#our current podcast revolution is a confusing time for me

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I am 385739373 years late but thank u ladies of @hoist-the-colours-podcast for doing the Gay Lord’s work and also i have crushes on all of you

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Gary Boomershine and The CoronaVirus Crisis

https://www.jayconner.com/gary-boomershine-and-the-coronavirus-crisis/

Gary Boomershine founded RealEstateInvestor.com in 2005 out of the need to scale and grow his own real estate investing and home buying business. With a family legacy in the real estate niche, and a long successful career in enterprise and emerging technology markets, Gary saw the vision for RealEstateInvestor.com.

He noticed the glaring opportunity to leverage people, processes and technology to gain a leg up in a changing and competitive marketplace. As he worked to develop and use the initial product and service, he saw his real estate business flourish by allowing him to work smarter - not harder and focusing on the one thing that makes money - talking to sellers and making offers.

That’s when RealEstateInvestor.com began offering its flagship product, REIvault, to the savvy investor market.

According to Gary, “Most small real estate enterprises limit their growth and many times fail because they lack real marketing and sales expertise along with the infrastructure to scale their business. Instead of being able to focus on closing deals and maximizing profits, they hit a wall trying to build and do everything themselves; and they simply can’t do it!”

REIvault caters to top producing agents, investors and smaller hedge funds who are looking for a competitive advantage in their local markets. Under the leadership of Gary Boomershine, this service has launched a “technology revolution” within the real estate niche; offering an alternative to the MLS by bringing pre-screened motivated sellers and buyers face to face at the right time.

Gary currently resides in Northern California with his wife and two daughters where he continues to manage a global team for RealEstateInvestor.com. He is actively involved in real estate investing and private lending. In his free time, he enjoys fly fishing, skiing, hiking, mountain biking and traveling with family.

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Jay Conner (00:12): Hey, here we are, Scott Paton. I believe we are live today.

Scott Paton (00:16): We are you live!

Jay Conner (00:17): Alright, well let me know when we have some live human beings starting to show up here with us.

Scott Paton (00:25): Three people already! Jay we're popular.

Jay Conner (00:28): How do they do that?

Scott Paton (00:29): I don't know. How did you find this everybody? Give us something in the comments.

Jay Conner (00:37): It's like we've been live for like 8 seconds and people are here. Maybe people are like waiting. I don't know. So everybody say hello. So obviously we know your name when you comment, but type in your city and state as to where you are tuning in from. We've got a fantastic guest today. Some of you may have heard from him before. Gary Boomershine is in the green room right now waiting for us to bring him back or bring him back out here. But we're going to be focusing today when we officially launched this show here in just a couple of minutes, we're going to be focusing in on obviously Corona virus, how things are different, what's different, how you need to be different.

Jay Conner (01:27): And Gary's going to be talking to us today about what he's doing different in his business, what his team is doing different. So as y'all are coming in to the live stream right now in the comments section right now below, doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or you're on YouTube, everybody say hello and where you are coming in from. And there you are. There's Paul from South Dakota. It says email and waiting. There we go. Scott. They saw the email and here is Stephen from Nashville, Tennessee. The first two year on YouTube we got Harold all the way from New York on my lands. Harold. So Harold there in from Facebook Harold in the comments section, let us know how things are with corona virus up there where you are in New York. I'm interested to know. So again, as you all are coming in either from YouTube or you are coming in from Facebook, everybody say hello and you're city and state that you're coming in.

Jay Conner (02:34): We're going to bring Gary Boomershine out here in just a second and talk about how things are different and how we can actually embrace this corona virus thing that's going on and how we can serve a lot of people and profit from it greatly as well. So we haven't officially started for those of y'all that have started, I'm going to give you a little sneak peek now. And that is, I am going to be putting on three free events and y'all should write this down. Three free events May 15th, 22nd and 29th. Those are Fridays. All three Fridays. I'm going to be teaching all day long. They're going to be absolutely free and you can go over right now to get free tickets for those three free fridays at JayConner.com/Fortune and get registered on that site. Hey Scott, did we get that fixed? We had one participant last hour that said that they could only register for the first Friday or were they confused?

Scott Paton (03:47): They were confused. Once you sign up, like we're making this as we're talking and so we don't have yet a sort of a thank you email that's going to go out, but we'll get that done today. And so when you sign up, you'll get emails telling you where to go so you can watch each of the three days as we set them up.

Jay Conner (04:08): Excellent. So yeah, those three free days, in fact, Gary Boomershine is going to be a part of it, but on those three free days, the first Friday May 15th is going to be all day long on private money. How you can raise a lot, not even raise, I mean, how to get it without even asking for it. How to get a ton of private money here in the midst of corona virus and have that at your disposal to buy houses, to buy commercial properties. I've got more private money coming at me right now than I have in forever. I mean, look what's happened in the stock market. People, they don't want to be investing in the stock market. They got money sitting on the sidelines. So that's Friday, May 15th, then we got Friday, May 22nd. That's going to be all day long. How do I make a fortune in foreclosures, right here in the midst of Corona virus?

Jay Conner (05:05): How to be getting ready for that, how to learn, how to be able to purchase those foreclosures, serve a ton of people while getting high profits yourself. There's gonna be an avalanche of foreclosures when we come out on the other side of coronavirus. I want to position you to be ready for that. That's the second free Friday, May 22nd. And then the third free Friday, May 29th I'm actually going to be teaching a strategy called how to locate and get free private money. So that's gonna be a strategy I'll be teaching as to another way that you can own properties without even having to raise any private money to do that. So get right on over to JayConner.com/Fortune and get registered for those three free Fridays. We got hellos from Nathan in Texas. And yes, Harold says up there in New York says, well, my wife and kids have me on lock down.

Jay Conner (06:06): I bet so Harold. Just had two casualties here in Erie County. And...

Scott Paton (06:12): Sorry to hear that.

Jay Conner (06:13): Our thoughts and prayers are for sure out to the families on that. And Fuquan! Fuquan's been on my show here before, I love that! Fuquan says, free Fridays. I love it. You gotta keep going, get right on over there and get registered at JayConner.com/Fortune and y'all can take advantage of that. Okay. Again, if you've just come in and you've not said hello yet, it doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or on YouTube right now. In the comment bar below the video we want to hear from you, tell us hello, what city and state you're from. And of course we appreciate you subscribing, rating and reviewing as well. So Scott, let's kick this show off officially so I can bring Gary. Oh there's, Greg, Uhmer. Hello, Greg from Durham, North Carolina, one of my mastermind members. Hey Greg. You know Greg from being at my live events.

Scott Paton (07:13): Yeah. I was going to say, Paulina just joined us from Syracuse. Hi. Hey Paulina.

Jay Conner (07:23): Glad to have you, Paulina. Alright! I'm ready. Scott, let's go officially live on this show.

Scott Paton (07:29): All right!

Jay Conner (07:30): And I'm not gonna, I'm not going to do my shameless plug. I'm going to get right on and let it be all about Gary.

Scott Paton (07:37): Alright! I will disappear and put you in place and here we go.

Jay Conner (07:55): Well, hello and welcome to another episode of real estate investing with Jay Conner. I'm Jay Conner, your host, also known as "The Private Money Authority". And you may be tuning in now, live on YouTube or Facebook, or you could be listening to the official podcast show on iTunes or on Google play. No matter where you're turning in from or when. And we're glad you're here. If you're tuning in from iTunes, be sure to subscribe, rate and review. We love the five stars that you give us and your testimonials. We're hitting right on now, right quickly at 300,000 downloads and listens here on the real estate investing with Jay Conner and we're glad to have you back now if you're tuning in on YouTube or Facebook, we need your help. We need your questions and your comments for our special guests today. I'm so excited to have him out or have him back and I'm going to bring him out here in just a second.

Jay Conner (08:58): I'm excited to have Gary Boomershine back here on the show. I had him here on the show just a couple of weeks ago and you know, due to Corona virus going on and all the ramifications of that and how things are different. We like, I told Gary, I said we got to have you back on the show. You're just as soon as possible and thankfully he's agreed to come back. So for those of you who have not been introduced to Gary Boomershine, let me just tell you a little bit about him. At first of all, Gary's been around the block more than a year or two. He's got a knack, a big time knack for actually staying ahead of the curve, staying in front of the emerging real estate trends. That's why I wanted to have Gary back here on the show just as soon as possible.

Jay Conner (09:49): I mean, folks, have we got a new and emerging real estate trend going on right now? Absolutely! You know, with Corona virus going on right now, the way we're doing the real estate investing business has changed. We're doing a lot of things virtually that we weren't doing virtual before. And even more so of a longterm consequence when we come out on the other side of Corona virus, things are going to be different, right? So that's one thing I'm gonna want to drill down with Gary because he did. He's got a, he's been through more than one or two cycles. He knows what to be looking at in his crystal ball and he's going to be sharing that with us. Well, back in 2004 Gary actually started his real estate investing career. So he and I started right at the same time and very quickly he built a direct mail software that was called sales team live and today it's grown into a much bigger service that is an amazing service.

Jay Conner (11:00): That's called RealEstateInvestor.com. RealEstateInvestor.com. So this company that Gary founded and started with the vision and what a team has put together, they've sent out over well over 40 million pieces of direct mail. They've made more than 2 million outbound seller calls. And Gary and his company have now been named in the fastest growing companies according to inks, five hundreds lists. And that's three years in a row. Another thing I love about Gary is his heart. Gary is a servant by nature. He's a servant first and everything that he does, and we're going to talk right now with Gary about what's different and what we can be expecting on the horizon. With that, Gary Boomershine my friend, welcome to the show.

Gary Boomershine (11:55): It is an absolute pleasure. What a wonderful introduction. I actually am. I can tell you I'm getting a little goose pimples on. What a fantastic introduction that is. Thank you Jay. We go back, we've got a long history of you and me. It seems like we're always running into each other. We'll be at speaking events or you and I were in Tampa and it's like, Oh my gosh, bear hug to Jay Conner. Even though, even though we're on the opposite sides of the Island, I'm in California and you're on the other side of the country and you've got the area where we're at, the $2 million price tag and 200,000 I'd actually prefer not to be in California right now because buying real estate and about what, what's to happen right now is what we've been looking for. If you've been around the block for awhile.

Jay Conner (12:41): Yeah. So yeah, you're in California. So folks here, here's the perspective. So I'm here in Eastern North Carolina, this little teeny tiny town called Morehead city, North Carolina population 8,000 my entire target market is only 40,000 people, but we still do two to three deals a month. On average profit of $67,000 but here's the point I wanted to bring out based on what Gary just said. Our median price point is 225,000. What's your median price point in your market there where you live, Gary?

Gary Boomershine (13:15): Well, in where I'm at, it's probably 1.5 million and I would say the median in this sort of Val you know, California where we're living, San Francisco Bay area is closer to about 770. It's insane.

Jay Conner (13:29): Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, my medium price here is $225,000. I mean, folks, you can't even buy an outhouse in Gary's backyard for $225,000. And if you don't know what an outhouse is, well my granddaddy could tell you that's where he used to go get private time from my grandmother.

Gary Boomershine (13:51): Yeah. You know, what we just came out of was the end of the cycle, a typical real estate cycle. We can talk about that, but yeah, it's a seven year cycle. It's euphoric, which means everybody, you know, it's like that's the time you don't, you don't want to buy, you want to prepare. And there were, there was a tear down down the street from me, a literally a tear down of a house that sold for 1.35 million. 1.35 million and somebody paid cash.

Jay Conner (14:21): They paid 1.35 million and tore the house down. So they'd bought it for the dirt and now they're, they're building whatever.

Gary Boomershine (14:29): Yeah. Complete insanity.

Jay Conner (14:32): Wow! So, Gary, just so our viewers and attendees here don't have to wait to the very end of the show. How about going and, because I want us to dive in here on your perspective, your crystal ball about where you see this thing going and the ramifications and consequences and opportunities from Corona virus. Then before I can get you to dive in on that, just go ahead and tell everybody a little overview about your amazing company, RealEstateInvestor.com and the kind of services that you and your company provide.

Gary Boomershine (15:10): Okay. I'd love to do that. So there is, one of the biggest holes in real estate. Historically, we've been, a lot of us have been targeting off market deals. That means go direct to the seller. They're not on the MLS. It's how do we get in front of, you know, the hot and motivated sellers that are ready, willing and able to sell and but nobody else is targeting them. And that's off market. So there's a couple of ways to do it. The ones that are most proven is direct mail sending out text messages, right? Legally. Ringless voicemail, which means dropping a voicemail to them where the phone doesn't even ring and then cold calling. So number of ways just to, you know, you gotta buy the list of names and addresses correctly, and then you've got to market to those people.

Gary Boomershine (16:00): And with the output of being, you know, qualified sellers that you can go meet with and close and it's a lot more of a daunting task than most people think. And so we perfected it. I started this from my background in 2005 and today, fast forward, we've done over 50 million pieces of direct mail. I do it for a handful of people around the country, about 1200 active investors that are actively buying. So over 50 million pieces of direct mail. I've got every response rate, which means every metric around what's working in what part of the country. And on top of that, I have a phone team that does, and a system. A proprietary follow-up system that does all of the follow-ups so that we can generate the leads unless our some of our clients have their own, but we put those into a proprietary system. And I can talk about that does automated follow-up. It's almost like a little engine that basically says, Oh, this, this person needs to get an email. Oh, this person needs to get a text message with the exactly the right word. So most of us as real estate investors, we don't have to do any of the thinking. And then on top of that, I have a phone team. Those are called inside sales agents or lead processors. Somebody that's dialing for dollars. That's calling those and following up on all those seller leads at the right time with the right message. And then the output of that is an appointment. A scheduled qualified appointment that can be passed over to a real estate investor or agent to go and make offers and close deals. And so we've done about, I think we're at about 3.5 million outbound phone calls on behalf of our members.

Gary Boomershine (17:56): And so we've got lots of different services and offerings with RealEstateInvestor.com we've got lots of free stuff. But yeah, you check us out if you're, if you're new or you're super, super experienced RealEstateInvestor.com may have something for you. And we'd love talking to real estate professionals. And you know, we're super passionate about it. I have about 115 people on staff all over the world. And I, we recently we did an inc 500 fastest growing company three years in a row. And recently we used to be called REI vault. You can actually see that behind me, but we recently merged, acquired a couple of software companies and have merged into RealEstateInvestor.com which is a brand that I've owned for a long time. So RealEstateInvestor.com is a place to, you know, help real estate investors and especially being able to get out of the busy work. The $10 an hour work, that is such a booby trap for most of us, right? We get into real estate for having a life and financial freedom and many people get stuck doing $10 an hour work and wonder why they still have a $10 bank account. And so we're really passionate about helping people kind of jump the line in real estate, whether they're new and they're trying to actually make it real. And have a new lifestyle. And a new life around real estate is the vehicle or people that have been doing this for decades and they're looking to scale and go even even higher. So...

Jay Conner (19:36): if you're just joining us, my special guest today is Gary Boomershine of coming all the way with us from California. And he has an amazing company that he has created. RealEstateInvestor.com with fantastic sources and automated services for locating motivated sellers and having the follow-up process totally automated. So Gary, let's dive in right now to what we got going on with corona virus as far as a real estate investor goes and how you and your team are supporting real estate investors right now to locate motivated sellers and do business. What's different today? What, how are we, how are we going about, how are you going about doing deals differently than product corona virus?

Gary Boomershine (20:30): Yeah, great question. So I want us, I think a great way to start. Number one, we've never been in exactly this situation before. This is new for all of us. In fact, it's new for the entire world. And what we can do though is can use history as a guide in a crystal ball for part of the future. And one of the things I've had a podcast for the last two years and almost every podcast I've been talking about this coming downturn. And I also saw it back in about 2006, 2007 real real estate is a seven year cycle. It has been a seven year cycle for a hundred years and it just happens that this last cycle has been the longest that we've actually had in a hundred years. It was, it got, you know, it went seven years, eight years, nine years.

Gary Boomershine (21:24): We were actually almost at year 11 depending upon where you start and, and those cycles there is a massive transformation of wealth at each of those cycles. And so the hardest part for most real estate investors, especially a full time active real estate investors is actually at the end of the cycle. And so where you really, you know, you would go back to Warren Bufet, you want to buy low, you want to sell high, you also want to buy when there's panic, not when there's euphoria, right? Warren Bufet, one of the smartest, richest guys in the world. I was actually at a shareholder meeting and one of my favorite quotes actually came from his really as COO, CEO, the guy, the brains behind Warren buffet Berkshire Hathaway as Charlie Munger. And he said, his success formula is what's called K. I. S. S. Keep it simple, stupid.

Gary Boomershine (22:21): He goes, you know, you buy. Real estate is a simple game. Nothing new under the sun, right? You don't have to reinvent any wheels. You basically find what works in the current market and replicate it. And then once you, once you make it work, you can make it better for yourself. But a lot of people make the mistake of trying to reinvent the wheel. So we're coming out of a time where we're going to see probably one of the greatest transformations of wealth in history. Real estate investors that are properly prepared and positioned and trained are going to do incredibly well. And I can kind of tell you what we're preparing for a lot of us. I've been interviewing some top, top, top performers around the country. We have Facebook, private, we're basically calling it the beacon of light for real estate investors.

Gary Boomershine (23:15): It's real estate investor. It's basically called real estate investor beacon. We can post that you know, at some point that's it's a private Facebook group we're delivering lots of content there in interviews with people around the country. But what we're finding is most of us that are active are actually excited about this market. This is not a time to be watching the TV. Most of us, there's a lot of people on the sidelines right now. They're watching the TV. I call that fear porn. It's a lot of people, like, my daughter hates me using the last word. She's like, Oh dad, you got to come up. But it really is right. It's panic and a lot of people are frozen and this is not the time to freeze up. We call it the 3PS. This is a time to protect, which is to get your house in order. This is a time to start to pivot and into the moneybmaking activities so that as soon as the market's ready to go, and then the third P is to profit. And...

Jay Conner (24:15): Hey Gary, do you know how many new Netflix subscribers there are in the past six weeks since we've been in Corona virus?

Gary Boomershine (24:24): It's incredible! It's incredible! You know, I, I came alive, I have videos all over Facebook and I talk about social distancing, all these new acronyms too that I don't even want to go down because that becomes like, you know where they're coming from. It's like all of a sudden everybody's parroting these new, you know, these acronyms that had been created by, you know, the guys up on top. But social distancing for me means I am social distancing myself from watching any of the TV. Social distancing myself for being in the house. I can't tell you I'm out hiking, I'm walking, I'm getting a new perspective. This is a really an opportunity of a really reflection, right? And being thankful but also preparing up and people have been asking me like, we're as a family, I've got two daughters and we're having a blast.

