- the first to understand this were certainly the consumers.

12. In your ideal future what would a videogame represent and how would it be perceived?

As a medium capable of conveying meaning, not just tied to the entertainment industry, we wish for games to be part of an interactive literature, to put in Espen Aarseth’s terms. We hope people will mainly approach video games for what they communicate, rather than for just killing some time. Cinema has a great diversity, from Sundance to Cannes to the Oscars, for example, these are events that celebrate different ways to use the medium, differentiating content and other aspects, all the way down to the duration of the movie itself. We should hope for this kind of diversity for video games in the future. We would also like to see the indie community outgrow what sometimes looks like an elitist behaviour. Self-referencing groups are not bad, per se, and they are pretty common in fields where the research goes beyond the common knowledge on a topic (for example, scientific publications are often aimed at an élite for a reason). But we think it’s not good when our community scorns those who believe that games can also evolve in different directions outside the “indie manifesto”. It feels like we are going against our own goal, which is to explore the communicative power of games. The recent interview with Kurt Bieg (developer of Circadia, Twirdie and SwordFight) at penny-arcade.com addresses this problem in a very critical, but interesting way. It is definitely an important issue, and we cannot afford to lose the voice of talented and passionate developers like Kurt.

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adangertootherdancers · 7 years

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Tools, Work, Condition – and other Predicaments

Transcription of a talk in the context of the class "Open Access. Opposing the Violence of Corporate Software?", 13.12.2016

As an attempt to contextualize some of the concepts introduced during past classes, I want to jump off a discussion about the text "Software Takes Command" by Lev Manovich and share some of my thoughts on Design–designed tools, their instrumental power, – possibly violent power and propose methods to collectively comprehend and/or counter some of those forces, we have been talking about.

The interconnectedness of our critical tool research and the topic of work condition, the concept of labor or as Silvio Lorusso proposed – the entreprecariat, seems self-evident. Being an immaterial and nomadic worker myself, dealing with time as my most important commodity I am very interested in the critical examination of the tools that accommodate my precarious practice–or maybe enabling exactly that practice.

(Typewriter meme from: Florian Cramer “What is post-digital”)

According to Hannah Arendt, the ancient understanding of life being differentiated in public and private live, in which the public realm would be the space to express yourself freely (free from any biological necessity), changed with the appearance of authorities like the Church. With the introduction of privatization of public realm the matter became more complex. Life from then would be differentiated in labor, work and action. Labor in that regard is human activity directed at fulfilling human needs, and therefore never reaches an end, as needs are continuous. Work however has a clearly defined start and end and results in some durable object, a tool or a consumable product.

Action, –for example speech, is enabling human relationships, is free of any boundaries and doesn’t need to meet human needs or anticipation.

In a time where I am enjoying my flexible lifestyle, and realizing that I can do so because of a range of extraordinary privileges, Arendt’s differentiation between Labor, work and action are my guide, helping me to test and measure the actual status of my condition (work/life). Having to or being able to perform at all times, attending openings, giving talks, seeing and seeking opportunities, I am working on creating my work environment, being commissioner and commissioned, living leisure and being productive, on vacation and doing over hours, all at the same time.

While monetizing my smile, interaction, gestures I am curious: How do we organize and claim worker’s rights if our practices are floating in space, indefinable, uncatchable lost in time zones?

"The precariat consists of those who feel their lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labor, play and leisure in a sustainable way"

Guy Standing

(Quote: from Silvio Lorusso “Precarity Feels”)

I find myself in a condition where I am not sure: Am I sustaining myself, entertaining myself? Am I acting in solidarity or opportune? Am I getting exploited or do I exploit others and myself?

(Images from Werker Magazine filed under: domestic work, home office, http://www.werkermagazine.org/domesticwork/home-office-3/, and http://www.werkermagazine.org/domesticwork/office/)

I believe that software has a big part in creating that condition. According to Manovich, that condition is not exclusive to cultural workers–also flex workers, temporal workers who are rented out to work for companies, nomadic workers, and any worker in the service industry are facing similar challenges. Since software is replacing physical technologies, it makes us create, distribute, store and share cultural artifacts.

Software as Social Glue

(Image: Marina Abramovic & Jay Z: Who is the instrument here? Who is worker? Who is the object?)

I wrote a small script based on "Dowse. The Privacy Hub of the Internet of Things", a software developed by Amsterdam-based Hacker collective Dyne.org. I try to address questions such as: "Am I a user that has an experience right now or am I a worker that is dealing with a condition?" The script would parse up the information my devices send out and received unrelated to my actively usage. Connecting to the Dowse box I could visually and in real-time read these connections. Without even turning on my phone, it was constantly sending and receiving data from and to Facebook. I basically facilitate this platform constantly, without actively interacting with it. So what my script did was creating invoices as PDF files of 0,01€, directed to Facebook, with every connection my device made.

(Image: Screenshot from my email client: outcome of a workshop by dyne.org, as part of the “HDSA2016. At Work. If you are so smart why are you so poor?”)

Silvio called for collectivization by constructing an evolving platform "the entreprecariat, which fabricates its own slogans, memes and chants".

In our context, here at the Sandberg Institute we are a collective by definition, – a collective that shares space, times, – infrastructure, with certain common goals, which may not be identified yet.

Interestingly Silvio’s talk stirred up some concerns amongst you. You shared worries and ideas about your work, work conditions and the future of design practice. During your time at Sandberg you will be testing, defining and refining the possibilities of design work, which is a very important underlying prospect considering you may be shaping your own working conditions in the future – in and outside of the Sandberg Institute, striving to sustain a critical practice while dealing with neoliberal work forces.

(Image: Our Own Private Germany: https://medium.com/matter/our-own-private-germany-6ce44ac93a7b#.xkbmehpwt)

Having starting studying at the Sandberg myself during a period of growing sense of responsibility for the work I create, I am now wondering if I would be able to actually persist corporate forces within my work. And if I won’t be able to, how could I start participating myself in the work I create?

“We designers . . . can begin to build a meaningful aesthetic culture if we are willing to prepare ourselves for a new learning experience, and we cannot learn unless we participate”

(Quote from: “Design and Human Values,” a legendary Aspen design conference that took place in 1957, the American designer Richard Latham interrogated the ideas that designers cater to and the kind of responsibility they should take)

I therefore want to emphasize and encourage you to use my classes and your studies at large as a test site in order to counter act notions such as efficiency, productivity, and velocity.

(Image from: CLUI Morgan Cowles Archive managing the image resources of The Center for Land Use Interpretation)

All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and learn — is the antithesis of democracy. (…)

The Teenage Liberation Handbook Grace Llewellyn

(Image from: Tim Ivison & Tom Vandeputte, http://www.metropolism.com/en/features/23004_build_your_own_university)

In http://www.e-flux.com/journal/31/68212/general-performance/ Sven Lütticken quotes Franco Berardi:

“contemporary “cyber time” being marked by our feelings of insufficiency about never having enough of the damn thing (time) to accomplish all the things we should“.

So let’s create shared moments of commitment, time camps (Sven Lütticken) and temporary autonomous zones (Hakim Bey) to be inefficient together.

(Quote from: Matt Hern http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling

In an economy where work becomes more dependent on immaterial factors self-performance becomes harder to relate to and evaluate.

With moments like the H&D Summer Academy I aim to address the lack of software literacy within my own practice. Methods of physically experiencing machine-learning processes, appropriating and embodying logics of algorithms have proven rewarding and eye-opening learning experiences.

(Image: Workshop "Internet of Bodies" with Simone Niquille and Carina Namih. The participants were equipped with a map that Google uses to train their biometric prediction algorithms, and made communal data self-portraits at life-size scale. More: http://hackersanddesigners.nl/#/Internet%20of%20Bodies)

Image from: http://feelgrafix.com/group/pixel.html

The "Pixel" is an examples of GUI (Graphic User Interface), which is regarded as presumable discrete as much as the word “Data”.

However someone did come up with it. Someone with an identity, a gender, preferences, worries, intentions decided at some point that a pixel is a square.

(Image: Jeremy Bailey – Challenging practice Jeremy Bailey: Famous New Media Art Patent Office http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/jeremy-bailey-famous-new-media-art-patent-office)

We need to overcome the understanding of Computer Science as something that is ultimately true. It’s something that is part of culture; with all problematic that come with history. I am therefore curious about the assumptions and models about me as a user, my needs and the needs of my environment. Can I trace those assumptions encoded in “discrete” GUI?

(Image: "Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" button by Steward Brand. http://create.adobe.com/2016/4/18/the_whole_earth_the_story_of_an_image_that_changed_the_world.html)

In order to make responsible decision we need to be able to relate.

 Stewart Brand launched the “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” campaign in 1965.

