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hetmusic · 5 years

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UNSIGNED: THE KTNA | The Most Radicalist x BBH Global

In this interview feature, we get to know the most radicalist up and coming stars on the planet. This time we caught up with the Kenyan-born, Manchester-bred and now London-based duo The KTNA. Most of us will be familiar with the inevitable descent of disillusionment with our hometown. It’s a universal experience that The KTNA captures to other-worldly effect in their most recent single ‘OWT’, short for ‘One Way Ticket’. Their music is a captivating combination of R&B, trip-hop and future-soul, all glued together by pure grit, determination and an unparalleled love for their craft. As you’ll discover in the interview below, sisters Hope and Millie Katana don’t cast off their Northern roots, in fact they owe a lot to their childhood in Manchester. It’s more the case that growth sometimes calls for upping those roots and planting yourself down somewhere new. The song and video for ‘OWT’ was written around a pivotal time for the sisters, living in Manchester, lacking inspiration and selling their furniture for extra income. As the old adage goes… should they stay or should they go? In case the answer wasn’t already apparent, the pair upped sticks and left for London. However, the trials of The KTNA wouldn’t be over just yet. With little money and no place to live, a friend of the band offered them a studio to record in for free, one that doubled up as a place to live. What ensued was a year of sleeping on the floor of a windowless studio with their respective twin sister. It was throughout this particularly testing time that they finalised and recorded their soon-to-be-released Life Under Siege EP. It’s safe to say that The KTNA has been through the fire over the years, as is the experience of so many unsigned artists. Now, these flames have been lit under their project which has the explicit aim “to break all the boxes that have been handed down to us by no faults of our own. As overly sexualised, dual heritage, working class women from the North, we want to show the world that anything is possible.” In closing, they impart yet more refined wisdom: “We can be whoever we choose to be. You can change the world no matter how small you THINK you are.” It’s at our core to continue supporting the rising, the unsigned, the names we believe that are on the cusp of greatest, The KTNA clearly being one of them. Get to know Hope and Millie a little better below.

TMR: Let’s dive right in and talk about the new Life Under Siege EP. What does this release represent for you? This release is the freedom we’ve been seeking for many years now. It marks the end of a very long chapter in our lives and we hope it is a good introduction to the world we’re trying to create, through music. TMR: What are some of the themes that run through the EP? Life Under Siege is about the struggle and hustle of this crazy human experience we’re all currently living. We’re as brutally honest as possible with our writing, especially when discussing our own mental health throughout. We don’t really class ourselves under any genre, so we tried to keep the subjects of the songs as real and consistent as possible. TMR: We recently shared the apocalyptic video for ‘OWT’, which appeared to be an exaggerated retelling of living through tough time and wishing to be elsewhere? Absolutely. I’m sure everyone’s had a moment in their lives where they wished everything was different, that you could weather the storm and end up somewhere completely different. Yeah, that was our lives daily for a long time. So we thought we’d make a visual with that thought in mind, and honestly with the help of a small village, we made it come to life. TMR: Has music always managed to provide an escape? Definitely, for as long as I can remember. One of my first ever musical “experiences” was whilst watching The Prince Of Egypt as a young kid. I remember the minute the music and film started it swept me far, far away. Even as a kid. So yeah, I think you can say we’re still chasing that high. TMR: Growing up in Manchester with its rich music industry and multicultural population, what music and other forms of creativity were you exposed to? Growing up in Manchester 100% enhanced us as creative beings. When we were growing up we’d go to an organisation called GMMAZ (Greater Manchester Music Action Zone) where we’d meet people from every borough of Greater Manchester and get together and make music. People from every race and religion got together put our differences aside and made beautiful (sometimes strange) music together. That experience definitely had an impact on the way we made music going forward. TMR: Looking forwards, your music takes genres like trip-hop and R&B and transforms them into something distinctly KTNA. Is this an active choice through the songwriting process or does it come naturally? Haha well our motto is “don’t do too much, just enough.” So we try not to force anything creatively. If it’s not coming naturally we tend to end the session pretty quickly and start something new. In respect to genre we grew up on - so many different amazing artists from probably every genre imaginable. We just try to incorporate a little of our favourites in everything we do regardless of being put in a genre “box.” TMR: When it comes to songwriting duties, does one of you take point with the lyrics, and the other composition or visuals or production? Or is it an entirely shared process? Our process is based off of team work. It depends on the day, or how we’re feeling, or what we’re working on. However, most of the time we work on a 50/50 basis.. it’s the best way we find (No cat fights.) TMR: The French duo Ibeyi cite the special, and often sacred, connection between twin sisters. Is this something you relate to? And does it influence your music? We defo relate, it is SO special. Our twin bond definitely influences our music a whole lot for sure! There’s something about when voices blend together as siblings that we just find so beautiful and satisfying. Above all though we just love singing together it’s life joy! TMR: Did you find the tightness of your relationship was tested while recording the EP in the windowless studio that also doubled as a shared bedroom for a year or did it bring you even closer together? Hahah both!! We’re not going to lie, it’s very difficult! When you live and work with a person non stop, especially in that environment, it’s very hard for you to turn off and think about anything other than work (making us HIGHLY irritable at times..) It truly tested our bond, but honestly we made the most beautiful music of our lives in that studio and even though it was very hard we had so many beautiful times there, so many beautiful songs and memories were made in that period... we wouldn’t change that time for anything in the world!! It was a life changing time for us. TMR: What’s next for The KTNA? LOTS of music!!! (Like sooo much) LOTS of shows !!!! AND LOTS OF HAPPINESS!!

