I wrote this blog thing in 2012 (was I even born then?) and most of it still holds up. It’s about ways that the comedy industry loses value.
I was pretty agressive in there. I was apocalyptic. I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like there’s value in anything that’s surviving. There might not be enough pie pieces for everyone involved, but there’s always a way.
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In some ways collaboration is a waste of creative time
People relate to people. What people want from entertainment is people. They want the things they like, the things they don’t like, the flaws, the achievements, the opinions, the fears. People are imperfect, but they feel concrete to us. A person’s opinion could change, but their story doesn’t change.
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It is infinitely valuable and everyone looks in the wrong place for it.
Creativity is what makes everything worth living for. It’s what keeps humans from being outsourced and automated. It’s the future of our economy. I work with the greatest entertainment companies in the world. When I tell people my career, they often tell me “I’m not creative.” They’re wrong and stupid!
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The switch happened before we knew it and tons of people were suddenly making things from home.
Putting a stage show on camera sucks
Doing an IRL show without the live audience reaction, without the communal feel, without the environment, without the grandness, without the exclusivity, without the focus is like… a pizza without the mozzarella, sauce, or crust.
Without the pizza parts, we can have an empty plate or a cheeseburger. If a virtual show (live streamed) is going to have value, very little of it will come from the legacy of a live stage show. We gotta add in ingredients. A burger and a pizza are not very different in value, but only when they’re on the same level.
I talked about how to build that burger in another post, but let’s talk about pricing and value.
Value is set by what the buyer will pay for something. It’s based on supply and demand, quality, emotionality, randomness, and whether it has a Colgate logo on it.
There are tons of factors, so if you’re looking for a simple math equation to find value, you’re up a certain kind of creek. Why isn’t the phrase “down” a creek?
Entertainment, like cooking, takes practice. The entertainment we see today took lots of entertainer stage-time to develop as well as all the ancestral stage-time before it. The major loss of value for streaming shows (vs stage shows) is this history.
We can pull experience from live shows, tv shows, video games, and youtubes, facetimes, and other stuff; but we aren’t very good at this yet.
I don’t think I need to list all the things we lose from the in-person experience, I’ll leave that up to you.
Another thing to consider in lowering the value is event planners and show producers don’t know how to make money like they did from gatherings. They might not feel that entertainment has the same ROI as it used to.
In virtual events not just the entertainment changes. Let’s say you’re putting together a Zoom sales meeting… Here are some things (that cost you money) you don’t have anymore.
In a way, the benefit of the stuff in bold above is provided by the entertainer. That’s some value added there!
Another major factor to appreciate is that, just as the entertainment side of this stuff is new, the online gatherings themselves are new. Likely, every part of the event will kinda suck. If entertainment can be added, it might be even more crucial to a good event than it would have been traditionally. Even low-quality entertainment will mix things up, and show the attendees that the producer really cares about their experience. This means A LOT in the clinical environment of online whatevers!
“Virtual show” is like “artificial pizza.” Nobody wants that. The entertainment that bursts with value in this environment is a new style of presentation that accepts the strengths and weaknesses of the medium.
Then, this new thing needs to be refined.
If you’re looking for the entertainment company that can present real value in this arena, look for folks that are grinding and agile — most likely young people who have done lots of live online stuff. It may feel risky if you see an offering for something all new, but something all new with repetition is actually the lowest-risk sitch you can get right now.
If you’re an entertainment company, do five online shows today. Race to get to 100 experiences as fast as you can. Figure out what you’re doing. Figure out what you could never do before. Don’t offer a show – bookers and audiences never really cared about a show. Offer a transformative, modern thing. If stage-time is your goal, you could have more than anyone else in the world in a month.
Online shows are not good right now, but people need them. If there’s a need, there’s a value.
When computers came out, they were not good, they were difficult, they didn’t do a lot, but they did enough to have value in a computer-less world. Companies that understood paid well for them.
This is a time for producers to pay more and get the very best in a burgeoning field. This is a time for bottom-tier entertainment companies to redefine their status.
The number of your fans is not what you want it to be.
The people who are truly dedicated to the entertainment you make probably is a smaller group than you hope, but it is probably also bigger than you might imagine.
You’re not going to serve them, and they’re not going to support you if you don’t know where they are. So, let’s get them all together in one place. Then, you can…
You might be working on a great project right now, and that project might end. You gotta have everyone together so they can move over to the next project. You can also set up more services around your current project.