After NASA released the image, he used it on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog. The image became the root of a global environmental consciousness.

Before people perceived the earth as flat (not literal) and infinite, the root of all their misbehavior.

(Picture from Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command)

I am usually really excited about new technology and to curious to not try new stuff but I do wonder how we can remain critical within the current pace of innovation, - neural networks training themselves, increasing complexity of algorithms …

I believe the collective effort could be the answer. A way to approach this is by creating these time camps and committed spaces of inefficiency.

#talk #transcript #tools #sandberg institute amsterdam #design #practice

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wikimakemoney · 4 years

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Practical tips to transition your ecommerce business in the second half of 2020

30-second summary:

The idea of flexible pricing is to ensure sales, and it’s easier to make sales by selling products at the lowest price. However, your goal should be to find a price at which consumer purchasing friction is low, and the profit margin is fair enough.

Leveraging perpetual inventory management software for inventory accounting is ideal for ecommerce sites. It will keep you up to speed about the sale and purchases of goods and items.

Be it a loyal customer or a new customer, ecommerce stores need to ensure that every customer passes through the same authentication steps with no exceptions. Employing AI and Machine Learning algorithms could help in this case.

If you haven’t got a chatbot for your business, then this is the time to get one. You can get a chatbot builder or take the help of an agency to construct a bespoke chatbot to drive engagement and sales and better customer support.

Set “Special Hours” to help customers buy online and pickup-in store. If you do not own a physical store, you could think of partnering with the existing brick-and-mortar business to serve BOPS customers.

Some of the ubiquitous customers support tools that businesses could make use of are email, text messages, and website support.

The current pandemic has caught the world off guard. It has made us realize how alarmingly unprepared we are when a paradigm-shifting pandemic, of COVID-19 nature, strikes the world. The minuscule virus not only turned the global economy upside down but also the healthcare sector of many countries.

In fact, most of the businesses were forced to go online, overnight, independent of their online experience. This was to ensure that the health and safety of their employees and their families weren’t compromised.

On the other hand, retailers with no online options in place, like clothing stores, saw sales fall by more than 50 percent.

Now, we are almost into the sixth month of the pandemic, and one of the sectors that seem to be showing significant growth, despite the health crises, are the brands with an ecommerce-first approach.

Brands with the ecommerce-first strategy are doing great businesses, thanks to the customer data accumulated over the years, which they are currently leveraging to connect with the customers.

Target, for instance, saw its online sales rise by a whopping 275 percent since April – the quarter is being considered as its best since 2000, despite its in-store purchases declining.

It’s being claimed that even after the pandemic settles, the growth of the ecommerce sector may continue as customers may still find it easier to shop online.

According to Kantar Group’s research, six of the ten consumers would still prefer to buy online post-pandemic. And not just essential goods, all ecommerce categories most likely would witness a significant jump demand.

By the way, such a change in consumer buying behavior was supposed to happen in three to four years. However, according to experts, the corona crises have accelerated this buying trend.

Now, let’s dive right in to find out strategies that will keep your ecommerce business up and running irrespective of the panic situation this pandemic spreads.

#1. Flexible pricing of products

In the wake of COVID-19, some ecommerce companies are experiencing an explosive demand for their products. And these companies are those that are into offering critical products and services such as medical supplies, shipping, and cleaning.

Also, there’s a massive demand for toilet paper, canned food, home entertainment, video conferencing, audio, and headsets. That said, the high demand for certain products has prompted price-gouging.

According to the Mckinsey report, many states in the U.S. have reported several hundred cases of price-gouging in the days that followed lockdown, prompting the U.S. government to undertake a probe against the culprits.

The report further states that the current crises shouldn’t be manipulated by businesses to generate outsized profits as perceptions of price gouging could lead to severe reputational and legal consequences.

Solution

Remember, raising the prices of essential goods or services wouldn’t bode well with the customers, especially in a crisis like the one we are witnessing. So, the best bet is to set an optimal price for essential products or stick to your pre-pandemic costs.

The optimal amount is the price, which would help you sell them at a possible profit. For this, you’ll first have to identify competitors’ prices, market demand, and perceived value of the product.

A pricing software would help you accumulate this info and the competitor data and market analysis, which would help you strategically price your products.

That said, flexible pricing for products doesn’t mean offering products at the lowest price possible.

Sure, the idea of flexible pricing is to ensure sales, and it’s easier to make sales by selling products at the lowest price. However, your goal should be to find a price at which consumer purchasing friction is low, and the profit margin is fair enough.

#2. Build crises-proof inventory management through automation

With COVID-19 disrupting supply chains, inventory shortages have become the new normal. Businesses, specifically the ecommerce ones, have to be super conscious about their inventory needs more than ever.

According to Digitalcommerce 360 report, of the 107 retailers interviewed, 30% are facing inventory shortages.

In fact, as per the report, unavailable inventory is cited to be amongst the top three reasons that are making online shopping more difficult. Other two being, slow websites and no free shipping options.

Ecommerce businesses, on the other hand, need to be always on guard to know which products were ordered verses which got delivered, which could be replenished faster versus what could take time, which products are in excess demand versus those with zero demand.

Solution

Inventory management software is the bedrock of success for modern ecommerce businesses. Unlike traditional inventory management that’s prone to errors, the software could profoundly alter how an inventory is managed.

Benefits of using inventory management software for your ecommerce business:

Most of the inventory software will automatically upload your products onto your website, Amazon, and eBay.

Automates order fulfillment and inventory quantity updating. Just enter your inventory quantity once; it then gets automatically updated on all your sales channels.

It helps you track items that are in shortage so that you could immediately reorder them.

It helps diversify the supply chain by importing multiplier supplier catalogs and price comparisons to determine the best materials available at the best cost

While you are looking for inventory management software, you need to opt for one that’s specifically designed for ecommerce.

This is important because while Googling for inventory software, you may find an umpteen of them; however, most of them are meant for physical stores. So, nail down the ones that could exclusively be used for your ecommerce store.

Leveraging perpetual inventory management software for inventory accounting is ideal for ecommerce sites. It will keep you up to speed about the sale and purchases of goods and items.

The system keeps track of the real-time movement of inventory and also other additional aspects such as Cost of Goods Sold, Cost of Inventory Purchases, and Cost of Ending Inventory to help you keep a tab on the financial aspects of inventory management systems.

Further, ensure to diversify supply chain network too. A diversified supply chain will ensure that you will never run out of stock; plus, it would help in price comparisons. Through price comparisons you’ll be source products at best rates.

#3. Customize ecommerce security experience for every customer

As it turns out, ecommerce stores are known to offer a one-to-one experience to customers, be it in terms of web content, offers, pricing, promotions, among many others.

The services are provided based on customer preferences and their buying history. That said, they now need to broaden their personalized offering by including account control and security.

Be it a loyal customer or a new customer, ecommerce stores need to ensure that every customer passes through the same authentication steps with no exceptions.

Also, by customizing security experience for each customer, instead of the conventional one-size-fits-all account verification, customers will be able to build more trust in brands.

To this point, the stores will have to put in place a micro-segmentation-based strategy. In other words, online stores will need to have data about the user type, device specifics, geolocation, IP risk, and more, if it has to offer customized account control and security to its customers.

Solution

Employing AI and Machine Learning algorithms could help in this case. For instance, systems such as Kount Control customize every customer experience by identifying and segmenting users based on their characteristic features.

However, the noteworthy part of this system is that it helps identify returning customers even though they may have logged in from a new location or device.

Kount also helps discover and stop credential attacks, and even improve user’s login and purchase experiences. The best part of the system is that it helps identify potentially risky IP addresses and forward them to the Security operations.

Not to mention, they also identify potential users that are under attack and are helped out through customer outreach.

#4. Make chatbots, and AI an integral part of ecommerce machinery

Some of the smart technologies that complement human work include AI and chatbots. According to Aivo’s research study, on average, chatbots answered 88% of the customer inquiries in 2019, which meant only 12% of the queries were transferred to human agents.

In the current crises, when businesses are witnessing a 51% rise in customer conversations in March compared to February, chatbots could be used as a go-to tool for customer service.

According to Hubspot, almost 48% of consumers prefer to connect with the company via live chat over other means of communication. And according to Ubisend, about 35% of the consumers want to see more companies leveraging chatbots.

Interestingly, AI in customer service empowers customer service agents too. AI aids the technology in emulating the best services agents of the company by feeding them with relevant customer history and leveraging different AI tools to suggest answers to questions.

Solution

#5. Leverage ‘BOPS’ option

If you are running a physical store alongside your online store, you could leverage one thing: BOPS (Buy Online and Pickup in-store option.)

