#there are literally dozens on articles about that from music and business media

[dreamings-free]

1. The FITF campaign was an embarrassment, radio interviews in the middle of nowhere is a good promo for you? Same stupid interviews, nothing high profile, it’s like he’s some c-lister.

2. The album wouldn’t get a number 1 in the uk in million years if it wasn’t for the fans masss buying it, the team and Louis just got lucky.

3. The venues choices were weird and almost none of the shows were sold out, they can’t even work out what size of the venues he should play.

4. Don’t get me started at how the LIVE “promo” was handled lol

5. Also don’t get me started at some insulting interviews that Louis had to do for the TIMES magazine because his stupid team decided to book them

I can go on and on lol

anon, I’m sorry for your suffering, hope they find a cure for dumb af disease soon ❤️

[non-nu]

you’re my answer [1] | wonwoo

↠ pairing: actor!wonwoo x manager!reader

↠ genre: secret relationship, actor au

↠ word count: 1.8k

↠ warnings: mild cursing

↠ synopsis: y/n is living out a peaceful existence as the manager of top actor seo jisoo. but all of that changes when jisoo is forced into a fake relationship with her costar jeon wonwoo. thrown together in this bizarre situation, y/n quickly discovers wonwoo isn’t what he portrays himself to be. things get even more complicated when y/n starts to fall for wonwoo.

↠ character profiles ↞

↠ masterlist ↞

“We never should have gone to that hot pot restaurant,” you sigh as you place your phone down in your lap.

“I didn’t think their food was that bad,” Jaebum replies from beside you. You turn to him with a disapproving expression that quickly shatters into a grin when you make eye contact.

“You know what I’m talking about,” you nudge his arm at his widening smile. You let out a short chuckle but fall silent as your mind returns to what you had just been reading. Seeing the worry on your face, Jaebum grows serious.

“More articles are coming out, huh?”

“People are going crazy,” you show him the latest comments on your phone, “Jisoo and Wonwoo have been trending for the whole afternoon. All because of these rumors.”

“You know how it goes,” Jaebum offers some encouragement, “Everyone will forget about it by tomorrow morning.”

“Tell that to Ms. Kim. She’s already asked us to come in for a ‘chat’. I’m going to get an earful and then some.”

Before Jaebum can reply, the door the two of you are sitting next to opens. Jisoo steps out of the practice room followed by her vocal coach, a slightly older woman who is speaking enthusiastically.

“Jihoon is one of the biggest producers right now. You’re so lucky to be working with him,” she gushes.

“Oh really?” Jisoo attempts to inject a modicum of interest in her voice, but you can tell by her expression that she’s losing her will to be polite, “I don’t follow the music industry so I don’t know his work.”

The other woman clucks her tongue and a wistful expression comes over her face.

“The opportunity is wasted on you. I should have gone into acting, then maybe I’d have a shot at a singing career,” she pushes out a harsh laugh and motions in your direction, “Better yet, I should have become a manager. Then I’d get to meet all kinds of celebrities just by driving someone around a couple hours a day.”

Yeah, it’s so great my film degree didn’t work out. The words almost tumble out of your mouth, but you catch yourself.

“It’s a pretty sweet deal,” you reply instead with an awkward laugh.

“Yup, she’s my glorified chauffeur,” the sarcasm behind Jisoo’s comment does not register with the older woman as she lets out another round of laughter. You, Jisoo, and Jaebum all exchange glances as her outburst goes on for a bit too long.

“But you know,” her tone becomes serious as she regains her composure, “would it be too much trouble to pass him my demo when you’re in the studio?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jisoo places a hand on the woman’s shoulder as a farewell and begins to walk down the hall swiftly. You and Jaebum bid her goodbye as you follow close behind.

“By the way, Jisoo!” she calls from down the hall as you wait in front of the elevator, “Why don’t you bring Wonwoo around next time?”

“Isn’t there another vocal coach in this city?” Jisoo mumbles as the elevator doors open.

Jisoo has already started her tirade as you put the keys in the ignition.

“In the first place, why am I even featuring on this track? Whose idea was it to put that in my contract? And second of all, how much free time does the company think I have anyway? Making me spend two hours a week with that horrible gossip. All she has me do is run scales half the time and the other half she’s asking for an autograph from this actor or that singer. Wasting my time. It’s not that hard to string a couple notes together in the studio.”

“Oh, is it not? Someone should let Park Hyoshin and Sohyang know.”

Your joke breaks Jisoo out of her ranting mode as one corner of her mouth sneaks up.

“I know it’s shitty, but it’s not worth it to get worked up because of that woman,” you reason with her as you merge onto the main road, “If that’s how she copes with the disappointment of never fulfilling her dreams, shouldn’t we let her have that much?”

A brief silence falls over the car and your heart clenches as you realize what you’ve just said.

“Damn. You really said it.” Jisoo says in an appreciative yet slightly shocked tone while Jaebum lets out an extended “ohhh” behind his hand.

At their reactions, you mentally kick yourself for managing to put your foot in your mouth yet again. You quickly back track.

“No, no. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant…Really, I-”

Jisoo stops your floundering with a knowing wave of her hand.

“We know,” she reassures you, “I’m sure you meant it to be empathetic, in your own twisted way.”

“You don’t have to call it ‘twisted’…” you mutter but relief quickly washes over you at her words of understanding.

“I don’t know why you try so hard to be agreeable. I think you’re much better this way.” She makes the comment absently while looking out the window.

“You’re unique in many ways, Jisoo.” you tease.

“Oh, but I wish I could be there the day someone lets her have it. She will literally implode.”

“I don’t know if I’d wish that on her.”

“Always the pacifist.” Jisoo says in mock disapproval.

“Some people would say Y/N knows to pick her battles.” Jaebum chimes in and you wave an approving finger in his direction.

“I’m saving my energy for the lovely conversation we’ve been called in to have.”

“God, don’t tell me we’ve finally been summoned by Ms. Kim,” Jisoo cries out in exasperation, “Why do we have to get dragged out because people can’t keep their minds from going crazy with wild fantasies? What’s she going to tell me, anyway? I shouldn’t go out to eat because you never know if you’ll happen to run into another actor?”

You and Jaebum brace for the incoming spew of words and frustration.

“In the first place, what’s the big deal? So we ate at the same restaurant. Who cares? People eat at the same restaurant all the time. There were dozens of other people at the place, too. Am I dating all of them?”

“The rumors started more from the fact it happened three times. Within a month.” Jisoo dismisses Jaebum’s words with a flick of her wrist.

“Also because you’re about to shoot a movie together. Literally tomorrow.”

“Even if we were dating, what’s so interesting about that? It’s my business and it doesn’t belong on the front page of a trashy website that mistakes click bait for journalism.”

“In a way, she should be grateful you and your new movie are getting this much media play already,” you ponder as you pull into a space in the company parking lot.

“Any publicity is good publicity.” Jaebum offers as you unclick your seatbelts.

“Let’s get this over with.” You sigh as you head towards the imposing concrete building.

“She’ll see you now.” Ms. Kim’s assistant walks up to where you had been waiting in the lobby. She motions for you and Jisoo to follow her.

“You can wait here.” She speaks to Jaebum who remains seated.

Her heels click neatly against the perfectly white tiles as she leads you to the main office on the floor. She swings the glass door shut behind you as you enter the pristine room.

Ms. Kim is sitting at her desk with a document in hand. She doesn’t look up, but motions for you two to sit in the metal chairs on the other side of the table. The room is thick with silence aside from the occasional rustling of sheets as she turns a page. You’re examining a twisted glass statue on her bookshelf when Ms. Kim finally places the papers down. She clasps her hands together on the table and slowly turns her gaze up towards you and Jisoo.

“We’ll release an official statement in a few days,” she delivers the edict emotionlessly.

“A few days?” you repeat in confusion, “Don’t we want to stop this before things get out of hand?”

“And why would we want to do that?”

“Because” Jisoo seems shocked she has to clarify this point, “Jeon Wonwoo and I are not dating.”

“Well, now you are.”

You both know the severe woman before you is not the joking type, but Jisoo snorts a disbelieving laugh anyway. You’re met with impassive eyes as the two of you wait several seconds for her to clarify or take it back.

“No.” Jisoo returns the woman’s icy stare, “This is absurd. Do you actually realize what you’re suggesting?”

“I do. And it’s not a suggestion.”

You sense Jisoo bristle at that statement.

“Just what makes you think I’ll go along with this insanely unethical plan of yours?”

“Don’t be naïve, Jisoo. You’ve been in the business long enough to know this is hardly uncommon.”

The two continue to lock stares across the table for several heated seconds. With a sickeningly fake smile contorting her face, Ms. Kim continues to speak.

“If you don’t like it, of course you have the right to break your contract. But I’m sure we’d all hate to see you tangled up in court for the next five, six years.”

You’re well aware her threats are not unfounded. Everyone had read the stories. An endless legal battle and a couple vicious rumors could end anyone’s career. And it would be all business as usual for Ms. Kim and the company.

At this point, you can practically feel Jisoo vibrating in the chair next to you, her temper about to boil over. You had seen her mad, but never like this.

She had trekked a long path to get to where she is now, but you sense she could be capable of turning her back on it all just to throw it in the publicist’s face. When she inhales sharply, you jump to cut her off.

“What do we need to do?”

Ms. Kim keeps her gaze fixed on Jisoo a moment longer before giving you a quick glance. Her eyes linger less than a second before she begins shuffling through the papers on her desk.

“We’ll be in touch with more information. You may go.”

“Ok. Thank you.” You stand up in a hurry but Jisoo stays put, fists clenched tight in her lap.

“Jisoo,” you whisper tentatively, “let’s go.”

Her eyes are daring the woman seated across the table to acknowledge her. Having said her piece and gotten the desired response, it’s like the two of you no longer exist to Ms. Kim who continues to review the documents before her.

“Jisoo,” you place a hand on her shoulder, “There’s nothing we can do right now. We need to leave.”

Jisoo could probably sit there all night, she’s stubborn enough. But instead she slowly releases the tension in her body with a shaky exhale before rising to her feet. Her mouth remains pulled into a deep frown as she stomps out of the room in silence.

↠ a/n: wow. i meant to post this sooner but got super busy😖anyway, the next part is underway and our main man will finally make an appearance! i’ll post it as quickly as i can. in the meantime, lmk what you think so far😊thank you for reading 🌻

[suburbanmetaldad]

What can I do for you?

Here, friends, is my super power:

I can create an entire book — a good one — quickly, with very little help.

You want a book with your name on it. I can make that happen.

Maybe you typed up a draft, and you’re not sure where to go next.

I can take it from here.

And anything smaller than that will be cheaper and faster.

Get on the schedule while you can.

Following are more details about me and my work.

Follow are links to different things D.X. Ferris makes & does. 

I am D.X. Ferris.

I grew up obsessed with music and reading. I went to school for writing. At the time, I thought I couldn’t create things. I didn’t know it yet, but I was wrong. I tried to quit. Writing wouldn’t let me. It kept pulling me back in. 

Once I figured out how to do what I wanted to do, I made up for lost time. Now I’ve covered a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction for Rolling Stone. I endured a career-ending injury. I’ve been to the Pentagon on business. I’ve written books with & about some of my iconic heroes. Communication is my business, and business is good.

I do a lot of different things. 

I am an award-winning writer, editor, manager, publisher, teacher, speaker, cartoonist, maker, co-author, ghost writer, and overall communications professional. To me, those various & sundry processes are all part of the same sphere — and here’s the common thread: Communication is the art of organizing information. That, friend, is what I do. I can do it for you. And we can make some money together.

I have written/co-written nine books. My personal record is four new books in 16 months.

I cut my teeth as a rock & roll journalist. Then I successfully transitioned to hard news. Lately, I’ve been creating motivational literature and self-help books. I write very effective press releases & promo material. I write & storyboard short videos. I’m writer for a documentary I can’t talk about yet.

I get around. I teach college. My CV includes work for dozens of publications, including Rolling Stone and Alternative Press (America’s two top rock & culture magazines). I’ve also written for leading outlets such as The A.V. Club and Decibel. I write and stage communication seminars. 

I have been to the Pentagon and National Air & Space Museum on business. I have been backstage at the Vans Warped Tour on business. My body of work includes book-length oral histories. 

I have collaborated with certified Grand Masters, civilians, and high-profile musical & Hollywood creative types. I have had Almost Famous moments on the side of the stage at European festivals. I wake up so early it hurts. I make money for my partners.

I am a 33 1/3 author. An Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Reporter of the Year. And a third-degree black belt (in Taekwondo). Also a 32° two-time WM/PM.

Let’s do some good work — and then let’s do some good with what comes from it.

Click the following links for my...

Good Professional Wrestling: Full Contact Life Lessons From the Pinnacle Performance Art The Good Advice From... series is now officially a franchise. Volume II features a foreword by Diamond Dallas Page, motivational icon, founder of health & wellness movement DDP Yoga, and WWE Hall of Famer. Professional wrestling is the toughest business. It is a form of competition built on collaboration and cooperation. Every successful wrestler has a diverse skill set that can help you get over too, no matter what your business or lifestyle. Filled with short chapters and useful advice, this browsable motivational manual features inspirational quotes from dozens of wrestling icons. Each is followed by easy-to-read analysis and actionable tips that can turn a life around.

I collaborated with Darren Paltrowitz on this one-of-a-kind positivity handbook. It breaks down the habits, skills, and strategies that your favorite superstars practice — and you can too, starting today.

Good Advice From Goodfellas: Positive Life Lessons from the Best Mob Movie It’s the last — or maybe first —  motivational manual and self-help guide you’ll ever need. 320 pages, paperback; Kindle ebook also available, cheap. At 145 short chapters, it’s the perfect airport/travel book. This unique meditation & reading finds teachable moments in all your favorite and quotes and scenes from this beloved, seminal movie. If you know what to look for, Goodfellas covers all the same evergreen topics as your favorite business podcasts and startup seminars... but it’s a lot more fun. No, seriously.