http://www.themostradicalist.com/features/tmr-talks-to-the-ktna/

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coolgreatwebsite · 7 years

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Why DotEmu Has Me Worried About Windjammers On The PS4

Early in 1994, an unassuming little game named Windjammers made its way to arcades. Developed by Data East for the Neo Geo Multi Video System, Windjammers is essentially high-octane video air hockey. Players pick one of six characters with different skills and shots, one of six courts of different sizes and layouts, and proceed to volley a frisbee back and forth with the hopes of jamming it past their opponent and into the goal. It’s a game that’s dead simple to pick up and play, but that simplicity masks an amount of depth to its mechanics and variety in a player’s options that makes Windjammers something special. When two skilled competitors go at it throwing rapid fire shots, counter-shots, trick shots, super shots and counter-super shots, the game is an edge-of-your-seat adrenaline pumping blur. Unfortunately, most people just didn’t seem to catch on to that hidden layer, and Windjammers was generally met with a middling reaction.

As time went on and arcade game emulation became easier, Windjammers gained a bit of a cult classic status. For a good long while it was a side-tournament staple in the fighting game community, and a French community had rallied around it and were doing their thing, but it wasn’t until website about video games Giant Bomb started playing it in 2013 that North American awareness of the game really started picking up. As much as I would like to be a cool on-line guy and say that I was way into it before that, I was only tangentially aware of the game prior to Giant Bomb’s coverage (I was more of a Street Hoop guy when it came to weird Data East Neo Geo sports games, for whatever reason). Nevertheless, it’s a game I feel like I’ve been a fan of for a long time, if that makes any sense. It’s an immediately and deeply lovable game.

The only port Windjammers has ever had as of this writing was a Japan-exclusive release on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010. This release eventually got delisted in late 2013, shortly after Giant Bomb’s coverage started strangely enough. Ever since then, there’s been a steady rumbling of people asking for the game to come to modern systems with online play, mainly aimed at PlayStation’s Third Party Production team. After all, they’re the guys who got us a Final Fantasy 7 remake and Shenmue 3, right? If anyone can get this weird obscure frisbee game out of whatever licensing hell it fell into following the death of Data East and years of turmoil SNK has gone through, they could! Well, at PlayStation Experience 2016′s showcase event it finally happened. The lights dimmed, a familiar tune started playing, and there it was on the big screen: Windjammers was coming to the PlayStation 4. The wish had been granted.

And then the monkey’s paw curled.

Pictured above is the banner for the Windjammers booth at PlayStation Experience 2016, and pictured in the zoom-in of that banner is the one thing powerful enough to instantly turn a retro video game fan’s excitement into dread: the logo of French video game company DotEmu. Founded in 2007, DotEmu is a company that specializes in bringing old video games to not-so-old platforms. Over their nearly 10 years of existence they’ve built up a network of connections with Japanese developers and rightsholders and have been responsible for bringing a sizable amount of classic games to various platforms (an exact list is hard to compile, as even their website’s game list is clearly incomplete). The rub here is that, despite the years of experience and web of trusted business partners, DotEmu consistently puts out products that can be described as poor at best.