Sure, the whole idea of running an ecommerce store is to get the items delivered at your customers’ homes. However, it can sometimes it’s more feasible to convince your customers to pick the order at your physical location if there are shipping issues.

And with lockdown measures being relaxed, you could think of keeping your store open for a few hours, inviting a few customers at a time, bearing in mind the social distancing measures.

Solution

Set “Special Hours” to help customers buy online and pickup-in store. As it turns out, Walmart, Costco and Target have set up “Special Hours” for elderly people and vulnerable shoppers, who are most susceptible to COVID-19 and would prefer to avoid crowds.

If you do not own a physical store, you could think of partnering with the existing brick-and-mortar business to serve BOPS customers.

#6. Asynchronous conversations

Consumers like to have full control over their time. So, if there aren’t any pressing issues, they’d like to drop a message and go on with their daily routine.

This is where asynchronous communication helps. In case of such communication, both parties need not be present. A customer could begin a conversation when she is free, pause it when busy, and resume when she is free. In short, the chat is carried out as per the customers’ convenience.

The benefits of asynchronous conversations include 24/7 service, limited investment in other tech channels, and helps focus on other needy customers during peak hours.

Solution

Some of the ubiquitous customers support tools that businesses could make use of are email, text messages, and website support.

Better late than never

According to a recent research, 90% of the shoppers fear shopping in-store due to corona. The only alternative available is ecommerce.

This means people are ready for a better online experience, so it’s up to the retailers to pull up their sleeves and offer products and services that compel them to buy.

In the meantime, don’t forget to be a bit forgiving if your deliveries get delayed as things are yet to normalize in several places.

Jennifer Warren is the resident wordsmith at GoodFirms – a review and rating company.

The post Practical tips to transition your ecommerce business in the second half of 2020 appeared first on ClickZ.

source http://wikimakemoney.com/2020/08/18/practical-tips-to-transition-your-ecommerce-business-in-the-second-half-of-2020/

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straydogstory · 4 years

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Divest From the Video Games Industry! by Marina Kittaka

https://medium.com/@even_kei/divest-from-the-video-games-industry-814a1381092d

This piece seeks to contextualize the problems of the video games industry within its own mythology, and from there, to imagine and celebrate new directions through a lens of anti-capitalist and embodied compassion.

My name is Marina Ayano Kittaka (she/her), I’m a 4th gen Japanese American trans woman from middle class background. I work in a variety of different art forms but my bread and butter are the video games I make with my friend Melos Han-Tani, e.g. the Anodyne series.

I am not an authority on any of these topics, and it’s not my intention to speak over anyone else or offer comprehensive solutions, only to be one small piece of a larger conversation and movement. I use declarative and imperative sentences for clarity, not certainty.

I seek to follow the leadership of BIPOC abolitionist thinkers such as Ejeris Dixon, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, along with the work of local (to me) groups like Black Visions Collective and MPD150. I welcome feedback, especially if you believe that something I’ve said is harmful.

This piece is inspired by the latest wave of survivors bravely sharing their stories (it is June 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprising against anti-Black racism and the unjust institution of police). I believe and stand with survivors.

The Problems

The video games industry has many deep, tragic, and intertwining problems. It’s beyond the scope of this piece to examine the entirety of games culture (I will focus on development and, to a lesser degree, distribution). It’s also beyond the scope of this piece to convince anyone that these problems exist, but I’ll be moving forward with the assumption that we agree that they do. Here is an incomplete list:

Pervasive sexual abuse

Workplace abuse, bullying, crunch, burnout, generally exploitative labor conditions

Sexism, racism, and other bigotry — the above abuses are accentuated along these intersections (e.g. the sexual abuse of marginalized genders or the exclusion of racial minorities).

Supply chain problems including conflict minerals and exploitative factory conditions

Heavy environmental impacts

Non-Judgement

This conversation may spark hurt or defensive feelings. I want to address this directly. Many people love video games, and not only that, but are deeply invested in the world of games. I’m particularly sensitive to marginalized creators who have fought hard to find a foothold in the games industry and deserve to follow their dreams. I exist more on the periphery of the games industry and my goal is not to center my personal anger or disdain — but instead to push toward a world with better games, played by happier audiences, made by creators who feel safe and appreciated.

Additionally, this conversation is not about the merits of any individual AAA (large studio) game. It’s not about creating strict rules about media consumption. It’s not about shaming people into certain beliefs or behaviors. When we try to act like our personal tastes must align with our most high-minded ideals, we encourage shame or denial — things that distance us from others.

Nor is this exclusively about AAA. This is about any situation where the power becomes the point. There can be gradations of industrial complexes and power complexes existing from the smallest micro-communities to the largest corporations. We can divest on all levels.

The Industry Promise

I believe that many of us as game creators and audiences have (consciously or not) bought into the idea that happiness and wonder are scarce and fragile commodities — precious gems mined via arcane and costly processes. Life can often be isolating, alienating, and traumatic, and many of us cope by numbing some parts of ourselves¹. The poignance and pleasure of simply feeling becomes rare.

In answer to this perceived scarcity, The Industry swoops in with a promise that technological and design mastery can “make” people feel. It does this not only blatantly in marketing copy or developer interviews, but also in unwieldy assertions that games can make you empathic, or through the widespread notion that games are an exceptionally “immersive” art form due to “interactivity”. Embedded in this promise is the ever-alluring assumption that technological progress is linear: games overall must be getting better, more beautiful, more moving, because that is simply how technology works! Or perhaps it is the progress itself that is beautiful — each impressive jump towards photorealism delivering the elusive sense of wonder that we crave.

At this point, I could argue that the benefits are not worth the cost, that the aforementioned Problems outweigh even this idealized vision of what games provide. But I’m guessing many of you might find that unsatisfying, right? Why don’t we simply reform the system? Spread awareness and training about sexism and racism, create more art that engenders empathy, encourage diversity? Isn’t it throwing the baby out with the bathwater to “halt” technological progress in order to fix some issues of bad leadership here or abusive superstar there?

Here we come to my main purpose in writing this piece: to expand the imaginative space around video games by tearing out The Industry Promise at its roots. If wonder is not scarce and progress is not linear, then the world that rises from the ashes of the Video Games Industry can be more exciting and more technologically vibrant than ever before.

Precious Gems

Take a deep breath and picture some of the happy moments of your life. Maybe some of them look like this:

Staying up late and getting slaphappy with a friend; looking out over a beautiful landscape; a passionate kiss; collaborating with friends in a session of DnD or Minecraft; a thoughtful gift from someone you admire; a cool drink on a hot summer day; making a new friend who feels like they really see you; singing a song; a hug from someone who smells nice; getting junk food late at night and feeling naughty about it; the vivid colors and sounds of a rainy city evening; drifting to sleep in the cottony silence of a smalltown homestead; getting a crew together to see a new movie; the scent of the air at sunrise; having a meaningful conversation with a nonverbal baby.

Picture the games you loved most as a child, the games that felt full of possibility and mystery and fun. Were they all the most technologically advanced? The most critically revered?

Maybe your happy moments look nothing like this. Or maybe you can’t recall feeling happy and that’s the whole problem. But my point is that happiness, joy, fun… these things are at their core fluid, social, narrative, contextual, chemical. In both its best and most common incarnations, happiness is not shoved into your passive body by the objective “high quality” of an experience. Both recent psychological research and traditions from around the world (e.g. Buddhist monks) suggest that happiness and well-being are growable skills rooted in compassion.

Think of all the billions of people who have ever lived, across time, across cultures, with video games and without, living nomadically or settling in cities or jungles. In every moment there are infinite reasons to suffer and infinite reasons to be happy². Giant industry’s monopolistic claims to “art” or “entertainment” have always been a capitalist lie, nonsensical yet inescapable.

The Narrative of Technology and Progress

Is this an anti-technology screed? Am I suggesting we must all go outside like in the good old days and play “hoop and stick” until the end of time? Let’s start by unpacking what we mean when we say “technology”. Here’s one definition:

Technology is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives. — Wikipedia

Honestly, technology is such a vague and broad concept that nearly anything anyone ever does could be considered technological! As such, how we use the term in practice is very revealing of our cultural values. Computing power, massive scale, photorealistic graphics, complex AI, VR experiences that attempt to recreate the visual and aural components of a real or imagined situation… certainly these are all technologies that can and have grown in sophistication over time. But what The Industry considers technological progress actually consists of fairly niche goals that have been artificially inflated because capitalists have figured out they can make money this way. Notably, I don’t use “niche” here as an insult — aren’t many of the most fascinating things intrinsically niche? But when one restrictive narrative sucks all the air out of the room and leaves a swath of emotional and physical devastation in its wake… isn’t it time to question it?

