Captain Digital

Random musings on politics, society, and pop culture from the Internet's marketing curmudgeon.

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Things go better when Woke?

By now, you’ve probably heard about an internal Powerpoint stack that was leaked to the public, put together by the diversity department at Coca-Cola, and how they were trying to train employees to be “less white.” You might not have seen the original story, but you couldn’t miss all the memes flying about the ‘net, mocking Coke and their misbegotten messaging. (My particular fave are the ones that show Coke firing the polar bears, and hiring brown and black bears instead, because the polar bears are…wait for it…too white.)

Yes. Wokeness has gotten that stupid.

[Read more…] about Things go better when Woke?

Jeep Takes a Left(ist) Turn

I’ve held back from commenting on the SuperBowl Jeep ad for a bit, because I wanted to see if others felt about it the way I do.

Weirdly, both Leftists and Conservatives seem to feel the same way. They hate it. But for different reasons.
If you haven’t seen it, it features Bruce Springsteen as his trademarked character, the Working Man™, riding around Kansas, in a Jeep that’s gotta predate the Vietnam War. He’s drinking a cuppa Joe in a diner, driving the backroads, and (metaphorically) wrapping himself in the American flag, all the while staking a claim for unity in America.Lots to unpack on this one. So let’s get started.

[Read more…] about Jeep Takes a Left(ist) Turn

TyperActive.

I love typography. Always have. From a very early age, I’ve been fascinated with letterforms. When I was in elementary school, I used to rubber-band two pencils together to create a crude way to draw Blackletter (a.k.a. “Old English”) lettering on posters. While other kids decorated their textbook’s book covers with drawings of muscle cars, military tanks or alien spacecraft, I decorated mine with words in a variety of typefaces. Blackletter, calligraphy, Cooper Black, Bodoni, Futura – you name it, and I experimented with it. As I grew into a career as a freelance artist, I discovered that typefaces could provide a subtext (no pun intended) to ad copy and headlines. The face I chose to design something had the power to communicate meaning, context, and even tell people how to think about the words on the printed page, before they’d even read them.

Waaaaay cool. [Read more…] about TyperActive.

Read All About It.

I hear that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, like many other once-proud newspapers, is up for sale. Even worse, if it’s not sold inside of 60 days, it will cease to exist in print (but might continue in a greatly scaled-back online form).

Sad. Very sad.

I was thinking the other day about how the newspaper biz has changed since I was a kid, throwing a paper route in Shreveport, Louisiana. It’s changed a lot – and not for the better. Of course, you could argue, and many do, that the Internet killed the Newspaper, just like it’s kill(ing) CDs and will soon kill DVDs. But if you’ve ever tried to get all your information from the web, you’ve probably seen that there’s something that you lose, when you ditch paper. So, I’m not convinced the problem with newspapers lies at the feet of the World Wide Web alone. No, I think it’s something(s) much deeper, and will, in fact, cause the destruction of an entire industry in no less significant a way than what happened to the dinosaurs. [Read more…] about Read All About It.

New site launched. Read all about it.

We just lit up a new site for RiverFields – an Amarillo-based sporting goods shop that specializes in fly fishing, hunting, and self-defense. Their old site was, dated, to put it mildly. The reason was, it required a web guy to make any changes. It was just way too difficult for RiverFields to make changes conveniently. Therefore, they simply didn’t change anything. For several years. At all.

We began the new site by designing it with an eye towards how they’d be able to update it easily. That meant designing it for Adobe Contribute (so they could make changes to the text and static pictures) and implement a content management system so they could easily make changes/additions/deletions to their photo galleries (using the worth-its-weight-in-gold SlideShow Pro Director).

You can see the new site at www.riverfields.com. You can compare and contrast it with the old site, which (for a while yet) is online at www.riverfields.com/oldsite.

Let me know what you think.

Let me entertain you.