Co-author of motivational/how-to Masonic leadership manual

Co-author of parents’ motivational guide to kids’ martial arts

I am the most prominent, prolific non-marquee contributor the music-writing/music journalism textbook How to Write About Music, from the brain trust running Bloomsbury/Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. TECHNICALLY, I AM ON THE SAME LABEL AS NEIL GAIMAN. This is one of two or three books on this topic. Note to self: Write your own.

Wrote the official book with Donnie Iris and the Cruisers For my money, Donnie Iris & the Cruisers are the best-kept secret from 80s rock radio. That had not one, but seven hot 100 hits. The bandleader/songer penned an enduring disco hit. AND he worked with three Rock Hall of Fame artists. The band have a continuous near-40-year run. During this epic tale, they work with a young Trent Reznor, Kiss, Breathless, Cinderella, Sam Kinison, Gamble & Huff, the Jaggerz, Wolfman Jack, and bunch of others. The book is a painstakingly researched oral history that plays like a mix of the four-hour Tom Petty documentary, the movie That Thing You Do!, and the American Hardcore book. Coffee-table book, 464 pages, 102 images, 308 endnotes, 8.5x11″.

Wrote two books about thrash-metal icons Slayer

One is part of 33 1/3, the vanguard series of music-related writing.

One is an exhaustively researched full-length biography featuring 33 images and over 400 endnotes.

Publisher of 6623 Press, home to creator-owned, useful, reasonably priced, unconventional books about popular culture, success, and other cool stuff. People like them.

Full-service, full-contact indie publishing. I write, co-write, ghost-write, edit, and publish books. Quickly.

Do you have book in you? We’ll get it out.

Worked for Rolling Stone, the no. 1 music & culture magazine ever.

I’ve been writing for Alternative Press — America’s no. 2 music magazine — off & on since 2002. More recent pieces are here. Older material is here.

Wrote for alternative newsweekly Cleveland Scene, in various capacities, for 8 years. Won numerous awards for news reporting, business reporting, arts reporting, commentary, feature writing, personality profiling, and sports reporting. Click here for profiles, business features, columns, reviews, and more.

I think this piece about Cleveland’s LeBron James banner won me the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists’ Best Reporter award: Literally the entire city was looking at an iconic, massive piece of public art/advertising — and I was the one person who looked behind the scenes. For alt-weekly Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/64-and-counting/archives/2010/08/05/goodbye-lebron-banner-hello-sunshine-workers-behind-the-banner-speak

For Rolling Stone, I interviewed a band and created unofficial liner notes for a classic album:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/they-might-be-giants-flood-track-by-track-guide-to-the-geek-chic-breakthrough-82345/

This kind of piece is a specialty. For Alternative Press, I interviewed an infamous punk musician about his friendship with the late, great Anthony Bourdain. I supplied many conversation prompts, transcribed it, then edited his answers into one continuous narrative, while I remained invisible in the piece. If it looks like I didn’t do much, then that was the entire point.

https://www.altpress.com/features/anthony-bourdain-harley-flanagan-cro-mags-tribute/

I visit a business, describe the experience, and research how a controversial industry works. For Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/game-of-chance/Content?oid=2183398

While the rest of the rock-journalism world were writing SOPA stories (Summarizing Other People’s Articles) about a developing story, I dug deep, excavated some court records, and wrote an informed summary. For Metal Sucks — for my money, the best metal news & views site.

https://www.metalsucks.net/2019/06/11/how-many-more-misfits-reunion-shows-will-there-be-according-to-legal-documents-probably-just-one/

A friendly multi-person Q&A and sidebar, stitched together from three different interviews from different media. For Alt Press.

https://www.altpress.com/features/punk-goes-fearless-records-interview/

Cover story/feature profile of the president of a local university — and how his work has helped shape the city. It’s pretty whitebread and dry, but I can work in that style when I’m not writing about raging hellions. For Cleveland Magazine, the city’s upstanding guide to what’s happening and who’s doing it.

https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/city-mission

News interview with Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavaliers and Quicken Loans. For Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/enhanced-interrogation-dan-gilbert/Content?oid=1678536

Excerpt from Good Advice From Goodfellas, my self-improvement book that draws positive life lessons from the greatest gangster movie:

https://6623press.tumblr.com/post/181078213342/the-new-self-helpmotivational-manual-good-help

Christmas Sevenfold: Metal Dad, Compendium Two  My second comic-strip compilation collects seven years of Christmas & fall holiday stripes, with new art, a foreword, and an essay about why the kind of guy who wrote two books about Slayer still loves Xmas. 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Suburban Metal Dad, Compendium One: Raging Bullshit. The first compilation book for my webcomic. It collects Years III and IV of the comic, with 172 strips, 8 previously unreleased demo strips, an updated FAQ, and a true-life, all-text real-life metal dad story (so there’s something to really read). 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Individual strips of Suburban Metal Dad, an online comic that has run twice weekly since 2010.

I am totally into the Misfits/Danzig/Samhain, and wrote a bunch of stuff about this record-setting continuum of ground-breaking musicians

I wrote things for Metal Sucks

Guest on heavy metal podcasts, and bloggage about it all

Guest on assorted TV and superhero-show podcasts

Guest host on rock podcast Lost Together

Annotated both versions of “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” at Genius

Random bloggage about stuff that isn’t necessarily metal... mostly movies and holiday stuff like a survey of Christmas imagery in True Detective season 1

Tweet too much, but it’s healthier than taking cigarette breaks.

The Pentagrammarian: I take note of writing, grammar, usage, and the business thereof. I am one of very few professional writers who can list the four parts of a well-rounded profile or break down the constituent parts of a sentence, in correct technical grammar terms.

The goat had it comin’. I swear.  

[marcjampole]

Mainstream news media created the conditions in which a bottom-feeder like Trump could thrive by focusing on celebrity culture to encourage conspicuous consumption

AARP the Magazine is thus a small part of the giant propaganda machine that created the celebrity culture that created Donald Trump. It took from the first stirrings of consumer culture in the 1890’s until the 21st century for the focus on celebrity to pollute our marketplace of ideas enough for a toxic algae boom like Donald Trump to emerge (with apologies to algae blooms worldwide!). But unlike cleaning up the environment, saving our political discourse is conceptually easy—all the news media has to do is dedicate more of its feature coverage to those whose accomplishments can’t be measured by money made or spent, and cease to cover every issue like a reality show featuring celebrities. Not one big action, but a bunch of little actions are needed to stem the tide of celebrity culture. AARP could do its part by working into the mix a healthy share of scientists, historians, civic leaders, activists and literary figures into Big5-Oh and other parts of the magazine.

Those seeking to put the Trump phenomenon in a broader context will usually point out that his rhetoric and actions typically stay within the margins of 21st century Republican thought, especially as it concerns taxes, regulation, healthcare insurance, women’s health issues and white supremacy. Sometimes Trump has extended those margins with more outrageous versions of standard Republican fare. Others label Trumpism as the American version of the movement throughout the West to embrace ultranationalist, anti-immigration autocrats.

As insightful as these analyses are, they miss Trump’s cultural significance. Not only does Trump represent the bitterly racist and classist endgame of Ronald Reagan’s “politics of selfishness,” he also is the apotheosis of our cultural decline into celebrity-fueled consumerism. Remember that in the real world, Trump was a terrible and unethical businessperson who drove companies into bankruptcy six times; had at least a dozen failed business ventures based on his most valuable asset, his brand name; lost money for virtually all his investors; often lied to banks and governmental agencies; and has been sued by literally thousands of people for nonpayment or breach of contract. 

But while Trumpty-Dumpty was engaging in a one-man business wrecking crew he managed to get his name in the newspaper for his conspicuous consumption, his attendance at celebrity parties and his various marriage and romances. His television show was a hit, which reaped him even more publicity. But make no mistake about it, before he started his run for political office by promoting the vicious, racially tinged lie that Obama hails from Kenya, the public recognized Trump primarily for the attributes he shared with the British royal family, the Kardashians, Gosselins, Robertsons, the housewives of New Jersey, Atlanta, South Beach and elsewhere, Duane Chapman, Betheny Frankel, Paris Hilton and the rest of the self-centered lot of rich and famous folk known only for being rich and famous and spending obnoxious sums of money.

Trump’s celebrity status always hinted at his master-of-the-universe skills in business and “The Apprentice” never missed an opportunity to reinforce that false myth. Thus, whereas the business world recognized Donald Trump as the ultimate loser, celebrity culture glorified him as one of the greatest business geniuses in human history. It was this public perception of Trump—completely opposite of reality—that gave him the street cred he needed to attract unsophisticated voters. Trump is completely a creation of celebrity culture.

When we consider the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era—the Zeitgeist, which in German means the “spirit of the age”—we often focus on defining events such as presidential assassinations, Woodstock, the moon landing, 9/11, the election of the first non-white president. But a Zeitgeist comprises thousands upon thousands of specific events, trends and personal choices. 

Which brings us—finally—to the subject of this article, AARP the Magazine, the semi-monthly slick magazine of the American Association of Retired People (AARP). The magazine usually uses celebrities and celebrity culture to give tips on personal finances, health, careers, relationships, retirement and lifestyle to its members, people over the age of 50. Because AARP membership rolls is so enormous, I have no doubt that AARP is one of the four or five most well-read periodicals in the United States.

Now AARP the organization must have many qualms about Trump and Trumpism. Trump has already rolled back consumer protections that prevent seniors from being taken advantage of by both big businesses and small-time con artists. Trump is vowing to dedicate his second term to cutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs of utmost importance to the well-being of AARP’s members. The leadership of AARP certainly understands that Trump’s cruelly aggressive effort to end immigration from non-European countries is the main cause for the growing shortages of the home care workers so vital to many if not most people in their final years. They must also realize that a tariff war affects people on fixed incomes the most.

What AARP leaders—of the organization and magazine—show no signs of understanding is that they played a role in creating the monster. The focus of AARP the Magazine and the other AARP member publication on promoting celebrity culture helped to create the playing field that Trump dominates—that shadow land of aspirations for attention and materialism in which all emotional values reduce to buying and consumption and our heroes have either done nothing to deserve their renown or have worked in the mass entertainment industries of TV, movies, sports and pop music.  

As an example of how celebrity culture permeates and controls the aspirational messages of AARP the Magazine, let’s turn to the feature on the last page of every issue, something called “Big5-Oh”: Big5-Oh always has a paragraph story with photos of a famous person who is turning 50 sometime during the two months covered by the issue. The bottom third of the page consists of one-sentence vignettes with head-and-shoulder photos of famous people turning 50, 60, 70 and 80. The copy typically describes something the famous person is doing that demonstrates she or he is continuing to thrive and do great things despite advancing age.

I’ve seen Big5-Oh in every issue of AARP I have ever read, and I have perused each issue for about 18 years. And in every issue, the famous people mentioned are virtually all celebrities, by which I mean actors, pop musicians, sports stars and those known only for being known like the Kardashians and Snooki. Only quite rarely a film director, popular writer or scientist sneaks in.

The latest issue, covering August and September 2019 exemplifies the celebrity-driven approach that hammers home the idea that only celebrities matter (since it’s only their birthdays and ages that are seemed worth memorializing). The featured person turning 50 is Tyler Perry, an actor and writer-director. The smaller features include four actor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jason Alexander, Richard Gere and Lilly Tomlin, plus the athlete Magic Johnson and the rock star Bruce Springsteen.

Not one scientist, not one historian or sociologist. Not one civic leader, politician, physician, novelist, poet or classical or jazz musician. No astronaut, architect or engineer. I did a little cursory research to come up with a reconceived Big5-Oh for August and September 2019: The big feature, always about someone turning 50, could be the chess player Ben Finegold, the best-selling but much scandalized popular writer James Frey or the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. That’s pretty much a wash with Tyler Perry. If I were editor of this feature, I would probably still pick Tyler Perry over this competition. 

But when we get to people who turned 60 and 70 during these months, you realize how much celebrity culture guided the editor’s choice of subjects: ignored are the designer Michael Kors, the current governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, the distinguished Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, the even more distinguished journalist James Fallows, the important literary novelists Jane Smiley, Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen, the leader of the Irish Green Party, astronaut Scott Altman and Beverly Barnes, the first woman to captain a Boeing 747. All these people are non-celebrities and all have made more significant and lasting contributions to America than the people the column’s editor selected, with the possible exception of Magic Johnson and Bruce Springsteen. 

What’s more significant, though, is including some of these people instead of all celebrities would make an important message about what we value in our society. It would say that we honor the intellectual contributions of our writers, scientists, knowledge professionals and civic leaders. The fact that AARP always selects celebrities for Big5-Oh and tends to build other stories and features around celebrities makes the opposite message about value—that all that matters is the gossip surrounding celebrities and the promotion of celebrity culture.  

Now AARP shares the blame for our culture’s emphasis on shallow consumerism and superficial celebrities with many of our cultural organizations and educational institutions. For example, the political reporting of the mainstream media reduces all political discourse to celebrity terms—name-calling, who is feuding with whom, who’s winning in the polls, the skeleton-closet scandals of the candidates’ families, which celebrities love and hate them, zingers and misstatements, the candidates’ theme songs and other main themes of celebrity culture. Notice that Trump is as much a master in these endeavors as he is an inexperienced and ignorant buffoon in matters related to governance such as policy, history, the inner workings of the government and the scientific research informing governmental decisions. Note, too, that based on how much ink and space is given to endorsements by the media, in the hierarchy of value, celebrities rate above elected officials who rate above unions, business and scientific organizations and luminaries in fields other than entertainment. 

[hoenn-hakase]

The Hosts in 20 Years

So there was  a prompt over on the subreddit and i thought I’d share my entry here.