Let’s say you have a TV show about goats for goat owners. You have some fun behind the scenes footage that you don’t want to put on the TV show. You need another way to serve your fans those extras. The TV show ends and you set up a goat food delivery service that saves goat owners tons of money. Wouldn’t you want your fans to be the first to know?
There are pros and cons to different ways to gather fans…
| Pros | Cons | |
|---|---|---|
| email list | 1. you own your list 2. once people are enrolled, they’re more likely to participate 3. no algorithm change is going to disrupt you | 1. may cost money for big lists 2. not everyone opens emails |
| Youtube | 1. there’s a social discovery aspect 2. you can form super deep relationships 3. built in monetization platform | 1. most of your subscribers might not see what you’re making |
| 1. super easy for someone to like your page 2. built in monetization platform 3. you’re where people are anyway 4. you can be aggressive without being too annoying | 1. you’ll most likely need to pay to get all your fans to hear you. 2. lots of integrated tools for building audiences and making ads based on audiences | |
| Patreon | 1. your fans are committed. you won’t have any lookie-loos or accidental patrons 2. they will all hear you | 1. expensive buy-in for your fans 2. you have a major responsibility to provide them lots of entertainment |
I like sending fun emails to fans. With Boobietrap, it costs us $50/mo to have our list of 4000 emails. We sign up people who attend our shows and people unsubscribe if we’re not serving them, but we try to make sure that every email we send out is a service.
This doesn’t mean we have 4000 fans. We have a lot less than that, but we have direct connection with the people who are true fans. We can give them awesome stuff and they can give us awesome feedback about what they want.
Make a commitment to one gathering place. Then, direct everything toward that when you make anything for fans. The call to action is always the same thing and you’re always telling them why. “text me to get bad photos of my dog” “all my best jokes come out on twitter first. Follow me there”
Letting your fans scatter everywhere is an escape. It’s a way for you to not face the facts and not work on doing something important for your people. It’s a great way of letting yourself imagine that you’re more successful than you are. Unless you’re the CEO of Netflix, you probably don’t have the bandwidth or team to maintain true service to your fans in multiple gathering places.
Get them all together, serve the shit out of them, you will get fulfillment and so will they!
If your base of true fans ( who will tell others / who will buy $100 worth of stuff from you / however you measure it ) is small, try to make a bigger impact on them. If you have the bandwidth to text them each personally every week, booyah! do it! What if your list grows to 75? Then you’ll change. Right now, make as much individual impact on each fan as you can because they’re the embodiment of the value you put into the world.
It can get daunting to look at the actual number of people who are on your side. Remember that even though these are your easiest people, your best people, the people on your mission, they are not the only people who want what you offer.
There are lookie-loos, bargain hunters, buyers, researchers, snobs, community members, all kinds of different people who are available to connect with new entertainment — and possibly be converted into your fans. The easiest way to convert those folks, comes back to gathering and serving your true fans in the first place.
There’s serious social change happening right now. I can’t believe it how people are coming together for public health and racial equality at the same time. While I haven’t gone silent about these things, I have 90% been digging in to my expertise (entertainment) even though it may seem stupid / empty / selfish at a time like this.
I don’t believe what I do to be “essential work” but I do believe entertainment is incredibly important for humans. The IRL stage stuff I’ve created now takes its time in the shadows as digital entertainment (movies / TV / video games / socials) get the spotlight. People are also trying to do virtual stage shows which I mostly see as a crappy patch – not a stand-alone form of good entertainment with value.
We need entertainment. It gives us a break, a connection to humanity, and sometimes a reason to live. Performers who own even the most frivolous of acts have powerful missions behind what they do.
Up until the age of 30, I was probably depressed 50% of the time. A lot of the depressed thoughts were based on failure at so many things that weren’t really in my wheelhouse.
… and on and on
was relieved by the serenity meditation
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference
What is my realm of influence? Where do I feel important? Which actions that I take make a potent change?
So, personally, I find flow and influence in entertainment. When I’m flowing, I’m doing more. When I’m working within my wheelhouse, I’m making more of an impact.
I am not an impactful activist, I’m not a lobbyist, I’m not a political thought leader. I’m good at making clowns funnier.
You don’t want the surgeon being the one to mop the floor. The surgeon needs to save their energy for surgery. At the same time, sometimes the floor isn’t getting mopped fast enough.
I doubt regularly whether leaning into entertainment more is helpful overall. I’m hopeful that what I do continues to be life-affirming to others. I hope my entertainment is bolstering to the first responders, to the activists, to the politicians, the virologists, and the soup kitchen workers.