Gary Boomershine (25:15): And a lot of us on the real estate side are starting to pivot and we can talk about sort of where I see the market going. But this, there is a lot of money to be made right now around what I consider virtual wholesaling. Especially for people that are fairly new. It's an opportunity. While you know, there's a massive panic, a lot of people aren't paying rents, right? So a lot of these, what we call burned out landlords are not getting the rents and they're realizing, wow, this is an opportunity for me to sell and unload. That's one huge opportunity. There's, there was $3 trillion of money in what's called the i-buyer network. The i-buyer model, instant buyer, that's like Zillow and open door and offer pad. Basically institutional investors. There was $3 trillion available to these sellers where they could sell that.

Gary Boomershine (26:12): Those were competing with us, Jay and myself, and a lot of you, hopefully all of you. And that money is gone. That money literally disappeared off of the streets. And so now all of a sudden we've got this great opportunity where people are panicking and this is an opportunity where you can make money literally without ever going and seeing the house. So a lot of us are doing that. I do think that the market's gonna shift over the next 12 to 24 months where there's going to be an incredible opportunity or an incredible buy opportunity of buying foreclosures, specifically the ones that go back to the bank. And an incredible opportunity to pick up longterm, appreciating assets in the right market at a great price and buying them creatively with cash that you raise, but also create a financing that you can get from the seller and these types of markets.

Gary Boomershine (27:10): So I'm super excited. I, you know, obviously we're locked down. There's a lot of unknown. There's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of sequestering of information, right? In fact, you can't even be on YouTube now and quote the C word. That sounds, I call it the cerveza bug by the way, you know, correctly the cerveza bug because if you actually use the acronym they will take you down. The YouTube CEO basically said, if it doesn't support the narrative of the world health organization, they're, they're basically pulling all those videos. And so just an interesting time, but this is an opportunity to really connect with other investors. And if you're an agent, other agents and a lot of us are preparing and not stopping what we're doing, this is not a time to stop the business because if you don't have marketing and you don't have sales, then your business is toast. And this is an opportunity, a lot of us, I'll tell you, like a lot of us that have been doing this business, we're doubling up on marketing right now because this is the time.

Gary Boomershine (28:17): There's a lot of people that are not doing it. Our competitors are not doing it. And this is a time to take those old leads. If you've been doing this business for a while, we're actually going back to all those old leads and with the right system and following up and getting them on the phone and finding that, Hey, there, now all of a sudden they're interested people that said, you know, they were hanging up and said, don't bother me. Or they said, Hey, I'm not interested in selling. All of a sudden they're starting to open up again. It's really awesome.

Jay Conner (28:44): Yeah. So are you advising your clients now to until we come out of corona virus to back off of their marketing? Any looking for motivated sellers or to stay consistent or to increase their budget?

Gary Boomershine (29:00): Yeah, well it's, there's a lot of components around that. So this is first and foremost, if this is really a time to double up on marketing and this is definitely time to double up on your follow-up specifically following up. And I can go through the math on that, but you got to have, marketing is not the end all be all. Okay. You have to, you use marketing to generate leads and then there's a sales component that is to convert those leads into dollars. And you have to have both working. So a lot of us are making sure that, you know, the marketing is fairly easy. You can use a company like RealEstateInvestor.com if you want. It's basically, it's a numbers game. It's really a numbers game. It's like I have to spend a dollar to make $5.

Gary Boomershine (29:50): It's a return on investment. And knowing the math around, you know, what market you're in and how much do you have to spend to get enough leads that then you can get on the phone and then convert. And so this is a time but you have to have the sales piece in place as well. And what I found is that the, you gotta have marketing to generate leads. You have to have a system to automate the follow-up. And because there's massive amounts of follow-up required to close a deal, it's just the way it works. And then you need a phone team that also is actually talking to the sellers. And then preferably if you're a real estate professional, all you want is the good ones. You want the ones that are saying, yes, I got a three bedroom, two bath house, I'm interested in selling properties currently vacant. And so as long as you've got both marketing and sales working, this is a time to double up in my opinion.

Jay Conner (30:48): Yeah. So Gary, in your opinion and what you've observed, where do you think real estate investors missed the ball in their follow-up or lack of follow-up?

Gary Boomershine (31:02): Yeah, great question. Number one, not doing it. Not doing it. Most. What we saw as the difference between success and failure was really those that did it consistently. We're actually converting and those that didn't complaint and they basically said, okay,

Jay Conner (31:20): How often should you, how often should a real estate investor follow up? And who should they follow up with? I mean, should they follow up with the people that said, you know, don't you ever call me again?

Gary Boomershine (31:32): Here's the number. This is a Harvard review. And by the way, this is not just real estate. This is almost any type of direct response marketing, direct mail being one of them. Cold calling be another. Leads coming in from Facebook or you know, Google pay per click is what they call it. 90% of the profits come from the sixth contact and after. 90% come from the sixth interaction. Okay. Interaction with the seller. Like they're actually interacting with you. Less than 10% of all investors and real estate agents in the entire country follow up more than twice. Okay. And why? Because it's a massive amount of work. I mean, so that's number one. Number two is trying to do it yourself is like. I use the concept of opening up a pizza parlor. Imagine if we're going to be a business owner.

Gary Boomershine (32:38): Okay, that's what we are. If we're actually doing full time real estate and trying to buy and flip properties kind of full time, that's a business operator. You're a real estate business operator, not a true real estate investor. A true real estate investor according to Warren Bufet. Not Gary Boomershine. But Warren Bufet says you have money, you buy a physical asset, which is a real estate property, whatever kind it is, that's the asset. And then you hold it and you take all the benefits of real estate over the long haul, right? And the tax advantages and the appreciation. So a real estate business operator. Imagine if you're, imagine that you have a pizza company and you decide to invest in a pizza company and imagine you don't have that much money. So you, you're the cook and you're making the pizzas, you're taking the phone calls, you know, you're putting up the advertising and handing out all the flyers. And then you're taking the orders when people come in. Or taking the phone calls for their pizza and then you're flying back to the back of the kitchen and you're making the pizzas and then you get in the delivery truck and you go deliver them.

Gary Boomershine (33:43): And that's that. It's impossible. It's not a business, right? That is a job and a really terrible job cause you're not going to make that much money, right? So really what you want to do is you want to leverage, just like we leverage money, right? OPM, which is using other people's money. That's the whole game of real estate is you leverage money to borrow money at one rate, make money than another, and take the spread. You want to leverage people, other people. And there are time, experience and resources. And you know, and you get a massive return on investment. So as a real estate investor, a real estate operator, our time is really worth somewhere. If you do the real calculation, if we want to make a half a million to a million dollars or whatever the number is, typically your time value of your time is worth between 250 and a thousand dollars an hour.

Gary Boomershine (34:38): So if you're doing $5 or $10 an hour work, like pulling mailing lists and sending out licking stamps and talking to sellers and doing all the text follow up, you know, you don't have enough time in the day to actually go and raise money and close deals. You're doing one or the other. So you want to leverage people at a fraction of the cost. That's how you get a massive return. So that's like a lot of people come to RealEstateInvestor.com to say, Hey, how do I get the maximum bang for my buck? By spend a dollar, how do I actually make five with as little work as possible? And then we say, Oh, let's set up your marketing if you want, let's set up your followup system in 24 hours. It's all automated. You don't have to do a darn thing except, you know, do a little bit of training on how to use it.

Gary Boomershine (35:23): And then if you want to use our phone team to actually do all the work, we can do that. And then we do it for them. In any parts of that, a lot of people have said, Hey, can we just use your follow-up system? Or, Hey, can I just use your phone team? And so we have those capabilities. So the follow-up is absolutely key. The phone team have actually, there's one thing that you cannot automate in this business. For all of you that are fairly new people that have been doing it will totally get this. But you cannot automate the talking to people. You have to do. There's a live human interaction with the seller and with the buyer that you cannot have a system that automatically does it for you. Down the road maybe artificial intelligence, right? 10 or 20 years. There's a live interaction because when you're buying a physical property from a seller, there's a relationship. There's some trust building and there's coming up with an offer or a solution to their problem.

Gary Boomershine (36:23): Okay? And that can't be automated. You can automate everything else. And those that do it right and automate all of that work, the $10 an hour work so that they can just get, you know, 10 appointments a week. Five appointments a week. Two appointments a week. Whatever the number is, right? Then it becomes a numbers game. And when you get good at this business, you can then hire a sales person, right? And leverage them to do that work for you. So you're really standing back and just collecting a piece of big, a nice piece of the pie.

Jay Conner (36:58): My special guest today is Gary Boomershine, creator and founder of RealEstateInvestor.com has amazing service for helping you as a real estate investor, locate motivated sellers and has a way to completely automate the process when it comes to follow-up. Gary, is, we are about to wrap up the show. Tell our audience and viewers at what point in RealEstateInvestor.com automation process does either the real estate investor or the real estate investors acquisitionist as you just said, who actually is going to be talking to the seller? At what point in the process do they become involved?

Gary Boomershine (37:40): Yeah. It's so funny. A lot of people come in and they're like, so you do all this stuff. What's left for us to do? And I hear it, we hear that. And Julia who talks to most of our, she's an investor herself out of Dallas, but she says, you do have to close the deals. You do have to, we're going to tee up these deals for you via with a, here's the script, here's exactly what the seller said. You're going to have to go out and make the offers to them. And negotiate a great deal and close it and profit from it. So, you know, we're going to be on the front end, really is your team is your expert resource team that are experts. But we're not stealing your pencils and drinking your coffee, right? We're not sitting in your office.

Gary Boomershine (38:26): You don't have to train us to do anything. You don't have to hire somebody in the Philippines to, and keep them motivated and manage them and make sure that they're moonlighting with like 10 other clients. Like that's what we do. And our team will manage that for you. And it's pretty awesome. So you do have to close the deals. There's a lot of, you know, we love, you know, we love, we don't provide the training. We typically the training of real estate. There's some great people, like you guys have an incredible three day free event. We're actually promoting your upcoming event here because we've got some great people and we know exactly what you teach is congruent to, you know, what we think the market's going to be doing. And so you go to, you know, you got to JayConner.com and do that training.

Gary Boomershine (39:21): And then if you've got the training, you combine it with what we have and it's like, it's like peanut butter and chocolate, right? You got the great training and the great coaching and then you got the great system and boom should, should work. But there is work. You know, anybody that thinks that you can truly just make money in your underwear and go to bed you know, broke and wake up rich. That's not real estate. That's not anything that I've ever seen. And anytime I hear somebody talk about that, I say run away from it quickly. Right? Cause it's, I'm 51 years old and I've spent hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars on pretty much every training known to mankind and I've never seen anything that just pops out of a box and works perfectly. There is some stuff that you have to do.

Jay Conner (40:06): Yeah. But money still does not grow on trees for sure. Thank you so much for coming on for the show today. Parting comments?

Gary Boomershine (40:16): You know, I think this is a I know in the crazy time that we have right now this is a crazy time and I just think that I always go back, I'm a faith based guy and I go back to first Timothy one seven, which is God did not give us a spirit of fear but that of love and self-discipline. Right? And so I really embrace that fear is false evidence appearing real and right. And so I just think this is a time to, again, the 3PS. And this is, you know, this is going to be an interesting this week, the next 12 months are really going to be around taking advantage of the current market. But what we're going to see is we're going to see an opportunity for a massive, you know, buying opportunity because there is inflation coming, which means assets, physical properties are going to skyrocket.

Gary Boomershine (41:15): And I anticipate that being in the, really around the 24 month timeframe. So using that as an opportunity to learn from guys like Jay and be prepared, right? You're gonna want to learn how to raise money. You're gonna want to learn how to do the virtual real estate. You want to learn how to do creative deals, raise money, et cetera, as I said, and be surrounding yourself with the people that are doing this business today and that are abundance mentality and willing to teach you. That's my, that's my take. Long winded, but that's my take.

Jay Conner (41:49): I'm right there with your brother. There you have it folks, my good friend and special guest and expert, Gary Boomershine. Gary, thank you for coming on. And again, thank you to everyone tuning in. We had a bunch more people tune in here. We've got Paula. We got Jermone. We got heroine. We got Javier. And we've got the whole crowd here. So thank you for joining folks. I'm Jay Conner, "The Private Money Authority". Be sure and connect with Gary boomershine at www.RealEstateInvestor.com. And here's to taking your real estate investing business to the next level. We'll see all of y'all on the next show. Bye for now.

Scott Paton (42:40): Okay, well I didn't hang up. We're still live. It's the after show. It's the after party after show where all the really good stuff gets talked about.

Jay Conner (42:48): And then we've got a bunch of people still here on live. So again, thanks to everyone for tuning in. Just a real quick plug since we've finished the actual show being turned into the podcast. You're welcome, Harold. Thank you for coming and y'all stay safe up there in New York. But for those of y'all that came in after we got started, I got three free days, May 15th, 22nd and 29th. These are going to be all day trainings, free virtual that I'll be conducting. That's Friday, May 15th, Friday, May 22nd and 29th and the first Friday so you can get registered for free at www.JayConner.com/fortune. The first Friday May 15th is going to be all about private money.

Jay Conner (43:38): How to get a bunch of private money right here in the midst of Corona virus. I got more private money coming on my shelf than I've had in a long time. The second Friday, May 22nd is going to be how to serve a ton of people in foreclosure and make a fortune in foreclosures, particularly when they come on the other side of the Corona virus. I want to get you all prepared for it. That's what we're going to do on Friday, May 29th I'm, excuse me, Friday May 22nd and then Friday May 29th is going to be how to locate and get a bunch of free private money. I'm not going to tell you what free private money is until that Friday, but I got a strategy to teach you is that how you can buy a bunch of property without even having to raise any private money as well. So you all get on over there to JayConner.com/fortune and get registered for that. Think Gary Boomershine is participating those three free Fridays, so we're looking forward to Gary being a part of it as well.

Scott Paton (44:37): What else, Scott, before we let all these people go?

Scott Paton (44:41): I was trying to think of one last sort of deep question to ask Gary and about real estate. And I was just coming to blank because you really covered everything that I was curious about. But one thing that comes to mind. Gary, is there anything that you do that keeps your attitude and your mindset in the right place? Because I know that, you know, I'm sure that there's, well, suicide rates are going through the roof. Alcohol and marijuana are going through the roof. So obviously a lot of people are having a hard time dealing with this situation. It's not an easy situation. So what are some of the things that you would recommend people do?

Gary Boomershine (45:20): Yeah. Well, what one is, I am a, gosh, I've been where almost all of us have been. I come from being a crazy workaholic and it's very easy to be a workaholic and then repeating the same cycle over and over again. It's the Albert Einstein quote of insanity, right? Of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. So you have to change. If you want a different outcome, you have to change what you do. Mindset, the most expensive real estate is the six inches between here and here. It is really all about our mindset. I do what's called habit stacking. And these are creating new habits. Typically 2200. So you want a new habit.

Scott Paton (46:06): 2200 new habits?

Gary Boomershine (46:08): It's 20 slash 200. If you want a new habit, it's really 20 days is 20 days or 200 times. And so when I stack habits, I actually, I've got multiple coaches. I always have a, like I have, I have four CEO coaches in my life, one of them being a personal trainer. So whenever I want to perfect something and improve something, I always go get a coach. That's a been a life changer. Number two is I associate myself with likeminded people. I do masterminds, the huge mastermind proponent. The third is I always follow a best practice. I go and I find something that's already working and I just, I just grab it as my own. But habit stacking. So let me walk through one of the habits I do. I have a 5, 10, 3 rule. All right. I wake up and this actually came from a coach of mine years ago. I wake up at five, we all have the same 24 hour day. So how can somebody I used to use bill Gates's name, but I don't really like to refer to him anymore.

Gary Boomershine (47:25): I'll just leave it at that. But anyway people can read into that however you want, but you know, how, how do you take somebody like Warren Bufet, right? Or somebody like Jack Welch who ran general electric or, or those guys have the same 24 hours and how are they able to do what they do within the same hours? Cause the time is the, is the most precious commodity on this planet. It's our time. And when you do the exercise, I'm 51, when I actually look at the number of really hours that I have, it's actually pretty limited. And then I look at, I look at the number of hours that I want to have a life and how do I fit? How do I fit my work time into all the other stuff that I want to do. Skiing and fly fishing and hiking and biking and spending time with my family.

Gary Boomershine (48:14): So here's what I do. I go to bed earlier and I wake up at five in the morning. I push out my Workday actually till 10. So that gives me five hours of personal time. And I've found that I don't actually have any time issues anymore because I have, I have five hours. And then during those five hours I work out, I exercise. I actually have dropped like 40 pounds in the last couple of years by doing that. And I journal. And I do prayer. And I read scripture. This is my morning time. That's my time. I always make coffee for my wife and clean the kitchen too. That's actually that by so many dividends I've been doing that.

Scott Paton (49:00): That's a way, great way of being in service to your relationship.

Gary Boomershine (49:04): Absolutely. Amazing. And then I follow a, the one thing that Dr. Gary Keller, Keller Williams, right? The founder. He's got 2 million realtors, realtor teams around the country. He has the one thing. So I actually will go in and put my one thing that I'm going to do to move the marker. There you go! I actually interviewed his business partner. Jay. I actually just did a podcast with him. It was amazing. But the one thing, and now I'm able to sometimes do as many as three. What's the one thing that I'm going to do as a CEO to move the marker today and then the 3, 5, 10. The three is the three hours that I work in my businesses not just business. I actually have three businesses that I'm going to move the marker and then I focus on that one thing. And I do that before going to social media, responding to email, returning phone calls.

Gary Boomershine (50:04): I do the one thing that's going to be the money making activity to move the marker my business. And that's really changed my life. That's the mindset. I am very optimistic and thankful. Like I lived in a world of being thankful for what we have. And what we have the freedom, the, you know, I told my daughters, I'm like, there's, you know, with all the stuff going on, why do we pray at night? And it's to be thankful for what we have because we don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. And it gives me a mad amazing knowing that allows me to live in the present and not about the future. Cause we really don't know what the future is. And I can tell you that gives me an amazing amount of peace and then I, and then I can, I can deliver that same amount to my team. And let's see, what else? I would say being a servant leader, this is not like being Caesar. It is the servant leader is the triangle, except upside down. I'm the servant for my team. It's not the other way around. And I can't tell you how the team will run through walls if you have a servant heart in all you do.

Scott Paton (51:13): Awesome. Well thanks for sharing that Gary. Really appreciate it.