Red: Was never one for the massive following he got. He did love to think that he was able to bring so many to the light of Helix's teachings, but they should be following HELIX not him. Used the fight with AJ to fake his death, and after getting Abe back home, his bro helped him find a good place to build a monastery hidden in the mountains. His followers are some of the most zealous, but he doesn't mind because he's the worst since it's a much smaller group. Abe and their mom are just glad to know where he is and write more often than risk visiting.

AJ: After "murdering Red", he had several years and a heck of a time proving his innocence on the matter. Honestly, he'd be proud to admit it if it didn't mean basically losing EVERYTHING either due to being hunted down by Red's followers (which he's had enough of that already) or the stigma from his friends and family to learn he'd actually killed someone, so he eventually managed to convince the courts that there wasn't enough evidence to say whether or not Red's reported death was his fault. While there is still speculation, he's managed to live a mostly quiet life. 20 years later, he's telling his adopted kid about his wild tales on the road and lauding himself how it's because of him that Johto is at least much safer than it used to be when the Church of Helix was at it's peak.

A-chan: If her addictions haven't killed her, after 20 years, she's probably been through rehab a few times on mandate. Her wild and reckless streak has toned down, but she's still quite the pistol you don't want to mess with. It's been debated for years just how much damage her and her team actually caused for Hoenn, whether talking about the societal structure, the economy, or property damage, and even more so in wondering if all their work was "for the better" or not. Gets compared to Alice a lot as far claims of totalitarianism goes, but no one can deny that Hoenn has at least been peaceful since she took out Aqua, Magma and the League.

Alice: Pokemon Professor, no surprise, but she is THE authority of Commewnist Kanto. Green is also a professor, usually the one dealing with starting trainers and such, but most kids know that if or when they're ready to go into an academic career instead of being just another trainer, they'll probably be meeting with her eventually.

Napoleon: Even if he doesn't like to show it, he's surprisingly close with those of his inner circle. His friends, his family, his Pokemon, he just seems to like traveling a lot with them or to visit them for some reason or another while keeping his life very private from the public. When he does show up though, it's usually as a major Sinnoh event (like the League games or Rapidash Races) or when opening new venue. He sure does still own a lot of different kinds of gambling venues (like his Aunt Gracie has a place named after her since she's long since retired as a Rhyhorn Rider) and he sure does know how to throw one hell of a party, but after 20 years he's not big on the dance riots. He still enjoys a good dance riot, and many will say to see any of the family dance is a real treat, but he tends to just feed off the energy of the room than participate.

Aooo: It is a mystery! 8O But seriously, while she does have a family to take care of, how she does so is anyone's guess since she doesn't work but instead will go off for hours by herself and somehow come back with stuff for them. With her wife being a big name movie star, most just assume that money isn't the issue, but where she goes all day leaves people guessing. Never shows up at Sabrina's movie premiers either, at least... not on the red carpet. People always report seeing her at the theatre, but for some reason no fan or tabloid has ever be able to prove it on camera.

Jimmy: While he may have gained such notoriety as an internet star and has had his fair share of ups and downs with the Media trying to bring up his ties with Plasma in the past, he's learned not to let it get to him. After 20 years Plasma has long since been gone, he was the one to take them down in the first place, the former and even current gym leaders support him and often guest star at his online or real life charity events, and it seems when it's not some charity event he's in the papers for, it's his on-again-off-again relationship with N that's even become something of a joke with his fanbase in taking bets to how long before N runs off again. He's had other relationships, but somehow... somehow this just never "officially" went away.

Cly: While she is still a big name actress, she's not as active as she used to be. She's a lot more meticulous in her roles and only seems to show up for either big-budget projects or films she really feels passionate about the script. And she can do that because she's got a clothing line and several music albums that seem to take up most of her time anyway.

D: Hilariously, while he failed as a fashion designer, he's a really great detective. It's just, most people don't realize this. As a member of the Looker Bureau, he's got a code-name like the others, and his investigations often seem to coincide with his love and knowledge of high fashion: jewelry theft, accusations of plagiarizing from between big name stores, getting asked for his opinion on cases where articles left at the scene might be crucial evidence of a bigger picture, ect. Nevermind the rumors that the only reason he's not on the streets yet is because his royalty family keep his otherwise lavish lifestyle funded, he likes the thrill of the hunt and it's kept him both well off and entertained between attempts at a "real" business. Pepe gives him a hard time in saying that by now Richard is failing on purpose. He should know how to art, it is really not that hard. Says the one with possibly literal god-given talent. Lay off him, jerk. XP

Arty: As I've mentioned before elsewhere, married to May (no, not M A Y but the Birch girl he traveled with during his time in Hoenn) and was at odds with her brother Orlando for quite some time but has since reconciled. HOWEVER, Orlando is still unsure how May even puts up with Arty after all these years because the guy has never held a steady job in his life. Sure he can always fall back on his music, but considering most people are asked what their fall back is when they want to get into music, that's saying something. The guy has done the rock star thing, the small business thing (several times really, from making t-shirts to breeding rabbits), the published writer thing (he did have an autobiography book published recently, but that was with a ghost-writer and sales were decent at least) and even the mafia thing. Not that he was bad at the mafia thing, but he just didn't think he was up for all this "shady business" when he craved the spotlight. Rumors still swirl around that he's got ties to the mafia, but oddly, despite all evidence, most general public just looks at that and laugh it off.

Abe: After finally making it home, stayed home for quite a long time just sort of helping out around Kanto. Helping Red get his place built and up and running, it kind of reminded him how much he missed traveling and exploring the uncharted territories of the world. Still, after all the trouble he ran into, he takes some baby steps at first in just making better maps of the Kanto and Johto region. 20 years later, he's a leading name when it comes to cartography and is quite the established architect too, having dozens of blueprints seen in buildings around the world for some of the most surreal looking structures. Got a dream? Let him take a look at the landscape in mind to get this thing started.

Baba: Like A-chan, if she's not dead, she's probably left quite a mess in her wake. Baba however was never as aggressive as A-chan was, and while her time as President was seriously controversial, many of Chengdu don't blame her for the circumstances as she inherited a mess to begin with. If she didn't pull the trigger, it would have been someone else (possibly was someone else considering the mysterious circumstances to when she left office.) For all she did wrong with the ongoing war with Orre, she did a lot of good in the way of equality for Elfs, Half-elfs, and the humans still leery about them. After 20 years, she's done quite a bit of travel anywhere other than her home country, and has settled down quite nicely in a house by the sea when she's actually home.

Amber: The ever faithful cleric still finds trouble making Sanae as big a thing as anything with the Fossil Pantheon. However, she's found quite a following none-the-less and has found much better tolerance among other "small" religions such as the fading Weather worshippers in Hoenn.

Athena: While she's never given up the fight for equality for her people, it's been a long and tiring fight nonetheless. Others have been able to take up the mantle for her, large gatherings taken up with more powerful or outspoken leaders. She writes a lot, but spends most of her time traveling with Amber since her own work can be done from anywhere whereas Amber seems to following her calling.

Nina: ...Oh Nina. Where do I even begin? -Ahem- After 20 years, she's finally managed to return home to find that Hoenn is FINALLY safe. While it could take a lifetime for things to finally return to normal, at least they can handle anything that's still lingering. Handle being the key word there. There's always still a lot of work left to do though. On the upside, there's no longer a sense of urgency for fear of impending doom, so the things she and all her network of friends has to focus on now is stuff that takes time. Stuff that she couldn't actually help with no matter how much she wanted to. Stuff that, for her at least, will have to wait. So in the meantime, there's a lot of trying to settle into a semi-normal life. But at least for all the "... what now?" that permeates the region, everyone is willing to work together to solve this.

A7: Like many have said, he never really could settle down. Not that he had some purpose he was chasing like Amber or Abe, he just doesn't know how. He's at least come to peace with his past though, and has long since come to accept that there's a whole lot of people who actually do care about him. He spends a lot of time going from one couch to crash on to another, and while his friends may not necessarily like it, they're always glad to see him when he passes through.

Alpha: ...|D;;; -AHEM- Well not taking anything else into account, I'm sure he's grown up to be a fine young... teen. It's not that he doesn't age, but due to a lot of his cybernetics and chemical changes, his body just doesn't respond normally anymore. It's been odd seeing his little sister grow up and surpass him, but his physical form has had done little in stopping him from becoming a high ranked researcher at the Pokemon HQ. And hey, he can still do a heck of a lot more than most people can, so his smaller stature has never been an issue either. He's had a lot of identity issues to overcome, but over the past 20 years, he's figured that there's a lot of stuff he can do to help in the region's recovery and gods know he's got plenty of time to do it.

Evan: Is basically a god. Timelines or not, I can't see him as anything otherwise. Shared the burden of Olden's power he inherited with Azure, and the two do a lot of minor meddling in the world to keep it functioning. He's WAY more chill about things than Olden ever was though, and has been rather curious and pleased to see how over the next several decades after being named supreme overlord that the Glitches have somewhat been accepted by the world. It's not necessarily peacefully, it's almost like any story where you have lots of mythological creatures being real. The "old wives tales" have proven quite useful to people who have learned that "If you see a -glitch- you can protect yourself with a pouch full of basil! / If you encounter one, it could prove quite lucky and make you a very wealthy person indeed! / They're actually very curious little things you might see out of the corner of your eye. They disappear if you ignore them long enough." He tries to keep them in line more often than he goes meddling in human affairs anyway. Even he, though, has become something of a legend among people as they may swear that sometimes, sometimes, you may see a ripple in the fabric of reality where the Glitch King has passed through recently.

Paul: He made it to the top! CEO of his own company, lots of friends, lots of adventures! ... So why did he feel like his journey was so... lackluster compared to the others? He's heard plenty of the other hosts, I don't doubt he's probably met a few of them, but hearing their stories compared to his own, it seemed... dull. But then again, he was a lot older than any of them when he started, so maybe the journey just seemed a lot less "magical." Or perhaps it was because of his friendship with the Glitches, that there seemed to be a lot less danger? Sometime in the first 10 years, he goes to take a personal journey for some soul searching for what he felt he was missing. After 20 years, he's long since returned home feeling empowered by what he's learned, and his company has been flourishing.

Pepe: By far the most quiet and reserved of his family, it constantly surprises people he's also the friendliest. Whenever there's some kind of major event, chances are he's there. Hiding out in the crowd, somewhat mingling along the outskirts to admire the building's decore or take a fascination with the party's theme, but he's very rarely one to instigate conversation. Should someone approach him though, he's not one to turn them away. He claims to own the dance floor. Napoleon highly disagrees, but it's more a matter of opinion since they have VERY different styles when it comes to dance. Over the past 20 years, he's realized that there's oddly a LOT of perks to being in his brother's shadow. He can shirk off most of political duties Napoleon has to deal with, and takes advantage of the fact that most people don't seem to care about him as much. He's not a major leader, he's not a party animal, he's got a fairly steady love life, and he's quiet about it. The news finds him dull usually, and intriguing to realize there's a certain air of mystery about him. Otherwise, he spends a lot of time off by himself, with his work, with his faith, and holding close the secret he's had since he was a child about the whole Artisan ordeal the world has long since forgotten about.

Cyan: In a constant state of "Dad pls" even after she's managed to get him to step down as Champion and has him offering advice whenever she rants to him whether she actually asked for his opinion or not. Her family still loves to get away from things every now and then, camping trips, exploring their "territories," her trying to prove to her parent that the Glitches are really sweet... that's not been going well, but they admire her for it anyway. After 20 years, she's quite the leader now and has spent a lot of time trying to clean up Naljo/Rijon political system. Probably goes golfing with Paul occasionally as an excuse for them to complain about Host things that no one else could ever understand.

Nigel: While he's settled down in Alola, he's never given up his Ranger ways and spends a lot of his time working in conservation efforts and working with other regional leaders about just what they could do to help out in a more grand scale preservation effort on some of the world's most delicate species.

Devin: Devin is uh... Okay, so 20 years from now, he... There's really no telling with him. While he does most likely have a bird sanctuary, he's got several other things he runs as well. His hyperness has thankfully gone down with age, but his eagerness has never waned and he's a World Tournament super star as his thirst for battle has only grown with each new region he gets to explore. Movie star? Maybe once or twice, and getting to meet Cly is certainly a good motive, but only because he can't turn down a good challenge. (She still kicked his ass btw, though in a coordinated for film fight, they loved to show off and keep it rather even.) He still lives in Alola though, and very rarely stays away for more than a few weeks at time because he does feel like he has a lot still to do there. WHERE in Alola is anyone's guess since he tends to just show up on the different islands at random, but a lot of people joke that he's probably got a bed set up in his office at the sanctuary. He's no longer Champion though due to how much he travels, but still stays in touch with all of the would-be Champions that have tried to take his place (except Faba, he will gladly kick him out of the seat the MINUTE he finds out Faba succeeded in becoming champ -shot- ).

X-man: Whoo boy, I hate to say it, but the rate technology advances, after the first decade most of his features have probably become obsolete. After 20, if he's not in a museum, you know that finding parts and storage drives has become nearly impossible due to the increasing rarity of finding such tech in good condition. He might still be functioning though, even if only as a display for how things were back then. There's been newer models since then, sleeker, more human looking models too, but even if the team found a way to transfer all of his data to the new robot, it's just not quite the same. New!X-man probably has looked at the old model in the display and smiles sometimes as he still remembers the journey. Every. last. input because his data files are accurate and doesn't allow for such nostalgia, but even he has to sometimes wonder at the grandmotherly parrot on his shoulder how the hell they managed to do it?