Generally not poor in flashy, attention grabbing ways mind you. They’re competent enough that a passerby could go “sure, that’s Metal Slug!”, but for the people who love and care about these classic games the vast majority of DotEmu’s output may as well have shipped with crash bugs. It’s not just old game obsessives that suffer either as, even though it may be difficult to point out specific shortcomings without side-by-side comparisons, the way DotEmu’s ports are busted have an undeniable effect on the way these games play at even the most casual levels. These problems aren’t flukes, they’re consistent and documentable, but they often go ignored in media coverage of the company and general discussion of their releases.

I don’t think this is due to any sort of nefarious intent or anything, but rather a lack of education about the subject. Most of the complaints are loosely organized tweets, or squirreled away in niche message boards, and the informative reviews that hit Steam are easy to lose among the less-than-informative ones. The reason I set out to write this article was to attempt to find and document the issues plaguing DotEmu’s ports (with a focus on their Neo Geo offerings as they pertain more to Windjammers) and, most importantly, put everything somewhere easily viewable and shareable. With that mission in mind, I jumped into the Steam version of one of my favorite arcade games: Metal Slug 3.

The Steam version of Metal Slug 3 was, unbeknownst to me at the time, my first brush with DotEmu. I ran through it once back in mid-2014 and here in 2017 all I could recall was that it was the worst port of the game I had ever played, so it was a natural pick to start off with. I played the Steam release simultaneously with the game running in MAME, trading off every other level, just to make sure I was getting all the facts straight. The most immediately apparent issue with the Steam release is that the audio is wrong on almost every level. Most of the sound effects are off in different ways, the worst of them reduced to nothing but shrill screeches, and the music is mangled in one of the oddest ways I’ve ever experienced. It has trouble keeping a steady beat, but it doesn’t quite skip and instead sort of tries to rush back to where it’s supposed to be. It almost makes it seem like the music is being performed by some sort of drunken orchestra, or as if someone were briefly holding back the turntable of a record player in the few cases where it seemed to affect the pitch. I’ve taken the liberty of making a video comparing the music of both versions, below.

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The other two big issues are slightly more subtle, but much more impactful on the gameplay itself. First off, the Steam version drops frames like crazy, which means the game consistently stutters and jumps around erratically. Metal Slug 3 is pretty chaotic so it can be a little tough to pick out amidst the explosions, but the DotEmu port drops frames at all times, even during the game’s rare quiet moments. I found that the tiled background of Stage 3′s pre-sub cave area offered the most readily visible comparison (below). [UPDATE 1/12/17: This is actually an issue with frame-pacing rather than dropping according to John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Frame-pacing issues are where, rather than completely skipping over frames of the game, individual frames will stay on screen for longer or shorter than they’re supposed to. The end result is still a stuttering, choppy mess.]

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This problem only exacerbates the next issue: the Steam version has input lag. Input lag means, well, there’s a lag on your inputs. You press a button and it takes a little bit longer for the corresponding action to happen on screen. Don’t know why, don’t know how, but there is a slight amount of input lag present in the DotEmu port that just isn’t there in the MAME version. Weirdly enough it wasn’t anything visual that tipped me off, but instead something auditory. The gap between pressing the fire button and hearing the gunshot sound effect is a bit wider in the Steam version, and it’s fairly noticeable when you’re going back and forth between versions.

These two issues are bad enough alone, but when combined it causes the game to feel muddy and unresponsive when in actuality it’s quite snappy. Easily dodgeable attacks suddenly become less so, simple actions such as jumping and shooting below you become more difficult to perform effectively, and the game is much more likely to register jumping and shooting as a simultaneous press of A+B, making you accidentally activate your kamikaze Slug Attack while in a vehicle. This isn’t any sort of scientific evidence, and I certainly wasn’t playing amazingly in either version of the game, but I did demonstrably worse in my playthrough of the Steam version and I attribute that to the generally awful feel of the controls.

The one nice thing I can say about DotEmu’s port is that the online play seems, from my extremely limited experience, totally fine. I played the first couple of levels with a friend and it was smooth throughout. The port’s underlying problems still existed, and I’m not sure how the netcode would hold up to something more timing intensive like a versus game, but online play did not accentuate any of the port’s issues from what I could tell.

A brief check-in with the Steam port of Metal Slug X revealed that it, unsurprisingly, has the exact same problems Metal Slug 3 has. This is where my firsthand experience with DotEmu’s products ends, because I’m not enough of a sucker to buy three bad versions of old games. Just two. Craving more info, I put out the call to my wonderful, smart, definitely non-sucker Twitter followers. What follows is everything I was able to gather from them.