It dawned on me, as I was creating some ‘quickie’ bizcards, that I needed a website specific to the musician-side of my life. I’m a big believer in perception versus reality, and the reality is, people perceive a certain degree of “serious” in regards to an email address. If you want someone to take you seriously, a Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo address is not gonna cut the mustard. On the other hand, if you have your own domain name, it’s almost like instant street cred. So I bought bradkozak.com and set it up as a site dedicated to my singer/songwriter/entertainer biz. Of course, since I create websites for a living, it didn’t take but a couple of hours to throw together a website. (It took longer to get Mrs. Digital to help me with the photos, and to do the Photoshopping than it did to write the site code.) [Read more…] about Let me entertain you.

The “Voice of God” has passed away…

I am sorry to report that Don LaFontaine, master voiceover artist, has passed away on Labor Day. He was 68.

I never met Don in person, but I had the opportunity to work with him on some TV spots, and I know his wife, Anita, well. (She’s from my hometown of Shreveport, LA, and my Dad wrote the arrangement she used of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to go to the Miss American paegant, as Miss Louisiana.)

By all accounts, everyone that knew Don called him a great guy. My cousin (who visited Don and Anita in California a bunch) tells me he was witty, with a wicked sense of humor, and not at all pompous or distant in the way that celebrities can be. I can attest personally to the fact that he was generous to a fault, and was willing to “put his money where his mouth is” when it comes to causes he would support.

It’s hard for me to think about Don in the past tense. While there are other voiceover artists that mimic’d Don’s style and delivery, there will never be another Don LaFontaine. My heart and prayers go out to Anita and their kids in what must be a very difficult time. Please keep them in your prayers.

In a world of advertising, where too few voiceover artists have the ability to create a distinctive sound, Don LaFontaine will be missed.

A little experiment in musicial (self-)marketing.

Recently, I’ve gotten restless, and I’ve decided to begin playing music professionally again. Trouble is, I don’t have a lot of contacts here in Amarillo. So I’ve decided to apply the same techniques I recommend to my marketing clients to my own situation. That means I’ve got to find ways to get myself noticed around town. What you see at the left here is a poster I whipped up in an hour or so this evening. I’ve secured a one-night gig – kind of a “let’s see if this works” kind of thing. Obviously, I’d like this to turn into a regular gig. So I’m doing everything I know how to do to make that happen. First, we’ll start with promotions. I’m going to print several of these posters and give them to Pizza Hut. I figure that the combination of a nice-looking poster along with taking the initiative to promote my appearance there will go a long way towards helping them see the possibilities. It won’t cost me much to do it, and it will help serve my larger goal of getting my name out there as a musician in Amarillo. With only two days before the gig, I don’t have much time to self-promote, but I figure that anything I can do is better than sitting around and waiting for something good to happen. [Read more…] about A little experiment in musicial (self-)marketing.

A little blogging news.

grokmediaI’m a big fan of blogging. Part of it is that I’m a writer – copywriting, techincal writing, correspondence, you name it. (Mrs. Digital keeps bugging me about writing the next Great American Novel. We’ll see.) Anyway, I’ve been gratified by the responses I’ve gotten, as well as the ever-increasing number of people that are reading my blog. Blogging is a lot like anything else you do – the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. One of the things I’ve learned, is that if you put a little work into promoting your blog with the blog aggregators and social networking services, you’ll dramatically increase the number of people that know about your blog – and if it’s any good, the number of people reading it. [Read more…] about A little blogging news.

Perception IS Reality.

What is real? That’s really the most fundamental question, isn’t it? If we can’t trust our senses, we cannot tell what’s real from what’s not. And that brings us, campers, to the true nature of marketing – perception versus reality.

I once worked for a guy who was a brilliant marketer – a true natural. His favorite aphorism was “Perception IS reality.” His point was that your view of reality is colored by your belief system and, therefore, your perceptions…ergo, perception IS your reality. It follows then, that it doesn’t matter what reality is – it matters only what your audience PERCEIVES reality to be.

Think about the implications of this for a second. They are staggering. [Read more…] about Perception IS Reality.