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Hey all! I'm a small business (print shop) owner and, having established my business locally over the past few years, have decided to spend 2019 studying and immersing myself in online marketing- Facebook/Instagram/Youtube/Tik Tok...I spent the past few months studying the Tik Tok alogrithm, figuring out what makes videos successful and best practices are when using the platform. Below is a rough draft of a write-up I'm planning to release on Linkedin in a few weeks. I think it's got some very useful info for those new to the platform and am open to debate with anyone who has successfully built a following and disagrees on any of the points :)Thank you!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What is Tik Tok:If you haven’t heard of Tik Tok yet, it’s time to start familiarizing yourself with the social networking platform. With over 500 million active users and a higher organic reach than every other social media app on the App Store, Tik Tok is well on it’s way to overtake instagram (just like instagram overtook Facebook) as the must-have app for millenials and gen Z in the next half decade.I was put on the app by my younger brother, now twelve, who started using Tik Tok over two years ago. Back then the platform wasn’t as popular in the US, with most of its user base being centered in China and India. It also went under a different name- “Musically”. In 2017, the company was bought out by ByteDance and rebranded. Since then it has seen explosive growth in the United States, mainly among kidsA strange shift has occurred. Rather than gen Z following in the footsteps of millenials and adopting Facebook and Instagram as their platform of choice, zoomers found their own place on Tik Tok. Stranger still, month by month, I see my friends and peers downloading and using the app, and the older demographic on the app growing.For those not in the loop, Tik Tok is an app that allows users to take short, 15-60 second videos and share them with followers and strangers. The in-app video editor features a host of features, including fun filters and effect (like those seen on Snapchat and Facebook Messenger) and an audio embedding feature that plays a pre-recorded audio loop behind you clip. Users can borrow each others audio clips and record their own video over them sort of like a template, fostering as meme sharing culture. It’s really much easier to understand simply by hopping on the app and spending a few hours watching videos.Personal Experience:As I mentioned before I first heard of the app through my brother, Jimmy. He has been on the platform for about two years now and makes at least a video a day without fail, sometimes more. Most clips are shot in his room and the content ranges from short, highly edited, silly dances to 60 second videos of him talking about his day. He averages about 50 views a video and, on a good day, may get 15-20 likes.I made myself an account over a year ago but have only been a lurker up until last week, when I decided that I understand the ecosystem enough to throw my hat in the ring. I shot my first video on my iphone 8, made some minor edits on my computer, and posted the clip. Within the first 48 hours the 16 second video had over 200 thousand views and 30 thousand likes (edit: now 300k+ views and 50k likes). What’s even more impressive is that the clip wasn’t a random dancing video or funny skit, it was a product video. Specifically, it was a short montage of me printing a tshirt at my home studio, a tshirt I sell online. I’ve since posted several other clips with various success and hope that Tik Tok will be a viable marketing platform for my business and my personal brand in the coming years. (feel free to check it out at @this_is_jonjon on TikTok)The success of my first post was not a fluke but a function of proper search engine optimization and my familiarity with the Tik Tok algorithm. While the video itself was nothing out of the ordinary, everything else- the caption, the thumbnail I chose, the hashtags used, even the backing track in the clip were all vital to it’s reach. Below is a more detailed explanation of the Tik Tok algorithm and a list of the factors I believe made the clip go viral.The Algorithm:I’ll mention right off the bat that no one other than ByteDance developers know exactly how the Tik Tok algorithm works, however, while minor points can be debated, the overall idea of how Tik Tok distributes and "rates" content isn't a secret.When you first load the app, you land on the “For You” page, similar to the discover page on Instagram or Facebook/Linkedin news feed. This is where you, as a consumer of Tik Tok content, will spend most of your time. The app will show you videos in all sorts of random categories- car videos, funny videos, dancing videos.. And will decide based on view time (how long you continue watching each video before clicking away) and interactions (whether or not you like/comment/ or follow the creator) whether or not you have any interest in said category. Despite only working with these limited variables, Tik Tok very quickly figures out what you’re interested in and begins feeding it to you, still occasionally throwing in unrelated content to see if you’ll “bite”. You don’t need to tell Tik Tok anything about your interests, they figure it out for you, and they’re almost always right.The content that ends up on your “For You” page isn’t content that’s made by your friends like on instagram or creators you subscribe to like on Youtube, it’s completely random content. Whenever someone uploads a video, regardless of what category the video is in, Tik Tok will try to show it to 50-100 people to gauge the viewers’ reactions. If the video has a good engagement rate, Tik Tok will continue showing it to random users, and if it has bad engagement, it will be swallowed by the void. About a quarter of the videos on my For You pajjge are these “tester” videos, made by unknown creators and with (usually) less than 50 impressions. Tik Tok found a perfect balance between showing you proven content you’re genuinely interested in and showing you “tester” content to figure out whether that content is worth sharing with more users. If the app senses you’re getting bored, it will feed you less “tester” content and more videos with proven positive responses, and visa versa.Gaming the System:Your first video)There is one final detail I failed to mention in the previous few paragraphs. The first video that any user on Tik Tok posts gets an instant spike in impressions. As a new user, Tik Tok metaphorically “throws you a bone” and will in most cases show your video to more people right off the bat than it would a video by a repeat poster. This means that it’s vital to make your very first post on Tik Tok engaging.Unlike Youtube, for example, where you can feel free to post tons of crappy content as you get comfortable in front of the camera and find your voice, Tik Tok will literally punish you for having a bad start. The app will rate you based on your first video, and while it’s possible to climb back up after a bad start, it’s better to just hit the ground running.Consider making a “tester” account to try out a few different video formats before having an official launch on another account, or simply take several videos and save them all as drafts until you find something that’s worth launching your Tik Tok journey with. Whatever you do, don’t open your account and launch with a boring “Hello World” style video, it’s instant death.Follow general video guidelines)Your videos need to be engaging, so it should go without saying that they should be of decent quality. If your video is grainy and pixelated people will click away before even hearing your message (I’m calling you out, Android users!). The majority of Tik Tok creators are teenagers filming on the cheap, front-facing camera on their smartphones. Simply using the back-facing camera on a newer model iPhone and finding good lighting is enough to set you apart from the competition. I mention iPhones for a reason, by the way. It’s not because I’m an Apple fanboy, it’s simply because apps like Tik Tok and Snapchat are better coded for working with Apple hardware.Make sure not to go the opposite extreme, however. Tik Tok culture values authenticity, high definition videos filmed on 4k DSLR cameras come off as too professional and almost feel like advertisements. Tik Tok users want to see you filming on a handheld device, they want you using the in-app filters and sounds, and will click away instantly if they sense your content is fabricated and ingenuine.Trend hopping)In my personal experience, understanding the culture of Tik Tok is the most vital part to anyone’s success on the app. My viral post used an audio clip that had just become popular a day before, and therefore rode on the success of about a dozen other viral videos using the same clip. Just like a musician can gain their first small group of followers by doing covers of trending songs, many Tik Tok influencers gained notoriety by jumping on trends that were already proven to be popular. Much like Tik Tok feeds its users popular videos and interjects “tester” clips every once in a while, many popular Tik Tokers post mostly trending videos- clips of them lip syncing popular songs and copying current memes, and interject personal skits and less popular content within.There is no way to explain Tik Tok culture and current trends in an article like this, especially since new memes and trends appear literally every day. The best advice I can give to aspiring influencers is to download the app and spend 30-60 minutes a day over the course of the next two weeks browsing the For You page. You’ll quickly begin to recognize common themes and motifs, and will get an understanding of the culture I’m talking about.Ask for the close)Even at only 20 years old, I find a lot of the content on Tik Tok cringy and childish. This is likely because, though the user base is growing, gen Z’rs still make up the majority of content consumers on the app. Regardless of the reason, attention-seeking behavior tends to do fairly well on Tik Tok. Actually, very well.Simply adding “I worked super hard on this vid pls like” at the end of your clip is enough to boost conversion. My biggest mistake in my first post was not asking for the close. I didn’t embed my Tik Tok username in the video, I didn’t have good profile picture or bio on my account, and I didn’t ask people to follow me in the description. As a result, no one followed me. After the first 24 hours or so the video had reached over 100k views and 15k likes but I had about 50 followers on my account. Upon realizing this I quickly changed my profile picture to a clear photo and changed my bio to something along the lines of “follow me for more cool content”. My follower count more than quintupled within the next few hours.Though this may seem in-authentic to the average marketer, it really isn’t. Tons of kids on Tik Tok pour their heart and soul into their content and genuinely want people to follow them. These creators, as well as most of the audience, see nothing wrong in asking for likes or follows. Asking for the close, in the Tik Tok community, is seen as more of a friendly reminder than a pushy sale.more info on: https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-statistics/ (this is not my website, just a source)Thanks for reading! Hoping this helps some people launch/grow their account. I haven't seen a decent writeup on Tik Tok best practices yet so I'm hoping this can serve as a foundation. Please debate/add on points in the comments. -Jonathan.

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The Mortgaging of Sierra Online

The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from their founder and leader Ken Williams), and their habit of grouping their games into well-delineated series with predictable content, they fostered a sense of loyalty and even community which other game makers, not least their arch-rivals over at LucasArts, couldn’t touch — this even though the actual games of LucasArts tended to be much better in design terms. Here we see some of the entrants in a Leisure Suit Larry lookalike contest sponsored by Sierra. (Yes, two of the contestants do seem suspiciously young to have played a series officially targeted at those 18 and older.) Sadly, community-building exercise like these would become increasingly rare as the 1990s wore on and Sierra took on a different, more impersonal air. This article will chronicle the beginning of those changes.

“The computer-game industry has become the interactive-entertainment industry.”

— Ken Williams, 1992

Another even-numbered year, another King’s Quest game. Such had been the guiding rhythm of life at Sierra Online since 1986, and 1992 was to be no exception. Why should it be? Each of the last several King’s Quest installments had sold better than the one before, as the series had cultivated a reputation as the premier showcase of bleeding-edge computer entertainment. Once again, then, Sierra was prepared to pull out all the stops for King’s Quest VI, prepared to push its development budget to $1 million and beyond.

This time around, however, there were some new and worrisome tensions. Roberta Williams, Sierra’s star designer, whose name was inseparable from that of King’s Quest itself in the minds of the public, was getting a little tired of playing the Queen of Daventry for the nation’s schoolchildren. She had another, entirely different game she wanted to make, a sequel to her 1989 mystery starring the 1920s girl detective Laura Bow. So, a compromise was reached. Roberta would do Laura Bow in… The Dagger of Amon Ra and King’s Quest VI simultaneously by taking a sort of “executive designer” role on both projects, turning over the nitty-gritty details to assistant designers.

Thus for the all-important King’s Quest VI, Sierra brought over Jane Jenson, who was fresh off the task of co-designing the rather delightful educational adventure EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus with Gano Haine. Roberta Williams described her working relationship with her new partner in a contemporary interview, striking a tone that was perhaps a bit more condescending than it really needed to be in light of Jenson’s previous experience, and that was oddly disparaging toward Sierra’s other designers to boot:

I took on a co-designer for a couple of reasons: I wanted to train Jane because I didn’t want Sierra to be dependent on me. Someone else needs to know how to do a “proper” adventure game. We’re all doing a good job from a technology standpoint, but not on design. In my opinion, the best way to learn it properly is side by side. Overall, it was a positive experience, and it was very good for the series because Jane brought in some new ideas. She learned a lot, too, and can take what she’s learned to help create her new games.

There’s something of a consensus among fans today that the result of this collaboration is the best overall King’s Quest of them all. This strikes me as a fair judgment. While it’s not a great adventure game by any means, King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow isn’t an outright poor one either in terms of writing or design, and this is sufficient for it to clear the low bar of the previous games in the series. The plot is still reliant on fairy-tale clichés: a princess imprisoned in a tower, a prince who sets out to rescue her, a kingdom in turmoil around them. Yet the writing itself is more textured and coherent this time around, the implementation is far more complete (most conceivable actions yield custom messages of some sort in response), the puzzles are generally more reasonable, and it’s considerably more difficult than it was in the earlier games to wander into a walking-dead situation without knowing it. Evincing a spirit of mercy toward its players of a sort that Sierra wasn’t usually known for, it even has a branching point where you can choose from an easier or a harder pathway to the end of the game. And when you do get to the final scene, there are over a dozen possible variants of the ending movie, depending on the choices you’ve made along the way. Again, this degree of design ambition — as opposed to audiovisual ambition — was new to the series at the time.

The fans often credit this relative improvement completely to Jenson’s involvement. And this judgment as well, unkind though it is toward Roberta Williams, is not entirely unfounded, even if it should be tempered by the awareness that Jenson’s own later games for Sierra would all have significant design issues of their own. Many of the flaws that so constantly dogged Roberta’s games in particular were down to her insistence on working at a remove from the rest of the people making them. Her habit was to type up a design document on her computer at home, then give it to the development team with instructions to “call if you have any questions.” For all practical purposes, she had thus been working as an “executive designer” long before she officially took on that role with King’s Quest VI. This method of working tended to result in confusion and ultimately in far too much improvisation on the part of her teams. Combined with Sierra’s overarching disinterest in seeking substantive feedback from players during the development process, it was disastrous more often than not to the finished product. But when the time came for King’s Quest VI, Jane Jenson was able to alleviate at least some of the problems simply by being in the same room with the rest of the team every day. It may seem unbelievable that this alone was sufficient to deliver a King’s Quest that was so markedly better than any of the others — but, again, it just wasn’t a very high bar to clear.

For all that it represented a welcome uptick in terms of design, Sierra’s real priority for King’s Quest VI was, as always for the series, to make it look and sound better than any game before. They were especially proud of the opening movie, which they outsourced to a real Hollywood animation studio to create on cutting-edge graphics workstations. When it was delivered to Sierra’s offices, the ten-minute sequence filled a well-nigh incomprehensible 1.2 GB on disk. It would have to be cut down to two minutes and 6 MB for the floppy-disk-based release of the game. (It would grow again to six minutes and 60 MB for the later CD-ROM release.) A real showstopper in its day, it serves today to illustrate how Sierra’s ambitions to be a major media player were outrunning their aesthetic competencies; even the two-minute version manages to come off as muddled and overlong, poorly framed and poorly written. In its its time, though, it doubtless served its purpose as a graphics-and-sound showcase, as did the game that followed it.