Jay Conner (51:16): Thank you so much Gary. Well look, Scott I'm gonna jump off. And Scott, I guess you are taking care of Gary and his team with everything that they need for our joint venture.

Scott Paton (51:30): Yeah, I'm working on that right now. So in the next day or two I'll be reaching out to everybody.

Gary Boomershine (51:35): Awesome. I'm really excited. I've been, we've been putting together all the special training that we want to do for your three day events and I'm really excited of being able to share with everybody who's signing up with JayConner.com/fortune. Correct?

Jay Conner (51:57): There you go! Don't let your people push that out because we've got to get your affiliate in place to cookie all of your people.

Gary Boomershine (52:05): Okay. Love it.

Scott Paton (52:07): I'm gonna be working with Jay's on that today and tomorrow.

Scott Paton (52:10): Thank you so much, Garry. Scott, I'll see you in 55 minutes. Yep, right. Bye bye.

[filthysavagecreatures]

From Under the Vault: Sleeping Boy Collective Interview

Disclaimer: This was a transcription I found in a notebook. Nowadays, founding members Maria, Paeng, and Alva were part of SBC back then.

I will tell vague details of the people I interviewed from this new group of people I got acquainted with. They call themselves Sleeping Boy Collective. This group was formed as a tribute to their late friend Raffy whose favorite song was "Sleeping Boy the Paranoid" by Funeral Diner.

I remember that it was raining when I went against the trafficky Saturday of summer time 2015 from Parañaque. I even got lost on the way to QC (way, way lost. As far as Navotas) because I was not familiar with the commuting route of the area. This technically was my first time in Maginhawa. It was a blast.

I remember entering the house they were in. As I remember, I recall Alva, Maria, and Grois rents the place. Paeng is always around there.

Maria was helping Clarenz (which was coincidentally, part of SBC as well) set up his offset guitar. They were also hinting a part of a new song they wrote which ended up as "Corpse Medicine" from Beast Jesus' first EP In Various States of Disassembly. After that I was confused and they took me to dinner. I remember before leaving that Alva muttered something like "Uy, wala munang uuwi ha. Manonood tayo ng movie. Wild Tales."

While walking, I asked Maria where did they get a copy of Sunbather. They were heavily into that record back then. They replied, "one of my best friends shipped it to me."

Tim's sister, Tita Thysz gave an improptu tour in Maginhawa as we were walking to that dinner place. She introduced us the place so deliberately, that in my opinion, she can describe Maginhawa with her eyes closed.

Her introduction of Van Gogh is Bipolar, Caution Hot, and the original food park located there caught my attention.

All I remember from that dinner was Tim was eating dinner with red horse beer as his drink, I think Paeng was drinking beer too. I cannot remember the things I have ordered. Maria had this huge Root Beer Float which I regret not ordering the first time I saw it. Alva and Maria have small strands of cat fur in their shoulders, their, backs, well... in basically their shirts. By the way, their cats are friendly and one of them jumped in my lap before we were leaving.

Ocho from Quezo/Franco passed by when we were eating dinner. I was the only one who noticed.

The next stop was dessert! This place which I cannot remember the name of, served locally-flavored iced cream based on the regions of the Philippines. Tim actually payed for my dessert. (He owes me 150 bucks from the Algernon Cadwallader cd I sold him. So technically, we're even.)

This place ended up to be the go-to place where I take my friends whenever I get the chance to visit Maginhawa. Their "Bicol"-flavored iced cream is highly commendable.

Before we went back, Tim's sister had other plans for the night so she won't be coming back with us. Clarenz had to go back home since he's from the South and it's a long ride home.

We bid our goodbyes and the girls and Paeng bought more food and drinks (AKA red horse and pulutan).

While we sat down on their second floor waiting for them, there were are a lot of pedals on Maria and Alva's boards (I remember specifically, Maria showed me his mooer triangle Buff and Boss HM2.) and random guitars that I cannot describe back then. I'm pretty sure there was a Jazzmaster there somewhere.

This whole interview happened because Tim and I were present in the last King Ly Chee show last Friday. I asked him if I could do an interview with SBC because we plan to have an article posted for Timog Bulletin. He invited me to go to their place for the interview.

Kuya Ebong's Timog Bulletin blog was still active back then before he and Kuya Darwin turned it into a podcast a few years later. The next day, I went for it. Unfortunately, the recorded file was lost. This is all that is left and a bunch of interesting memories.

Here is the rest of the transcript which is the interview I salvaged:

Me: Ayun, background check. Ilang taon kayo nung nakarinig kayo ng punk, hardcore, screamo, post hardcore, or anything?

Maria: Anything extreme? Well, nonconventional music, I've been listening to weird shit since I was like what? Seven years old. 'Cause my mom used to work in a music store. I crate dig and I find cassettes that nobody wanted. I got into obscure electronic shit. Stuff like Atari Teenage Riot, Orbital, Chemical (brothers)

Alva (jokingly): My Chemical Romance?

Maria: Mga ganun. (random laughs in the background.) It was eventually when I was a teenager, siguro mga 14-15 ako, I got into stuff from Victory Records tapos-

Tim: Blame Snapcase.

Maria: Oo! Snapcase, Thursday... tapos dahil sa kakapakinig ko sa stuff na ganun parang binibili ko na yung cassettes and cds nila, nakikita ko yung "Thank Yous" nila. Ito like, "thank you to this band and that band."

Nagustuhan ko yung Thursday, baka magustuhan ko rin yung taste nila sa mga friends nila and everything y'know? These bands that they think they acknowledge.

Paeng: What's up brother? (Brings in food and beer)

Tim: What's up?

Paeng: Yeah.

Alva: Haha, biglang may Paeng.

Maria: So it just went from there. I have been listening to non-mainstream music since I was 13-14 until 25 going to 26 now. So that's me, who's chiming in next?

Me: Ayun, bale... lahat kayo.

Tim: Ok, ako naman. Ah, siguro nagsimula akong makinig ng non-mainstream shit nung may nag recommend sa akin na makinig or pumunta ng fourfa (fourfa.com) office mate ko siya sa net café tapos uh, elder statesman namin siya dati sa school. Parang, "O sige ganyan-ganyan ka naman pumorma, ganyan-ganyan ka magsuot, eto pakinggan mo." Or "puntahan mo yung site na to. Ako naman, "o sige." So doon na yun nagpunta lahat.

So... hindi ko siya actually nagustuhan kaagad. I didn't actually save it on the cellphone and played it throughout.

Parang nangyari, nagbackdate ako ng "ano ba yung (pinagmulan)?" Bakit ba sila gumagawa ng ganitong jams? Parang from one thing led to another then you see Revolution Summer (Dischord Records era of hardcore) parang ganun, tapos parang hindi ko pa rin siya napagtripan kaya pumunta pa rin ako ng pababa.

Nakita ko yung DC hardcore. Bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, tsaka Bad Brains, etc. Saka ko pa lang nakita na "Huh? Eto pala yung ginagawa nila 'tas parang yun yung unang beses kong nafigure out na ito pala yung pwede ko mapag-tripan na kailangan kong sabihin na, "Uy eto ganito, ganito, ganyan." So that was I think in second year high school? Ay! Second year college.

Ah kasi parang expat or migrant coming from Bukidnon, nandito ako sa Manila, wala akong mapuntahan or mapagtripan tapos mainly, skate music lang yung pinapakinggan ko. Not really coming from the mainstream ika nga and eventually it led through there. Then you realize, "uy, masaya siya pakinggan." Ayun, so next is Paeng.

Me: (Very intimidated and a bit shocked that Tim's interview was over.) Ummm...

Maria: The question here is how did you first get into non-mainstream shit?

Paeng: Uh... PureVolume.

Uh... I got into non-mainstream shit because of my upperclassmen. Yung crush ko na girl na upperclassman ko, hinila niya ako on some sort of a date sa campus. Tapos nagsoundtrip kami ng mga... mga Typecast.

In unison: (Everyone laughs.)

Paeng: Tapos binigyan niya ako ng cd ng Typecast tsaka ano... Too Late The Hero tsaka Saydie. Which by the way, ako yung nagpoproduce sa Saydie ngayon.

Tim: And guitarist?

Paeng: 'Di na. 'Di na ako nagsesession doon. Tapos after nun, it became some sort of identity for me. Yun nga yung sort of formative years ng teenage life ko. Sa college, so naghahanap lang ako ng association or identity at that time. Kasi one, ayoko sumali ng frat. Two, mga upperclassmen ko medyo bully. Tapos na ako nun nung mga high school.

Aesthetically, I thought it was y'know... for the girls so sinundan ko yung trend na yun admittedly. Siyempre, naghahanap pa ako ng form of identity nun. Then, after I got out of the surface level aesthetics, I delved in deeper kasi may mga ibang subject matter ng mga usong kanta nung mga emo shit nun that didn't jive well with me.

Kasi una, hindi ako bobo. Tapos, naghahanap naman ako ng emo bands na hindi naman bobo at marunong mag articulate in deeper form or usage of language, hindi lang "Oooh, I'm so sad." or basta mga ganun.

Me: Surface level aesthetic?

Paeng: Yeah. Uhm... then I realized na these are just trendy stuff na nagpapa popularize lang ng mga websites na tinitignan ko. But then, may nakita akong isang page sa forum

*Grois goes upstairs, Paeng gets sidetracked*

Paeng: Where was I?

Maria: You found a forum?

Paeng: Ayun, nakahanap ako ng forum na nakalista ang napakaraming emotive hardcore bands. Ah okay medyo nadistract ako.

*pauses for a while and there was a little chit chat about my tablet's recorder.*

Paeng: Sorry naderail ako sa conversation. Tapos pinakinggan ko yung bands na nakalista doon sa forum. Pagkatapos nun, nakilala ko si Francis (Maria) sa isa pang forum tapos nagdecide kami magmeet up.

Francis wanted to play "chaotic converge stuff" which was what he was currently into that time. Bale, pinagsoundrip niya ako sa mp3 player niya dati tapos iniskip through ko every single one of the songs until narinig ko yung Scarlet (US). Naalala ko dati na sa soulseek kami kumukuha ng files. Si Maria, ginagamit niya pa rin. Ako, I don't have the patience anymore, and there weren't any torrents back then.

Tim: Limewire sucks.

Paeng: Yeah, Limewire sucks. You end up with misconstrued song titles and child porn. So ito yung beginnings into music and the ideology involved rather than the surface level aspect. Hanggang ngayon I still apply this aspect in critiquing and producing other records for other bands and how to interact with them. Dahil sa roots ko sa Davao punk scene, yung idea ng Anarchy tsaka anti-establishment is still implied. Pero narealize ko... everyone is technically a sellout.

Me: Why is everyone technically a sellout?

Paeng: From birth, you're not the one that chooses the lifestyle you're born into. Kapag pinanganak ka, mapa-mahirap man o mayaman ka wala kang choice. Doon ka lang makakapili ng landas mo kapag may autonomy or sariling decision ka na. Ako personally, lumayas ako from home at 16 after namin magkaroon ng argument with my mom. I learned life firsthand. Natatandaan ko nakatira lang ako sa kubo. Tapos yung CR ko butas lang sa lupa.

Hindi ako naniniwala sa sellout na word. Dati nung lumayas ako, isipin mo I was emaciated 5'11" ako tapos para ako yung sa Machinist.

Tim: Si Slenderman hahaha.

Maria: I look like Christian Bale hahaha... from The Machinist.

Paeng: May mga times na tumutugtog yung Capulette (pre-Caitlyn Bailey) tapos mag cocollapse ako. Mahihimatay ako kasi wala akong kinain buong araw.

Maria: Umabot sa point na nag organize kami ng gig para magkaroon si Paeng ng funds for food for one whole month.

Paeng: Tapos nagkaroon ako ng work sa mall serving food. It was then that I realized that we are tethered to the system and if I break it, I will die. But at the same time, if I want to change the system, I have to corrupt it the way it corrupted me. I am trying to do that by implanting myself into the system which indoctrinates the youth, which is the educational system. That's why I ended up landing a job as a professor in Mapua Institute of Technology. So what was your question again?

After this I asked Grois and Alva. As far as I remember in the interview:

Alva Presbitero's first introduction to extreme music was by his kuya recommending her some stuff like Botch and Converge.

When she was studying college in UP, she was involved in an alternative metal sounding band which took a lot from Deftones and Tool called Tabula Rasa.

She was frontman of prog band Game Theory. She was playing guitar and singing vocals with emo/powerpop/alternative group Small Hands alongside Tani Cariño of Neverdie and Chi & Sep of Typecast at the time of the recording of this interview.

I remember vaguely that Grois Enayo started getting into punk when she was in college.

"I just came here to drink beer... what's up?"

While studying, she started to look for bandmates in the PUP, Pulp, and Rakizta forums online. Which Paeng followed through jokingly saying:

"Ahhh... PULPera ka pala dati?"

After that endeavor did not work out for her, she started to look for members again to play Bikini Kill sounding stuff.

At time of this recording, she's a member of the politically-charged band, "Death to Puberty" which Chuck Baclagon fronts and the Shocking Details which where she channels her inner Riot Grrrl roots.

Currently, she is a member of punk group Catpuke and The Shocking Details recently released recorded material a few years back.

After the interview at about 3am-ish they guided me to how to commute to get back home and they went into a bakery to buy Coca Cola and bread I think? I don't even remember how I got home.

[pieheda]

Queer, Reclaiming, and Umbrella Terms: A Slightly Less Furious Post

Today I was chastised yet again by someone much, much younger than me for using the umbrella term “queer.” I was informed that it’s a slur. 

I was referencing Cameron Esposito’s podcast Queery. I’m not really sure how to do that without saying the word queer. But such is the tumblr-verse.

Here are the reasons why I adamantly, and frequently angrily, take issue with the re-slurring of the word queer: 

1. First and foremost, queer is a word that makes life easier for people who (a.) do not fall into a single or simple category or (b.) wish to feel solidarity with their entire community without separating themselves into sub-classifications. I’m not sure which of these I’m more passionate about. I want to protect my fellow queers who don’t fit in, and protect their ability to define in a generalized way, who don’t want a label that feels confusing or difficult to explain. I do this BECAUSE I want to feel solidarity in my community. 

2. TERFs hate the word queer and are responsible for the q-slur movement. Sources from actual TERF hate sites. I’ve removed the hyperlinks here, but you can copy and paste if you like:  https://bugbrennan.com/2012/07/13/compulsory-heterosexuality-queerified/ https://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/lesbianism-is-revolution-by-bev-jo/#more-1078 https://twanzphobic.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/jeffreys-on-the-degendering-of-womens-spaces/ (this site is particularly offensive. Proceed with caution).  https://privilegedenyingtranny.wordpress.com/ (also seriously awful, proceed with caution. Uses queer and trans interchangeably). http://thelesbianmafia-blog.tumblr.com/post/53305832090/our-answer-to-twitter-friend-dozz22s-question (TERF tumblr account. Just one of many offensive anti queer/trans posts)

The movement to make queer a slur starts with TERFs and it’s a TERF argument. That alone makes it worth fighting.

3. Historically it is a term of empowerment. Specifically, ACT UP coined the phrase “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Probably some of us olds have told you this before. There’s a reason why we’re passionate about this - we used this chant when the American government was literally going to just let a substantial number of us die from HIV/AIDS. This is, historically, one of the greatest acts of violence against LGBT people ever committed. It set back queer progress in America by decades specifically BECAUSE of how many of us died. The slurring of the word queer - and being admonished by our fellow community members for using it - is a stab in the back to those of us who fought this fight.  

Please stop and think about this. Modern issues like whether Clexa deserved better pale in comparison to watching half the people you know die while your government simply allows it to happen because they don’t care about you. There’s a reason why those of us who survived are passionate about the word queer.

4. Queer studies. The nature of a slur is that there is no setting in which you can use it and lose the strength of the slur itself. Even if I reclaim the word “dyke” (which I, as a lesbian, sometimes do), it still sounds harsh. Reclaiming has a certain fierceness to it, so if I use that word I accept that. This is why we have queer history, queer studies - but not dyke studies. 

5. But likewise, any word can be said in anger. All of our words have been wielded as weapons. I’ve been called “gay” in anger and “lesbian” as if it’s kinky/ridiculous/an insult. 

Now, there are in fact people who don’t like the word lesbian because of how it’s been used in their lives. They don’t call themselves lesbians. They choose another word, like wlw or queer. That’s fine. I’m not interested in yelling “YOU’RE A LESBIAN AND YOU SHOULD BE CALLED A LESBIAN” at members of my community. That’s pretty dickish. However, if I refer to lesbians collectively as lesbians, that’s objectively not offensive. Nothing in my intent is to offend, and I’m using the term from the inside, as a lesbian, in a way that is meant to describe people who I am like. Yes, it may rub a few people the wrong way, but without collective terms we have no way to BE a collective, which is deeply important in these current times. 

How straight people choose to oppress us isn’t the metric for what words are or are not slurs. And on that subject...

6. When you tell me, a fellow LGBTQIA+ person, what I am allowed to say... you sound kinda hetero. Up until the last year when the “q slur” thing really seemed to gain ground, the last person to tell me what words I’m not allowed to say about my own community and about myself was a straight white cis dude. He didn’t like me calling myself a dyke. He felt that this was unfair to straight people, that nobody anywhere should have language that belongs specifically to them. He also took issue with various people of color reclaiming slurs. 

The white cis hets who do this do it because they can’t stand a world that they aren’t allowed to control. The very proof of our oppression is their belief that they have a right to control how we describe and express our own selves. 

Fight people who tell you what you can say about your own self and your own community. Don’t do it to each other. 

7. We have bigger issues to deal with. Ultimately - and why I’m making one big mega post about it so that I can be done with it - if the biggest issue on your LGBT plate is whether or not queer is a slur, you are living a privileged life. I’m only going to speak for America because that’s where I live, but we have some massive issues to deal with regarding anti-trans violence, employment discrimination, poverty, gay conversion therapy, parental rights, even marriage rights because as of this year, counties in Texas and Alabama are still denying marriage licenses to gay couples. 

And maybe it’s not your biggest issue and you do care about those things. We can care about big and small things simultaneously. But ask yourself - why are you spending any time at all telling other queers whether or not they’re allowed to say the word queer? Why is any of your effort being spent on gate-keeping the language your community is allowed to use? Why is it that this one word has generated so many call-outs (hint - because TERFs are really good at doing to gays on tumblr what nazis are good at doing to conservatives on reddit)? 