What if humans having basic needs met is “technological progress”? What if indigenous models of sustainable living are “hi-tech”? What if creating a more accessible world where people have freedom of movement opens up numerous high-fidelity multisensory experiences? These questions go far beyond the scope of the video games industry, sure, but in the words of adrienne maree brown, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”³.

What We Hope to Gain

The kneejerk reaction to dismantling an existing structure tends to be a subtractive vision. Here we are, living in the exact same world, but all blockbuster video games have been magically snapped out of existence… only hipster indie games remain! Missing from this vision is the understanding that our current existence is itself subtractive — what we cling to now comes at the expense of so much good. The loss of maturing vision and skill when people leave the industry due to burnout, sexual assault, and racist belittlement. Corporate IP laws and progress narratives that disincentivize preservation and rob us of our rich and fertile history. The ad-centric, sanitized, and consolidated internet that chokes out democratized community spaces. The fighting-for-scraps mentality that the larger industry places on small creators with its sparing and self-interested investment. Our current value system limits not only what AAA games are but also what everything else has the capacity to be.

Utopia does not have an aesthetic. We don’t need to prescribe the correct “alt” taste. Games can be high and low, sacred and profane, cute and ugly, left brain and right. Destroying the games industry does not mean picking an alternate niche to replace it. Instead, we seek to open the floodgates to a world in which countless decentralized, intimate, and overlapping niches might thrive.

When we decentralize power, we not only create the conditions for more and better games, we also diminish the conditions under which abuse can flourish. Many of the stories of abuse hinge on the abuser wielding the power to dramatically help or harm the careers of others. The consolidation of this power is enhanced by our collective investment in The Industry Promise (not forgetting the wider cultural intersections of oppression). Mythologized figures ascend along a linear axis of greatness, shielded by the horrifying notion that they are less replaceable than others because their ranking in The Industry evidences their mystical importance.

What’s Next?

Here is a fundamental truth: we do not need video games. Paradoxically, this truth opens up the world of video games to be as full and varied and strange and contradictory as life itself.

So. Say you agree with all or part of my assertions that collectively we may proceed to end the video games industry by divesting our attention, time, and money, and building something new with each other. But what does that look like in practice? I don’t have all the answers. I find community very difficult due to my own trauma. Nonetheless, I’ll do some brainstorming. Skim this and read what speaks to you personally, or do your own brainstorming!

Center BIPOC/queer leadership

I.e. people who have been often forcibly divested from the majority culture and have experience in creating alternatives. Draw on influences outside of media e.g. transformative justice, police abolition, and prison abolition. Books like Beyond Survival and Emergent Strategy are based in far deeper understanding of organizing than anything written here, and are much more relevant to the direct and immediate issues of things like responding to sexual assault in our communities.

Divest from celebrity/authority

Many people will tell you that their most rewarding artistic relationships are with peers, not mentors and certainly not idols. Disengage from social media-as-spectator sport where larger-than-life personalities duke it out via hot take. Question genius narratives wherever they arise. Cultivate your own power and the power of those adjacent to you. If you feel yourself becoming a celebrity: take a step back, recognize the power that you wield over others, redirect opportunities to marginalized creators whose work you respect, invest in completely unrelated areas of your life, go to therapy.

Divest from video games exceptionalism

Academics have delved into video games’ inferiority complex and the topic of “video games exceptionalism”, which is tied into what I frame as The Industry Promise above — the idea that video games as a technological vanguard are brimming with inherent value due to all the things they can do that other forms of media cannot. This ensures that gobs of money get thrown around, but it’s an ahistorical and isolating notion that does nothing to actually advance our understanding of games as a form (Interesting discussion on this here, which reminds me of Richard Terrell’s work regarding vocabulary).

Reimagine scale

Rigorously question the notion that “bigger is better” at every turn. With regards to projects, studios, events, continually ask “why?” in the face of any pressure to make something bigger, and then try to determine what might be lost as well as what might be gained. Compromising on values tends to be inevitable at scale, workplace abuse or deals with questionable entities. For me this calls to mind the research led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggesting that the happiness benefits of wealth taper off dramatically once a comfortable standard of living is reached. Anyone who’s ever had a tweet go viral can tell you that it’s fun at first and then it just becomes annoying. Living in a conglomerated, global world, we regularly have to face and process social metrics that are completely incomprehensible to the way our social brains are programmed, and the results are messy. Are there ever legitimate uses for a huge team working on a project for many years? Sure, probably, but the idea that this is some sort of ideal normal situation that everyone should strive for is based on nothing but propaganda.

Redefine niche

Above I suggest that AAA is niche. I believe it’s true broadly, but that it’s definitely true relative to their budgets. What do I mean by this? AAA marketing budgets are reported to be an additional 75–100% relative to development costs (possibly even higher in some cases). Isn’t this mindblowing? If a game naturally appealed to proportionately mass numbers of people by virtue of its High Quality or Advanced Technology, then would we really need to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to convince people to play it? For contrast, Melos estimates that our marketing budget for Anodyne 2 was an added 10% of development costs and it was a modest commercial success. Certainly marketing is a complex field that can be ethical, but to me, there is something deeply unhealthy about the capacity of large studios to straight up purchase their own relevance (according to some research, marketing influences game revenue three times more than high review scores).

On a separate but related note, I don’t buy that all the perceived benefits of AAA such as advancements in photorealism will vanish without the machine of The Industry to back them. People are astonishing and passionate! It won’t always necessarily look like a 60 hour adventure world, but it will be a niche that we can support like any other.

Ground yourself in your body

Self-compassion, mindfulness, meditation, exercise, breathing, nature, inter-being. There are many ways to build your capacity to experience joy, wonder, and happiness. One of the difficult things about this process though is that if you approach these topics head on, you’ll often be overwhelmed with Extremely Specific Aesthetics that might not fit you (e.g. New Agey or culturally appropriative). My advice is to 1) be open to learning from practices that don’t fit your brand while also 2) being able to adapt the spirit of advice into something that actually works for you. The benefit of locating our capacity for joy internally is that it reveals that The Industry is fundamentally superfluous and so we are free to take what we want and throw the rest in the compost pile.

As a side note, some artists (who otherwise have structural access to things like mental health services) fear becoming healthy, because they’re worried that they will lose the spark and no longer make good art. Speaking as an artist whose creative capacity has consistently increased with my mental health, there are multiple reasons why I don’t think people should worry about this.

You carry your past selves within you, even as you change. “Our bodies are neural and physiological reservoirs of all our significant experiences starting in our prenatal past to the present.”⁴

You can lose a spark and gain another. You can gain 6 sparks in place of the one you lost.

What is it that you ultimately seek from being “good at art”? Ego satisfaction? Human connection? Self-respect? All of these things would be easier to come by in the feared scenario in which you are so happy and healthy that you can no longer make art. Cut out the middleman! Art is for nerds!

Invest outside of games

Games culture often encourages a total identification with video games. This pressures developers into working and audiences into buying, conveniently benefitting executives and shareholders to everyone else’s detriment. Investing in interests wholly unrelated to video games is beneficial in many ways and there’s something for everyone! Personally, I love books. A novel is “low-tech” in nearly every way that a AAA game is “high-tech”, and yet books are affordable, data-light, easy-to-preserve, stimulating, challenging, immersive, and entertaining. What is technology, again?

Another pertinent thought: while there’s nothing inherently wrong with dating a fellow game developer, you should not enter industry/work spaces or events looking for romantic connection. Particularly if you have any sort of institutional power, you will inevitably put others in uncomfortable situations and prime yourself to commit abuse. If you want sex, relationships, etc, find other outlets, shared interests, and dating pools.

Work towards a more accessible world

In the context of an often systemically ableist world, video games can — at their best — be fun, valuable, and accessible experiences for disabled audiences. Consequently, when I say “divest from the video games industry”, I don’t want to gloss over the fact that divestment comes with a different cost for different people. Certainly accessibility within video games continues to be as important as ever, but if I’m asking, e.g., for people to “invest outside of games”, then a commitment to a more accessible out-of-game world is also extremely vital. For instance, non-disabled people can be attuned during this particular moment to the unique perspectives and leadership of disabled people regarding Covid lockdowns and widespread work-from-home, and be wary as we gradually lift restrictions of reverting to a selective and hypocritical approach to accommodations.