My favorite part of the much-vaunted King’s Quest VI introductory movie are the sailors that accompany Prince Alexander on his quest to rescue Princess Cassima. All sailors look like pirates, right?

A more amusing example of the company’s media naiveté is the saga of the King’s Quest VI theme song. Sierra head Ken Williams, who like many gaming executives of the period relished any and all linkages between games and movies, came up with the idea of including a pop song in the game that could become a hit on the radio, a “Glory of Love” or “I Will Always Love You” for his industry. Sierra’s in-house music man Mark Seibert duly delivered a hook-less dirge of a “love theme” with the distressingly literal title of “Girl in the Tower,” then hired an ersatz Michael Bolton and Celine Dion to over-emote it wildly. Then, Sierra proceeded to carpet-bomb the nation’s radio stations with CD singles of the song, whilst including an eight-page pamphlet in every copy of the game with the phone numbers for all of the major radio stations and a plea to call in and request it. Enough of Sierra’s loyal young fans did so that many a program director called Ken in turn to complain about his supremely artificial “grass-roots” marketing strategy. His song was terrible, they told him (correctly), and sometimes issued vague legal threats regarding obscure Federal Communications Commission laws he was supposedly violating. Finally, Ken agreed to pull the pamphlet from future King’s Quest VI boxes and accept that he wasn’t going to become a music as well as games impresario. Good Taste 1, Sierra 0. Rather hilariously, he was still grousing about the whole episode years later: “In my opinion, the radio stations were the criminals for ignoring their customers, something I believe no business should ever do. Oh, well… the song was great.”

The girl in the tower. Pray she doesn’t start singing…

While King’s Quest VI didn’t spawn a hit single, it did become a massive hit in its own right by the more modest sales standards of the computer-games industry. In fact, it became the first computer game in history to be certified gold by the Software Publishers Association — 100,000 copies sold — before it had even shipped, thanks to a huge number of pre-orders. Released in mid-October of 1992, it was by far the hottest game in the industry that Christmas, with Sierra struggling just to keep up with demand. Estimates of its total sales vary widely, but it seems likely that it sold 300,000 copies in all at a minimum, and quite possibly as many as 500,000 copies.

But for all its immediate success, King’s Quest VI was a mildly frustrating project for Sierra in at least one way. Everyone there agreed that this game, more so than any of the others they had made before, was crying out for CD-ROM, but too few consumers had CD-ROM drives in their computers in 1992 to make it worthwhile to ship the game first in that format. So, it initially shipped on nine floppy disks instead. Once decompressed onto a player’s hard drive, it filled over 17 MB — this at a time when 40 MB was still a fairly typical hard-disk size even on brand-new computers. Sierra recommended that players delete the 6 MB opening movie from their hard disks after watching it a few times just to free up some space. With stopgap solutions like this in play, there was a developing sense that something had to give, and soon. Peter Spears, author of an official guide to the entire King’s Quest series, summed up the situation thusly:

King’s Quest VI represents a fin de siecle, the end of an era. It is a game that should have been — needed to be — first published on CD-ROM. For all of its strengths and gloss, it is ill-served being played from a hard drive. If only because of its prominence in the world of computer entertainment, King’s Quest VI is proof that the era of CD playing is upon us.

Why? It is because imagination has no limits, and current hardware does. There are other games proving this point today, but King’s Quest has always been the benchmark. It is the end of one era, and when it is released on CD near the beginning of next year, it should be the beginning of another. Kill your hard drives!

Sierra had been evangelizing for CD-ROM for some time by this point, just as they earlier had for the graphics cards and sound cards that had transformed MS-DOS computers from dull things suitable only for running boring business applications into the only game-playing computers that really mattered in the United States. But, as with those earlier technologies, consumer uptake of CD-ROM had been slower than Sierra, chomping at the bit to use it, would have liked.

Thankfully, then, 1993 was the year when CD-ROM, a technology which had been around for almost a decade by that point, finally broke through; this was the year when the hardware became cheap enough and the selection of software compelling enough to power a new wave of multimedia excitement which swept across the world of computing. As with those graphics cards and sound cards earlier on, Sierra’s relentless prodding doubtless played a significant role in this newfound consumer acceptance of CD-ROM. And not least among the prods was the CD-ROM version of King’s Quest VI, which boasted lusher graphics in many places and voices replacing text absolutely everywhere. The voice acting marked a welcome improvement over the talkie version of King’s Quest V, the only previous game in the series to get a release on CD-ROM. The fifth game had apparently been voiced by whoever happened to be hanging around the office that day, with results that were almost unlistenably atrocious. King’s Quest VI, on the other hand, got a professional cast, headed by Robby Benson, who had just played the Beast in the hit Disney cartoon of Beauty and the Beast, in the role of Prince Alexander, the protagonist. Although Sierra could all too often still seem like babes in the woods when it came to media aesthetics, they were slowly learning on at least some fronts.

In the meantime, they could look to the bottom line of CD-ROM uptake with satisfaction. They shipped just 13 percent of their products on CD-ROM in 1992; in 1993, that number rose to 36 percent. Already by the end of that year, they had initiated their first projects that were earmarked only for CD-ROM. The dam had burst; the floppy disk was soon to be a thing of the past as a delivery medium for games.

This ought to have been a moment of unabashed triumph for Sierra in more ways than one. Back in the mid-1980s, when the company had come within a whisker of being pulled under by the Great Home Computer Crash, Ken Williams had decided, against the conventional wisdom of the time, that the long-term future of consumer computing lay with the operating systems of Microsoft and the open hardware architecture inadvertently spawned by the original IBM PC. He’d stuck to his guns ever since; while Sierra did release some of their games for other computer platforms, they were always afterthoughts, mere ways to earn a little extra money while waiting for the real future to arrive. And now that future had indeed arrived; Ken Williams had been proved right. The green-screened cargo vans of 1985 had improbably become the multimedia sports cars of 1993, all whilst sticking to the same basic software and hardware architecture.

And yet Ken was feeling more doubtful than triumphant. While he remainedr convinced that CDs were the future of game delivery, he was no longer so convinced that MS-DOS was the only platform that mattered. On the contrary, he was deeply concerned by the fact that, while MS-DOS-based computers had evolved enormously in terms of graphics and sound and sheer processing power, they remained as cryptically hard to use as ever. Just installing and configuring one of his company’s latest games required considerable technical skill. His ambition, as he told anyone who would listen, was to build Sierra into a major purveyor of mainstream entertainment. Could he really do that on MS-DOS? Yes, Microsoft Windows was out there as well — in fact, it was exploding in popularity, to the point that it was already becoming hard to find productivity software that wasn’t Windows-based. But Windows had its own fair share of quirks, and wasn’t really designed for running high-performance games under any circumstances.

Even as MS-DOS and Windows thus struggled with issues of affordability, approachability, and user-friendliness in the context of games, new CD-based alternatives to traditional computers were appearing almost by the month. NEC and Sega were selling CD drives as add-ons for their TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis game consoles; Philips had something called CD-i; Commodore had CDTV; Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, had split away from his old company to found 3DO; even Tandy was pushing a free-standing CD-based platform called the VIS. All of these products were designed to be easy for ordinary consumers to operate in all the ways a personal computer wasn’t, and they were all designed to fit into the living room rather than the back office. In short, they looked and operated like mainstream consumer electronics, while personal computers most definitely still did not.

But even if one assumed that platforms like these were the future of consumer multimedia, as Ken Williams was sorely tempted to do, which one or two would win out to become the standard? The situations was oddly similar to that which had faced software makers like Sierra back in the early 1980s, when the personal-computer marketplace had been fragmented into more than a dozen incompatible platforms. Yet the comparison only went so far: development costs for the multimedia software of the early 1990s were vastly higher, and so the stakes were that much higher as well.

Nevertheless, Ken Williams decided that the only surefire survival strategy for Sierra was to become a presence on most if not all of the new platforms. Just as MS-DOS had finally, undeniably won the day in the field of personal computers, Sierra would ironically abandon their strict allegiance to computers in general. Instead, they would now pledge their fealty to CDs in the abstract. For Ken had grander ambitions than just being a major player on the biggest computing platform; he wanted to be a major player in entertainment, full stop. “Sierra is an entertainment company, not a software company,” he said over and over.

So, at no inconsiderable expense, Ken instituted projects to port the SCI engine that ran Sierra’s adventure games to most of the other extant platforms that used CDs as their delivery medium. In doing so, however, he once again ran into a problem that Sierra and other game developers of the early 1980s, struggling to port their wares to the many incompatible platforms of that period, had become all too familiar with: the fact that every platform had such different strengths and weaknesses in terms of interface, graphics, sound, memory, and processing potential. Just because a platform of the early 1990s could accept software distributed on CD didn’t mean it could satisfactorily run all of the same games as an up-to-date personal computer with a CD-ROM drive installed. Corey Cole, who along with his wife Lori Ann Cole made up Sierra’s most competent pair of game designers at the time, but who was nevertheless pulled away from his design role to program a port of the SCI engine to the Sega Genesis with CD drive:

The Genesis CD system was essentially identical to the Genesis except for the addition of the CD. It had inadequate memory for huge games such as the ones Sierra made, and it could only display 64 colors at a time from a 512 color palette. Sierra games at the time used 256 colors at a time from a 262,144 color palette. So the trick became how to make Sierra games look good in a much smaller color space.

Genesis CD did supply some tricks that could be used to fake an expanded color space, and I set out to use those. The problem was that the techniques I used required a lot of memory, and the memory space on the Genesis was much smaller than we expected on PCs at the time. One of the first things I did was to put a memory check in the main SCI processing loop that would warn me if we came close to running out of memory. I knew it would be close.

Sierra assigned a programmer from the Dynamix division to work with me. He had helped convert Willy Beamish to the Genesis CD, so he understood the system requirements well. However, he unintentionally sabotaged the project. In his early tests, my low-memory warning kicked in, so he disabled it. Six months later, struggling with all kinds of random problems (the hard-to-impossible kind to fix), I discovered that the memory check was disabled. When I turned it back on, I learned that the random bugs were all caused by insufficient memory. Basically, Sierra games were too big to fit on the Genesis CD, and there was very little we could do to shoehorn them in. With the project now behind schedule, and the only apparent solution being a complete rewrite of SCI to use a smaller memory footprint, Sierra management cancelled the project.

While Corey Cole spun his wheels in this fashion, Lori Ann Cole was forced to design most of Quest for Glory III alone, at significant cost to this latest iteration in what had been Sierra’s most creative and compelling adventure series up to that point.

The push to move their games to consoles also cost Sierra in the more literal sense of dollars and cents, and in the end they got absolutely no return for their investment. Some of the porting projects, like the one on which Corey worked, were abandoned when the target hardware proved itself not up to the task of running games designed for cutting-edge personal computers. Others were rendered moot when the entire would-be consumer-electronics category of multimedia set-top boxes for the living room — a category that included CD-i, CDTV, 3DO, and VIS — flopped one and all. (Radio Shack employees joked that the VIS acronym stood for “Virtually Impossible to Sell.”) In the end, King’s Quest VI never came out in any versions except those for personal computers. Ken Williams’s dream of conquering the living room, like that of conquering the radio waves, would never come to fruition.

The money Sierra wasted on the fruitless porting projects were far from the only financial challenge they faced at the dawn of the CD era in gaming. For all that everyone at the company had chaffed against the restrictions of floppy disks, those same restrictions had, by capping the amount of audiovisual assets one could practically include in a game, acted as a restraint on escalating development budgets. With CD-ROM, all bets were off in terms of how big a game could become. Sierra felt themselves to be in a zero-sum competition with the rest of their industry to deliver ever more impressive, ever more “cinematic” games that utilized the new storage medium to its full potential. The problem, of course, was that such games cost vastly more money to make.

It was a classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. Ken Williams was convinced that games had the potential to appeal to a broader demographic and thus sell in far greater numbers than ever before in this new age of CD-ROM. Yet to reach that market he first had to pay for the development of these stunning new games. Therein lay the rub. If this year’s games cost less to make but also come with a much lower sales cap than next year’s games, the old financial model — that of using the revenue generated by this year’s games to pay for next year’s — doesn’t work anymore. Yet to scale back one’s ambitions for next year’s games means to potentially miss out on the greatest gold rush in the history of computer gaming to date.

As if these pressures weren’t enough, Sierra was also facing the slow withering of what used to be another stable source of revenue: their back catalog. In 1991, titles released during earlier years accounted for fully 60 percent of their sales; in 1992, that number shrank to 48 percent, and would only keep falling from there. In this new multimedia age, driven by audiovisuals above all else, games that were more than a year or two old looked ancient. People weren’t buying them, and stores weren’t interested in stocking them. (Another chicken-or-the-egg situation…) This forced a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot mentality toward development, increasing that much more the perceived need to make every game look and sound spectacular, while also instilling a countervailing need to release it quickly, before it started to look outdated. Sierra had long been in the habit of amortizing their development costs for tax and other accounting purposes: i.e., mortgaging the cost of making each game against its future revenue. Now, as the size of these mortgages soared, this practice created still more pressure to release each game in the quarter to which the accountants had earmarked it. None of this was particularly conducive to the creation of good, satisfying games.

At first blush, one might be tempted to regard what came next as just more examples of the same types of problems that had always dogged Sierra’s output. Ken Williams had long failed to install the culture and processes that consistently lead to good design, which had left well-designed games as the exception rather than the rule even during the company’s earlier history. Now, though, things reached a new nadir, as Sierra began to ship games that were not just poorly designed but blatantly unfinished. Undoubtedly the most heartbreaking victim of these pressures was Quest for Glory IV, Corey and Lori Ann Cole’s would-be magnum opus, which shipped on December 31, 1993 — the last day of the fiscal quarter to which it had been earmarked — in a truly woeful condition, so broken it wasn’t even possible to complete it. Another sorry example was Outpost, a sort of SimCity in space that was rendered unplayable by bugs. And an even worse one was Alien Legacy, an ambitious attempt to combine strategy with adventure gaming in a manner reminiscent of Cryo Interactive’s surprisingly effective adaptation of Dune. We’ll never know how well Sierra’s take on the concept would have worked because, once again, it shipped unfinished and essentially unplayable.