You may ask why I’m putting so much energy into it (I wonder that myself sometimes), but it’s because I don’t like people sheep-herding me behind the gates in my own community. These are not your gates. You are not in charge of keeping them. They’re not my gates either, but as a reminder - I’m not saying what anyone should be forced to do. I’m saying what we should NOT be forced to do, which is the opposite of gate-keeping. And pushing back against gate-keepers is always a worthwhile cause. 

[booksbyjoshr]

Why Am I Listening To Country Music

  Yup, this is a post about the type of music I listen to but there is a twist. So, readers, are you ready to learn an important lesson from a music genre? Ready or not, we are diving into today’s topic.

  So why is a Hispanic from Brooklyn, NY listening to Country Music? I am very open-minded when it comes to music and I listen to almost anything. My current playlists on my phone are as follows; Ballads, Cantopop (Chinese pop), Country, Disco, Doo Wop, Freestyle, Hindi Music, Italian Music, Japanese Pop, Jazz, Rock, Salsa, Rap, Reggae, and Reggaeton. There’s a couple more random playlist but you get the gist, I listen to basically anything. So, what does my eclectic music taste have to do with everyday life? My music taste is a metaphor for our minds. I know I’ve lost every single one of you but just hear me out, you must have an open-mind exactly like my music taste. So now that you know what this post is exactly about, now I can get to the meat and potatoes.

  Just the other day, I recorded a podcast episode about the power of our minds and mindset, that episode is basically a prelude to this post. In that episode, I went over how our mindset can affect how we act so now I will go over the importance of an open mind. The world is constantly evolving and the way we lived yesterday is different from the way we live today (I’m talking figuratively, yesterday is referring to a couple of years ago). Technology has changed the game we call life, most of us use services such as Uber to get around. I use Apple Pay and Samsung Pay to pay for items more often than actual cash or cards. If you are not open in regards to this digital revolution you will get left behind. Sounds harsh but technology is taking jobs away from many. McDonald’s started implementing kiosks in order to save on the cost of labor. Soon there will be self-driving tractor trailers which will put millions out of jobs, which means they must learn a new skill to become relevant in this era. Big companies such as Toy R Us and Payless have gone out of business because they were unable to adapt to the trends of the modern day. If these big companies couldn’t succeed, how can we?

  It might sound like I’ve gotten off topic but it comes full circle, trust me. In the modern age, we must be open to everything that is around us. Many of us are stuck in our own ways that we don’t realize that there is more than one way to crack an egg. We travel to and from work using the same path, we never try another route even though it might be faster. I’m using many metaphors but what I’m trying to get across is: We need to try new things. The old way may work but it might not be the best way. In the past the only way to publish a book if you didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars was to go through a publishing house; however, you can now self-publish your book digitally and make a living for much less. If you wanted to learn a skill you would have to find a class in a local college or community center and go there physically. Now we can learn skills from sites such as YouTube or SkillShare (Not Sponsored), from the comfort of your own home. This new era is all about adapting and leveraging the power of technology. We are able to use our phones in ways that would have been impossible years ago. They can now shoot a 4k video edit and upload it to the web without using a computer. The speed of current phones and tablets has exceeded some laptops. Phones have become more than a tool we use to call, text or email, yet many of us don’t see its potential.

  Still confused? Don’t worry I’m going to put it into context by applying it to my own life. My business is content creation and I’ve been struggling to reach a broader audience. I’ve run Facebook ads and received some luck through there but it’s not enough. So, I decided to think outside of the box because what I was doing wasn’t giving me the results I wanted. So, I joined Tumblr, Goodreads, and Writing.com. Why did I join all of these sites, they give me more exposure as a writer? I need to build a following and what’s better than showcasing my work on popular writing sites. I’m even posting articles on linked in order to drive traffic. My YouTube channel sucks and in 2019 that is a No-No. So, I decided to learn how to do actual video edit (my weak point) and invested in some equipment to help me in this aspect. But Josh you just said that we can do everything from our phone, that is true and I will be using my phones in certain ways to help with the video. Since a fresh set of eyes is always welcomed, I listen to everyone’s feedback and tweak my content based on it. I keep my mind open and that allows me to implement new tactics in order to make my business succeed.

  That’s how I implement keeping an open mind but how can your average person implement this lesson? The first thing you can do is be open to criticism, it’s hard but constructive criticism can help. By listening to your customers or coworkers, you can improve your productivity or sales. When I did sales, my coworkers’ feedback helped me improve as a seller. Another thing you can do is to learn how to become open to opportunities. Opportunity comes in all shapes and sizes, sometimes they present themselves in the form of a client or friend. You may spend extra time with them or they might ask for your assistance on a task after a while they might offer you an opportunity. The main thing to remember is to keep open the lines of communication. That may not apply for some of you but opportunity can present itself in other ways such as freelance. If you are an aspiring photographer or videographer you can offer your services for free in order to build a portfolio. If you are a web developer or graphic design you can use sites such as Fiverr or Upwork to build a clientele and generate an income. Like I said earlier it’s all about thinking outside a box and leverage the tools that technology has given us. The last thing you can do is read. Reading books can help open up your mind no matter what the genre. Reading a fantasy book like Harry Potter can open up your mind to become more imaginative. A biography can open up your mind on how you view your life and your past in relation to the person you are reading about.

  I can sit here all day and type about this topic, but as we know from DMX talk is cheap. You have to go out there and take action. So, take a look at the world as if it was your first time.

Remember to be successful it's your right, duty, and responsibility.

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump Day 75: Revolutions Podcast

Welcome Back to 100 Days of Trump, where I try to explain WTF happened in 2016 in 100 recommendations.  Now I have made no secret of the fact that I don’t judge all of these works equally, some of the things I recommend matter more than others.  Assassins, Marat/Sade, Veronica Mars, The Wire are all the most important works to understand the shitshow that was 2016, and on that list of “most important works” I include the Revolutions Podcast, by Mike Duncan.   It is a podcast....about Revolutions....made by a man named Mike Duncan.....its good....

     Ok seriously, the left likes to fetishize the idea of revolutions as the glorious wave that brings down the autocratic state, but rarely do they know more than a the most basic details of said revolutions.  Taking to a lot of people they seem to be under the impression that if enough happens then....the Revolution will happen.  Magically, on its own.   Which leads to this sense of inevitability towards revolutions, and that is where you have people who have been sitting around saying “revolution any any day now “ since 1964.  But this podcast goes through each of the major revolutions in a fairly in depth view, and once you get into concrete details, you see a lot about how revolutions actually work in practice.  And since this is a comparison work, you see a lot of interesting patterns emerge from this, and a lot of you’re questions about revolutions might be answered such as 

Why did the French Revolution go so crazy while the American stayed largely moderate (I mean by Revolution standards)

Why did the English Revolution go into Repeat mode like twice?

Why do so many revolutions wind up emulating the people they overtherw

Why do Reovlutions happen when they do?

Wait, Haiti had a revolution?  

 To me the most interesting thing about this series are some of the reoccurring patterns that always seem to emerge in every revolution

Firstly: If you don’t reform a system from within, it will fall apart from without.

In every single revolution covered the monarchs in power (but this applies equally well in non monarch nations) were aware that there were systemic problems decades before the revolution, and often tried to even address it, but systemic corruption, entrenched interests and just sheer incompetent rulers made them give up, which allowed societal pressure to build up and explode in bloody revolutions down the line.  The English, English Again, French, French Again, Spanish, and French again (seriously WTF France) all had opportunities to fix their system well in advance but didn’t, and then were shocked, shocked to find that the people went to more extreme measures.

Seriously, I can’t empathizes this enough, if you’re political system makes a majority of you’re citizen body extremely unhappy, and they don’t have any way in which to change the system legally, they will do it illegally eventually, and when that happens, shit gets really ugly.   Whats worse, if you deny people the ability to work within the system, then they will grow more radical, and thus far more dangerous.  It is always good to reform you’re system well in advanced so that you don’t have to deal with worse problems down the road...

which yeah, America hasn’t done, our system hasn’t been properly reformed since 1980, which is why the population got so angry in 2016, because all of the earlier attempts at reform didn’t seem to work.

Secondly, Revolutions start with stupidity, not Malice

The popular image of a revolution is a baby eating Caligula like tyrant who is so cruel and vicious that he drives his own people to a glorious fantastic revolution to end his evil regime but in practice...not so much.  As a rule, when rulers impose a really iron fist, revolutions mostly just peter out after a few months, they don’t really lead to the overthrow of the state.  No what leads to that are weak, stupid, unfocused, incompetent, or simply unlucky rulers, who claim absolute power but lack the actual competence to enforce it.  Charles I of England wanted to be an absolute monarch but was like...really incompetent.  The British Parliament/King George III demanded the Colonies obedience but the colonies were way too far away to impose order.  Louis XVI was less evil rather than profoundly stupid, Charles X had no idea what he was doing and the Spanish American Revolution happened once Spain was literally cut off from her colonies.  Even the Haitian Revolution the most directly oppressive of them all didn’t happen during the most vicious period of oppression towards the slaves, but instead when those in power were having a civil war allowing the slaves the opportunity to organize a revolt.  Incompetence is the great killer of kings more than tyranny ever does

Third, Revolutions usually start over seemingly unimportant things

The English Revolution started because of unclear limitations on Parliamentary Power, the American Revolution started because of a Tax dispute, French over a Budget Crisis, Spanish American over trade agreements, July Revolution over a freedom of the press dispute, and Haitian revolution...over another tax dispute cause the slave owners rebelled first only to then find the slaves rebelling against them.  Revolutions are usually only possible when those who have power but not all the power get pissy, and the thing that upsets them the most?  Taxes.  This is why an internally stable country is important, otherwise you get revolutions over something seemingly minor

Fourth, Revolutions are never united and always paranoid

There is never a faction of “the rebels” up against “The goverment” it is always a massive collection of a bunch of vaguely united factions who spend as much or more time fighting each other rather than fighting the goverment.  However the goverment itself is often doing the exact same thing.  Revolutions are confusing, messy, and actually really hard to fit into simplistic narratives.  But in every single revolution, people involved keep assuming that the other faction is going to do something extreme and therefore preemptively do something extreme before hand....while later historical records reveal that the extreme thing never was going to happen anyways.  Partisan paranoia destroying a state, why does that seem familiar to me.  

Finally, those who call for revolutions are always consumed by them.  

In literally every revolution so far, the person who is the most radical firebrand hard core revolution at the beginning will wind up being a conservative cautious moderate by the end without ever changing their beliefs, because revolutions more fast.  We tend to remember Tom Dickinson as the guy who opposed the American Revolution but he started out as the single most radical voice in the colonies with his “Letter from a Pennsylvania Farmer’ only to find himself left behind.  This gets to be its most insane in the French Revolution, Lafayette was a super radical liberal but after the 1789 Revolution, he quickly became a conservative stick in the mud that the arch mega radical Danton helped overthrow (its more complicated than that I know, shut up making a point). That same Danton, the most radical man by the standards of the radicals was overthrow and executed for being too conservative by the later revolutions, because revolutions move really fast, and they get really scary really quickly.  This is why I really don’t like revolutions because they never end up where you think they are going too.   However regardless of my feelings towards them, if the system doesn’t reform fast enough, revolution become inevitable, and the whole nation falls apart.  

    As we live in an era where the most powerful country in the world is starting to becoming more and more unstable, it might be a good time to look at other instances of this happening and try you know...not doing what they did...cause it went badly.      Seriously, check out this podcast, its fun, its informative, and you can pester all of you’re friends with facts about Simon Bolivar @randomshoes   The links are below.

Revolutions Introduction

What is a Revolution Anyways?  Is the fact that the word literally means something going back to where it started...intentionally funny?

The English Revolution

Which teaches us a valuable lesson about why political compromise is a good thing. King Charles I is basically the Hillary Clinton of 1600s England.  

The American Revolution

When governing a nation with a three month travel delay, seriously, don’t just make laws you can’t enforce.  If England had chosen one policy and stuck with it, they likely would have won, but they couldn’t make up their mind and the travel time allowed the colonies to organize.  

The French Revolutions 

AKA the revolution that never ends, there is a running gag in this show that Mike Duncan keeps wanting to be done with this one, but he can’t because all following revolutions are directly influenced by this one.  It is also the most analogous to the US right now and isn’t that scary) where there is a massive wealth gap, the rich aren’t paying their taxes, the executive power is both too powerful and not powerful enough, and all reform fails because of entrenched wealth interests.  Oh and rampant partisanship combined with paranoia that leads to leftist auto cannibalism, this is of course the most important revolution to study

The Haitian Revolution

The second most is this one, because most people haven’t heard of the Haitian revolution and it is really worth you’re time, particularly because it is a great lesson in how oppressed people are totally fine oppressing others, as the Coloreds are totally victims of racial oppression...and are owning slaves at the same time.  

The Spanish American Revolution 

The giant revolution, this one is just fun to listen too and all of the nationalism is fascinating.  

The July Revolution 

The current one, Charles X is really reminding me of Trump honestly.  

Revolutions FAQ

The whole thing is really worth you’re time if you want to understand politics as like...actual study and not just abstract rhetoric, this is what you want to check out

[ebola-chan-love]

NTEB PROPHECY NEWS PODCAST: COVID-19 Has Absolutely Impacted And Changed The Entire World, It Is A Biblical Pestilence From Matthew 24?

The headlines today are screaming at us, telling us to wake up and look around, to open our King James Bibles and connect the dots of what is truly happening. COVID-19 is not a pestilence like AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS chicken pox, scarlet fever or anything else, it is the Pestilence that has changed the world.

As I write this we are approximately 38 days here in America into the nation-wide COVID-19 shut down of the US economy, and a suspension of our freedoms and liberties the likes of which has heretofore never been seen since our founding in 1776. Globally, every major nation on earth is undergoing similar measures. There can be no question that the world is being shaken to its core, the only question is why, and why now?

“For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts.” Haggai 2:6-8 (KJB)

On this episode of the NTEB Prophecy News Podcast, we are looking into the ‘beginning of sorrows’ in Matthew 24, with some of the only verses in the entire chapter that can be rightly divided and applied to the Church Age, and examine the COVID-19 phenomenon in light of the prophesied ‘pestilences’ that Jesus said would precede the time of Jacob’s trouble. Our time, in the days before the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church.

CLICK TO LISTEN TO THIS LIVE END TIMES PROPHECY NEWS PODCAST WHEN IT STARTS TODAY AT NOON EST

CLICK TO LISTEN TO THIS LIVE END TIMES PROPHECY NEWS PODCAST WHEN IT STARTS TODAY AT NOON EST

The headlines today are screaming at us, telling us to wake up and look around, to open our King James Bibles and connect the dots of what is truly happening. COVID-19 is not a pestilence like AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS chicken pox, scarlet fever or anything else, it is the Pestilence that has changed the world. And that change has only just begun. On today’s NTEB Prophecy News Podcast, we will connect those dots and the wise shall understand.

ARTICLES REFERENCED IN THE PODCAST:

MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE IN UTAH IS THE LATEST EVENT IN A SERIES OF EVENTS THAT BEGAN ON JANUARY 1ST AND IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE MATTHEW 24 BIRTH PANGS

DARK AND SINISTER OPENING CEREMONY OF THE 2012 LONDON OLYMPICS USED PREDICTIVE PROGRAMMING TO SHOW US THE COMING COVID-19 PLANNEDEMIC

PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE ID2020 COVID-19 ‘IMMUNITY PASSPORT’ THAT COMBINES DIGITAL IDENTITY WITH VACCINATIONS, BLOCKCHAIN AND NANOTECHNOLOGY

1981 DEAN KOONTZ THRILLER ‘THE EYES OF DARKNESS’ ACCURATELY PREDICTED CHINESE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK EVEN NAMED A LAB IN WUHAN AS STARTING POINT

SATANIST MADONNA ANNOUNCES SHE IS JOINING THE GATES FOUNDATION COVID-19 THERAPEUTICS ACCELERATOR PROGRAM TO VACCINATE EVERY HUMAN BEING ON EARTH

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SUNDAY NIGHT: Our original Sunday Night Radio Bible Study, it’s from 9:00 – 11:00 PM EST, and we have praise, singing, testimony and of 90-minute King James Bible study. All our King James bible study programs are archived here.

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I just want to thank you for the teachings you give every Sunday night on radio.  You are such a blessing to me. I absolutely love your way of teaching the scriptures.  I don’t have a church where I can have fellowship and teaching, so you have been my teacher for many months now. Thanks God you are there for all of us who have no church to go to.  I pray that the Lord will bless you abundantly in your ministry, and your loved ones too.  You are such a blessing to me, and many others, in these last days before the rapture.  Thank you so much Geoffrey, from the bottom of my heart. May the Lord keep you, until He comes back for us. You are in my prayers.” Donald Godin

“Thank you for the work  you are doing brother.  Your page and your testimony were a blessing to me this morning as I came across it for the first time.  Thank you for the reality of your testimony and what God has done for you in introducing you to Jesus our Lord.  God has brought me, in salvation, to Himself as well, through His love and mercy and grace in salvation.  How can we praise Him enough?  How can we not share this good news!?  I pray this day for God’s blessing on your ministry that He may save many souls through the work He has called you to.  Isaiah 40:31 (KJV)” Mark and Melissa

“Love the Sunday night bible study. I want to support someone who has the passion for the lost like Geoffrey does and rightly divides the word of God. God bless you.” Teresa Carey

“I give because not many news outlets are brave enough or Godly enough to tell these stories from a Christian’s point of view. I see stories here that will not be seen anywhere else.” William Grayshaw

“It’s hard to find solid biblical teaching in America these days. It’s a blessing to be able to take part in a ministry financially without being concerned about false teaching. All glory to God! God bless!” Maximilian Swan

“I donate because you are reporting the truth about the increasing wickedness of our time, as God’s word foretold. In so doing we are reminded to “Keep looking up” as we wait in joyful hope for the Lord’s coming, Maranatha! ” Anthony Sloane

“Geoffrey has the best End Times News out there. I have been receiving his emails for years now and always enjoy his Sunday night messages although I don’t always think exactly as he thinks. We are all in this “boat of life” together and as I come to the end of my life’s journey here, I am more aware of Jesus’s call for us to be one as He and the Father are One.” Deborah Cleaveland

“I believe in Christ Jesus, my LORD and Savior. I see Mt 24 “ The Days of NOAH “. Happening before our eyes. I think from all the signs, turmoil, godlessness, the Rapture Is at hand.1 Thes 4:16–18. WARN SOMEONE TODAY.” Dwight Shotwell

” I like the way you are promoting the scriptures of the Kingdom Message Baptism of Jesus Christ, as those of Paul in Acts 20: 27-31 Preachers don’t D this !! they make up their own IDEAS and then claim the person has Holy Spirit, WHEN THEY HAVE NOT not ever will !!!! …bye now…” Bara Rodgers

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        The post NTEB PROPHECY NEWS PODCAST: COVID-19 Has Absolutely Impacted And Changed The Entire World, It Is A Biblical Pestilence From Matthew 24? appeared first on Now The End Begins.