Invest in alternative technological advancements

What might we have the resources, attention, and energy to grow if our industry weren’t so laser focused on a constricted definition of technological advancement? For example, audio-only games appear to me an incredibly fertile area for technological advancement that has been under-resourced. How about further advancements towards biodegradable/recyclable microchips and batteries? A fundamental rethinking of the “home console” model in which each successive generation strives to obsolete the last and sell tens of millions new hardware units? Something like an arcade or those gaming lounges (but do they all have to have the same aggressive aesthetics?). The success of Pokemon GO seems to gesture at potential for social, non-remote video game experiences with broader demographic/aesthetic appeal. At the Portland (Maine) Public Library, there’s a console setup in the teen section where local kids would play and they also had a selection of console games for checkout — that was really cool! Local game dev organizations like GLITCH creating events where local devs show and playtest games with the public…

Look to small tools

Small tools such as hobbyist-centered game engines very naturally and successfully act as springboards to community. Look at ZZT, early Game Maker (e.g. gamemakergames), OHRRPGCE. Look at bitsy, PuzzleScript, Pico-8! Look at Electric Zine Maker by Nathalie Lawhead as well as this post they wrote on small tools. Small tools, by virtue of their limitations, tend to lend themselves to particular aesthetics and goals. Whether you’re ultimately playing to or against the core gravitational pull of a small tool, I think it grounds you within a certain design conversation that is conducive to community. Participating in these communities as a child (even though I rarely interacted directly) fundamentally instilled in me ideas like: people make their own fun; wonder is uncorrelated with budget; being strangely specific has value. Can other structures learn from small tools? Events, meetings, parties… what happens if we think of these as communal “engines” — structures built around a conversational core that people can use to create things or express themselves…?

Something that crosses my mind often is that it may be fundamentally healthy for us all to be “big fish in small ponds” in one way or another. The idea that there exists One True Big Pond that reflects all of our collective values simultaneously is a harmful myth that serves to direct all admiration and energy towards corporate interests and robs the rest of us of our accomplishments.

Sucking as praxis

“Professional artistry” as the capacity to maintain the shared illusion that there are indisputable measures of beauty and worth. When you allow the illusion to fail — often against your will — 1) capitalist powers will be disappointed in their inability to wield you with proper efficiency and 2) fellow small creators will be heartened because you bypassed the illusion and still offered something worthy. Failure in a backwards system can be strength. Growing as an artist can be a gloriously paradoxical affair.

Fight for history

We miss out on so much when history is lost to us, and video games are extraordinarily susceptible due to their technical dependencies on ever-shifting hardware. The Industry’s current incarnation goes beyond history-apathy to a downright historical hostility. Sustaining the narrative of linear technological progress inevitably involves shitting on the past (there are a chosen few old games that are kept accessible, but they feel like exceptions proving the rule). Emulation is a vital resource, ever on the verge of outlaw (See Nintendo’s legal actions), Internet Archive is under attack, and Disney warps copyright laws to keep their stranglehold on media intact. Overviews and longplays of difficult-to-play older games are incredibly valuable and I’m truly grateful for people who do this vital work. Off the top of my head, I’ve enjoyed Nitro Rad’s comprehensive work in 3D platformers, and Cannot Be Tamed’s retro reviews. See also: the Video Game History Foundation.

Public libraries could be a vital ally in this cause. What if libraries had access to legacy tech or specialized emulation software that made playing, researching, or recording from old video games more feasible? What if small creators or defunct small studios could get grants or support in preserving their own old work? Would disappointing institutional responses to Gamergate have played out differently if knowledge of and respect for the ongoing historic contributions of BIPOC, female, and/or queer developers were built into the core fabric of video games spaces? Would it be so easy to accept the AAA model as the pinnacle of technology if we contextualized the astounding complexity of past games like Dwarf Fortress, or the Wizardry or Ultima series — technological complexity that would not have been possible had the games been beholden to modern AAA priorities? (Talking out of my ass here, as I have never played these games. See also: modern work on Dwarf Fortress). See also: The Spriter’s Resource and it’s affiliate sites.

Expand government arts funding

I don’t know a lot about this, but… there should be more of it! I see it happening more in other countries besides the US.

Labor organizing

We can look into studio structures like co-ops. We can join unions. Those unions must be intersectional to the core (see recent events regarding GWU international). How about dual power? Many small studios could combine in overlapping networks of varying formality. They could integrate their audiences, cross-promote, build collective power so as to not be totally beholden to the will of corporations. I’m not an expert on labor though, look to others who know more.

Collaborative / open source resources

E.g. The Open Source Afro Hair Library, Open Game Art, Rrrrrose Azerty’s prolific CC0 music and the broader Free Music Archive community.

Give money

Normalize mutual aid. Normalize buying small games. Contribute to things like Galaxy Fund.

Just Play!

Play something totally random on itch.io (or another community-oriented site) with no outside recommendation. Compliment and/or pay the developer if you like something about it!

Conclusion

Thank you for engaging with these thoughts! I hope that they spark thoughts for you, and that we can all learn from each other. Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or via email: [email protected]

[Edit: at 11:20PM CDT, 6/25/20, I changed the audio games link from a wikipedia article to the more relevant-seeming: https://audiogames.net/]

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brianobrienny · 4 years

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The Importance of B2B Storytelling

Telling and listening to stories comes naturally to people across the globe. From ancient to modern times, storytelling has remained a constant throughout the evolution of the human race.

Stories in different forms get passed from one generation to another and exist across various channels in multiple iterations. There are simple, linear ones and stories with dizzying complexity and both types keep bringing interested audiences back for more.

Storytelling works because people have the innate desire to learn about certain developments that might be relevant to them. As humans we’re on a constant quest for knowledge and stories help us satisfy the urge to learn and be entertained. The best stories allow their audiences to immerse themselves completely, focusing solely on the story’s universe.

Over time, people have learned that one story can be molded and transformed across a bunch of different platforms. Each storytelling format has its pros and cons, and great storytellers have learned how to maximize every platform’s strengths to benefit their cause.

Storytelling also provides an alternate reality, especially if it’s fiction. Meanwhile, nonfiction stories, particularly the successful ones, are read because they motivate and inspire. People buy into stories because of our inclination to make sense of everything.

We use stories to build connections between related concepts through what we’ve learned and experienced, which in essence means engaging our audiences in a way that’s both surprising and familiar to them.

Why Storytelling Is Powerful

Storytelling is a powerful tool for marketing, but let’s take a look at why it works from a psychological standpoint:

Form of Communication

Putting types and platforms aside, storytelling shares information. The main purpose of storytelling is to share plots and narratives that hold deeper meaning.

From history to mystery, it’s all part of communicating something important. Storytelling connects people because of the common ground it builds for all of the people that interact with the story.

Collaboration and Connection

Storytelling births in its audience an understanding of other backgrounds (social or cultural) and deep emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and joy. The act of reading or listening to a story creates an experience, which can affect how people think, especially when making decisions.

Because of the massive effect of storytelling, it’s no surprise that it has become a powerful tool in the world of B2B marketing. Marketers can communicate their product or service better through storytelling. At the same time, it bypasses the concept (or even the need) of a hard sell. People are drawn in by story without being explicitly aware that a product or service is being sold to them.

Listen here why I think B2B Storytelling is so important for B2B Marketers:

youtube

B2B marketers found subtlety in storytelling. The modern marketing industry has shifted to appeal to emotions instead of bombarding their audiences with self-promotional tactics. Businesses are now investing in creating brand stories about their product or service. Instead of hard selling, they attract prospects through the value of a story.

Enhances Imagination

Storytelling taps different sections of the brain to implant thoughts and feelings about concepts, making them more apparent and memorable. Brands can take advantage of this by transforming their sales process into an attractive visual experience.

Genuine emotions, presence, and behavioral responses are all the result of good storytelling. Rather than being spectators of a narrative, storytelling gives its audience the chance to become participants, interpreting the true meaning of the story on their own terms.

Order and Thinking

Good storytelling follows a specific structure: beginning → middle → end, which is shaped like an arc because a good story must not begin nor end haphazardly. This makes the audience think in a very specific pattern, which, in turn, makes the story easier to consume.

It’s natural for people to make sense of something by relating it to the different aspects of their lives. Also, by making space in their thoughts for that something, it becomes easier to remember and absorb the message.

Storytelling doesn’t just explicitly tell a story. It’s made to create waves of conversation and interpretation. It extends itself to be an experience to whoever the consumer may be.

Importance of B2B Storytelling

In reality, successful B2B content marketing strategies are not just about logic, technical processes, and facts. The world has come to realize that it’s about connecting with people on an emotional/psychological level.

According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your business’ goals, objectives, mission, and vision. If a B2B buyer sees that there’s a common ground, they identify with your brand, which creates a sense of trust.

Based on the same study, 71% of B2B buyers purchase when they see personal value in your business. Along with that, 68.8% of the B2B buyers surveyed are even willing to pay a higher price to do business with a brand they believe in.

But what does “personal value” mean in B2B marketing?

It’s the professional, social, and emotional benefits you experience in addition to the actual product.