Now, I love Metal Slug 3, but I’m far from an absolute expert on it. There are people who have played the game for longer than I have and are way better at it than I am. I doubt the same can be said for friend of the site LordBBH regarding Shock Troopers. One of his favorite games of all time, BBH has probably put more hours into playing Shock Troopers than anyone on the planet (and plenty of those hours are on video). He knows the game inside and out, and he found all of the same issues in Shock Troopers that I found in the Metal Slugs, but he also stumbled upon a couple of things I would have never even thought to check. Such as the difficulty settings, for instance. Every Neo Geo game has about 8 or so different difficulty options that you can change in the system settings, but DotEmu’s ports have just four: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard. Whereas the original release of Shock Troopers adjusted the damage you take depending on what difficulty you were playing on, the difficulty options in the Steam version, from what LordBBH can tell, do... absolutely nothing. If it were anyone else I would chalk it up to not knowing the game well enough to spot the differences, but this guy knows.

There’s also another issue that’s entirely specific to Shock Troopers and definitely worth noting. There were two versions of the game, and the thing with Shock Troopers is you can either select one character or a team of three that you can freely swap between in-level. In what’s generally considered the “main” version of the game, a team has individual life bars for each character. In the other version, the whole team shares a single life bar. This minimizes the difference between playing as a team and playing as a single character, and the version of the game that uses the shared life bar is treated as more of a curiosity than a thing people play. The DotEmu port uses the single life bar version, and there’s no option to switch to the other one. This is probably an easy thing to overlook if you’re not, you know, a company in charge of porting the game to a different platform. But if you are, it shows a real lack of knowledge and care for your product in my eyes.

If you want a really, really long look at LordBBH playing and discussing the Steam version of Shock Troopers (and a little bit of the next game), he uploaded a video of it to his YouTube channel. For now though, let’s move on.

Twinkle Star Sprites is a cute versus shoot ‘em up game where players compete to clear out the enemies on their side of the screen and launch attacks at the other player. According to the info I received, the Steam version has all the general problems of the previously discussed games, but with a couple of fun unique wrinkles. First of all, the online leaderboards report impossible scores. Like, scores in the billions. For a while people weren’t sure whether it was a bug or people were hacking, but it turns out the leaderboards take the sum of all scores attained in all the versus matches you’ve played and post that. This makes the feature useless for competition, as you can rack up higher and higher scores simply by playing more.

The other thing I was told is by far the weirdest one I’ve heard. While the previously mentioned useless difficulty options actually do something in Twinkle Star Sprites, what they do is increase the frame rate. The game itself is unaltered, it’s just sped up. I have absolutely no clue how or why this would happen, and I didn’t receive details on how much each option increases it by, but this is apparently a real thing that happens and I kind of can’t believe it.[UPDATE 1/12/17: My source on this has gotten back to me with claims that this does not actually happen. Whether or not it never did or was fixed in a patch is unknown. The difficulty settings currently do nothing. Leaving everything here for transparency.]

With that we’ve gone through all the specific examples I was told about and could find on my own, so that about wraps up the “what” of this whole situation (for now). Now we have to move on to the “why”. Why are these ports so consistently shoddy? Why does a company that positions itself as trying to make sure classic games don’t “get lost” continue to bungle everything in both the most basic and most baffling ways? The answer to that isn’t exactly clear. We could look at the case of DotEmu (legally, don’t start) using Nebula, an emulator last updated in 2007, for their 2015 Neo Geo Humble Bundle releases and question their competency. We could look at stuff like the apparently lacking Heroes of Might and Magic 3 HD release or the fact that their promotional Windjammers PS4 theme contains no actual elements from Windjammers and question their passion. We could look at any number of things and take any number of guesses, but I have a feeling the real reason for all of it is simple: they can get away with it. You can technically play through everything beginning to end, and the amount of people who care about these games to the point of easily noticing and articulating these flaws is minuscule compared to the greater number of players. Major outlets aren’t going to report on the input lag of a specific port of a 17 year old game. Negative Steam reviews complaining about frame drops aren’t going to drown out the people going “just like my child days!” and giving a thumbs up (except in the case of specific franchises where obsessives outnumber nostalgia fiends). The people just coming to these games for the first time aren’t going to have the frame of reference to know something is wrong, for all they can tell the game just normally sounds like that. DotEmu can phone it in because there’s not enough people to get the word out that they’re calling collect.