Now The End Begins https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/nteb-prophecy-news-podcast-covid-19-has-absolutely-impacted-changed-the-entire-world-biblical-pestilence-from-matthew-24/

[dorothydelgadillo]

Here’s What We Can Learn from 7 of Recent History’s Biggest Company Rebrands

When I watched the remake of The Jungle Book for the first time in theater, I was blown away.

It took a movie I already loved and made me fall in love with the Disney brand all over again.

Disney seems to have found a winning formula in remaking classic animated films into live-action formats (because the success of its Pixar movies, Marvel franchise, and recent Lucasfilms purchase weren’t enough).

Re-creating these classics using the voices of today's biggest stars and modern day technology has given new life to these movies.

It marks an evolution in the right direction for the company’s brand that can be supported by new generations and older fans who grew up with it. That excitement and increased brand loyalty spurred from these films is similar to that when a company you love successfully rebrands.

When done right, a rebrand can inspire new prospects and increase sales. It’s praised.

However, when a rebrand misses the mark it can do more harm than good, having people talk about your company for the wrong reasons.     

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of rebrands that have fallen into both categories.

These rebrands have come in many different shapes and sizes.

Sometimes it’s in the form of a small refresh where a company tweaked their current logo or changed fonts. Other times it was a major overhaul where a company created an entirely new personality or established themselves in a different market.

Here are seven of my favorite rebrand stories (both big and small) and the biggest takeaways I learned from them.

1. Uber

In 2017, Uber found themselves in the midst of many scandals including claims of sexual harassment, a “macho” office culture, and multiple senior executives resigning from the company.

But they’ve since focused on taking the proper steps to rebuild their reputation.

They hired new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, put a major focus on passenger safety, and more recently, went through a major rebrand to show the world this is a new and improved Uber.

Ready for a fresh start, Uber teamed up with global brand consultancy Wolff Olins to create a logo and brand that aligned with the company’s new direction and core values.

They wanted to show people they weren’t just a tech startup anymore, but a global mobility platform.

The rebrand began by spending over a 1000 hours interviewing people all over the globe to see how their brand was perceived in different markets.

These interviews helped shine a light on where the disconnect was between users and the brand.

They used this information to build a brand that would be able to scale globally and communicate Uber’s new core value of safety for passengers. The rebrand included a new simplified logo, an updated color palette, new custom typeface, and an improved in-app experience.

My Takeaway:

I love this rebrand because it shows us the importance of having a brand that connects with your users and embodies who you are as a company.

Take a page out of Uber’s playbook by collecting user feedback on how your company is perceived and then use that information to build a visual brand and a brand messaging strategy.

2. Mail Chimp

Ever since Mailchimp was founded in 2001, it's been a pioneer of the quirky, friendly, and humorous design style we see in so many tech startups nowadays.

I’ve always loved their brand and connected with their laid back and user-friendly vibe that was a perfect reflection of the product itself.

I remember listening to the “Serial” podcast and hearing the now infamous Mailchimp commercials where they poked fun at their own name.

Their humor and quirkiness was something that separated them from other tech giants. You’d never see a company like Apple or Google mock its own name like that.

When I heard Mailchimp went through a full rebrand, I feared they had gone in the “Apple-esque” direction that many other startups have tended to as they grow and mature.

Fortunately, I quickly went to their site and found the complete opposite. They were doubling down on their quirk.

Freddie, the Mailchimp mascot, received a slight update, but more noticeable was the newly implemented serif typeface from the 1920s and a whole new series of illustrations that appeared almost childlike.

Initially I thought these were just weird for the sake of being weird, but I soon noticed that every illustration symbolized a piece of Mailchimp’s business; they just chose to portray it in their own quirky way.

They wanted their brand to send a message to growing companies that “success doesn’t mean erasing your peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. It’s about amplifying them. That’s how you stand out and connect with everyone.”

My Takeaway:

The Mailchimp redesign took me a little while to warm up to. The illustrations and typography were like something I had never seen before, but that’s what I think makes this brand so special.

  Mailchimp teaches us to not be scared to be different from the other companies in our industry and their new imagery reflects that.

We should never make marketing decisions solely based on what other companies are doing, we should instead stay true to your own brand and focus on what our prospects and customers need. MailChimp leaned into that idea with its rebrand.

3. Zendesk

If you’re familiar with Zendesk, one of the first things that comes to mind is the Buddha character known as “The Mentor” that used to be the face of the customer service software’s brand. 

Image Credit

In the earlier years, the Buddha worked perfectly for what the company was trying to communicate. Toke Nygaard, chief creative officer at ZenDesk, says “he represented a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale, corporate, and sad on-premise customer service industry.”

However, as time went on and Zendesk began to compete with bigger companies, such as Oracle and Salesforce, it became more clear that it was time for a rebrand.

They realized their brand wasn’t scalable. Their “zen” theme led to them getting confused with spa and wellness brands and concerns of cultural appropriation were raised.

So, in 2015, Zendesk finally made the tough decision to rebrand and move away from the beloved Buddha.

The final product included an entirely new brand that included new messaging, a fresh logo, a new color palette, and most importantly allowed for the addition of new product sub-brands.

The redesign marks a new chapter for the company and its future growth.

Video Link

My Takeaway:      

While I love the cheekiness and fun appearance of The Mentor, I’m more of a fan of the new direction Zendesk is going in.

They’re a company that recognizes the importance of stepping back and evaluating evolution of your brand and company goals.

As your company grows and changes, it’s vital that you take the time to stop, reassess your companies goals, and make sure your brand aligns with those goals.

While reflecting on the Zendesk rebrand Toke Nygaard says “A redesign is not cosmetic: it’s a culture revolution from within. It resets and rebuilds. It’s a rallying cry. It galvanizes.”

4. Dropbox

When Dropbox rebranded in 2017, it was a hot topic for debate amongst designers.

Dropbox has one of the most talented design teams in the world and their previous branding was a constant source of inspiration for many designers, myself included.

Their previous visual brand was the definition of “doing more with less.”

Their site utilized a ton of whitespace, but it never felt empty. They made use of clean monochromatic illustrations and short, punchy blocks of text that made the site easy to navigate and digest information.

Over the years, Dropbox would make subtle changes to their products and find new ways to simplify their brand, however, when their new rebrand was announced, it was a huge step away from what the one we all loved. 

The new brand included a number of new color combinations, different fonts, and complex juxtaposed images and it was clear the company was heading in a new direction.

Dropbox released the following comment on the rebrand:

“As our mission has evolved from keeping files in sync to helping keep teams in sync, we realized our brand needs to change, too. Our new brand system shows that Dropbox isn’t just a place to store your files—it’s a living workspace that brings teams and ideas together.”

One of the most interesting insights to come out of the rebrand was the story of their newly redesigned pricing page shared by former Dropbox designer Arlen McCluskey.

McCluskey says they noticed a dip in their key metrics on their pricing pages following the launch.

The Dropbox team immediately reverted the page back to its previous state and got to work on studying the numbers to find a cause for the dip.

Once they came up with a few hypotheses, they redesigned and relaunched the page using a combination of the previous and new branding. The new page outperformed both the pre-branded and rebranded pricing pages.

My Takeaway

I’m not in love with the new direction of Dropbox’s brand. I don’t think colors showcase them as the well-organized and easy-to-use software they are.

However, I respect their decision to take a chance and try something out of the norm.

Making major changes to your brand can be scary, especially if it’s a brand your customers love. You’re never sure how people are going to react, but sometimes those changes are necessary in order to grow.

I also think they went about their rebrand in the right way by making changes and testing them. They showed how crucial it is to measure and track your website statistics so you can iterate when needed.           

5. Dunkin Donuts

I’ve been on a casual first name basis with Dunkin’ Donuts for a while now so it didn’t come as a surprise when the chain decided to drop the “Donuts” from their name and go with just Dunkin’.

The name change not only aligns the company with their timeless slogan of “America Runs on Dunkin’,” it also comes as a part of a bigger rebrand to bigger to position themselves of being the go-to “beverage-led, on-the-go brand,” rather than a donut destination.

However, Dunkin’ understood that building towards this vision would require more than just a simple name change.

They needed to create an entire experience around the idea.

That’s why they’ve also invested $100 million in a newly redesigned store concept and new equipment to aid the on-the-go beverage strategy as well.

My Takeaway

Dunkin’ shows that rebrand isn’t something to be taken lightly.

A rebrand is about more than just choosing a new name or changing the colors you use; If you’re rebranding, you need to make sure you’re doing it with purpose, and the final product is something that builds towards your future goals and vision.

6. Slack

You probably haven’t heard, but Slack recently released a new logo.

Yes, that was a bit of sarcasm.

Slack’s new logo has been a hot topic of debate amongst its users over the last couple months.

In case you’re out of the loop, in January, Slack unveiled a new logo that moved away from the fun and vibrant “octothorpe” we’ve all grown to love to a more professional toned down logo.

This new logo was a major piece in a bigger rebrand effort for the collaboration platform. They set out to create a brand that was built for longevity, established brand consistency all while maintaining its original brand identity.  

While they had good intentions, many people were less than thrilled.

Tweet Link

Slack posted a press release explaining the reasoning behind the rebrand, stating that while they loved their original logo and brand, it was time to evolve.

One of the main issues with the old logo was the complicated visual guidelines.

The hashtag was distinctive but its intricate color palette made it easy to get wrong. Placed anywhere other than a white background led to it looking terrible. 

Image Credit

According to Slack, the new logo “uses a simpler color palette and, we believe, is more refined, but still contains the spirit of the original. It’s an evolution, and one that can scale easily, and work better, in many more places.”

Despite its logical motivations, Slack’s new logo was met with a lot of disapproval and even social controversy.

My Takeaway

Deciding whether not I like Slack’s new logos a tough question. I do miss the hashtag and bright playful color palette. I always thought the use of it was a powerful way to connect the brand with the product, however, I also understand the reasoning behind the change.

They had a set of requirements that their old logo wasn’t fulfilling so they needed to make a change in order to help grow their brand.

Love it or hate it, there's some valuable lessons to be learned from the Slack redesign.

Always have a reason for a redesign. Slack had very clear reasons for why the redesign was needed.

Always keep your audience in mind. While rebranding is project focused around you as a company, try to consider how certain colors and imagery will be perceived by the people using your product.  

7. Toys ‘R’ Us

In June of 2018 we had to say goodbye to one of favorite childhood places -- Toys ‘R’ Us.

The company filed for bankruptcy in late 2017 due to fierce competition from online retailers and left thousands of former employees facing uncertain futures after hundreds of stores closed.

However, in a last ditch effort to save the company, Toys ‘R’ Us decided to cancel its auction and wanted to bring the company back with a major rebrand that included a whole new look and direction.

Image Credit: Lippincott

They announced the rebrand by having Geoffrey the Giraffe make a surprise appearance the company's Twitter account.

Image Credit

Paired with an image of Geoffrey holding a suitcase, the company tweeted that Geoffrey was simply on a vacation but was back and ready to play.

The messaging comparing going bankrupt to a vacation left former employees outraged. One former employee said “They’re saying Geoffrey went on vacation. We certainly did not go on vacation.”

Others felt like Geoffrey’s reemergence was a PR stunt meant to just boost the brand name in case Toys ‘R’ Us wanted to reopen their stores as the holiday season got underway.

Unfortunately, it became clear that the business’ outlook wasn’t going to give them enough time and rebrand was scrapped.

My Takeaway

While Toys ‘R’ Us may not have officially rebranded, I think there’s still an important lesson to be learned from this story.

When it’s time to unveil a rebrand, consider how you’re going to announce it  to your audience. You need to clearly voice your reasons for the rebrand and think about how your audience will perceive the announcement.

For Toys ‘R’ Us, their tweet announcing the rebrand was a case of “too soon.”

Taking a humorous approach to announce their rebrand during a time that was difficult for the many employees who were laid off led to a huge backlash that really took the excitement out of the company’s announcement.      

Perhaps if they had waited some time or taken a more sensitive approach, this could have been avoided.

Think Before You Rebrand

Rebranding isn’t a simple task, and can’t be done on a whim.

Making the decision to do it requires you to deep dive into your company and really assess what your goals are and what’s not working currently.

These companies may not have all hit the mark on their rebrands but they all have one thing in common - They saw something stopping them from growing, so they decided to make a change.

Take some of the lessons from these companies stories and apply them to your next rebrand.   

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/learn-from-recent-big-company-rebrands

[hominininae]

Since it’s the end of the year, I thought I’d make a list of the Shakespeare plays that I read this year, mainly for my own records. I’ve read quite a few since September, so I need to have it written down someplace.

So, in (somewhat) chronological order:

Hamlet: This was the play that got me into Shakespeare! Obviously, Hamlet is a deeply flawed character and we all love to hate him, but I couldn’t help relating to him in his deeper and  more introspective moments. This was the first literary work that I have read that depicted depression and mental illness in a way that I could closely identify with. To be honest, it was kind of a surreal experience to see some of my innermost thoughts put into words in a play that was written over 400 years ago. That’s not to say I think the character of Hamlet is a good person or that all of his decisions were justified -- quite the opposite really! He’s incredibly misogynistic, self-centered, and (directly or indirectly) causes almost every death in the play. However, I am more sympathetic to his character because of my own personal experiences with mental illness. (This is the play that I’ve thought about the most, if you haven’t noticed! I could write so much more but this post is going to be too long as it is)

Macbeth: I read this play immediately after Hamlet, which made for some interesting comparisons. They are both tragedies with ghosts, kings, and murders, but the contrast between Hamlet’s inaction and Macbeth’s immediate action was super cool! Were their actions due to an inherent difference between their personalities? Is it because Macbeth has people actively encouraging his murderous tendencies? What is the role of fate/destiny in their decisions? So many things to think about! Macbeth is also just a really fun play to read. I mean, it’s got witches, misleading prophecies, full-on war, and everyone’s favorite badass, Lady Macbeth.

Julius Caesar: This was my first reread of the year. I read it about two years ago for school, but I figured I should go back to it. Obviously, this is a play that is very relevant to our current state of political uncertainty. It addresses really important questions about idealism vs. realism, revolution, and how to deal with a failing/dying system of government. I listened to an interesting podcast about it, but if I’m being honest this play didn’t stick with me as much as the others.

Romeo and Juliet: This play gets so much undeserved flack from people who think it’s showing how love is stupid and teenagers are reckless. It’s a beautiful and tragic story about how society forces young people to make bad decisions, and it’s sad to see how many people hate it because of their experiences in school. There are so many heartbreaking moments and incredible lines of poetry and this play deserves so much better than being taught to every single edgy high school kid who just rattles off whatever their teacher told them. However, to end on a more positive note, I absolutely loved it and its commentary on society/generation gaps!

Much Ado About Nothing: Just. Nonstop. Roasting. So many burns in one play! I wasn’t a fan of the constant fears from men about women being unfaithful, but that’s exactly what the play was commenting on! Beatrice and Benedick are a great couple, and basically every man in the play is an asshole.

Coriolanus: This whole play could have been fixed if Coriolanus could just keep his mouth shut for 5 minutes. Seriously though, I liked the fact that Coriolanus refuses to play political games and always speaks his mind (characteristics that we find theoretically likable) and is still an incredibly unsympathetic character. He makes it clear that he hates the common people and always “tells it like it is”...sound familiar? 

King Lear: Wow this play is huge! I really need to reread it because there is so much in it that I probably missed. There are about 100000 different plots going on at the same time, which can get kind of confusing. This play really ripped my emotions to pieces. It’s so bleak and depressing, but beautiful at the same time.  

Twelfth Night: Another that I need to read again. I had to read it online, so I really want a physical copy so I can annotate and have the textual notes. My main takeaway: everyone is gay and it’s great!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Probably the play that I was most familiar with before reading, because my local ballet company did a production several years back. I learned the story then, and then I read the play in middle school. It’s a fun play, and I would love to see a production of it! 

The Tempest: Reading this play from the perspective of colonialism is really interesting. I had mixed feelings about Caliban’s treatment the whole time I was reading, and seeing it as a metaphor for how the Europeans treated the native peoples of lands they were colonizing helps to clarify those emotions a little bit. I’ve also just finished it, so I need some time to sort out my thoughts. 

Goals for next year: Currently, I am reading Richard II. I want to read King Lear again, and I also want to read Othello. Hopefully, I can tackle some more histories and comedies as well, since I’ve gone pretty tragedy-heavy this year! I will admit that I have found the tragedies more interesting to read (I own 6 of the plays and they’re all tragedies), but maybe I just haven’t read enough of the other genres yet.

[thegloober]

Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355)

Studies show kids are more creative when they aren’t promised a reward. But schools — with their incentives for performance and emphasis on quantifiable outcomes — may not be set up to prioritize creativity. (Photo: Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don’t assess the things we value. All these elements factor into the long, mysterious march towards a creative life. To learn more, we examine the early years of Ai Weiwei, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Maira Kalman, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Egan, and others. (Ep. 2 of the “How to Be Creative” series.).

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Stephen DUBNER: I don’t understand why you’re not in prison in China. It sounds like — obviously they did it for a little while.

Ai WEIWEI: I’ll tell the truth. I tried to think about it and suddenly, just this moment, I realized the answer. The jail in China is not large enough to put me in.

DUBNER: What do you mean?

WEIWEI: I’m just too large for them. My ideas penetrate the walls.

Are your ideas big enough to penetrate walls? His, apparently, are.

WEIWEI: My name is Ai Weiwei. I’m 61 years old. I was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. But in the year I was born, my father was exiled.

In our previous episode, we asked the art economist David Galenson to name a true creative genius.

David GALENSON: I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant. Ai Weiwei I believe is not only the most important painter in the world, he’s the most important person in art. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. With his art, he has made a contribution to political discourse. This is a unique person in art, almost in the last hundred years.

So we went to Berlin to visit Ai Weiwei. We interviewed him in his subterranean studio, a former brewery in the former East Berlin.

DUBNER: And how do you describe what you do now?

WEIWEI: That is a little bit confusing, because as a profession, most things I did relate to so-called art. So people call me artist. But since I have been also working in defending human rights or freedom of speech or human condition, they call me activist.

DUBNER: Do you care what people call you?