Simply put, emotions elevate customer satisfaction and customer experience. Based on a study by The Good Relations Group, the honesty of the vendor plays a big part at 93%. Moreover, personal recommendations also drive purchase action at 91%.

Although these are not explicit emotions such as happiness or sadness, they are deeply rooted emotions that are powerful enough to influence decision making. At the end of the day, purchasing is a risk. You need to trust the seller that he/she is not taking advantage of you.

Further, positive emotions increase a customer’s loyalty, improving the chances of them becoming brand advocates. In an age where customer loyalty is everything, businesses should take every chance they get.

Emotions and the Customer in B2B Storytelling

“Your customers feel before they think.” – Dan Hill

Consider the scale of your customer’s responsibility. For B2B purchases, it’s likely that the decision will affect not just them, but the entire business, so more effort goes into the decision-making process. This means that B2B buyers require a higher perceived value than their B2C counterparts.

So as a B2B seller, you should consider this. Tap the emotions that are of value to them. Will this decision improve their business’ efficiency? Luckily, you can figure out what motivates your target market simply by listening to them.

There are various channels you can use to research your audiences such as social media, surveys, phone calls, or even a simple email questionnaire. By doing this, you can get actionable insights from the source. No one knows your customers better than they know themselves.

An essential key to a successful B2B storytelling is effective listening. Don’t ignore what your customers are saying. Rather, listen to them before and after implementation. Go back to the drawing board every after evaluation and lay out possible points of improvement.

Storytelling humanizes your business. Surely, you can publish dozens of studies and whitepapers about how awesome your product or service is, but if there’s a disconnect emotionally, you’re going to turn off your customers.

The traditional view of B2B marketing aims to keep things professional in a very sterile manner. If you’re able to inject some personality and emotion into your communications, you’ll give your brand a much better chance of standing out from the clutter.

Components of B2B Storytelling

So, how do you seamlessly incorporate storytelling into your B2B marketing strategies? Here are three essential factors that every story needs:

Conflict

You can formulate the conflict by understanding your customer based on the customer journey you’ve created.

Identify their pain points and use it as inspiration for a compelling B2B story. Present their problems and issues in a creative and attention-grabbing manner. Make sure that you don’t offend them in the process.

Take your time in your research because a misrepresentation of your customer’s conflict can spell disaster for your B2B storytelling effort. Furthermore, knowing their real problems and issues will give you a solid understanding of what makes them tick.

Climax

After establishing your customer’s conflict, it’s time to match it with the solution that your product or service provides. It’s always a spectacular moment when you address your customer’s problems. This is where your business becomes the hero in the story by resolving the story’s conflict.

Don’t be afraid to involve feelings in B2B storytelling. Although there’s quite a stern ambiance in the B2B industry when compared to B2C, storytelling simply doesn’t work without emotional resonance.

Resolution

As usual, you must have the perfect curtain call to the story. Describe how your customer’s life changed after using your product or service. Feel free to go into detail. Don’t settle for generic satisfaction. If possible, show numbers to quantify the value of the benefit.

These three major points create a far more immersive customer experience. It elevates the typical process of engaging with your brand to a memorable and enriching one.

B2B Storytelling Success

The following companies are great B2B Storytelling examples and how stories can help your brand:

LinkedIn, known as the job hosting website, used the power of storytelling in their “Picture Yourself” campaign to create inspiring stories about some of their members.

The idea was to leverage the knowledge and experience of successful business professionals to create a valuable story for LinkedIn’s audience to learn from. What they managed to do was build a portal of quality business insights that increased the trust and relevance of the LinkedIn brand.

Cisco

Humor goes a long way. You might not imagine that a huge tech company would choose humor as their B2B storytelling core concept. Humor can have a huge impact because of the emotion it elicits from the customer.

But keep in mind that despite the lighthearted tone, they always stay true to principles of storytelling, from conflict, to climax, to resolution.

Kickstarter

Their B2B storytelling skills lie in all the success stories of the businesses they’ve helped to create. In other words, the users themselves build the storytelling of Kickstarter. This looks like a simple core, but it’s very effective because the people see their dream businesses realized. “We help people tell their stories.”

Intel

Intel found the key to making technology more relatable. The tech giant has made technology more human than ever before.

With the help of Toshiba, they took B2B storytelling to the next level by creating a series of short films called “The Beauty Inside.” The interactive nature of the film gives the audience a chance to play the lead role in the story, making it easy to understand why it’s gotten more than 70 million views since its release.

Zendesk

If you think that B2B storytelling only allows success for real stories, then think again. Zendesk took a different path when they created this fake band named “Zendesk Alternative,” which is a semi-grungy band, and accompanied this faux-band with a website of their own.

It caught people’s attention, to say the least, and Zendesk looked like a genius by going out of the box and being completely unexpected.

Microsoft

While other companies look for stories outside their company, Microsoft looked inside, and it worked. In 2010, they hired a guy that’s the master of storytelling as the Chief Storyteller. They completely revamped their content marketing strategy and published new content through different social media channels in a series titled “Microsoft Stories.”

By projecting an excellent company culture and employee engagement, other businesses found Microsoft to be the company they can trust and do business with. This worked so well that they turned their media center into a portal called Microsoft Story Labs.

Conclusion

B2B storytelling makes a brand real to its audience. Leading B2B CMOs are using stories to reach and engage new audiences.

A good story lets customers know your brand and what it stands for. It also bridges the gap between your business and your consumers. In addition, storytelling adds an extra layer to your customer care by recognizing customer’s stories and using them to inspire more people.

From what used to be a mushy marketing strategy, B2B storytelling has transformed into a leading tactic in Content Marketing. So, get out there and start connecting with your audience on an emotional level.

The post The Importance of B2B Storytelling appeared first on PureB2B.

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personalcoachingcenter · 4 years

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Power Tool: Security vs. Insecurity

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/power-tool-security-vs-insecurity/

Power Tool: Security vs. Insecurity

A Coaching Power Tool Created by David Braun (Executive Coach, CANADA)

Insecurity

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity ― Dag Hammarskjold

Definition: “Insecurity”: uncertainty or anxiety about oneself; lack of confidence… In short, insecurity means feeling anxious and fearful about yourself or something in your life.

Devastation of Insecurity

99% of people remember where the origin stories of their long-standing insecurities began;

The most common chronic insecurities people report are related to physical appearance, personality traits, group acceptance/ rejection, and future provision;

Living in prolonged insecure relationships may predispose people to later health problems such as cardiovascular disease, stroke or ulcers;

End of life studies of the elderly finds insecurities as root causes of some of the people’s regrets for their missed opportunities and lack of risk-taking.

Common Symptoms of Insecurity

Some of the symptoms of insecurity include the following:

We always worry about what other people are thinking.

We avoid meeting new people.

We feel the need to make others around us feel uncomfortable or insecure.

We regularly feel compelled to boast or make sure others see our goodness, competence, or achievements.

We struggle believing we are good enough, smart enough, or worthy enough to succeed.

We find ourselves putting on masks around particular individuals or groups, not being true to who deep down feel we are.

We often struggle to trust or relying on other people, including relying on ourselves because we have a looming sense of failure or disappointment.

We often look and expect the worst to happen. Thus, we tend to play it safe, procrastinate, or make excuses when challenge opportunities come our way.

Security

There is no real security except for whatever you build inside yourself. Gilda Radner

The Power of Security

Building Security

Feelings

Thoughts

Confirmation Bias: we accept only data which confirms our beliefs which pre-determines us toward continually feeling insecurity

Action

We are able to determine what our mission is—our “why’s” for what is important.

We are able to understand clearly what our personal values are—enabling us to value the journey or process versus only the results.

Redefine what success is to us by learning to cultivate an attitude of gratefulness for what we have.

My Reflection

Coaching Application

Resources:

What are the origins of insecurity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918896/

Insecurity:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/dealing-with-insecurities-might-get-easier-as-you-age-survey-shows

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201511/4-signs-someone-is-probably-insecure

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-things-insecure-people-that-slowly-destroy-their-lives.html

Quotes:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/insecurity

https://www.wiseoldsayings.com/security-quotes/

https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/insecurity-quotes

Emotional Integrity:

Are You In A Healthy Relationship?

