For a demonstration of what I mean, here are two videos made by artists under my watch: Light Surrounding You by Evermore and Young At Heart by Amy Meredith. Both are similar songs for similar audiences, made with similar budgets.
The Evermore clip was made by awesome director Michael Spiccia, who was left alone to conceive and execute his vision:
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The Amy Meredith clip was a painful process: the director’s original pitch was hacked by a team of marketers at the record company who each wanted to remove a part that they weren’t sure about. The editing process was worse: everyone wanted to put in their two cents and remove a shot here or there. The resulting video makes very little sense and doesn’t do justice to what should have been a major hit song:
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Funnily enough, the label that made the Evermore clip – Warner – all loved the Light Surrounding You clip and were proud to take it to media. The song went on to hit #1 on the ARIA chart while Amy Meredith and Sony parted ways soon after this clip was made.
My point is, don’t think that by involving a committee you’ll get more buy-in, that people will feel more empowered to promote the result. If the creative result is brilliant, everyone will want to be associated with it no matter whose vision it was.
In music, we had only the vaguest ideas of our target market. There was no science behind how we defined the audience for an artist. One strategy I must have heard a hundred times was, ‘Start this artist on Triple J, we’ll do cool festivals like The Big Day Out and Splendour In The Grass, then we’ll crossover to mainstream stations like Nova and Austereo.’
That was it! Music is somewhat easier than launching a new product, as you can piggyback onto the market of other artists.
But if you’re launching a new product like Posse, you have to think through your approach in much more detail.
Recently, we had to choose how to design our stores and town, and had five artists submit concepts. They were all good but very different. My first thought was to share the designs with as many people as I could to get feedback. I sent them to about 50 friends and our whole team. Everyone had a strong and different opinion – all five had about the same number of lovers and haters. It was very confusing!
To help make a decision, we decided to define our target market and test people only in that market. But would that give us a result that was too niche? After all, we want Posse to be a global platform with millions of users, so we can’t rule out an entire demographic like ‘men’. At the same, time I knew that if I tried to please everyone we’d have something bland that no one loved. So I decided to define and test our target market, which wouldn’t be everyone but would be big.
We focused on four groups who would use Posse: urban females age 16-25; urban females age 25-38, urban females with kids, and urban males 25-45. We interviewed several people from each of these user groups and learned about the kinds of places they’d recommend to friends, how they used social media, and their creative taste. We imagined one persona for each of our four audience segments and wrote out a detailed description of their life. What were their jobs, their weekend activities, the media they consumed and how, their dreams, and their worries. Then for each, we found a photo of someone who represented that persona.
Now, any creative decision we make we can sense check against these four personas. For big decisions (like the style of the store and town), we invite a few representatives of each audience segment into the office and tested the different designs on them. We wanted at least the majority of the representatives to love the design and we knew that none could hate it to the point where they wouldn’t use the product, or we’d rule out a giant part of our potential market.
The result was very interesting and the design we ended up with was a clear winner with our target audience representatives. It only came third when we polled everyone and didn’t bear in mind the target market. But many of the people who didn’t like it were not in our target market and never would have used the product anyway!
I wish we’d used a framework like this to make decisions in music.
In music, if you are in A&R, you’re supposed to be a music expert with magic ears. You can hear hits and read the wishes of 18-year-old girls. I’m sure the industry would have a much better hit rate if music marketers thought through the target market, interviewed them, built personas and then tested single and video choices.
As a music manager, I relied a lot on the artists’ creative instincts and they generally had the final say. But at Posse, I found myself in the daunting position of having no artist to be the genesis of ideas. I had the final creative say, although I’d never been in this position and am not an artist myself.
One thing I am good at is spotting great creative talent when I see it, and by following a framework of defining our values, trusting the talent, knowing and testing our target market, I feel like I’m in a much better position to make critical creative decisions that will define our product.
