Hey Pal, Can You Spare a Nanosecond?

I was directed to an interesting article recently about the rise of robotics; it made a valid case for grouping modern robotics with past life changing developments like gunpowder, the steam engine, and the computer. There can be no doubt this is game-changing technology that has a growing impact at every level of our society. Cars brake automatically to avoid collisions, correct lane wandering and even park themselves. Vacuums wander around the house unaided. Just tell your phone where you want to go and it will talk you through the route. There’s so much more, but what I find fascinating is that we no longer marvel at this technology because it is already so integrated in our lives.

If you think about it, you have an army of robots working for you now, and they have revolutionized our business of art licensing. Granted they have simpler programming than R2D2, but they are getting smarter by the day. Every time you pick up that Wacom pen you are operating a little interactive robot. Or when you load a pencil sketch in your scanner and tell it to take a picture, convert it to data and display it on a screen for editing – why, thank you little robot. Another one is posing as your website. It performs functions we previously had to do in person – answers the incoming inquiry, dispenses basic information about you, displays some samples and then gathers information for follow up. Some sites (like ours) also allow the client to search a library by subject and assemble a “portfolio” of selections for review and download. All while you’re in the shower. Ya gotta love it.

The web is becoming more visual by the day. If an art director needs some Christmas, what do they do? They send the Google bots out to scour the internet for Christmas art, currently by keyword but how long do you think it will be before an analytical visual search engine is viable? The need is here now: 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook every day, sites like Instagram hit billion dollar valuations, You Tube has played over a trillion videos, and making a video presentation is a possibility for anyone with a smartphone or pad. Content needs to be more than good, it needs to be SEEN. Companies are employing "visual curators” to analyze and improve their presence on sites like Pinterest, Tumblr and various social networks. The full global design market is still a fledgling, but as it matures and becomes readily accessible the impact on our business will be disruptive in ways we cannot predict.

Try picturing this: thousands of Net bots sifting through millions of images worldwide to pick designs. It could be any day now - have you thought about what your strategy will be to keep yourself visible in that scenario? Might be a good time to start.

Stick with the WOW!

There is some fascinating work out recently in the October Journal of Consumer Research by psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz in which they illustrate something they call the “Presenter’s Paradox”. What they’ve discovered, through a series of documented studies, is that the final perception formed by someone on the receiving end of a presentation tends to be an AVERAGE of the information rather than an additive approach to the individual components (which would lead to a higher valuation).

What does that mean? Well, basically it’s clinical proof of the old adage “less is more”. In many ways it seems irrational, but also head-slappingly obvious. Rankings of value go down when products are “bundled” to look more costly, or gift with purchase is offered, or a job candidate continues to rattle off excessive qualifications. It seems that offering more would be perceived as valuable, but because the receiver is unconsciously averaging the high value item (say an iPod) with the low value item (like a free song) they reach a final impression of lower total value.

Ronnie has always known this intuitively, and we’ve had a few…discussions…over the years about what and how much we are showing to a client. She has NO qualms about culling the old or weak designs from a portfolio and shelving any piece, even new work, that doesn’t measure up. One might assume that if a client is looking for a snowman, then the more snowmen you show them the better chance you have. Not so. What happens is people tend to automatically average out what they are shown in the pitch or presentation, so if you show them three great pieces, the “great” impression remains. If you show them three great pieces, 4 OK pieces and maybe a couple not so good pieces – they are left with the perception that everything was just OK, and you have significantly lessened the impact of your best work.

So what can you do? First, consider the showing of your portfolio to be a singular event, not a collection of individual pieces. If you are including items that are not your best work , realize that they are dragging the client’s perception of your best work down to a lower level. Say you assign a 1 to 10 ranking to every piece in your portfolio – when you add them up would the average land above 7? Maybe above 8? If not, dump the crap. This goes for any submissions you may make as well. Average is over, mediocre is done and typical is out. Learn to be ruthless - if you are tentative about a piece, pull it. 

Shoot for 10.

Sing Me An Art Licensing Song

We’ve been covering a lot of territory lately; woke up yesterday in Nashville (kinda sounds like a country song…), our last stop on a big swing that took us up through the Carolinas, across Tennessee, down through Atlanta and back to Florida. Contrary to what one may think, this Fall down time between the shows is also a great time to visit your clients on THEIR turf – most of the new product is underway and they are not wrestling with pre or post show art planning. If you really want understand their end of the business, there is no better way than a walk through the factory or warehouse. We also find these trips very energizing from a creative standpoint – nothing like exploring a few acres of a busy textile plant to get you thinking about your product. Sounds weird but it’s true. We also managed to spend a couple days in Ashville absorbing music and art (it comes from all points there), and then a few more days in Nashville exploring “Music City”, the history of country music and the current honky-tonk scene.