Loneliness:

https://www.inc.com/amy-morin/americas-loneliness-epidemic-is-more-lethal-than-smoking-heres-what-you-can-do-to-combat-isolation.html

https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/HealthyLiving/Strong-relationships-strong-health

Video:

The Importance of Feeling Secure

Job Security:

Job Security & Employee Engagement: Managers Can Make a Difference

Arrival Fallacy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2016/08/22/why-reaching-your-goals-can-surprisingly-make-you-less-happy/#4c7c6614b880

Effects of Perception of Time on Goal Setting:

https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/life-goals-and-the-perception-of-time-do-it-now/

Overcoming Things Which Stop People From Achieving Goals:

https://www.inc.com/chris-winfield/the-3-things-that-stop-most-people-from-achieving-their-goals.html

Goal Setting & Insecurity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5364185/

Power of Being Secure:

Feeling Secure vs being…

The Importance of Feeling Secure

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/rediscovering-love/201801/insecurity

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/power-tools/david-braun-security-vs-insecurity/

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lindyhunt · 5 years

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An Introduction to Persuasive Advertising vs. Informative Advertising

Out of all the entertaining ads that played during Super Bowl 53, there’s only one commercial that I woke up thinking about the next morning: Pepsi’s “More Than OK”.

“More Than OK” poked fun at how Pepsi usually takes a back seat to Coke, especially at restaurants. And by featuring a star-studded cast that included Steve Carell, Lil Jon, and Cardi-B (who hilariously and fervently backed up Pepsi’s OKness) their boldness to call people out for undermining Pepsi’s quality got a lot of laughs and persuaded a massive audience to reconsider their own perception of the soft drink.

As marketers, we know that if we want to persuade an audience, we need to evoke an emotional response from them. But how do you actually do that? Below, we’ll examine six persuasive advertising techniques you can use in your advertisements, five examples you can reference if you ever need some inspiration, and three informative advertisement examples that are surprisingly just as compelling as the persuasive advertising examples.

Persuasive Techniques in Advertising

The Carrot and The Stick

The Scarcity Principle

One Message Per Advertisement

Write In the Second Person

Give Your Audience a Sense of Control

Use a Call-to-Value Instead of a Call-to-Action

1. The Carrot and The Stick

Humans are hardwired to move towards pleasure, like a horse towards a carrot, and away from pain, like a donkey avoids a stick. When people read or watch your advertisements, "carrots", or promises of gain, can fill your prospects with hope and compel them to pursue that potential feeling of pleasure. "Sticks", possibilities of loss, evoke fear in your prospects, which will compel them to flee from that potential feeling of pain.

Both tactics can pull your prospects into a narrative and evoke emotions that inspire your desired action. Carrots, like a product’s benefit, entice people to take a desired action. Sticks, on the other hand, like anti-smoking campaigns, evoke fear in people to stop doing a certain action and start doing the alternative. To better understand how to craft advertisements that feature a carrot or stick, check out these insurance copywriting examples below.

Carrot: “15 minutes could save you 15% on car insurance.” -- Geico

Stick: “Get All-State. You can save money and be better protected from Mayhem like me. ” -- All-State

As you can see, Geico's ad uses a small time investment that could potentially produce big gains as a lure to get you to buy their product. Conversely, All-State’s ad uses the character “Mayhem” to evoke fear into people to stop using their “inferior” insurance and start using All-State’s.

2. The Scarcity Principle

People value objects and experiences that are rare -- having something that most people want, but can’t have, boosts our sense of self-worth and power. If you use words and phrases that imply scarcity and evoke a sense of urgency, like “Exclusive offer” or “Limited availability”, you can skyrocket your product’s perceived scarcity and consumer demand.

3. One Message Per Advertisement

To immediately hook people and persuade them to read or watch the rest of your advertisement, try sticking to only one message. Spotlighting your product or offer’s main benefit or feature will make it easy for your customers to understand its value and increase the likelihood of their conversion because you’re only conveying one message to your audience: your product’s main feature will benefit your customer’s life somehow, someway.

4. Write in the Second Person

Since your prospects primarily care about how you can help them, and pronouns like “you” and “your" can engage them on a personal level and help them insert themselves in the narrative you’re creating, writing advertisements in the second person can instantly grip their attention and help them imagine a future with your product or service bettering their lives.

5. Give Your Audience a Sense of Control

According to a research study conducted by three psychology professors at Rutgers University, the need for control is a biological and psychological necessity. People have to feel like they have control over their lives.

If you want to give your audience a sense of control, you need to give them the ability to choose. In other words, after reading or watching your advertisement, they must feel like they can choose between the option you suggest or another path. If they feel like you’re trying to force them to buy your product, they’ll get annoyed and disengage from your message.

To give your audience the ability to choose, and in turn, a sense of control, use phrases like “Feel free” or “No pressure” in your advertisements, like this example from Hotwire.com below.

6. Use a Call-to-Value Instead of a Call-to-Action

Call-to-actions are crucial for getting prospects to take the next step, but a “Download Now” or “Call Now” CTA isn’t always going to convince the more skeptical prospects to take your desired action. You need to make sure your ad’s last line of copy or quip is the best of them all.

So instead of writing an uninspiring, final line of copy like “Download Now”, write one that clearly communicates your offer’s value and gives a glimpse into your prospects’ potential life if they take your desired action, like this call-to-value prompting readers to download a blogging eBook: “Click today and be a blogger tomorrow.”

Persuasive Advertising Examples

1. Nikol

Image Credit: Brilliant Ads

Showing -- not telling -- your audience about your product’s benefits is one of the best ways to capture attention and get an emotional response. Obviously, Nikol’s paper towels can’t actually turn grapes into raisins, but this ad highlights the product's absorbent powers in a such a clear and clever way, they didn’t need write a single line of copy.

2. Heinz

Image Credit: Brilliant Ads

In relation to food, the word “hot” has multiple meanings: having a high temperature and being spicy. Heinz brilliantly used the connotation of high temperature to highlight the spiciness of their ketchup, and their creative method of communicating the value of their product helped them instantly attract people’s attention.

3. Mondo Pasta

Image Credit: Brilliant Ads

With this crafty use of guerrilla marketing, Mondo Pasta perfectly aligns their copy with their creative -- the guy slurping the noodle literally "can’t let go" because its a rope tied to a dock. By designing such a visual, unexpected, and literal ad with a seemingly one-dimensional prop, people’s eyes can’t let go of this ad either.

4. Bic

Image Credit: Brilliant Ads

Another example of guerrilla marketing, Bic takes advantage of an unkept field to highlight the power of their razors. By just mowing a small strip of grass on a field, this ad is an unconventional, simple, and extremely creative way to catch people’s attention and spotlight a razor’s shaving capabilities.

5. Siemens

Image Credit: Brilliant Ads

Siemens’ skillful ad shows the benefits of their product by unexpectedly placing their washers and dryers in a library to show you that they’re so quiet, even a librarian wouldn’t need to shush them.

Informative Advertising

Compared to persuasive advertising, informative advertising focuses more on the facts, and less on emotions. It highlight how your product’s features and benefits solve your customers’ problems and can even compare your product to your competitors' product. Although this type of advertising relies on facts and figures to trigger a desired action, the ad’s message is usually framed in a compelling way.

Informative Advertising Examples

Drink Responsibly

Miller Lite

Siskiyou Eye Center

1. Drink Responsibly

Image Credit: Bloggs74

Even though this ad might seem like it’s only aiming to evoke fear in its target audience, it actually leans on the facts to get their message across. If you drink and drive, your risk of crashing skyrockets 11 fold. And by focusing on this alarming reality, this ad can persuade people to get an Uber or Lyft home after a night out instead of getting behind the wheel.

2. Miller Lite

Image Credit: Miller Lite

After Bud Light took some jabs at Miller Lite for using corn syrup in their beer during their Super Bowl 53 ads, Miller Lite decided to throw a few punches back. A day later on Twitter, they revealed that their beer actually has less calories and carbs than Bud Light, which helped them persuade people that drinking Bud Light and Miller Lite actually have similar health benefits.

3. Siskiyou Eye Center

Image Credit: Entractech

There’s an old folk tale that carrots can improve your eyesight, but science has actually debunked this myth. That’s why this Siskiyou Eye Center ad is such a creative informative advertisement. While it pokes fun at this common fable, it’s still relying on the facts of carrots not being able to improve your vision and the Eye Center’s ability to provide quality treatment for your eyes to persuade people to do business with them.

Persuasive advertising vs. informative advertising: which one is better?

Persuasive advertising and informative advertising definitely focus on different aspects of persuasion, but they still aim to achieve the same goal: convincing your audience to take a desired action. So whether you pursue one advertising strategy or another, remember that if you can trigger an emotional response, regardless of the stimuli, your ad will be a success.

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idiosys-tech · 5 years

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HOW IMAGES IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR WEBPAGE

Web standards rise continually, changing our expectations towards a website. We want to find information quickly, want to socialize, want to get entertained, and want all of it to happen on a personal level. To make designing efficientand attractive websites our web developer use a wide range of engaging media. Web developer use image, video, info-graphic as an engaging media in webpage. In the term of using engaging media Images play an important role to make a attractive web page . Images deliver a powerful message and play an important part in brand building.