Each of these games had had real potential if they had only been allowed to realize it. One certainly didn’t need to be an expert in marketing or anything else to see how profoundly unwise it was in the long run to release them in such a state. While each of them met an arbitrary accounting deadline, thus presumably preventing some red ink in one quarter, Sierra sacrificed long-term profits on the altar of this short-term expediency: word quickly got around among gamers that the products were broken, and even many of those who were unfortunate enough to buy them before they got the word wound up returning them. That Sierra ignored such obvious considerations and shoved the games out the door anyway speaks to the pressures that come to bear as soon as a company goes public, as Sierra had done in 1988. Additionally, and perhaps more ominously, it speaks to an increasing disconnect between management and the people making the actual products.

Through it all, Ken Williams, who seemed almost frantic not to miss out on what he regarded as the inflection point for consumer software, was looking to expand his empire, looking to make Sierra known for much more than adventure games. In fact, he had already begun that process in early 1990, when Sierra acquired Dynamix, a development house notable for their 3D-graphics technology, for $1 million in cash and some stock shenanigans. That gambit had paid off handsomely; Dynamix’s World War II flight simulator Aces of the Pacific became Sierra’s second biggest hit of 1992, trailing only the King’s Quest VI juggernaut whilst — and this was important to Ken — appealing to a whole different demographic from their adventure games. In addition to their flight simulators, Dynamix also spawned a range of other demographically diverse hits over this period, from The Incredible Machine to Front Page Sports: Football.

With a success story like that in his back pocket, it was time for Ken to go shopping again. In July of 1992, Sierra acquired Bright Star Technology, a Bellevue, Washington-based specialist in educational software, for $1 million. Ken was convinced that educational software, a market that had grown only in fits and starts during earlier years, would become massive during the multimedia age, and he was greatly enamored with Bright Star’s founder, a real bright spark himself named Elon Gasper. “He thinks, therefore he is paid,” was Ken’s description of Gasper’s new role inside the growing Sierra. Bright Star also came complete with some innovative technology they had developed for syncing recorded voices to the mouths of onscreen characters — perhaps not the first problem one thinks of when contemplating a CD-ROM-based talkie of an adventure game, but one which quickly presents itself when the actual work begins. King’s Quest VI became the first Sierra game to make use of it; it was followed by many others.

Meanwhile Bright Star themselves would deliver a steady stream of slick, educator-approved learning software over the years to come. Less fortunately, the acquisition did lead to the sad demise of Sierra’a in-house “Discovery Series” of educational products, which had actually yielded some of their best designed and most creative games of any stripe during the very early 1990s. Now, the new acquisition would take over responsibility for a “second, more refined generation of educational products,” as Sierra’s annual report put it. But in addition to being more refined — more rigorously compliant with established school curricula and the latest pedagogical theories — they would also be just a little bit boring in contrast to the likes of The Castle of Dr. Brain. Such is the price of progress.

Sierra’s third major acquisition of the 1990s was more complicated, more expensive, and more debatable than the first two had been. On October 29, 1993, they bought the French developer and publisher Coktel Vision for $4.6 million. Coktel had been around since 1985, unleashing upon European gamers such indelibly (stereotypically?) French creations as Emmanuelle: A Game of Eroticism, based on a popular series of erotic novels and films. But by the early 1990s, Coktel was doing the lion’s share of their business in educational software. In 1992, estimates were that 50 to 75 percent of the software found in French schools came from Coktel. The character known as Adi, the star of their educational line, is remembered to this day by a whole generation of French schoolchildren.

Sierra had cut a deal more than a year before the acquisition to begin distributing Coktel’s games in the United States, and had made a substantial Stateside success out of Gobliiins, a vaguely Lemmings-like puzzle game. That proof of concept, combined with Coktel’s educational line and distributional clout in Europe — Ken was eager to enter that sprawling market, where Sierra heretofore hadn’t had much of a footprint — convinced the founder to pull the trigger.

But this move would never quite pan out as he had hoped. Although the text and voices were duly translated, the cultural idiom of Adi just didn’t seem to make sense to American children. Meanwhile Coktel’s games, which mashed together disparate genres like adventure and simulation with the same eagerness with which they mashed together disparate presentation technologies like full-motion video and 3D graphics, encountered all the commercial challenges that French designs typically ran into in the United States. Certainly few Americans knew what to make of a game like Inca; it took place in the far future of an alternate history where the ancient Incan civilization had survived, conquered, and taken to the stars, where they continued to battle, Wing Commander-style, with interstellar Spanish galleons. (The phrase “what were they smoking?” unavoidably comes to mind…) Today, the games of Coktel are remembered by American players, if they’re remembered at all, mostly for the sheer bizarreness of premises like this one, married to puzzles that make the average King’s Quest game seem like a master class in good adventure design. Coktel’s European distribution network undoubtedly proved more useful to Sierra than the company’s actual games, but it’s doubtful whether even it was useful to the tune of $4.6 million.

Inca, one of the strangest games Sierra ever published — and not really in a good way.

Ken Williams was playing for keeps in a high-stakes game with all of these moves, as he continued to do as well with ImagiNation, a groundbreaking, genuinely visionary online service, oriented toward socializing and playing together, which stubbornly refused to turn a profit. All together, the latest moves constituted a major shift in strategy from the conservative, incrementalist approach that had marked his handling of Sierra since the company’s near-death experience of the mid-1980s. From 1987 — the year the recovering patient first managed to turn a profit again — through 1991, Sierra had sold more games and made more money each year. The first of those statements held true for 1992 as well, as sales increased from $43 million to within a whisker of $50 million. But profits fell off a cliff; Sierra lost almost $12.5 million that year alone. Sales increased impressively again in 1993, to $59.5 million. Yet, although the bottom line looked less ugly, it remained all too red thanks to all of the ongoing spending; the company lost another $4.5 million that year.

In short, Ken Williams was now mortgaging Sierra’s present against its future, in precisely the way he’d sworn he’d never do again during those dark days of 1984 and 1985. But he felt he had to make his play for the big time now or never; CD-ROM was a horse he just had to ride, hopefully all the way to the nerve center of Western pop culture. And so he did something else he’d sworn he would never do: he left Oakhurst, California. In September of 1993, Ken and Roberta and select members of Sierra’s management team moved to Bellevue, Washington, to set up a new “corporate headquarters” there; sales and marketing would gradually follow over the months to come. Ken had long been under pressure from his board to move to a major city, one where it would be easier to recruit a “first-rate management team” to lead Sierra into a bold new future. Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle that was also home to Microsoft, Nintendo, and of course Sierra’s own new subsidiary of Bright Star, seemed as good a choice as any. Ken promised Sierra’s creative staff as well as their fans that nothing would really change: most of the games would still be made in the cozy confines of Oakhurst. And he spoke the truth —  at least in literal terms, at least for the time being.

Nevertheless, something had changed. The old dream of starting a software company in the woods, the one which had brought a much younger, much shaggier Ken and Roberta to Oakhurst in 1980, had in some very palpable sense run its course. Sierra had well and truly gone corporate; Ken and Roberta were back in the world they had so consciously elected to escape thirteen years before. Oh, well… the arrows of both revenue and profitably at Sierra were pointing in the right direction. One more year, Ken believed, and they ought to be in the black again, and in a stronger position in the marketplace than ever at that. Chalk the rest of it up as yet one more price of progress.

(Sources: the book Influential Game Designers: Jane Jenson by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, Spring 1994, and Fall 1994; The One of April 1989; ACE of May 1989; Game Players PC Entertainment of Holiday 1992; Compute! of May 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1992; press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. An online source was the Games Nostalgia article on King’s Quest VI. And my thanks go to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-mortgaging-of-sierra-online/

[thewebofslime]

As the Texas Democrat enters the race for president, members of a group famous for “hactivism” come forward for the first time to claim him as one of their own. There may be no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual. But is the United States ready for O’Rourke’s teenage exploits? By JOSEPH MENN in SAN FRANCISCO Filed March 15, 2019, 3:30 p.m. GMT (This article is adapted from a forthcoming book, “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World”) > Some things you might know about Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president: • The Democratic contender raised a record amount for a U.S. Senate race in 2018 and almost beat the incumbent in a Republican stronghold, without hiding his support for gun control and Black Lives Matter protests on the football field. • When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards. • The charismatic politician with the Kennedy smile is liberal on some issues and libertarian on others, which could allow him to cross the country’s political divide. One thing you didn’t know: While a teenager, O’Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work. Members of the group have protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter that is scheduled to be published in June by Public Affairs. O’Rourke was interviewed early in his run for the Senate. YOUNGER DAYS: Beto O’Rourke, left, in a photo of his band, Foss. Texas Republicans also tweeted out what appears to be a police mug shot of the Texas Democrat. Handout via Texas GOP Twitter There is no indication that O’Rourke ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity, such as breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. But his membership in the group could explain his approach to politics better than anything on his resume. His background in hacking circles has repeatedly informed his strategy as he explored and subverted established procedures in technology, the media and government. “There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically and have fun while you’re doing it,” O’Rourke said. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that.” An ex-hacker running for national office would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But that was before two national elections sent people from other nontraditional backgrounds to the White House and Congress, many of them vowing to blow up the status quo. Arguably, there has been no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual. Still, it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money. > ‘Footloose’ for the hacker set O’Rourke was a misfit teen in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s when he decided to seek out bulletin board systems – the online discussion forums that at the time were the best electronic means for connecting people outside the local school, church and neighborhood. “When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day,” he said. “You just wanted to be part of a community.” O’Rourke soon started his own board, TacoLand, which was freewheeling and largely about punk music. “This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll [magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn’t find at record stores,” he said. He then connected with another young hacker in the more conservative Texas city of Lubbock who ran a bulletin board called Demon Roach Underground. Known online as Swamp Rat, Kevin Wheeler had recently moved from a university town in Ohio and was having problems adjusting to life in Texas. Like O’Rourke, Wheeler said, he was hunting for video games that had been “cracked,” or stripped from digital rights protections, so that he could play them for free on his Apple. Also like O’Rourke, Wheeler wanted to find other teens who enjoyed the same things, and to write and share funny and profane stories that their parents and conservative neighbors wouldn’t appreciate. It was good-natured resistance to the repressive humdrum around them, a sort of “Footloose” for those just discovering the new world of computers. SWAG OF THE DEAD COW: Promotional material from the hacking group. Handout via REUTERS Wheeler and a friend named the Cult of the Dead Cow after an eerie hangout, a shut-down Lubbock slaughterhouse – the unappealing hind part of Texas’ iconic cattle industry. Most CDC members kept control of their own bulletin boards while referring visitors to one another’s and distributing the CDC’s own branded essays, called text files or t-files. At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other people’s phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls. O’Rourke didn’t say what techniques he used. Like thousands of others, though, he said he pilfered long-distance service “so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill.” Under Texas law, stealing long-distance service worth less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. More than that is a felony, and could result in jail time. It is unclear whether O’Rourke topped that threshold. In any event, the state bars prosecution of the offense for those under 17, as O’Rourke was for most of his active time in the group, and the statute of limitations is five years. Two Cult of the Dead Cow contemporaries in Texas who were caught misusing calling cards as minors got off with warnings. O’Rourke handed off control of his own board when he moved east for boarding school, and he said he stopped participating on the hidden CDC board after he enrolled at Columbia University at age 18. Hana Callaghan, a government specialist at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said that voters might want to consider both the gravity of any candidate’s offenses and the person’s age at the time. Among the questions voters should ask, she said: “What was the violation? Was it egregious? What does it say about their character – do they believe the rules don’t apply to them?” If substantial time has passed, she added, voters should decide whether the person “learned the error of their ways and no longer engages in those kind of behavior.” “When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day. You just wanted to be part of a community.” BETO O’ROURKE When he was a teen, O’Rourke also frequented sites that offered cracked software. The bulletin boards were “a great way to get cracked games,” O’Rourke said, adding that he later realized his habit wasn’t morally defensible and stopped. Using pirated software violates copyright laws, attorneys say, but in practice, software companies have rarely sued young people over it. When they do go after someone, it is typically an employer with workers using multiple unlicensed copies. Software providers are more interested in those who break the protections and spread their wares. CDC wasn’t of that ilk. Although some CDC essays gave programming and hacking instructions, in the late 1980s, the group was more about writing than it was about breaking into computer systems. But its focus on creative expression didn’t mean there were no grounds for controversy. Like many an underground newspaper, the Cult of the Dead Cow avidly pursued it. A CDC member who joined in the early 1990s had previously used real instructions for making a pipe bomb to joke about shedding pounds by losing limbs. Three teenagers in Montreal found the file, and one lost two fingers after he tried to follow the formula, prompting outrage. Rather than remove similar posts and hide the group’s history, the CDC warned readers not to take the files literally and added a disclaimer that survives on its current web page: “Warning: This site may contain explicit descriptions of or advocate one or more of the following: adultery, murder, morbid violence, bad grammar, deviant sexual conduct in violent contexts, or the consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs.” > Grabbing media attention O’Rourke and his old friends say his stint as a fledgling hacker fed into his subsequent work in El Paso as a software entrepreneur and alternative press publisher, which led in turn to successful long-shot runs at the city council and then Congress, where he unseated an incumbent Democrat. Politically, O’Rourke has taken some conventional liberal positions, supporting abortion rights and opposing a wall on the Mexican border. But he takes a libertarian view on other issues, faulting excessive regulation and siding with businesses in congressional votes on financial industry oversight and taxes. His more conservative positions have drawn fire from Democrats who see him as too friendly with Republicans and corporations. His more progressive votes and punk-rock past helped his recent opponent, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, portray O’Rourke as too radical for socially conservative Texas.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Her Own Story: A Nora Ephron Appreciation

This review was originally published on March 28, 2016 and is being republished for Women Writers Week.