WEIWEI: I don’t really care. I think I’ll live my life. I do care if I still can wake up the next morning. I do care if I can walk to school to pick up my son.

(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)

You can see why people are confused by what, exactly, Ai Weiwei is, or does. He spends a lot of time making things but also a lot of time on Twitter, calling out institutional hypocrisies or cruelties. He once created a museum piece comprised of 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds; he also made a series of photographs in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn to the ground and smashes it to bits. Lately, he’s been consumed with the global refugee crisis: he hung 14,000 life vests around Berlin’s main concert hall; he installed a sprawling public-art project in New York called “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”; and he made a documentary film called “Human Flow.”

WEIWEI: The officials came here and told them, look, there’s no way you’re going to get papers to continue. Either you go voluntarily, or we arrest you.

Ai Weiwei’s enduring obsession has been to stick his finger in the eye of the Chinese government. He helped design the Olympic stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Games; but by the time it was built, he’d attacked the organizers for cronyism and corruption. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands, he launched a citizens’ investigation into the poorly-built schools where so many children died; he gathered up the mangled rebar from quake sites and turned it into a sculpture called Straight. When the government placed him under surveillance, he responded by making a sculpture called Surveillance Camera. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was kidnapped and jailed by the Chinese government, charged with “subversion of state power.” Upon being set free, he decided it was best to leave China.

WEIWEI: Since I was born, I would be seen as a son of the enemy of the people. They see you are dangerous. They see you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble.

DUBNER: They were right.

WEIWEI: They’re perfectly right. But I try to live up to that kind of conditions, too. I am not satisfied with what I did.

Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was a prominent poet and intellectual. Before the Communist revolution, he was considered a leftist subversive. When Mao took over, Qing started out in the new regime’s good graces but eventually fell out of favor, and the family was exiled from Beijing.

WEIWEI: So I grew up in the Xinjiang province, which is Gobi Desert. And spent about 18 years in that location.

DUBNER: So when you were a kid, you’re growing up in — we call them labor camps or reeducation camps. I don’t know what you call it?

WEIWEI: We call it reeducation camps to remake you, to become a better part of a society.

DUBNER: It didn’t seem to have worked.

WEIWEI: It did work on me.

DUBNER: Well, if the state was trying to reeducate you —

WEIWEI: But that reeducation is very important, because it builds your reactionary to this kind brainwashing or trying to limit individual’s rights and freedom of speech. So you get, somehow, immune to these attacks.

For several years, the family lived underground, in a cavern. For two decades, Ai Ching did not write.

WEIWEI: My father is so scared. There is no single day he comes home not physically shaking because he’s been so mistreated and —

DUBNER: He tried to kill himself several times.

WEIWEI: He did. He attempted three times.

DUBNER: How did he try? Do you know?

WEIWEI: He once, the electric — how do you call that?

DUBNER: Socket.

WEIWEI: Socket. Of course, the whole light went off because of the shortage. And he once tried hanging himself, and it’s so lucky the nail was loosened.

DUBNER: And you were a teenager then or younger?

WEIWEI: I was about eight or nine.

DUBNER: And did you know what happened?

WEIWEI: I didn’t know at all. He told me.

DUBNER: Later.

WEIWEI: Yeah.

Concerning Ai Weiwei’s upbringing, at least two questions come to mind, both of them probably unanswerable. The first: what are the odds that that boy, living in a labor camp in the Gobi Desert, would become one of the most influential artists in the world? And: how much did that environment have to do with who he became?

*      *      *

Ai Weiwei’s childhood was of course atypical. And a lot of his art is clearly a response to his family’s treatment during China’s Cultural Revolution. But is there any way to say that his upbringing was a cause of his creativity?

Dean SIMONTON: Yeah, that’s very important. We actually have a term for it. We call it “diversifying experiences.”

Dean Simonton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Davis. He’s spent decades studying the biographies of great artists and scientists to help understand where creativity comes from.

SIMONTON: What “diversifying experiences” means is you’re exposed to one or more events, in childhood or adolescence, that puts you on a different track from everybody else. So instead of being raised just like all the other kids on your block in a very conventional fashion, you all of a sudden find yourself different. You see yourself as different. You have different goals. And these diversifying experiences can take a lot of different forms, and often you look at the lives of a lot of creative geniuses and you see more than one of them operating.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that diversifying influences would tend to lead to higher creativity then, yes?

SIMONTON: Tend to lead to creative genius.

Pat BROWN: I didn’t realize that he was a spy until I was a teenager.

That’s the scientist Pat Brown. He grew up all over the world — in Paris, Taipei, in Washington, D.C.

BROWN: The way I figured it out was that a good friend of mine, my dad was his boss in a way, and he made some mention of the fact that his dad worked for the C.I.A., and I thought, “Well, that’s weird because —”

DUBNER: “My dad doesn’t.”

BROWN: Yeah.

For a time, Brown was best known as an inventor of a method of genetic analysis called the D.N.A. microarray, which has become useful for the study of cancer.

DUBNER: Was this research primarily within the context of solving cancer, addressing cancer, or no?

BROWN: No. Let’s put it this way. It’s kind of hard to, for so many of these things that I would do, any scientist would do, it’s not necessarily that there’s a single reason why you’re doing it. You just realize that, if we could do this, there’s all these cool things that you could apply it to. Okay. And in fact, in the early days when we had first got this thing working, we had a few good ideas there was reason enough to do it. And then as you’re actually doing experiments you realize, “Oh we could do this. Oh we could do this.”

Until a few years ago, Brown was a sort of high-end researcher-without-portfolio at Stanford. And then he took a massive left turn and founded a startup with rather modest goals.

BROWN: I’m currently the C.E.O. and founder of Impossible Foods, which is a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

I asked Brown whether he saw any connection between his globe-trotting childhood with a C.I.A. dad and his scientific career.

BROWN: I think the fact that I traveled and lived in multiple places in the world. And in those days kids were a lot more like free-range at a young age. And I felt like I had a lot of freedom to explore all these places and so forth, I think had an impact on me in the sense that it just it just made me aware of the fact that there is basically no place on earth that’s inaccessible.

Maira KALMAN: Probably the base of everything that I do is a fantastic curiosity about people, intense empathy that we’re all struggling, we’re all heroic to just even wake up in the morning.

That’s Maira Kalman.

Maira KALMAN: I am an illustrator and author.

And she’s got a son.

Alex KALMAN: My name is Alex Kalman and I’m a designer, a curator, a creative director, a writer, an editor, and someone with generally many ants in their pants.

DUBNER: Can one or both of you — you can take turns, you can interrupt, whatever you want — just describe briefly the family. That’s a small topic, but just a little bit about the family growing up and until now.

Maira KALMAN: Did you say that’s a small topic?

DUBNER: Yeah.

Maira KALMAN: Oh my God. That’s an epic. I think that’s the epic topic. There is no bigger topic than the family.

Maira Kalman is best known for her children’s books and her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style and her work for The New Yorker, including one of its most famous covers ever, called “New Yorkistan.” Her work manages to be whimsical and melancholy at once. Paintings of cake and dogs and demure old ladies in plume-y hats. She once bought a pair of the conductor Arturo Toscanini’s pants at auction, just to have them. Actually, she bought the whole suit …

Maira KALMAN: But his pants have a lot more panache when you say his pants.

For years, Maira Kalman was best-known as the right-hand woman to her husband Tibor Kalman, a wildly creative and influential designer. He died young, nearly 20 years ago, when their two children were young. I’ve known them since around that time.

DUBNER: Pretend I don’t know either of you at all.

Maira KALMAN: Okay.

DUBNER: And we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane or something and I say, “Who are you?” Oh, you guys are a mother and son, tell me a little bit about yourselves. What kind of family was this? Where did you live and what was that household like?

Alex KALMAN: I think we’d say, “Do you mind if we swap seats so that we don’t have to sit next to each other on our flight.” Yeah. We’d prefer not to talk, actually.

Maira KALMAN: I’m going to say, I’m going to be in business class and he’s going to be in — no, anyway, so go on.

Alex KALMAN: Mom!

Alex and Maira are collaborators too. They created an installation called Sara Berman’s Closet — Sara Berman being Maira’s mother and Alex’s grandmother — and the installation consisted of the contents of Sara’s closet, artfully curated and arranged. It’s appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So I was curious what the Kalman house was like to grow up in.

Alex KALMAN: It was a really joyful and wild and fun childhood. We were all very close and we went on many adventures. And days were filled with looking around and making books when we were bored and cooking dinner and listening to music from all corners of the earth and just a real — really deep exposure to everything and anything that was not familiar in our day to day.

Maira KALMAN: And I thought that a house where we’re making books and dancing and making costumes and turning the furniture upside down is — How could you not do that? So the creativity in the home, in the family, was a sense of play and a sense of loving language and art and music.

Alex KALMAN: I think that real creativity isn’t this thought to say, “Okay now let’s be creative.” It’s just a natural feeling or understanding of saying, “All these rules are opportunity to create new rules or bend certain rules.” And the joy in that type of experimentation and that type of play, hopefully with some result that is meaningful or profound or funny or entertaining.

Nico MUHLY: My parents to their enormous credit were really not that pushy.

That’s the composer Nico Muhly, the youngest person to ever have a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in New York. He grew up in New England with a painter mom and a documentary-filmmaker dad.

MUHLY: And it’s the usual, you have to be driven to the thing and then you have to get all the books and you have to pay for these classes and whatever. So my parents were really great about that, but it wasn’t this version of the thing where it’s as if we were going to press you so hard to become a concert violinist. Nor was it, isn’t this a cute hobby but you need to work for Goldman Sachs. I think they found the good middle point.

It’s less about them being artists and more about them creating a household in which ideas were spoken about. And I think that’s the real luxury of my childhood was not necessarily being surrounded by art in that way, but by people who read and thought about a million things and channeled that into, not just artistic expression. I mean, we all know, we all have horror stories of people raised by artists.

Horror stories, maybe. But also success stories. Growing up in a creative household means learning not only that a creative life is possible; but if you pay attention, you can learn how to do it. That was the case with Elvis Costello, the singular singer-songwriter, whose father was a singer with a popular dance band.

Elvis COSTELLO: Nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest way but the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late 20’s to the 80’s. He was a remarkable character in English light entertainment. They weren’t by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that.

Young Elvis — actually his name was Declan MacManus back then — young Declan would hang out in the darkened balcony of the Hammersmith Palais in London during the band’s Saturday afternoon set. Watching his father emerge into the limelight, in jacket and tie. Which is why to this day, Elvis Costello pretty much always wears a jacket and tie.

COSTELLO: You have a sort of admiration for your parents’ ability to do whatever it is they do. That was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcast. Later on, after my parents separated, his life transformed. He then sort of took on an appearance closer to sort of Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? He grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable clothes and listen to contemporary music, because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band and decided he wanted to do his own thing.

So that striking out and being independent thing was sort of from his example, no matter what the music was or the style — and bear in mind my taste in music changed just like any teenager; it was all about one thing, the next day it was all about another; it was always about the song. I had spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool which at that time was musically very quiet in the early 70’s, and tried to make my own way playing my own songs. I had a partner, we sang in bars and any evening where they would let us on the stage, really.

We were making tiny little bits of money, just about covered our expenses, and I learned a little bit how to do it, but I never really thought that I was — I looked at the television every Thursday to see Top of the Pops and saw the distance between the way I looked and felt and sounded and what was a pop singer right then, which was a lot of people in baker foil with eye makeup on; that was the music of that moment, the glitter, glam moment. That seemed very distant from a 17-year-old.

DUBNER: Did you wish you could do that?

COSTELLO: No, I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie, while still loving everything he did.

Wynton MARSALIS: My father really struggled a lot. He couldn’t make money playing modern jazz.

Wynton Marsalis is one of the most celebrated musicians alive — a jazz and classical trumpeter who also composes, teaches, and runs the landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center program. His father, Ellis Marsalis, is also an accomplished jazz musician: a piano player.

MARSALIS: He played with great musicians, but the people didn’t really want to hear the style of music they were playing.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when Wynton was growing up in New Orleans, the dominant popular music was funk and R&B; not the modern jazz his father played.

MARSALIS: I’d grown up around the music, so my father and them played, they listen to their music, no one else was listening to it, but I heard it.

So Ellis Marsalis supported the family by teaching.

MARSALIS: Well my daddy, the first jobs my father had paid $5,000 a year, $6,000. He was a band director for segregated high schools and in towns like Opelousas, Louisiana. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

But Ellis was still an influential musician in New Orleans — and for his son.

MARSALIS: Musicians knew what he was. People in the neighborhood respected him for his opinions. Yeah you can’t say nothing to jazz musicians; they know stuff. The barbershop or something. And also because in the barbershop, at the height of black nationalism, my father was always the one who was not nationalistic and that was a great embarrassment for me.

I’d be saying, “Man, why are you always talking to stuff that’s against what everybody is saying?” And he would always be very philosophical: “Man, you don’t attack people that’s not there. You gotta tell the people in front of you what they don’t want to hear.” And he was always, a big one, he used to say, “All of everybody never does anything.” If you said, “they,” he would always say, “Who is they, man? Can you tell me who they is? Do you know them? Who are their names?”

Wynton’s mother was also a big influence.

MARSALIS: My mama was unique, and she had an originality. Her food tasted different, she had her own way of doing stuff. She was a big creative person.

DUBNER: The way she decorated your house, I understand was artistic? Yeah.

MARSALIS: Everything about her, everything. She grew up, she’s from the projects. So, she’s very unusual, because she very much had the street element which has become a cliché now. Then it wasn’t as cliché. And she was also it was her first to graduate from college, she went to Grambling University. She was extremely intelligent in terms of just her ability to do, she could do my chemistry homework when I was in high school and any spatial problem she understood. But she also had a very deep social consciousness that was not, it was not cliché.

And Wynton Marsalis distinguished himself at a very young age.

MARSALIS: Well, I played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14. And the Brandenburg Concerto with the New Orleans Youth Orchestra when I was 16.

DUBNER: How did you recognize that trumpet was going to be what you were good at?

MARSALIS: Well, I didn’t know till I was 12 that I was going to be interested in it and then it was just a matter of applying, practicing and stuff. I noticed, if you practice you got better. Because a guy in my neighborhood was always picked on. And he saw Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, and he decided to get some nunchucks. And man he would swing these sticks and then all of a sudden, maybe five months of him swinging these sticks every day, he became a virtuoso at it.

Then there was no more picking on him, calling him fat, taking his money, stuff that people liked to do him. All of a sudden it was, hey, say Fats, come swing them sticks for us. And then Fats, his name was Theodore. We called him Thedo. We grew up, we were in the country, Kenner, Louisiana the black side, segregated side. And I noticed one day, he had an encounter with a guy name we called Big Pull, and after that encounter he definitely was not picked on.

And I thought, “Man, practicing is something.” This guy, six months ago, everybody was picking on him, now he practiced swinging these sticks and his whole position in the hierarchy of this food chain has changed. I understood from watching him that just the diligence and repetition, intelligent repetition you could become better at things.

A couple of years later, Wynton and his brother Branford joined a funk band.

MARSALIS: I was good at making a bass line. I’m left-handed so they would always say, “Put a bass line on this bro,” so I’d put a bass line or something. We rehearsed in the 9th Ward, we had a band called The Creators at that time. In New Orleans, my brother and I were the two youngest musicians on the whole funk scene. I was 13 and Branford was 14. Our band was mainly older men, maybe in their early 20s and teens, late teens. There were maybe 10 to 13 bands they all had names like Cool Enterprise, Flashback, Stop Inc., Vietnam, Blackmail, the Family Players.

We would have battles of the bands, we’d play dances. We’d play gigs everywhere, wedding receptions. We did a series of talent shows that the police department would sponsor to make community relations, and people would come up out of the audience, we played the worst areas of New Orleans, and it was the most fun we ever had. And they would come up and sing or play. And we had to learn their 15 or 20 songs and we learned that, we never look at music of course, most of the times there was never music. We just learned the music and we played and it was great.

I actually didn’t want to join the band, because at that time, when I was 12, I wanted to play jazz. And my daddy is the one that said, “Man, play in the band.”

DUBNER: Oh really?

MARSALIS: Yeah he said, “Man, join the band.”

DUBNER: Because why?

MARSALIS: Because you have to have experiences to know what something is. Don’t cut yourself out of experiences when you’re young. He was always saying, don’t adopt my prejudices; develop your own.

Mark DUPLASS: Jay and I were just this little two-person team.

That’s the filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, one half of another New Orleans brotherhood.

DUPLASS: We would sleep in Jay’s single bed together for way too late. Jay had already gone through puberty. I mean it was weird. But I think we started to develop this sense of we might try to become artists. And that seems like an impossible thing to do and be financially sustainable. So we better link arms and souls.

Mark and Jay Duplass both write, act, and direct, sometimes together, sometimes not. They had a pretty standard-issue suburban upbringing.

DUPLASS: Mom’s home with us while Dad’s cranking away 50 to 55 hours a week, building the American dream. So we can one day take a vacation that’s not in the car, one day fly to a vacation. That was the goal. So what that meant practically for me and Jay is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff. Our parents gave us a lot of emotional support and a lot of love, but they didn’t buy us a lot of stuff, so we were very bored.

And I think when cable arrived which was a marker of success. My dad was like, “We’re getting cable and we are doing it.” That’s when H.B.O. came into our lives and that really lit us up as a storytellers, because for those of you who don’t remember in the early-to-mid 80’s, there was no curation as to when certain kinds of movies were shown. They generally leave the R-rated movies for the nighttime now but back then we would come home from school and it was Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice and we were just enjoying the hard-hitting dramas of the late 70’s and early 80’s. And I think it really shaped a lot of who we were.

DUBNER: I’m curious, so you guys are what? You’re maybe 10 and Jay’s 14 or something at this point?

DUPLASS: Yeah, right around that age, yeah.

DUBNER: Yeah. So you’re watching Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice, which are not exactly teen or tween fare. Were you aware that you were outliers in that regard?

DUPLASS: It was still very subconscious, because we would take our bikes to the streets and still play with the other kids and play football. They really wanted to talk about Star Wars. And we were fine, and we watched those movies to keep up. But it was this feeling, which I think a lot of people have maybe later in high school when you start to realize, “Oh, this is not my tribe. I know how to play this game. I know how to talk about the things to get along, but when I go home, I’ve got my one or two people that are really are my tribe. And we’re talking about that stuff.” That sort of dynamic happened to me and Jay much earlier than most people talk about it happening.

