Captain Digital

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

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WOW.

Obama must be really nervous tonight. Biden, however, must be wishing he’d been screening his calls.

To call Sarah Palin’s speech amazing is to shower it with faint praise. I think this will go down in history in the same vein as the speech Ronald Regan gave to nominate Barry Goldwater (the speech that launched Regan’s political career). If there were any doubts on the Right that Sarah Palin was the wrong pick, they were more than answered with an emphatic “NO” tonight. She was everything the Right wants, and then some. If there was any doubt on the Left that Palin is going to be all but impossible to beat on the stump, those doubts have been suddenly and decisively retired. The Dems are in real trouble here. Palin’s articulate, well-spoken, intelligent, and…experienced – in both public speaking and in dealing with issues. (She even acquitted herself admirably on foreign policy issues.) And as far as the media goes, if they entertained any thoughts that she might be a pushover, or an easy ‘get’ for their poisoned pens, she quashed those. (My favorite line was the one about how she was not going to Washington to please the liberal media, but to serve the people.) Booyah! [Read more…] about WOW.

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.

Force of Nature.

In the world in which we live, it’s actually pretty easy to forget that nature trumps technology. For all our computers, machines, and other man-made paraphernalia, we still can’t control Mother Nature to any great extent. (Which, of course, is one of the things that makes me a hard-core skeptic over the man-made global warming thing – but that’s a topic for another time.) [Read more…] about Force of Nature.

I love pundits.

A couple of quick observations…

  1. Pundits are often wrong. (See the last few weeks of coverage on “McCain’s pick for V.P.”
  2. Pundits are sheeple, too. (They don’t always think for themselves, and there’s a pecking order…an influential pundit will say something, and the under-pundits will immediately start echoing his opinions as their own.
  3. Pundits LOVE their own talking points…and hate having to answer questions that force them to abandon using the talking points as answers. [Read more…] about I love pundits.

A Light Dawns.

Wow. When McCain sewed up the GOP nomination, I was resigned to hoping that he’d make a really great VP pick – somebody who would embody REAL Conservative values and principles. Sadly, none of the frontrunners really rang my bell. Jindal refused to be considered. Thompson wasn’t even in the running. Romney looked like a lock, but lost a lot of cred in the primaries, with unexplained “changes of heart” on core-values issues.

Then McCain surprised us all. [Read more…] about A Light Dawns.

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.

School Daze.

Tomorrow is the first day of school for thousands of kids across Amarillo, my daughter included. While the exact day children go back to school may vary from district to district, there is one undeniable fact – the school year is longer than it was when I was a kid.

When I went to school (you know…back in the dark ages, when St. George slew the dragon…a time before cell phones, instant messaging, and satellite TV), school NEVER started before Labor Day, and never lasted beyond Memorial Day. Those two holidays were the bookends to the freedom days of my youth. Today, it is vastly different, with state legislatures regularly extending the required number of days in the school calendar every time they consider the matter. My question is “why”? [Read more…] about School Daze.

Slow News Day.

I was all set to write about all the exciting things going on in the world of politics today. And then…suddenly…nothing happened. (But it happened suddenly!) It must be difficult to be the news editor at one of th 24-hour news networks on a day like today. Most days in fact, I suspect the news biz is a lot like what they say (“they” being the Van Patten family) about pilots – long stretches of boredom, punctuated by a few moments of sheer exhileration and terror. Trouble is, the newsies still have time to fill – and fill it they do, mostly with low-cal filler, tripe, trumped up stories, and navel gazing. Even my personal fave, FoxNews, does far too many breathless stories on the fate of ___________ (insert the latest tragic dissapearance, murder, or sensational trial). Currently, it’s the missing toddler, Caylee Anthony. Like most of the rest of the country, I suspect she’s no longer alive, and that her mom had something (if not everything) to do with it. Still, we live in a country where you’re presumed innocent, so we must let the justice system take it’s own course. Not the news media, of course. They’ve got time to fill, and just because they have no real news upon which to report, they’ll just find a way to stretch what they’ve got to fill the time available. [Read more…] about Slow News Day.

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.