Nora Ephron has been portrayed on screen by Diane Keaton, Sandra Dee, Meryl Streep, and Streep’s daughter, Grace Gummer. And that’s just the characters based on her life; her wit and insight are reflected in dozens of other characters she created as well.  

Nora’s writer mother Phoebe taught her that “everything is copy.” Even as she was dying, she ordered Nora to take notes. All four Ephron daughters became writers, but Nora, named for the door-slamming heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, most of all mined her own life and those around her for material. She is best remembered as the writer and/or director of four of the most successful romantic comedies of all time: “When Harry Met Sally...” (1989), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), and “Julie and Julia" (2009). The glossy charm of those films, and, let’s face it, their marginalization as “chick flicks,” makes it easy to overlook just how smart they are. For decades, no other romantic comedies have come close in quality or influence, despite the best efforts of various adorkable Jessicas and Jennifers confronting cutely contrived misunderstandings with Judy Greer as the quirky best friend. 

Nora was the oldest daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (their story is told in Henry’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything). They were New York City playwrights lured west to adapt established works like “Carousel” and “Daddy Long Legs” for Hollywood. Their four daughters grew up in Beverly Hills while the Ephrons worked on films like “Desk Set,” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” with Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe and “Captain Newman, M.D.,” with Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis. Phoebe wrote to Nora at camp describing the scene outside her office on the studio lot: a special effects crew creating the parting of the Red Sea for “The Ten Commandments,” using blue Jell-O. 

The Ephrons often entertained their friends, mostly other New York writers, and Nora grew up listening to complicated, challenging, witty—sometimes relentlessly witty—people. She remembered Dorothy Parker playing word games at her parents’ parties.  Nora dreamed of being the Parker-esque queen of a new Algonquin Roundtable: “The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit.”

The Ephrons did not hesitate to use each other's lives as material. Even Nora’s son, Jacob Bernstein, produced a superb documentary about his mother, which is of course titled "Everything is Copy." It tells the story of Nora’s sister Delia putting her head through the bannister rails in their house, so that the fire department had to come and get her out. The Ephrons made that into an incident in a James Stewart film they wrote called “The Jackpot.” “My parents just took it and recycled it, just like that,” Nora says in the film. Later, Nora’s letters home from college inspired her parents to write a successful play called “Take Her, She’s Mine,” which became a movie starring Sandra Dee as a free-spirited (for 1963) daughter and James Stewart as the lawyer father who tries to keep her out of trouble.

Phoebe and Henry were not the kind of parents who came to their children’s school events or comforted them reassuringly. Phoebe would respond to her daughters’ stories of heartbreak or disappointment by telling them it was all material for them to write about. She had a biting humor, sometimes at her daughters’ expense. But the Ephrons taught their daughters how to tell stories, especially their own stories. 

After college, Nora went to New York to work as a “mail girl” for Time magazine. News magazines of that era did not allow women to write bylined articles; the most they could expect was to be researchers for the male journalists. The fictionalized but fact-based Amazon series “Good Girls Revolt” depicts the experiences of the women who fought this system, and it includes a character named Nora Ephron, played by Grace Gummer. 

Nora was in the right time and place when two great upheavals came together in the 1970’s: the feminist movement and the arrival of “new journalism”—vital, opinionated, very personal writing that powered popular and influential magazines like Clay Felker’s New York Magazine. This was the perfect place for her distinctive, confiding voice. Her essays were deceptively self-deprecatory—her first collection was called Wallflower at the Orgy and one of her best-known pieces describes her insecurity about having small breasts. But Nora’s columns, especially the series about women collected in Crazy Salad and the series about media in Scribble Scribble, are fierce, confident, devastating takedowns of those she found pretentious, hypocritical, or smug, including her former boss at the New York Post and the President’s daughter, whom she described as “a chocolate-covered spider.”  

By 1976, Nora had already divorced the first of her three writer husbands and it was around this time she fell in love with another media superstar, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. In “Everything is Copy,” he described the night they met: “We had this amazing conversation.” They got married and she moved to Washington.  

When she was pregnant with their second child, she discovered he was unfaithful. She packed up and moved back to New York. As director Mike Nichols says in “Everything is Copy,” she cried for six months before taking her mother’s advice and writing a thinly disguised novel about it, the scathingly funny Heartburn. “In writing it funny, she won,” says Nichols, who then directed the 1986 movie version, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Streep called the book Nora’s “central act of resilience.”  

“She wrote herself out of trouble,” says her agent, Bryan Lourd. That was economic trouble as well as heartache. Although she had never intended to become a screenwriter like her parents, she found that it provided more flexibility for a single mother than being a journalist. So she adapted Heartburn for the screen and co-wrote 1983's “Silkwood,” also starring Streep as the Kerr-McGee employee turned activist.

Those who dismiss Nora’s work as lightweight because it is often light-hearted overlook its singularly radical and unapologetically female point of view. The moment in "Everything is Copy" that best illuminates her significance as a filmmaker is when Streep recalls Nichols asking Nora to provide more perspective on the husband’s point of view. But Streep understood that “this is about the person who got hit by the bus. It’s not about the bus.” Nora was saying that we have already seen a lot of movies from the perspective of the man; this one is the woman’s story. Indeed, it is the ability to control the point of view that was most important to Nora as a writer and director. In the novel version of Heartburn, she anticipated and answered questions about why she would tell the world something so personal and humiliating.

Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Nora loved the control of being a director and paid attention to the smallest of details.  For “Sleepless in Seattle,” she had a door flown across country so that the characters who had not yet met would be literally opening the same door, sending the audience a subliminal signal about their rightness for each other. She said that directing a movie meant that all day people asked her to decide things—she found it very satisfying to give them answers.

"Everything is Copy" shows a Newsday headline for a story about Nora: “She tells the world things that maybe she shouldn’t, but aren’t you glad she did?” Nora was her own best copy, and it is a treat to see topics and opinions from her personal essays show up in her films. In "When Harry Met Sally...," Sally’s “high maintenance” style of ordering in a restaurant is based on Nora, and the sexual fantasy she confides to Harry as they walk through Central Park in autumn is one Nora discussed for its possible anti-feminist implications in Crazy Salad. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” Nora pays loving tribute to a movie she saw with her mother, “An Affair to Remember.” (After they saw the movie, Phoebe introduced Nora to its star, Cary Grant.) In “Julie and Julia,” the loving, devoted relationship between Julia Child and her husband Paul is based in part on Nora’s very happy third marriage.

One of Nora’s most underrated films is perhaps her most personal, 1992's “This Is My Life,” based on the book by Meg Wolitzer, with Julie Kavner as a single mother trying to make it as a stand-up comic. Lena Dunham told the New Yorker that this film, Nora's directorial debut, made her want to be a filmmaker.  

On each viewing, a new joke or angle revealed itself to me and its world became richer. I loved Samantha Mathis’ surly teen, Gaby Hoffmann’s quippy innocent, and especially Julie Kavner’s Dot, their single mother, a standup comedian hellbent on self-actualizing despite, or maybe because of, these daughters. But what I really loved was the person orchestrating the whole thing. The costumes, perfectly low-rent polka-dotted blazers and grungy winter hats. The music, a mixture of vaudevillian bounce and Carly Simon’s voice that somehow made the city seem more real than if car horns scored the film. The camerawork, a single gliding shot that followed each family member into her bedroom as she settled into a new apartment in a less than desirable Manhattan neighborhood. I loved whoever was making these actresses comfortable enough to express the minutiae of being a human woman onscreen.

At first, the conflict in the story comes from the character’s struggles to support her children. But then, as she becomes successful, the conflicts are central to Nora both as Phoebe’s daughter and as her sons’ mother: How can a mother pursue her passion and talent, knowing she may neglect the needs of her children? And should her children’s confidences and problems be copy for her stand-up routine?  

In one scene, Kavner’s character Dottie talks to her agent:

Dottie Ingels: I spend 16 years doing nothing but thinking about them and now I spend three months thinking about myself and I feel like I’ve murdered them. Arnold Moss: You had to travel. It’s part of your work. Kids are happy when their mother’s happy. Dottie Ingels: No they’re not. Everyone says that, but it’s not true. Kids are happy if you’re there. You give kids a choice: your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they choose suicide in the next room. Believe me.

2000's “Hanging Up” is based on Delia Ephron’s 1995 book about her father’s death. Delia and Nora wrote the script, and Delia speaks frankly in "Everything is Copy" about the arguments they had while they were working together. The movie is a mess, of more interest for what it reveals about Ephron family dynamics than for its quality. The character based on Nora is played by Diane Keaton, who also directed. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote: “It is so blond and brittle, so pumped up with cheerful chatter and quality time, so relentless in the way it wants to be bright about sisterhood and death, that you want to stick a star on its forehead and send it home with a fever.” Tellingly, the Keaton/Nora character in the film is accused by her sister of appropriating her emotions for public display.  

My favorite “everything is copy” example in Nora’s films is from her most overlooked movie, the very charming and funny “My Blue Heaven" (1990). It stars Steve Martin as a former mobster in the witness protection program and Rick Moranis as the FBI agent assigned to take care of him as he prepares to testify against the head of the crime syndicate. The single mom prosecutor played by Joan Cusack reflects some of Nora’s experiences. But it isn’t the Ephrons who are copy here. By this time, Nora was very happily married to her third husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi, whose book about former mobster Henry Hill was the basis for the brilliant Martin Scorsese crime drama “Goodfellas.” Clearly, as her husband was writing about Hill, Nora was thinking that putting a goodfella into witness protection could be a funny story.  

Nora’s sons are now writers, too, both reporters, telling other people’s stories. But in writing about her death for the New York Times and telling Nora’s story in “Everything is Copy,” Jacob Bernstein tells his own as well. We see him talking to his father about the divorce and the many-year fight that followed, which included a negotiation for joint custody in exchange for allowing Nora to make the movie “Heartburn.” The agreement filed with the court even included a clause ensuring that Bernstein would be portrayed as a good father in the film, so the film did not just reflect her life; it was shaped by it. In "Everything is Copy," as Jacob mulls his grandmother’s famous phrase, and the private illness of his usually open-book mother, another generation of family writers expresses how their personal experiences can be illuminating for us, too. 

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[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

5 Movie Problems That Kids Today Will Never Understand

Like everything else, movies senility. Special aftermaths inspect worse, favourite slang and fad are left behind, and government and social framework displacement. But sometimes, the terribly central dilemma of a movie becomes so outdated that the cinema itself is no longer relatable to modern-day gatherings. Now are five examples of accurately that, delivered to you in convenient roster model — a format that they are able to never, ever become out-of-date or strange.

5

Christmas Vacation Is About A Middle-Class Homeowner Pee-pee That He’s Not Getting A Huge Christmas Bonus To Comprise A Pool

The holiday classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation remains a staple of the December basic cable movie pirouette. Its most famous scene is a holiday-pressured Clark Griswold lastly blowing a gasket in front of his family after he opens his highly apprehended Christmas bonus, only to find it’s a subscription to the Jelly of the Month club.

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That’s not one insignificant vistum from a simpler period; the whole planned is organized around that instant. Clark is counting on this bonus so he can mask the pay for the purposes of an in-ground fund, which he’s previously purchased in advance to stun their own families. To anyone under the age of 50 read this, suspect a sidekick of yours complaining about this today. How much tendernes could you muster?

Warner Bros. Studios “Sorry about your reserve. I guess you’ll have to just use the community pond, which I too can’t afford.”

Read Next

Meet The Spider That Subsists By Literally Looking Like Crap

Clark is not drowning in homeowner or student loan obligation, or the costs of referring two kids to college. He’s drowning in a pay of his compel, trying to prematurely compute a pond onto the beautiful live he previously owns. He has a house in suburban Chicago, his wife doesn’t manipulate, and he probably has health insurance and a 401 k. All those sweetened “employment” perks sound like some lost fantasy metropoli of Atlantis to Millennials enrolling the labour force today. And we’re supposed to share his madnes at not getting a good Christmas bonus? It might have been a relatable problem to a lot of parties back in the day, but be said that scene to your median “middle-class” laborer now, and prepare for some reeled seeings, accompanied by the most careful and exhaustive jerk-off flow you have ever seen.

4

One Hour Photo Is About A Creepy Guy Who … Gazes At All Your Illustrates

One Hour Photo performs Robin Williams as Sy, health professionals photo developer at a local supermarket … and we’ve previously confused our younger readers in several different ways. Sy befriends a family of regular customers, but his carefree professional behaviour revolves baleful when we view him at home, exhaustively browsing every picture their own families has in the past created him.

Fox Searchlight Pictures “Developed? Like, he added some filters? “

This scene still stops across as unsettling today, but digitize any of his actions, and we’d wager person predicting such articles is doing the exact same concept in another tab. You know, moving through every pole on their crush’s Instagram account. Still potentially frightening behavior, but nobody’s gonna make a movie about it.

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Today, this photo-obsessive mommy would definitely have an Instagram, and that accounting would almost definitely be public, and random beings would constantly be scrolling through photographs of her kids’ boasting incidents and their family vacations all the time. She’d want the maximum number of people to insure them; that’s the whole level of affixing photos publicly. Really, for modern publics, the only occasion tip-off them off that Sy is a creep is that haircut.

Fox Searchlight Pictures He is clearly the love child of King Joffrey and Flo from Progressive.

3

In Airheads , A Band Breaks Into A Radio Station To Get Exposure

In the ‘9 0s Comedy Central rerun staple Airheads , an amateur boulder strip referred the Lone Rangers attempts to “make it big” by taking a local radio station hostage and forced into to represent their demo strip. The plan is that an operator will hear the single, indicate them, and notebook them for Lollapalooza, or whatever the 1994 equivalent of Coachella was.