As for the final question: “where” does all this leave the PlayStation 4 port of Windjammers? Only time will tell. DotEmu has been talking up how they’ve had the French Windjammers community constantly playtesting and giving feedback to make sure they get things right, but then again David Sirlin said the same thing about having pro players help with the development of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It’s just not enough of an assurance to make me overlook the company’s extremely rough track record. I hope they prove me wrong and knock it out of the park. I would love to have an official and fully featured re-release of this game that I love, but I’m not holding my breath. My money’s on it being another in a line of DotEmu botch jobs. For a company supposedly devoted to making sure old games aren’t forgotten, it’s almost ironic that they’ve so consistently helped make sure they’re something even worse: misremembered.

Did I miss something? Get something completely wrong? Do you have something to add about a different game? Let me know! I want to update this article with as much relevant and accurate information as possible! Feel free to get at me on Twitter or send me an email.

#article

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 5 years

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Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

In late 2017, the YouTube channel Thoughty2 published a video exploring how music has changed over the decades. After starting with The Beatles, the narrator continues with an example of classic British understatement: “Fast forward to 2010, when Justin Bieber released his hit single Baby. This is generally considered to be a bad move.”

According to the research in the video, lyrical intelligence, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity have decreased while dynamic range compression has been used to make music louder and louder. In short, songs are becoming stupider – especially since every hit now includes the “millennial whoop” as well.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop music today is built using the exact same combination of keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software,” Thoughty2’s narrator states. “This might be considered as progressive by some people, but it truth it sucks the creativity and originality out of music – making everything sound somewhat similar.”

As a rule, businesses do not like risk. The video states that record companies today must spend anywhere from $500,000 to $3m to sign and market a new artist. That is a lot of money to spend on a band without being fully confident of success.

To minimise the risk and maximise the potential return, these companies optimise the music to do whatever seems to have worked in the past. Same set of instruments? Check. Simple lyrics? Check. Is it loud? Check. Simple melody? Check. Can you dance to it? Check. Millennial whoop? Check check.

But that optimisation process is a downward spiral that will result only in songs that will make Rebecca Black’s Friday sound as brilliant as Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It is creating music by paint-by-numbers. It is ticking boxes rather than being creative. And the same thing is occurring in the marketing industry today.

The rise of optimisation

After my first career in journalism years ago, I went into marketing and at one point met with a recruiter who was looking for a digital marketer. “I need an expert in SEO, ASO, and SMO,” she told me, further rattling off a lengthier list of random acronyms.

“Optimisation” became all the rage after companies discovered in the 2000s how much traffic websites could attract from search engines. After the birth of search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers tacked on the latter word to create “app store optimisation” and “social media optimisation” as well as countless other uses where the term also made little sense.

App store optimisation (ASO) looks for hacks to increase a mobile application’s ranking and findability in places such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store – rather than, you know, creating and promoting a real, useful app that people will like. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a useless term because social media is simply a set of channels and tools that can be used for any specific promotion tactic.

Now, businesses have always discussed general best practices. My last job in journalism in the 2000s was serving as the editor-in-chief and executive director of the Boston non-profit newspaper Spare Change News. (It is one of the newspapers in the United States that are modeled on The Big Issue in the UK.)

In that role, I once attended an annual convention of the North American Street Newspaper Association that was held in Halifax, Canada. There, the assembled staffers discussed the best practices in terms of pricing, circulation, and countless other topics. Today, marketers talk about optimisation, which often means the best practices in line with someone else’s algorithms or what has purportedly worked for others.

Buffer has published studies on the ideal lengths of everything from blog posts to tweets to headlines to Facebook updates. HubSpot has reported the best times to post on social media. But in the end, both best practices and optimisation come down to the same thing: doing what everyone else is doing.

The perils of optimisation

Once, I was in a meeting where people were discussing how to get more traffic from blog posts spread on Facebook. The ideas focused on using psychology and gaming the social network’s algorithm: “Let’s ask people to comment on posts to increase engagement!” and “Let’s change the posts so that they are lists whose headlines start with numbers!”

“Make a funny, creative video advertisement instead,” I suggested, noting the reach that humorous videos receive on Facebook. But no one listened. Everyone cared so much about optimising the form of the creative that no one thought about the creativity of the creative. They prioritised the form over the function.