Web visitor likes images more than text. Visual information is very convenient. Instead of reading a lot of text, which takes time and effort, we rather quickly scan an image or a graph. Then, images can trigger all sorts of emotions and memories, which makes them very engaging. Also, a lot of web visitor can better memorize visual information and often it’s easier to share than written content. At last, images can cross language barriers a lot better than text can. A small image can express thousand words in a moment. So when using images in your web page make sure that the images are according with your service and product. When use an image keep in mind it's position. Images should be placed close to the related text. The text beside the image will be perceived better by the viewers of the page. Improper positioning of images will make the website confusing for the visitor.

Not only a image, but it's Size, Dimension and Resolution are also very important in professional web page design. Size refers to the file size while dimension refers to the height and width of the image. Smaller files load faster. If the image is saved at a higher resolution and is forcibly resized to fit a small space it will result in increased load times and your web page can effected. So when using make sure that dimension and resolution of the image are appropriate.

Generally three kinds of image files can be used in a webpage. They can be jpeg, gif or png. Jpeg files can be considerably compressed to lower sizes without losing the display quality. Gif files are even lower quality used for mini icons. png are now used as alternatives to gif file types. Make sure that text is not embedded into images unless absolutely necessary.

Search Engines not only crawl the text content on webpage also search for keywords in the image files. Hence, using a plain descriptive text for naming images will increase its possibility to appear in the Image search listing page. Alt texts are alternatives to the images when they cannot be displayed by the browser. An optimized All tags add SEO value to an image. In fact using of alt tags is the best away to optimize an image.Image optimization can be directed towards achieving two goals for better Search Engine Optimization of the Website and for better design aesthetics.

#Digital_Marleting #SEO_Service_in_Kolkata

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simplicity2222 · 6 years

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Pikachu 1

We are not directly a part of © 2018 Pokémon Go. Our company does use data collected by ©2018 Pokémon Go, ©2016 Niantic, Inc. ©2016 Pokémon. ©1995–2016 Nintendo / Creatures Inc. / GAME FREAK inc. We do monitor or review bulletin boards, chat rooms, discussions, postings, transmissions, and everything on the web related to the Pokémon Company International. This is done for marketing purposes and to fulfill our Mission Statement which is:

"To

find both the real world and the virtual world the one that truly understands the Pokémon characters. To find the one who is dedicated to exploring and understanding the competitive Pokémon metagame by designing, creating, and playtesting new Pokémon concepts. To live in both the real world and the virtual world as one."

You have been chosen to be a part of this very exclusive gift offer. This offer will only be given to people that have shown to possess the special qualities that are unique to the Pokémon family. People with various talents and interests, with higher than average intelligence—metagame battlers, in-gamers, artists, spriters, writers, etc. A person that has the desire to get what they believe in at all cost and will not give up until that goal is achieved. You will inspire various interesting discussions about Pokémon, the spirit and mechanics of the game, in-depth analysis of the current competitive metagame and most importantly, to live, play, and socialize with the different characters. This is where the true test of your desire is. In this journey, you will have free will to do what you want, but working with different species is the best way to control how they evolve to help you get more eggs and other items to get you to a higher level. Setbacks are part of every adventure game, but the better you can work and understand the different personalities, manners, etiquette, cultures, and social upbringings, of the characters you interact with the faster you will get to the next level. You will learn to evolve into things that will be positive in your relationship with your trainer. You will learn to trust your trainer or be the trainer himself. It has to be a win-win situation or you both will lose valuable points and time. So teamwork and communication will be necessary.

So as our gift we give you Pikachu to test your skills. Pikachu has come along way since he first met Ash. He has learned a lot, but he is still learning and will make many mistakes. There is no absolute right in any situation and sometimes the obvious wrong, may have its right, it's all about how we perceive that challenge. Your Pikachu will always be on your side. He will often act on emotional impulse, without thinking, and lose an opportunity to score points, but with some patience and understanding he will listen and learn. He will always mean well and never intentionally go against you, sometimes he will just be misunderstood.

Tip on winning: Remember, a Pikachu will think things different than you. It does not mean one is right and the other wrong. You just have to remember how they may perceive a certain situation. Your goal is to score points and go to the next level. This works both ways, in both worlds, one way may work in the virtual world, but not in the real world. As long as you can understand how it may work and trust the other, you will reach your goal.

You may not feel like it is right, but don't trust your impulse, think outside the box and different possibilities. Don't lose Pikachu, he has a heart of gold and will fight for you. He will do his best to be your pillar of support when you need him. Your a team, work together and move on to the highest level. Go team PikaJean (or JeanaChu).

Sincerely,

Takara Sakiya 宝崎谷

P.S.

IMPORTANT,

Please take the time to read the Terms Of Service (TOS) below.

TOS #5

is especially important in playing

©Team Pokémon.

™Pikachu team giveaway is a TradeMark of ©Team Pokémon LTD 2017. and is part of the ©HallMark Corporation 2018 Pokémon and Pokémon character names are trademarks of Nintendo.

Any relation

Last Update: October 24, 2018

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THIS SERVICE.

1. WHAT SERVICES DO THESE TERMS COVER? These terms of use ("Terms") cover the following products and services ("Service") however accessed and/or used, which are operated by or otherwise made available by ©Team Pokémon LTD 2017 International, Inc. or its affiliates ("Pokémon" or "we", "us", or "our"):

2. decline use of our trademarks and copyrights. Subject to any limitations under applicable law, you acknowledge and accept that you have no property or other rights in any content on the Service, including but not limited to content that you may have created or developed including "Trainer Images", screen names, game scores, the content of chats and other messages submitted to a Service or to us directly.

All communications solicited feedback, and other materials submitted to the Service (by email or otherwise) are non-confidential and non-proprietary. By submitting material to the Service and subject to any limitations under applicable law, you give up any claims that the use of that material violates any of your rights, including moral rights, privacy rights, proprietary rights, publicity rights, rights to credit for material or ideas or any other right, including the right to approve the way such material is used. Additionally, you grant us and any successors and assigns a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, transmit, copy and display such submitted information and material in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised and represent that you have all necessary rights in such posting.

3. PLAYER TRAINER CLUB ACCOUNTS. In order to access some features of the Service, you will need to create a Pokémon Trainer Club account ("PTC Account").

4. PLAY! POKÉMON PROGRAM. Because of the popularity of the Pokémon products, a large number of real-world Pokémon trading-card and video game tournaments ("Play! Pokémon Events") may be occurring worldwide on any given day. While we do organize certain special events and championship events, most Play! Pokémon Events are organized or operated by independent third-party organizers, such as retailers of trading card games. While most Play! Pokémon Events are not run by us, we do post to the Service certain information we receive about Play! Pokémon Events

5. DISCLAIMER. THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT THEREIN ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF TITLE OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES. Everything in this email is fictional and used only with the intent to be private with Jeannie Durbin and is meant only as entertainment in hopes she understands that my intentions were always good and never to hurt her. I hope she understands I am far from perfect and make many stupid mistakes. I also understand how she felt and hold no blame for those feelings and will not judge her on that basis. However, because no one is perfect, misunderstandings will happen and I alone can not make a happy ending, therefore, I have to judge our reaction and actions. This we can control if we really cared to. We have free will, no one can make you mad to the point of beyond "saving the day" (or night). I will do all I can, but you have to try, or it will happen again and again. Not only to me, because no one is perfect, so the pattern will continue. I can give us a chance, I can be that "Pillar" you desire. I can give you the comfort that I do 100% understand what you are feeling and how real your emotions are. I can promise not to judge you on your feelings, I can give you support in understanding mine. You do not have to agree with my feelings, because I know you don't feel the same. But as I will understand your feelings, you must try to understand mine. With time and repetitiveness, you will learn to associate situations. With trust, you will not have an intense feeling of negative emotions. It will not be easy, but I only hope every time you try it will be a negative layer of weight off your shoulders. I cannot promise we will succeed, but I promise to do my best. I NEVER left you, just waited and reflected and understood what you were feeling. Just remember that I am on your side, I will do and say the wrong thing, I will overreact and be disappointed, I will even get mad. It does NOT have to ruin anything. If you can truly try to trust me, I think we have a chance.

Pikachu is ready to play with his new trainers, you and me. : )

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 2:37 PM Jeannie AFS <

[email protected]

> wrote:

Pikachu will be arriving Today, Sunday, October 21, 2018 before 9pm. Please, be sure you safely remove him from his delivery container that should be incased with bubble wrap for his protection. He may have jet lag so make sure he gets plenty of food, water and lots of TLC. If you have any questions, comments, or requests, please feel free to contact us anytime. You are a valued person and my services are here for you. This was made possible by Pikachu and Hallmark Corporations 2018.

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