The Duplass brothers pretty much built their mental model of a creative life from scratch. For Rosanne Cash, the opposite was true. She’s the daughter of country-music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian. As for Rosanne following in his footsteps:

Rosanne CASH: My mother was afraid of the life it would lead to. So she didn’t encourage me that much. My mother was very creative in other ways. She crocheted, and she painted, and she was president of her garden club and she was creative in some domestic realms. But writing and music just carried a lingering fog of fear around it for her.

But I remember my dad was on the road and I remember secretly writing him when I was 12 and saying everything I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to be a writer that I wanted to do something important, that I wanted people to read my words, that I loved language, that music was so important to me and had changed my life. I told him all of these things and he wrote me back and he said “I see that you see as I see.” It was powerful even to a 12-year-old. It gave me encouragement.

Her parents got divorced around this time; her father had become a heavy drinker and a drug addict. This made her rethink putting music at the center of her life.

CASH: Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician and I grew up thinking that fame was a terrible thing that happened to you, like a disease. And I thought, why would I go into that? Why would I try to attract that kind of attention? And you never have any privacy and privacy is so important to me because a writer needs privacy and I don’t want to go on the road and I don’t want to take drugs and get divorced. Well, actually I did want to take drugs in the beginning so that was — But most of that imprint came from my mom because she was really afraid of fame because of what happened in her life with my dad.

For Rosanne Cash, it was a cautionary tale but, in the end, not enough to stop her.

CASH: Yeah, I started writing songs and then I wanted to sing them myself and then I made demos and then I showed them to a record label. There was no turning back.

Rosanne Cash went on to put out many records, mostly country and pop, some of them big hits; she’s also written four books. She’s about to release a new record, called She Remembers Everything. A childhood like hers — a musician father, always traveling; drugs and alcohol; fame and its attendant burdens; her parents’ divorce: it’s practically the model for what we think of as a dysfunctional family. And having a dysfunctional family is often seen as the model for living a creative life.

Teresa AMABILE: It’s false.

That’s Teresa Amabile, a social psychologist from Harvard who studies creativity.

AMABILE: Many creative people do have dysfunctional families but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family. There’s some interesting research on this by David Feldman and Robert Elbert and a number of other people who have looked at the biographical backgrounds of people who have distinguished themselves for their creativity. Very often they faced a lot of adversity in childhood. Maybe they had a serious illness themselves. Maybe a parent was seriously ill or died. Maybe there was an ugly, acrimonious divorce or they lost a sibling.

Those kinds of events can crush a child, they can they can lead to a lot of problems; they can lead to substance abuse, they can lead to various forms of emotional illness. They can also lead to incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact. I don’t know if we — we being the field in general — have discovered what the keys are, what makes the difference for kids.

It is true, however, that eminent people in a range of fields are much more likely than the average person to have lost a parent at a young age. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8 percent. For high-performing scientists, the rate is 26 percent; for U.S. presidents, 34 percent; for poets, 55 percent. But, we should note, the rate of parental death is also disproportionately high for … prisoners. So it may be that a parent’s death is a shock to any child’s system, but that it’s hard to predict the direction of that shock. Too much depends on the circumstances, like how talented the kid is or whether they have some key guidance.

AMABILE: Sometimes it’s one key adult who can somehow rescue them in their lives. Sometimes it seems to just be a trait of the kid. Something within themselves.

There’s also the notion that creativity itself can be a kind of coping mechanism — as it was for the graphic designer Michael Bierut.

Michael BIERUT: I was a really good elementary school and junior high school and high school artist. I was very accomplished, I could do very realistic drawings that impressed people. And boy, did I take pleasure in impressing people. Most of my other physical attributes and mannerisms were the things that would provoke many strangers just to beat me up. But this magic ability to draw things actually seemed to be a thing that even bullies would be impressed by.

Early on, I started associating creativity not with just something that I would do in a lonely room for my own satisfaction but something that somehow would give me a way of operating in the larger world. If you were designing a poster for the school play, you got to go to rehearsals. So even if you couldn’t sing or dance or act, you got to make a contribution to the overall effort that went into bringing that play to the stage.

SIMONTON: Well, that’s another example of a diversifying experience. Being in an out group.

Dean Simonton again.

SIMONTON: Being a minority, as long as you’re not oppressed. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of minorities are oppressed, and so they’re not going to realize their potential, even though they are more inclined to think outside the box. If they can’t get a job, then it’s not going to help them much. I mean, a good example of that is that Jews in Europe are well-known to be overrepresented in a lot of domains of creativity, particularly in the sciences. For example, Nobel prizes in the sciences, Jews are overrepresented.

DUBNER: It’s something like 20 percent.

SIMONTON: But, guess what? That’s most likely to be in the case where Jews were emancipated, where they were no longer subject to the kind of anti-Semitism that they saw in medieval Europe. In Switzerland and a number of other countries. So Switzerland, that disproportion is much much higher than you see in Russia, which actually has many more Jews, but had a much longer history of anti-Semitism.

Maira KALMAN: I used to use the Nazis invading my studio as a motivator to finish an assignment that I was dragging. And I would say, “Well, if the Nazis came in two hours, would it be done? What if they came in one hour — would it be done then?” And that was expecting the worst. And I was brought up, of course my family — especially from my father that sense of you never know what’s going to happen. Horrible things will happen.

Kalman grew up in Israel, her parents having escaped Belarus before the Holocaust. But the rest of her father’s family did not make it out.

Maira KALMAN: In our family, all roads lead to the Holocaust. It’s kind of an inescapable part of a section of our lives and it’s a reference point for so many things. When we talk about politics or things being bad and we say, “Well, it’s not the Holocaust so get a grip.”

When I visited Kalman recently in her Greenwich Village apartment, one room was dominated by cardboard boxes, recently freed from storage. They contained the possessions of her late husband. She and her son Alex are planning to make a documentary about Tibor Kalman.

DUBNER: Would it be fun to open a Tibor box and just see what’s in one?

Maira KALMAN: No. I mean, it could be. Oh wait, I take that back. Let’s open this box.

DUBNER: Okay.

Maira KALMAN: This box is — no, not that box. This box — Yes. Okay. This is — he used to take this extendable fork to a restaurant. And he’d opened the extendable fork and then all of a sudden — this is — well this needs to be repaired but he would reach over to another plate from the customers next to us and take the food off their plate.

DUBNER: Oh, not at your own table?

Maira KALMAN: No, not at our own table. What would have been the fun of that? The fun of this was that he would reach over into somebody else’s table and take their food. He did it in Italy, and everything is much more jolly and festive there and everybody’s laughing a lot at this guy who’s reaching over. And these are Karl Marx communist potato chips which I made for the Tiborocity show. We created a mock store, and this is after he died of course, and I thought, shouldn’t we have Karl Marx communist potato chips, as if that was part of our collection.

The Mmuseumm is housed in an old freight elevator. (Photo: alexkalman/Wikimedia)

Maira and Tibor Kalman’s son Alex is now 33 years old. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of his creative spirit comes from his mother and his father. His main project at the moment is a small museum called Mmuseumm, he calls it “a contemporary natural history museum” and a form of “object journalism.” This is where “Sara Berman’s Closet” originated, before it landed at the Met. We visited Mmuseumm with Alex Kalman one afternoon. Mmuseumm is very, very small. How small? It’s housed in an old freight elevator. About three people can fit comfortably. And yet: it is a museum.

DUBNER: This is nicely done.

Alex KALMAN: Museum quality.

DUBNER: It is museum quality.

Alex KALMAN: It is.

DUBNER: Seriously.

Alex KALMAN: Yeah. Well the idea is that it’s a museum. There’s certain rules we felt we had to follow.

DUBNER: Yeah.

Alex KALMAN: And if we did that then, there’s other rules we could play with. So this collection is called “Modern Religion,” and it’s basically exploring how these ancient traditions stay relevant in today’s society and one way of staying relevant is redesigning the elements or the tools of that religion to fit in with modern trends. So today, everybody’s gluten-free. So now there’s gluten-free communion wafers. Or everybody’s on-the-go, so there’s on-the-go Communion kits. It’s looking at these seemingly banal objects, and —

DUBNER: And this one here is the —

Alex KALMAN: Yeah.

DUBNER: Really? It looks like a piece of Nicorette, and is that wine and a little host, then?

Alex KALMAN: That’s right, yeah. The idea in Mmuseumm is that we want to touch on many different notes of what it means to be human. So there’s things in here that are totally devastating and there’s things in here that are completely absurd and we don’t want the trick to be on you. We want you to be a part of it.

I asked Kalman how his father, and his father’s death, influenced him as a human and as a creative.

Alex KALMAN: There always felt to be a really deep and natural and profound connection between Maira and Tibor and Lulu and me.

Lulu is Alex’s sister.

KALMAN: So there is just a sensibility and a way of feeling and interacting and thinking and doing and why we’re doing and what we’re doing that feels very just binding and natural. And I often think that, subconsciously, the work that I do today feels like a way of maintaining a dialogue with Tibor and he feels very present and very active in it all.

*      *      *

Dean Simonton, you will recall, is a psychology professor who’s studied the biographies of creative geniuses.

Dean SIMONTON: To get back to just pure psychology, there’s something called the “Big 5” personality factors.

The “Big 5” are: conscientiousness, extraversion-slash-introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and …

SIMONTON: And one of those “Big 5” factors is the openness to experience factor. And it has a lot of different facets to it. It is openness to values, openness to actions, you’re willing to try out different foods, try out different music, all sorts of different things. And this factor is so powerful as a predictor of human behavior, that you can actually tell by going to someone’s dorm room in college whether or not they’re high or low in openness to experience. Okay? Well it turns out this correlates very, very highly with creative genius. Creative geniuses tend to be very, very high in openness to experience. They’re willing to explore different values, different approaches.

We did find a lot of openness to experience in the creatives we’ve been speaking with, often starting in childhood.

Margaret GELLER: I was very much interested in the arts as a child.

That’s Margaret Geller, a path-breaking astrophysicist.

GELLER: And my mother, who was a walking dictionary and loved literature, used to take me to the beautiful Morristown, New Jersey library. It was in a very old building, and one of the things that we read together were plays by all the famous American playwrights. And from that, I really inherited a love of the language and I became fascinated by the theater and by the human condition. So I demanded that I go to acting school. I don’t think my father was that fond of this idea, but it was impossible not to do it.

Geller’s father was a chemist at Bell Labs, the famous tech incubator.

GELLER: I think he started taking me there when I was around 10 and he used to have a mechanical calculator, probably nobody listening, or virtually nobody, knows what one of those are. But they were called Monroe calculators, and the fascinating thing was all the noise they made. And the best thing was to, say, divide one by three, so it would just go, “ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk,” and just put out all the threes it could.

I learned how to load an X-ray camera, and I learned how to measure an X-ray diffraction photograph, how to use a Vernier. And people would come in and chat with me. And also Bell Labs had, in its lobby, a Foucault pendulum which I used to be fascinated by, many stories high. So that was a fascinating thing to see.

The inventor James Dyson, he of the multi-billion-dollar vacuum fortune, was not predestined for a life of engineering.

James DYSON: My father was head of the classics department at my school till he died. My brother was a classics scholar. And my mother was an English scholar. So there was no engineering, or manufacturing, architecture, or anything in sight.

So how’d that happen?

DYSON: So all I knew about creativity, or the only creative thing I did in school, was art. I went off to art school or arts university to pursue art as a career, as a painter, in fact. But when I got there — and this is in London — I discovered that you could do quite a large number of forms of design, like furniture design, interior design, architecture, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, and so on. And I became interested in design but ended up doing architecture.

And while I was doing architecture I discovered that I was very interested in structural engineering. I don’t know why. Except that at that time, it was the time of Buckminster Fuller and his triadic structures, geodesic structures, and Frei Otto with cable-tensioned structures. And it was a time that concrete and, for that matter bricks, were disappearing as the structure for buildings and being replaced by steel structures of one sort or another. And I realized that architecture was going to be about the structure and the engineering, and not so much the form. And I found engineering fascinating, I don’t know why. I’d never come across it in my life before.

DUBNER: I’m curious if you were at all intimidated by the notion of architecture and engineering as much as it appealed to you, did it strike you as something that lay outside the realm of possibility for a boy who came from a family where the classics were the foundation? Did it seem at first just too hard?

DYSON: Not at all. You have to remember — or maybe it’s my arrogance, but you have to remember this was the mid-60s in London, where anything was possible. And it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter.

It’s probably no coincidence that moving to a big city like London changed the way James Dyson thought about his creative prospects. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago when he lived in New York City for several years.

WEIWEI: Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. Not everywhere is like New York City.

The world has gotten more urban over the past few decades. And that’s probably a good thing for the sake of creativity and innovation. Economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser argue that cities play an outsized role in economic growth.

Ed GLAESER: I think the city is our greatest invention because it plays to something that is so fundamental in humanity. It plays to our ability to learn from one another.

Our ability to learn from one another in cities. Ideas colliding, on purpose and by accident. Also, there’s competition in cities — and with that competition comes strong incentives to create. But this raises its own, larger question: is creativity best-served by external incentives and motivation, or internal? When Wynton Marsalis was first thinking about pursuing a career in music, his father warned him: he said don’t do it unless you truly love it. “Don’t sit around waiting for publicity, money, people saying you’re great,” he told him, because “that might never happen.” Things obviously worked out well for Wynton Marsalis, but he remembers his father’s message well, and passes it along to his own students in the jazz program at Juilliard, where he teaches.

MARSALIS: My first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement. And that mission statement has three sentences. What do I want to do, how do I achieve it, and why am I doing it? And based on that mission statement, I teach them. And I have, my fundamental teaching to them is, I want you to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward. I’m not going to reward you or punish you. This is information, and you can do what you want with this information. So, you’re always actualizing. And I always tell them, if you want to learn something I can’t stop you. If you don’t want to learn it, I cannot teach you.

What Ellis Marsalis taught Wynton, and what Wynton teaches his students, is supported by the academic research on creativity and children. A few decades ago, the Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper ran an experiment with nursery-school students in which he first watched them doing various activities, one of which was drawing with markers. Teresa Amabile, who studied under Lepper when she was getting her Ph.D., tells the story.

AMABILE: He then took all of the children, if they’d shown any real interest in these markers, he put them into his experiment. And had them go into a separate room and they were randomly assigned to one of a couple of conditions. The experimental condition was one where the children sat down, and the experimenter said, “Hi, I’ve got some Magic Markers and some paper here for you. I wonder, would you be willing to make a drawing for me with these materials in order to get this “good player award?” And the experimenter then held up this little award certificate with a big shiny gold star on it and a place to write in the child’s name. That was the expected-reward condition.

The kids in this group, as promised, got the certificate for making a drawing. A second group of kids were invited to make a drawing — with no mention of a reward — and got the certificate as a surprise afterwards. This was called the “unexpected-reward condition.” And a third group of kids, a control group, made drawings but were neither promised a reward nor surprised with one.

AMABILE: The results were amazing. They were very strong. The kids who were in the control condition, who were in the unexpected-reward condition, were just as interested in playing with those markers and drawing pictures in their free play time as they had been before they went into the experimental room. The kids who were in the promised-reward condition, the contracted-for-reward condition, were significantly less interested in playing with those markers. So this showed very clearly — and there were many subsequent experiments showing — that intrinsic motivation, intrinsic interest in children and in adults, can be undermined by the expectation of reward.

This finding — that extrinsic motivation can erode someone’s intrinsic desire to create — came as a surprise.

AMABILE: It was revolutionary at the time, which was the early 1970s, because behaviorism still held sway in much of psychology, the notion that rewards are purely good, that they motivate behavior, that you can shape behavior with reward and that is true. In fact it’s still true that rewards can be very powerful shapers of behavior. But Mark discovered this very counter-intuitive, unexpected, unintended negative consequence of reward.

Amabile herself, in a follow-up experiment, explored how extrinsic motivation affects the quality of creative work. She gave kids a bunch of art supplies and asked them each to make a collage.

AMABILE: Without a really strict time limit, although we generally guide people to finish the collage in 15 to 20 minutes.

The kids were divided into two groups. The first group was not promised any sort of reward; the second was told that the best collages would win an Etch-a-Sketch or a Magic 8 Ball. This was called the “competitive-reward condition.” Now all Amabile needed were some judges.

AMABILE: I brought in people from the art department at Stanford individually and asked them to rate each collage relative to the others on creativity on a nine-point scale, something like that. And when I analyzed the data, I found that the kids in the competitive-reward condition, made collages that were significantly less creative than the ones made by the kids in the other condition.

Based on this research and more, it would seem that the promise of extrinsic rewards — the kind of incentives that economists think encourage productivity — that actually discourages creativity, and decreases the quality. At least for kids, in these settings — it’s impossible to generalize. But the evidence is strong enough for Amabile to draw some conclusions.

AMABILE: I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I’m talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how the work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and the past several years. Part of it is the way curricula have been structured, even before the current major push on testing.

There’s too much focus on “what is the right answer, what are people going to think of what I’m about to say?” and too little focus on “what am I learning, what cool stuff do I know now that I didn’t know last week or a year ago, what cool things can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” And I think that if we could if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids’ creativity.

Kids come intrinsically motivated to learn, and we stamp that out of them through the educational system. I don’t think it’s impossible to reorient the way we teach. It’s not going to be easy. But I think we can do it. I think we have to do it.

Walter ISAACSON: I think we all see kids who are slightly rebellious, who talk back, who question the teacher.

That’s Walter Isaacson, who’s written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

ISAACSON: And at a certain point, the teacher either spends more time and lets the imagination wander or punishes them and says, “Quit questioning me.” Einstein ran away from his school in Germany because he was expected to learn by rote, and he was swatted down every time he tried to question the teacher. So he was lucky — he gets to run away and go to Switzerland, where they have a new type of school system that nurtures questioning authority.

One institution that has raised the questioning of authority to an art form is the M.I.T. Media Lab. It has research units called Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics — and Lifelong Kindergarten. That last one is run by a professor of learning research.

Mitch RESNICK: My name is Mitch Resnick.

Resnick argues that randomized, controlled experimentation — the gold standard of a lot of science — just doesn’t work very well for a subject like creativity.

RESNICK: One problem is it changes one variable at a time. And I don’t think any one variable is going to be the key to creativity. I think that what we see is the most creative environments have lots of different things that work together in an integrated way. So it’s really not so easy to take the classic approach of make a tweak in one variable and see the changes. I don’t think it’s going to be the way that we’re going to get a deeper understanding of the creative process.

Resnick argues that the lack of clear, quantifiable outcomes is a big reason why schools don’t prioritize creativity.

RESNICK: Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed, rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids and valuable for thriving in today’s society. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed.

Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group develop software that lets kids make things, like animated stories or interactive Lego models.

RESNICK: Very often, traditional learning has taken the form of delivering information, delivering instruction. And the view has been if we just find a better way to deliver the instruction, kids will learn more. But I think research has shown that learning happens when kids, and adults for that matter, actively construct new ideas. There’s the expression we “get” ideas. We don’t “get” ideas. We make ideas. So I think that yes, there’s some role for just delivering information. But I think the most important creative experiences come when kids are actively engaged in making new ideas through their interactions with the world.

The program is called Lifelong Kindergarten because Resnick thinks the ideas should extend well beyond childhood.

RESNICK: We focus on four guiding principles that I call the four Ps of creative learning: projects, passion, peers, and play. So we feel that the best way to support kids developing as creative thinkers and developing their creative capacities is to engage them in working on projects based on their passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit.

We lead most of our lives by working on projects. A marketing manager coming up with the new ad campaign is working on a project. A journalist writing the article is working on a project; in our personal life, we plan someone’s birthday party. That’s a project. So we want kids to learn about the process of making projects.

We also want them to work on things that they’re passionate about. We’ve seen over and over that people are willing to work longer and harder and persist in the face of challenges when they’re working on things they really care about. They also make deeper connection to ideas when they’re working on projects that they really care about.

The third P of peers — we’ve seen that learning is a social activity, that the best learning happens in collaboration and sharing with others. We learn with and from others.

Then the final P of play, I sometimes call the most misunderstood P. Often when people think about play they just think about fun and laughter. And I have nothing against fun and laughter but that’s not the essence what I’m talking about. I see play not just as an activity but a type of attitude and approach for engaging with the world. When someone has a playful approach, it means they’re constantly experimenting, trying new things, taking risks, testing the boundaries. And I think the most creative activities come about what we’re willing to experiment and take risks.

Jennifer EGAN: I remember when I would come home from school and no one was home and I didn’t have a plan. There was this almost mysterious excitement that I would feel about just being alone.

That’s the writer Jennifer Egan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.

EGAN: I have to say, I feel I lost touch with that through maybe even decades of my life where I was so worried about what everyone else was doing, how I measured up, how what I should be doing as opposed to what I was doing whether there was some important thing everyone else was doing that I should be doing too. And this was before social media. I think this is a scourge for young people now. From everything I hear. But if I can get that out of my head, which I find easier and easier as I get older, there’s a feeling that there’s sort of a mystery that’s waiting for me that I can possibly enter.

There’s so many childhood narratives that are really about this. I mean, The Secret Garden, all the Narnia books about passing through a membrane or a border or a door or jumping into a pool and being in another world. It’s a really basic fantastical longing. This wish to be at a distance from one’s own life and to touch something outside it, which is first of all thrilling in and of itself. And second of all returns you to your real life charged in some way. That’s what fiction writing does for me.

ISAACSON: I think that when we’re young, we really indulge our wonder years.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: That notion of playing and being imaginative, and having downtime where you can be creative — that’s something we sometimes lose in our school systems today.

One beneficiary of this creative downtime? Leonardo da Vinci.

ISAACSON: He had the great fortune to be born out of wedlock, which meant that he couldn’t go to one of the Latin schools that middle-class families of the Renaissance went to. And so he’s self-taught — he sits by a stream and puts rocks and different obstacles in it to see how the water swirls, and he draws it. And then he looks at how air swirls. All of these things you get to do when you’re young, you’re full of wonder, and you’re using your imagination.

We see that in Ben Franklin as a young kid, just being interested in, “Why does condensation form on the outside of a cold cup?” The type of thing that maybe we thought about, but somehow we quit thinking about. So that’s the number-one secret of being imaginative and creative, is almost being childlike in your sense of wonder. Albert Einstein said that. He said, “I’m not necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I was able to retain my childlike sense of wonder at the marvels of creation in which we find ourselves.”

But Walter Isaacson — like Mitch Resnick and Teresa Amabile — isn’t calling for a ban on conventional instruction.

ISAACSON: I think that creativity is something you can nurture, and even try to teach. But more importantly, creativity without skill — creativity without training and learning — can be squandered. If Louis Armstrong had not found somebody — King Oliver — to teach him how to play the cornet, all of his imagination would have been lost. So we should not disparage the role of training, of learning.

The same is true of Einstein — as a little kid, he’s wondering how the compass needle twitches and points north. What’s important is that he goes to the Zurich Polytech and starts understanding the concepts behind Maxwell’s equations. So people who think we should just nurture creativity without the skill sets and the training that allow creativity to be turned into action, to allow for things like applied creativity, they’re being too romantic about it. Leonardo had to work in Verrocchio’s workshop and learn how to do a brush stroke.

There are, of course, plenty of obstacles that may keep a person from gaining both proper instruction and the latitude to play and imagine. Nor is every kid lucky enough to grow up with two parents as talented and creative as Tibor and Maira Kalman. Or with parents like Margaret Geller’s, taking her to Bell Labs and indulging her passion for acting. These are privileges, not rights. They’re not always fully appreciated. Here’s John Hodgman, the comedian, author, and former Daily Show correspondent.

John HODGMAN: People who are hand-to-mouthing it and are really economically anxious, of course they’re going to have a disadvantage to, say, an affluent white dude from Brookline, Massachusetts who is an only child who had the full benefit of all of his parents’ love and never had to share anything in his life. I had a lot of time to sit around thinking and daydreaming to the point where, when I went to college, my dad said, “I don’t care what you do in college, I ask you only that you take a single course in bookkeeping and finance, so you know how that world works.” And I was like, “Dad, I love you, but no way.”

DUBNER: Really? That wasn’t a big ask on your father’s part.

HODGMAN: Even that. I know, fathers, I know.

DUBNER: What a spoiled brat you were.

HODGMAN: Totally. This is what I’m saying. I’ve regretted it every day of my life. It was an incredibly selfish and ridiculous thing to do, because I was spending his money to go to college. And yet I was like, “No, I’m going to sit on the grass and read 100 Years of Solitude for the fifth time.” You could make an argument that it paid off for me, to a certain degree.

But I mean, look: art comes out of all communities everywhere. Communities of means and communities of no means. I mean, the greatest art movement of the 20th and 21st century, that is probably the most globally meaningful art movement, is the development of hip-hop, which was creation in the South Bronx by young people who were obviously not affluent.

John Hodgman sure sounds like he’s got a grip on the causes and consequences of creativity. Wouldn’t you say? And that he’s got his own creative ducks in a row. He’s had a lot of creative and commercial success. But do not be deceived. If you think prior success insulates a creative person from — well, anything, you should think again.

HODGMAN: I mean, let me put it this way: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying. It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

We’ll explore that fear, and many other aspects of creativity, in future episodes of this series. Until then, keep your ears open for a bonus episode, our full conversation with Elvis Costello, who’s had one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music and has just put out a wonderful new record, called Look Now.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer.

Pat Brown, chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc.

Rosanne Cash, singer-songwriter.

Elvis Costello, musician, singer, songwriter, and composer.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.

Alex Kalman, co-founder, director, and curator of the Mmuseumm

Maira Kalman, illustrator, writer, artist, and designer.

Wynton Marsalis, American musician, composer and bandleader.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Ai Weiwei, contemporary artist and activist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

EXTRA

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitch Resnick (M.I.T. 2017).

The post Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/where-does-creativity-come-from-and-why-do-schools-kill-it-off-ep-355/

[itsjessicaisreal]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

from Marketing http://unbounce.com/product-marketing/bad-website-popup-examples/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[roypstickney]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

[kennethmontiveros]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[zacdhaenkeau]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://unbounce.com/product-marketing/bad-website-popup-examples/

[archiebwoollard]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://unbounce.com/product-marketing/bad-website-popup-examples/

[racheltgibsau]

Technology isn’t the Problem, We Are: 5 Horrific Website Popup Examples

It’s Day 5 of Product Marketing Month. Today I get to bash some really bad popup examples. Yuss! — Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner

But before I bring the heat, I want to talk a bit about what it’s like, as a product marketer, to be marketing something that’s difficult to market.

You see, there’s a common problem that many marketers face, and it’s also one of the most asked questions I hear when I’m on the road, as a speaker:

“How do I great marketing for a boring product or service?”

That’s a tough challenge for sure, although the good news is that if you can inject some originality you’ll be a clear winner, as all of your competitors are also boring. However, I think I can one-up that problem:

“How do I do great marketing for something that’s universally hated, like popups?”

We knew we had a big challenge ahead of us when we decided to release the popups product because of the long legacy of manipulative abuse it carries with it.

In fact, as the discussion about product direction began in the office, there were some visceral (negative) reactions from some folks on the engineering team. They feared that we were switching over to the dark side.

It makes sense to me that this sentiment would come from developers. In my experience, really good software developers have one thing in common. They want to make a difference in the world. Developers are makers by design, and part of building something is wanting it to have a positive impact on those who use it.

To quell those types of fears requires a few things;

Education about the positive use cases for the technology,

Evidence in the form of good popup examples, showcasing how to use them in a delightful and responsible manner,

Features such as advanced triggers & targeting to empower marketers to deliver greater relevance to visitors,

And most important of all – it requires us to take a stance. We can’t change the past unless we lead by example.

It’s been my goal since we started down this path, to make it clear that we are drawing a line in the sand between the negative past, and a positive future.

Which is why we initially launched with the name “Overlays” instead of popups.

Overlays vs. Popups – The End of an Era

It made a lot of sense at the time, from a branding perspective. Through podcast interviews and public speaking gigs, I was trying to change the narrative around popups. Whenever I was talking about a bad experience, I would call it a popup. When it was a positive (and additive) experience, I’d call it an overlay. It was a really good way to create a clear separation.

I even started to notice more and more people calling them overlays. Progress.

Unfortunately, it would still require a lot of continued education to make a dent in the global perception of the terminology, that with the search volume for “overlays” being tiny compared to popups, factored heavily into our decision to pivot back to calling a popup a popup.

Positioning is part of a product marketer’s job – our VP of Product Marketing, Ryan Engley recently completed our most recent positioning document for the new products. Just as the umbrella term “Convertables” we had been using to include popups and sticky bars had created confusion, “Overlays” was again making the job harder than it should have been. You can tell, just from reading this paragraph alone that it’s a complex problem, and we’re moving in the right direction by re-simplifying.

The biggest challenge developing our positioning was the number of important strategic questions that we needed to answer first. The market problems we solve, for who, how our product fits today with our vision for the future, who we see ourselves competing with, whether we position ourselves as a comprehensive platform that solves a unique problem, or whether we go to market with individual products and tools etc. It’s a beast of an undertaking.

My biggest lightbulb moment was working with April Dunford who pushed me to get away from competing tool-to-tool with other products. She said in order to win that way, you’d have to be market leading in every tool, and that won’t happen. So what’s the unique value that only you offer and why is it important?

— Ryan Engley, VP Product Marketing at Unbounce

You can read more about our initial product adoption woes, and how our naming conventions hurt us, in the first post in the series – Product Marketing Month: Why I’m Writing 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days.

Let’s get back to the subject of popups. I think it’s important to look back at the history of this device to better understand how they came about, and why they have always caused such a stir.

Browser Interaction Models & the History of the Popup

The talk I was doing much of last year was called Data-Driven Design. As part of the talk, I get into interaction design trends. I’ve included the “Trendline” slide below.

You can see that the first occurrence of a popup was back in 1998. Also, note that I included Overlays in late 2016 when we first started that discussion.

Like many bad trends, popups began as web developers started trying to hack browser behavior to create different interruptive interaction modes. I know I made a lot of them back in the day, but I was always doing it to try to create a cool experience. For example, I was building a company Intranet and wanted to open up content in a new window, resize it, and stick it to the side of the screen as a sidebar navigation for the main window. That was all good stuff.

Tabbed browsers have done a lot to help clean up the mess of multiple windows, and if you couple that with popup blockers, there’s a clear evolution in how this type of behavior is being dealt with.

Then came the pop-under, often connected to Malware virus schemes where malicious scripts could be running in the background and you wouldn’t even know.

And then the always fun “Are you sure you want to do that?” Inception-like looping exit dialogs.

Developers/hackers took the simple Javascript modal “Ok” “Cancel” and abused it to the point where there was no real way out of the page. If you tried to leave the page one modal would lead to another, and another, and you couldn’t actually close the browser window/tab unless you could do it within the split second between one dialog closing and the next opening. It was awful.

So we have a legacy of abuse that’s killed the perception of popups.

What if Popups Had Been Built Into Browsers?

Imagine for a moment that a popup was simply one of many available interaction models available in the browsing experience. They could have had a specification from the W3C, with a set of acceptable criteria for display modes. It would be an entirely different experience. Sure, there would still be abuse, but it’s an interesting thought.

This is why it’s important that we (Unbounce and other like-minded marketers and Martech software providers) take a stance, and build the right functionality into this type of tool so that it can be used responsibly.

Furthermore, we need to keep the dialog going, to educate the current and future generations of marketers that to be original, be delightful, be a business that represents themselves as professionals, means taking responsibility for our actions and doing everything we can to take the high road in our marketing.

Alright, before I get to the really bad website popup examples, I’ll leave you with this thought:

Technology is NOT the problem, We Are.

It’s the disrespectful and irresponsible marketers who use manipulative pop-psychology tactics for the sake of a few more leads, who are the problem. We need to stop blaming popups for bad experiences, and instead, call out the malicious marketers who are ruining it for those trying to do good work.

It’s a tough challenge to reverse years of negative perception, but that’s okay. It’s okay because we know the value the product brings to our customers, how much extra success they’re having, and because we’ve built a solution that can be configured in precise ways that make it simple to use in a responsible manner (if you’re a good person).

Follow our Product Marketing Month journey >> click here to launch a popup with a subscribe form (it uses our on-click trigger feature).

5 Really Bad Website Popup Examples

What does a bad popup actually look like? Well, it depends on your judging criteria, and for the examples below, I was considering these seven things, among others:

Clarity: Is it easy to figure out the offer really quickly?

Relevance: Is it related to the content of the current page?

Manipulation: Does it use psychological trickery in the copy?

Design: Is it butt ugly?

Control: Is it clear what all options will do?

Escape: Can you get rid of it easily?

Value: Is the reward worth more than the perceived (or actual) effort?

#1 – Mashable Shmashable

What’s so bad about it?

If you peer into the background behind the popup, you’ll see a news story headline that begins with “Nightmare Alert”. I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what’s happening here.

Design: Bad. The first thing I saw looks like a big mistake. The Green line with the button hanging off the bottom looks like the designer fell asleep with their head on the mouse.

Clarity: Bad. And what on earth does the headline mean? click.click.click. Upon deeper exploration, it’s the name of the newsletter, but that’s not apparent at all on first load.

Clarity: worse. Then we get the classic “Clear vs. Clever” headline treatment. Why are you talking about the pronunciation of the word “Gif”? Tell me what this is, and why I should care to give you my email.

Design: Bad. Also, that background is gnarly.

#2 – KAM Motorsports Revolution!

What’s so bad about it?

It’s motorsports. It’s not a revolution. Unless they’re talking about wheels going round in circles.

Clarity: Bad. The headline doesn’t say what it is, or what I’ll get by subscribing. I have to read the fine print to figure that out.

Copy: Bad. Just reading the phrase “abuse your email” is a big turn off. Just like the word spam, I wasn’t thinking that you were going to abuse me, but now it’s on my mind.

Relevance: Bad. Newsletter subscription popups are great, they have a strong sense of utility and can give people exactly what they want. But I don’t like them as entry popups. They’re much better when they use an exit trigger, or a scroll trigger. Using a “Scroll Up” trigger is smart because it means they’ve read some of your content, and they are scrolling back up vs. leaving directly, which is another micro-signal that they are interested.

#3 – Utterly Confused

(Source unknown – I found it on confirmshaming.tumblr.com)

What’s so bad about it?

I have no earthly clue what’s going on here.

Clarity: Bad. I had to re-read it five times before I figured out what was going on.

Control: Bad. After reading it, I didn’t know whether I would be agreeing with what they’re going to give me, or with the statement. It’s like an affirmation or something. But I have no way of knowing what will happen if I click either button. My best guess after spending this much time writing about it is that it’s a poll. But a really meaningless one if it is. Click here to find out how many people agreed with “doing better”…

It ends with “Do Better”. I agree. They need to do a lot better.

#4 – Purple Nurple

What’s so bad about it?

Manipulation: Bad. Our first “Confirm Shaming” example. Otherwise known as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”. Forcing people to click a button that says “Detest” on it is so incongruent with the concept of a mattress company that I think they’re just being cheap. There’s no need to speak to people that way.

I found a second popup example by Purple (below), and have to give them credit. The copy on this one is significantly more persuasive. Get this. If you look at the section I circled (in purple), it says that if you subscribe, they’ll keep you up to date with SHIPPING TIMES!!! Seriously? If you’re going to email me and say “Hey Oli, great news! We can ship you a mattress in 2 weeks!”, I’ll go to Leesa, or Endy, or one of a million other Casper copycats.

#5 – Hello BC

What’s so bad about it?

Context: This is an entry popup, and I have never been to this site before.

Relevance: Bad. The site is Hellobc.com, the title says “Supernatural British Columbia”, and the content on the page is about skydiving. So what list is this for? And nobody wants to be on a “list”, stop saying “list”. It’s like saying email blast. Blast your list. If you read the first sentence it gets even more confusing, as you’ll be receiving updates from Destination BC. That’s 4 different concepts at play here.

Design: Bad. It’s legitimately butt ugly. I mean, come on. This is for Beautiful Supernatural British Columbia ffs. It’s stunning here. Show some scenery to entice me in.

Value: Bad. Seeing that form when I arrive on the page is like a giant eff you. Why do they think it’s okay to ask for that much info, with that much text.

Control: Bad. And there’s not any error handling. However, the submit button remains inactive until you magically click the right amount of options to trigger it’s hungry hungry hippo mouth to open.

Trainwreck.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. You might be wondering why there were so few popup examples in this post, keep reading and I’ll explain why.

Coming Up Tomorrow – Good Popups, YAY!!!

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed of late is that there is a shift in quality happening in the popup world. When the team rallied to find the bad popup examples above, we found at least 10x as many good ones as bad. That’s something to feel pretty good about. Perhaps the positive energy we’re helping to spread is having an impact.

So get your butt back here tomorrow to see 20+ delightful website popup examples. More importantly, I’ll also be sharing “The Delight Equation”, my latest formula for measuring quantifying how good your popups really are.

See you then!

Cheers Oli

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly updates.

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