I’m also hopeful for the impact of the other people of the world who are so good at entertainment. Hopeful that they’ll keep on making great stuff and letting their lights shine — not denying their most powerful role because they think it’s not crucial anymore.
Kickstarter or Patreon can seem like a solution to an entertainer’s problems. The thinking goes, “I’m entertaining. People like what I do. I’ll ask them each for a small amount of money. I’ll have a large amount.”
The only problem with this thinking could be that… You’re not, people don’t, you will, you won’t.
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We are all born with the innate ability to sleep, cry, poop, and eat. This has become a vehement truth to me in the past two months of having little baby Arlo at home.
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The brand of an entertainment company or an individual is the way the public identifies that company. What is the core personality of the company?
If your brand is strong, most people will agree on the same brand description. If your brand is weak, each individual might have a very different feeling about who your company is. Your brand can be strong and out of your control – like someone caught in a scandal. It can be weak and in your control – like a soda nobody cares about.
It’s pretty simple theoretically. What good thing or things do you provide to your audience that your competition doesn’t?
It’s simple, but difficult to get right. That’s why people like me get so much money to help you with your brand. Here are some reasons it’s hard…
Here, I’m using the word “audience” to mean the group of people who you care have an impression of your brand.
If you’re trying to talk to people to buy tickets for a show, your audience is the potential audience of your show. If you’re selling to a booker, your audience is the kind of bookers that would book you. If you’re trying to get your family to agree you have a good career, your audience is your family.
If you feel like your audience is “everybody!” you’re going to have a tough time. In fact, the smaller you can make your audience group the easier it is to make the perfect message just for them.
Your competition is the entertainers who are trying to get the same gigs as you, or have the same TV time slot as you or whatever. They are competing for buy-in from your audience. If they’re not going for your audience, they’re not your competition.
Your brand is a message.. a story. If your brand is strong and well used, it’s in everything that you create. It’s reflected in your company name, your logo, the fonts you use, how you talk on the phone, the style of shirt you wear etc.
This exercise will help you at least get a starting place for a brand.
Here’s a simple version of an entertainment pro bio. There are so many bad ones out there.
NOTE: People don’t care about your life story.
People care about things that help themselves. Your job is to turn your life story into a message of how you have value to others.
Marty Jacobson is a quirky folk musician with Polynesian roots. His tunes are staples of protest rallies in at least 17 countries with chart topping singles around the world. He constantly brings his messages of unity, love and the ludicrous nature of life to audiences through channels such a TED, NPR, Fox News, Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations. Marty has won the Endevor Award for “School Song” as well as several honorary doctorates.
Jacobson did not aim to be a political icon and he still doesn’t claim that moniker. In highschool, he took up accordian because he thought it was the funniest instrument and; soon was fascinated by the tone, volume, and impact he had when playing for friends. Creating enjoyable music became an obsession. Within 14 months, he had recorded his first album “Creek Town” which he distributed and began performing at Minneapolis area high school dances. He would release two more albums before graduating.
As he loved sharing music, he started seeing the impact of the messages in his songs. Entering into Berkeley School of Music on a full scholarship, he started work on what he calls his “First real album.”
The album “Recycled Cotton” featured broken piano, mixing bowls, washboards, and over 53 different “instruments.” It landed and connected him with what he really enjoyed — truely impactful music. The album sold 1 million copies and gave him the motivation to quit school and start touring the world.
As he was embraced by the activist community, he found great joy in releasing his most popular songs about topics such as hugging, affirmations, sharing, and being vulnerable.
Since “Recycled Cotton,” Marty has released 17 albums and 10 hit singles internationally. He is an anomoly in the music world as he has never had an agent, and answers his own phone. He currently lives in Calgary, Canada with his two wives and 45 cats.
The main thing I want you to have in your bio is a section that can be easily cut and pasted. When someone recommends you or talks about who you are, they need that. That’s the most influencial use of your bio because word of mouth is so important. Also, don’t expect people to read the whole thing. They want to know what you do and why you’re good.
START there – first paragraph. The beginning of the bio shows the most value. If someone copy/pastes the first paragraph of a bio, we want it packed with the value offered. We want awesomeness to be clear.
Your brand is what’s special about you. Marty is weird and has social impact.
It’s okay to not have a resume like Marty’s. What have you achieved, though? If your mom’s talking about your career, what does she say first? You’ll add on to your resume as time goes on, but for now, put your best face forward. Your face will be ahead of all the people with bad bios!