20 th Century Fox And the idea of guys storming into a workplace with guns could be used in a comedy movie and not horror.

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Imagine a strap nowadays recollecting the only impediment for entry into the music business is coming their chant played one time on a neighbourhood radio terminal. Hell, depending on how media-savvy the objective is, you might have to explain the whole idea of radio stations to a modern teenager. “It’s like a podcast mixed with Spotify, but ever on. Also there are ads. Ads? Well you consider, firms used to make money on circumstances called adverti-“

There’s likewise the fact that the band owns TWO physical copies of their lyric: a reel-to-reel( which catches barrage) and a cassette tape that they lose and urgently need to track down. Nowadays, anyone would have a digital folder easily accessible on their phone, or a flash drive, or the damn cloud. 40 times of this film would today get abbreviated into a 15 -second scene in which Steve Buscemi re-downloads an email attachment.

20 Century Fox “What studio did you register this in? ” “The laptop in my apartment.”

2

In Sixteen Candles , Nobody Remembers A Girl’s Birthday

Sixteen Candles heralds from a stage in human history when a person could make it through their part daytime without going 75 Facebook birthday remembrances from acquaintances, family members, and forgotten senior high school relationships with babies you’ve received more occasions than a sunset.

That’s the driving force behind John Hughes’ directorial introduction, wherein Molly Ringwald’s character, Sam, bemoans the fact that everybody in her life forgot her special day. Her Sweet Sixteen happens to fall one day before her sister’s bridal, so everybody in her life is too distracted to convulse an “HBD” her channel. They don’t have Facebook, Google Calendars, extremely basic knowledge of their own flesh and blood, or the ability to read a teenager’s glaring facial cues.

Universal Pictures Props to John Hughes for making a movie with an F-bomb and nudity, yet still drawing a PG rating.

div >

Nowadays, Sam would be instantly cataclysm with “Happy Birthday” messages, beginning at 12:01 a.m. and continuing for three days after her birthday, at which point she would move through them, “like” best available ones, feel bad for not “liking” all of them, then agree and deplete the rest of her daytime politely “liking” the full 200. The 2018 edition of Sixteen Candles would concern Sam checking her email and wondering, “Why am I coming a birthday wish from ‘your friends at O’Hare Long-Term Parking? ‘”

1

The Ring Is About A Video That Kills You … Unless You Share It

In The Ring , beings succumb seven days after watching a cursed videotape. That is, unless they make a print of the videotape and register it to someone else. But this was in 2002, before the rise of the omnipresent, omnipotent YouTube.

Today, the cursed videotape would get rent immediately — possibly before it even officially came out — and then emulated hundreds of days, inspiring reaction videos, lampoons, and dozens of memes that would be beaten into the anchor within a week.

Dreamworks Pictures ” The Ring , but each time Superintendent Chalmers adds the letter ‘B, ‘ it kills you twice as fast.”

No one would ever succumb from the Ring curse. Well , not for at least a few months, regardless, after which our fleeting scrutiny distances would all change to a clip of a bird that looks like it’s doing the Dougie or something.

Also , no one actually owns a functional VHS player anymore. Unless it was uploaded to YouTube, the strip would claim the well-being of, like, two library technicians and 73 hipsters watching it ironically.

Dreamworks Pictures As if a VHS tape could have subsisted that long without going gobbled in a VCR or videotapeed over with a baseball game.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a see to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you . i > b>

For more outdated movie tropes, check out 6 Groups Who Don’t Work As Movie Bad Guys Anymore and 5 Huge Hit Movies That No one is Talks About Anymore . i > b>

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[seo53703]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[restatebrk24219]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seo19107]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seoprovider2110]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7

[seo90210]

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

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“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

“My Best Career Advice” from the Analytics Influencers

No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option for pre-Urchin children. We dreamed of being firefighters and doctors and, if you were like me, backup dancers for Michael Jackson.

Lucky for music lovers, my aspirations moved away from ruining the King of Pop’s entourage. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of our online investments.

In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.

That should sound familiar — after all, you’re reading this. Maybe you were more into Springsteen or Swift, but the premise was the same. Your interests led you down a path that eventually manifested itself as web analytics. And you aren’t alone.

Young professionals are flocking to careers in web and mobile analytics for same reason that I did. This article is designed to help them start or continue their journey. It includes a collection of career advice from some of the biggest names and influencers in analytics.

Krista Seiden, Google

Krista Seiden is an Analytics Advocate and Product Manager at Google. Krista’s resume speaks for itself. But she speaks for herself, too, at conferences around the world and on her blog, Digital Debrief.

Alex Moore, LunaMetrics

Alex Moore is Director of Analytics & Insight at LunaMetrics. Alex leads consulting initiatives in analytics and data science and is a national trainer in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Matt Petrowski, United States Postal Service

Matt Petrowski is Digital Analytics Program Manager at United States Postal Service. Matt and his team transform website traffic metrics from USPS.com into meaningful, decision-making marketing insights.

Annie Cushing, Annielytics.com

Annie Cushing is Chief Data Officer at Outspoken Media and founder of Annielytics. Annie is a usual suspect at digital marketing conferences and frequent contributor to industry publications, including Search Engine Land and Moz Blog.

Adam Singer, Google

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google and editor of The Future Buzz. Adam presents 15-20 times a year at the most prestigious conferences on digital marketing, PR, and analytics.

Michael Bartholow, LunaMetrics

Michael Bartholow is Manager of Digital Marketing Strategy at LunaMetrics. Michael is an industry advocate of data-driven marketing, presenter at Inbound and SMX, and national Google AdWords trainer.

Khalid Saleh, Invesp

Khalid Saleh is CEO of Invesp, a usability and conversion optimization firm and co-author of “Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects into Customers.”

Elena Alikhachkina, Johnson & Johnson

Elena Alikhachkina is Global Head of Analytics at Johnson & Johnson. Her insight was originally published here.

Russell Walker, Kellogg School of Management

Russell Walker is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics” and other books. His insight was originally published here.

Avinash Kaushik, Google

Avinash Kaushik is Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics 2.0” and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” His insight was originally published here.

If You Were Starting Your Career in 2017, What Would You…

To help guide future analysts young and old who are interested in the industry, I’ve asked for direct feedback from industry leaders as well as curating existing advice around two important points:

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do exactly the same?

If you were starting your career in 2017, what would you do totally differently?

Two simple questions with tremendous impact. Here is a summary of their advice, with some of my analysis and thoughts along the way.

Get Technical

We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.

But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.

“My path led from web development to SEO to paid search then, finally, Analytics. That continuum provided a broad context to the digital field, and at least an entry point for just about any conversation.”

Alex Moore

“I often feel limited by not having a development background, which can be frustrating. If I had a college do over I would absolutely study data science or computer science.”

Annie Cushing

There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.

While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation, or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, many commented on the need for deeper technical skills.

“I would begin my development-to-marketing path, not with HTML and JavaScript, but with Python, R, and Java. I wish I had seen the machine learning revolution coming ten years ago. Machine learning will be the great litmus test among agencies between those providing mere “reporting” and insight. With a solid foundation in these technologies, a young aspiring analytics professional in 2017 will be able to crack open data in ways that a human being literally cannot, and that puts these newcomers at a huge advantage.”

Alex Moore

“I would have had a much better start in the digital field with a more technical background. I don’t think I would have enjoyed a major in computer science, because it’s not really my strong suit, but a minor would be so incredibly helpful to what I do these days.”

Krista Seiden

Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. Someone could have saved us the frustration by encouraging experimentation with functions during daycare.

Sidenote: This book is actually a great primer for a non-technical person looking to get started with Google Tag Manager and HTML!

Understanding how things work is so important, even if you’re not the one writing code. Especially if you’re not writing the code. Regardless of your role, you will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.

“I would have spent more time actively engaging development teams about the importance of what we do. As we continue to type and talk our way through the IoT, we need to ensure that information can be found, adapted, and interpreted by all stakeholders.”

Matt Petrowski

Marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.

Related Reading:

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs (Analytics Summit)

Tips for Getting A Job in the Digital Analytics Industry (LunaMetrics)

Crave Experience

Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.

LunaMetrics’ About Us page reveals many parallels amidst such diverse backgrounds. Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.

More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to your career and extend your trajectory.

“You can learn everything there is to learn about fishing in a book, or at a University. You won’t actually get any good unless you grab that pole and sit for hours on end on the water… Go get a site. Your mom’s. Favorite charity’s. Your friend’s business. Your spouse’s sibling on whom you have a crush. Or. . . start your own!”

Avinash Kaushik

“I am continually curious about new technology, new digital platforms, and new ideas. I sign up for new products, implement them and play around with them, and then compare and contrast to what I know. Understanding the digital landscape is key — it’s how I got into Google Analytics in the first place. While I was working at Adobe, I decided to implement Google Analytics on my blog to expand my analytics knowledge set.”

Krista Seiden

“I spend 25% of my time learning something new and it used to be a lot more. You have to be constantly learning and adding to your arsenal.”

Khalid Saleh

Khalid is always reading something: new books, new blog posts. His company also keeps a weekly meeting where every team member is expected to bring in some piece of new information they learned and share it with everyone else.

Many professionals are quick to point out that knowledge beyond traditional analytics is essential, too.

“Almost all of your career success will not be sourced from your ability to build pivot tables in Excel… rather it will come from two abilities: a) your business knowledge [and] b) your emotional Intelligence.”

Elena Alikhachkina

“If your goal is to participate in leading and transforming an organization, it will require more than writing code and doing analysis… If you work for a company that manufactures goods, go visit the factory. Learn how things get done. Learn about the processes that you are modeling.”

Russell Walker

Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients.

“I would 100%, without question, start my career again at an agency — the diversity of projects and clients, and the expertise available for osmosis from every colleague and every smart client.”

Alex Moore

“Starting my career on the agency side was really a great decision. Agencies are the ones who execute much of the actual hands on, tactical marketing work, which you need to spend years working on before you truly understand developing higher level strategy work.”

Adam Singer

Agencies provide a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility. But that’s not the only way to learn. I’ve also found that entrepreneurial and nonprofit environments have similar advantages. Resource scarcity, while typically not something we strive for, can force us to be especially creative. Some of my most influential professional experience was derived from desperation — “Well, this has to be done and there’s no one else to do it…”

Related Reading:

Q&A With Ad Students: Advice For Marketers Just Starting Out (The Future Buzz)

Data Driven, Career Driven with Krista Seiden (Jeffalytics)

Career Change Tactics to Steal My Digital Marketing Job (LunaMetrics)

Pursue Passion

Career passion is a calling for some people — they can’t imagine doing anything else. For others, it’s a search. Our analytics experts spoke to both sides.

“Agencies give you a view into many different industries and companies so you can figure out what work you’re really passionate about to pursue.”

Adam Singer

“I’m extremely passionate about what I do. Analytics, and more broadly, digital marketing, is something I get excited about, to the point that I love to talk to my family and friends about it (likely too much so, in their opinions).”

Krista Seiden

Passion and generally standing for something goes a long way. Krista is a great example. She has put a tremendous amount of work into the #WomenInAnalytics movement to help elevate women in this field and make it a more inclusive space.

“I’m driven by my passion for the field, but also by the knowledge that many people out there haven’t had the opportunities I have had to dive into it, and I want to help them do so anyway I can.”

Krista Seiden

Passionate people live-and-breathe what they do, all day every day. Whether starting a career or looking to take it to the next level, remember that people (especially recruiters!) are drawn to enthusiasm.

“The best digital marketers advocate 24 hours a day. What are you advocating for in your spare time? Do you run Facebook ads for a family business or do volunteer work with a nonprofit’s website? Do you run an Etsy shop or a YouTube channel? Passion in the evening and weekends translates to passion for in-house and client work.”

Michael Bartholow

Last winter I spent a cold February weekend hacking together Google Assistant, Google Analytics and my FitBit in an effort to gamify my life. Now I’ll be the first to admit that normal people don’t do that. Normal people participate in winter sports and watch Game of Thrones.

Normal people also don’t love their job.

Related Reading:

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion (Forbes)

An Unassuming Key to Career Success in Tech (LunaMetrics)

Take Risks

A scan of the experts LinkedIn profiles reveals something interesting. Nearly all of them include career paths (or detours) that are not linear. They don’t follow a “perfect career progression” that you might see in a Tony Robbins seminar. Most of these thought leaders pursued passion projects, donated themselves to causes, and contributed to the conversations around them. They took risks. And, although arguable selfless or selfish or silly, this experience advanced them.

“I took a lot of risks early on in my career but, looking back, I think I could have done even more to push the envelope and try things no one else had done yet. When you are young your mind is basically free of the little voice telling you ‘This is a crazy idea, I shouldn’t do it.’ Take advantage of that!”

Adam Singer

Following someone else’s lead without questions or falling into your own routine can be dangerous. As an analyst, your goal should always be why and how, instead of simply what.

“I focused a lot on reporting and, boy, I could get very creative generating more and more reports with tons of data. But I lost track of what these reports are telling me. Reports without actionable insights from them are useless.”

Khalid Saleh

“I learned early the importance of anticipating questions before they are asked. There should be very few ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ left unanswered when it comes to discussions across teams.”

Matt Petrowski

This next quote, or quote of a quote, is perhaps the best advice of the group, and is the best way I can think to end this roundup.

“Even the things I tried that failed ended up providing such good lessons — success is a horrible teacher. As one of my former clients used to tell me, ‘Regret what you do, not what you don’t.’”

Adam Singer

Related Reading:

7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success (HuffPo)

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All (HBR)

Our comment section is typically filled with troubleshooting questions and technical caveats. If you’re a professional in the analytics industry, like many of our readers, I’d encourage you to share your own career advice below!

http://ift.tt/2GynVB7