The perfect example of this is when marketers see studies on which headlines get the most “engagement.” In June 2017, Buzzsumo analysed 100m headlines and found this information on which headlines receive the most clicks, “likes,” and shares on Facebook:

Too many digital marketers use such information and focus on producing whatever marcom is cheapest and then optimising it. Here is a sample of recent blog posts on Medium from a certain prolific marketing writer:

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

Too many marketers go overboard and focus on optimisation to produce rubbish marketing such as clickbait blog posts with the same headline format such as this: [number] [unnecessarily strong adjective] [noun] to [achieve some goal].

The internet will continue to be flooded with boring, optimised posts that all have the same title formats in an effort to get clicks or satisfy other short-term metrics. But optimisation is the enemy of creativity and leads to worst long-term results. (Just look at how many reboots of successful TV shows from the 80s and 90s have failed today. The studios likely thought that copying what was done before would guarantee another success.)

Redundant optimisation quickly becomes cliched, hurts the brand, and is obvious to consumers. If Oxford Academic were to title journal articles in the above manner, the Oxford brand would become laughable. The only way for BuzzFeed News to be taken seriously – and the publication is indeed doing excellent journalism – has been to decouple its brand from the notoriously clickbait parent company.

Optimised reflects only short-term thinking. Using clickbait to get people to a website is the same as knocking people over the head and dragging them into your store. They may be there, but they will not buy anything because they will hate your brand.

When everyone optimises for everything, it is no longer a competitive advantage. The only true competitive advantage that people will have is what rests in their brains – creativity. Without that, you will only be as good as everyone else.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

"Best practice is like training wheels – it keeps you safe whilst you're learning how to excel in your industry,” Helen Pollitt, head of SEO at the British digital marketing agency Reflect Digital, said. “To really differentiate yourself from the competition you need to be open to experimentation and growth, true optimisation requires facing failure. The issue with sticking to the safe zone of best practice is it stifles creativity."

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

“‘Difference’ isn’t just a two bob philosophy or a frivolous creative penchant. It is the most powerful communications tool there is to deliver commercial results. We have a vast amount of data to support that. Evidence from neuroscience, marketing science and creative effectiveness data all agree on this point; difference is commercially safer than ‘safety.’”

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

“Today, everyone scores their leads with Marketo and A/B tests thirty different varieties of their landing page. You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches zero,” he once wrote. "Using data to scale your marketing is critical. But when we all have access to the same types of data, it won’t be the data that differentiates us — it’ll be the art.”

Tom Goodwin recently said something similar: “A/B testing seems to be getting out of hand. Seems to be a way to offload decision making, not have a strategy, or gut or courage. What great art/music/products would ever be made this way?”

But tell that to those digital marketers who think only in terms of optimisation. Tell that to high-tech chief executives who want to mimic the marketing of competitors and think that they need only a differentiated product to be successful. (Just like record companies, startups are risk-averse because they do not want to lose the millions of investor dollars.)

In a quote attributed to John Ward from B&B Dorland in England, “advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

At Digital Annexe University in 2015, Dave Trott gave a classic speech on creativity. Effective communications, he said, needs to have an impact, needs to communicate, and needs to be persuasive. “Impact” is the most important part.

“Impact will get you on the radar,” he said. “Without impact, there’s nothing there. There might be a bloke outside on the street right now telling us the secret of all life, and we’ll never know because we can’t hear him. Without impact, nothing happens.”

Now, take the desire of so many marketers to optimise all collateral to match some alleged universal standard. How will their work be different from that of everyone else? How will their work stand out? How will their work have an impact?

“Optimisation might work for certain businesses for a certain amount of time,” Steve Daniels, an independent graphic designer in the UK, said. “This course of action may feel safer, but it only remains safe if there are no competitors who disrupt the market or start playing the brand game in a strong way. As soon as that happens, focusing on creativity is a great a way to play the long game – and to invest in your future success.”

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

So, if you want to listen to an album where the musicians wrote their own material, played dozens of instruments, and created songs that are lyrically intelligent, harmonically complex, and timbrally diverse, I have an assignment for you.

Listen to records or remastered CDs of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and The Smiths’ song How Soon Is Now? (1985) with a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some refreshment of your choice. Maybe it will kickstart some creative inspiration.

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by global marketing and technology keynote speaker Samuel Scott, a former journalist, consultant and director of marketing in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

This content was originally published here.

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 5 years

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Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

The rise of optimisation

The perils of optimisation

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

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Bored now.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

This content was originally published here.

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