the dotmatrix project

Hip Hop is dead.

Or as Bob Lefsetz puts it:

[...] Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them! [...]

Except that with Hip Hop, “the game” is celebrated as much, if not more than the content or the musicianship of the actual artist.

The shit makes my head spin.

UPDATE: And the campaign hits TV:

I’m so not the target audience for this shit.

(via Nah Right)

I have an Ad Design degree from Syracuse University, admittedly much more so because I was convinced by my father that I needed a stable job coming out of college than out of any incessant love for crafting adverts. Illustration was my passion as an adolescent — political cartooning to be precise — but she wasn’t too stable of a pursuit, so I caved early on.

Even before I matriculated, I knew I was never going to use my degree in its proper setting. I had no desire to become a Jr. Art Director, slaving away on terribly boring, listless campaigns at a big agency named after a long dead, old, white male copy writer. But many of the skills that I developed in the VPA program — creative brainstorming, rolling with constructive criticism, putting my feet in the shoes of a person with need, etc. — I find myself using to this day on supply-side projects from time to time, though I do try to do so with positive intent and not simply add to the noise of the media ecosystem.

Doc Searls is a demand-side advocate, and I completely agree with his position on the false construct of our system that attempts to connect markets to product via the boisterous shouting of offers into the wind. Maybe his VRM work will begin to flip the script on that paradigm, maybe not.

In any case, Bill Hicks is genius.

Time Squared from Matt Trecartin on Vimeo.

Before I get into this post, let me put out there that I’m not that big a fan of advertising anything through traditional channels.

I mean, the cost of both print and television advertising (production and placement) in relation to the ability to gage actual ROI makes for a ridiculously obscene (read: poor) investment. Companies — or more specifically, executives — have money allocated to marketing budgets that need to be spent, but imagine if a percentage of marketing budgets were to be reallocated to actual product development instead.

You know, adding improved talent or more resources to the mix to give products or entertainers a chance to actually sell themselves based on their merit?

Dream on, right?

Enter Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Facebook as a platform for the past few months, deep diving into its advertising functionality to get a sense of its potential value for independent musicians trying to raise local awareness.

I can’t tell you if Facebook is worth its $15 billion valuation, but man, to an indie artist this platform is gold.

The above is a snapshot I took of a campaign that I created to pimp Molly’s recurring Tuesday night show at M’Coul’s Pub in downtown Greensboro, NC. Through 5 some odd days, we’ve served just over 7,000 impressions with 7 click-throughs, which in traditional advertising terms is a wasted campaign. But there’s nothing traditional about our internet, so even a walled garden like Facebook can flip the script on another angle of meat space industry.

For Team Molly, that .10% click-through rate represents a huge win. Let me explain.

Less Is More… Seriously

Facebook users tend to fill out a good percentage of their profile information, so advertisers attempting to target any number of niche markets have a wealth of structured, personal meta-data options to leverage. Take the above campaign as an example.

Molly plays a weekly 2 hour show — a mix of jazz, blues, alt-country and funk — in downtown Greensboro at a 21 and over pub venue. Our primary goal at this early phase of her solo career is to raise awareness of her musical style, specifically with locals who dig the style she plays.

Alright, so here’s where our ROI kicks in:

• Greensboro is a city about 230,000 strong and 79,360 of them are Facebook users (34.5%)
• Out of that crew, 4,320 people have explicitly told Facebook that they like Jazz, Blues or Country music (5.4% of Facebook users in Greensboro)
• Narrowing that set down to a 21 to 50 year-old range — our guess at who Tuesday night bar goers might be — 2,460 people remain (3.1%)
• I created an ad to speak to those 2,460 people, choosing to go the CPC route, bidding a top bid of $.75 (the range was $.53 to $.75) for every click-through to Molly’s Facebook musician page. If we had chosen to place the ad in the News feed — going the CPM route — the cost would’ve jumped to ~$10 per every 1,000 impressions.
• I then set the daily budget to $5.00, knowing upfront that we’ll never get more than 7 or 8 click-throughs per day, which is fine because we’re promoting a weekly event

So yeah, we’re only getting a .10% click-through rate, with an average impression day of ~1,200… but Molly’s Tuesday night show isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. For less than $7.00 per week, we’re serving twice as many impressions than the total number of neighbors who probably most appreciate Molly’s talents.

Over time, that equals awareness.

This week, 3 of the click-throughs have “fanned” her page, which in Facebook lingo is synonymous with making a commitment to be kept up to date with her happenings around town. It’s too early to bank on those numbers staying consistent, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they keep steady. Extrapolated over the next 52 weeks:

• One years worth of fans: ~156 people (6.3% of our targeted market)
• Cost to reach them: ~$338
• M’Coul’s upstairs capacity = ~40 people

That’s four times the capacity of Molly’s weekly show, located smack dab in the middle of our hometown. These people have visible names and actual faces attached to them and they can be contacted either individually or as a group — Facebook’s notification system delivers iCast updates of what Molly’s doing and auto-updates fans when new gigs are scheduled.

Compare those costs and the qualified ROI of the campaign with a Rhino Times (a local, free weekly) full-page ad that runs for ~$1,200.

That .10% click-through rate is looking pretty sweet now, isn’t it?

We’re now building our local strategy around the contextual, hyper-local, interconnectivity that Facebook’s platform provides for free. The platform is working for us 24/7 — the exposure of friend’s actions consistently drives fan adds — and now we have a low-cost mechanism for simultaneously overlapping multiple niche campaigns to a local crowd.

Fuck making it big time; we want to make it locally.

You can become a “fan” of Molly here. Just know upfront that if you click that magic link, it’s a two-way sentiment coming right back ‘atcha.