Why tell you this, and what does it have to do with art licensing?

Well, everything. Ours is a business in flux, much has changed in the last few years and no one can really be sure where it will end up even in the near future. Message and connection have supplanted the pretty picture in our business, and artists who can offer a new and innovative viewpoint will have the greatest success. The A+B=C path just isn’t working anymore, so I think it can be beneficial (necessary?) to take a step back from that and think in more general terms about living a creative life – how is it done in other disciplines, what does it entail, how does one succeed, how did other people do it?

You don’t need to write a novel, sculpt from stone or sing rock-a-billy to appreciate the struggles and successes of the artists who HAVE done those things – however I can guarantee that the more you learn about their craft the better you will become at yours. 

And You Are?...

We spent most of last week in Las Vegas at a couple of trade shows, and once again the best part of the trip was when we boarded that plane for home. We are not gamblers (except on expensive trade show booths…), the food is either very mediocre or very expensive with very little in-between, and my tolerance for drunken gangsta wannabes is set pretty low so we end up counting the days till we can get off the Strip and back to our waterfront paradise. But enough about that… it was definitely a worthwhile trip.

We attended the SuperZoo pet industry show at the Mandalay and the Las Vegas Souvenir show at the LV convention center. Both are big events with 1000-plus exhibitors, and we covered every square foot of both shows, something we never get a chance to do when we are exhibiting.  We do have some licensees that exhibit at these shows, but we were really there because of the “ya never know” factor – meaning there is no good substitute for getting out there in front of a wide variety of new potential licensees, talking about what they make and what we can bring to the table.

When we go to these “outside of the box” shows we almost never see artists walking the aisles, and only occasionally see other agents. The ones we do run across are always the hardest working and most successful – and that’s not a coincidence. The advertised path into art licensing has been to do what everybody else has been doing – get some templates, build some collections, send them to the people everyone else sends them to, and maybe exhibit at that show in New York that everyone else exhibits at. The problem is that supply now far exceeds demand as hundreds of new artists are also angling for a slice of the art licensing pie, so being where everybody else is just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The need to differentiate yourself is greater than ever before, but you should realize there is more than one way to do that. One of the first truths you learn in sales is that it is very difficult to displace an established supplier because manufacturers don’t like to change, therefore you need to give them a compelling reason to do so. Switch your mentality from “farmer” to “hunter”. Take some chances on new categories. Invest in looking for new opportunities to tell your story and be there first.

It takes a lot of effort to move ahead and build lasting success in this business, but it’s always easier if you don’t have to shout over everyone else.

Sure, be happy to!

We are fortunate here at Two Town to have a number of high sku-count collections under development right now (things are cookin’ out there!) and there has been a lot of post-contract, pre-production work involved with some of them. The artist/client interchanges run the gamut from simple “give us a little more bleed” or “saturate the background color a bit more” up to “replace that pirate with a princess” or “change out these 3 designs completely and replace them with...” sometimes significantly altering the original artwork.

Decision time. Your response options for these kind of requests can run from “no way” to “no problem”, but the one safe bet at this stage of a project is that you will not have a lot of time to think about it.

Some artists have a visceral reaction to these type of requests, treating them as a personal affront, and others will just shrug their shoulders and get to work. It is one of the big differences between the licensing world and contract work, and also one reason why some experienced designers quickly drop out of the business. On occasion the collaboration between artist and licensee could almost fit the definition of spec work, and for many who have worked as traditional illustrators or graphic designers that is unacceptable.

It may be helpful to consider the mindset of your licensees: a group made up of business professionals looking to make the most economical, risk-averse, and high-value decisions for their companies. Any new product can be considered a risky venture into which they pour many thousands of dollars in the hope it will sell, and sometimes it doesn't – the “sure thing” does not exist. You are asking your clients to make a major financial investment in your designs, and it is not too farfetched to think that in some cases you could be asking someone to bet their job on your concepts. So when you react negatively or worse yet, emotionally, to their suggestions aimed at improving the chances of marketing a successful product… well, let’s just say you need to take a step back and carefully consider what they are saying. This is not about your artistic vision anymore.

Much, if not most, of the time there will not be any additional compensation available for the effort that goes into fulfilling these requests. We all would like to get paid sooner rather than later for work we’ve done, and when advances were typical this was less of an issue.  Of course advances are much more rare now and licensing requires the long view. The payback will be down the road when the product starts to generate revenue on the market. I believe you need to approach it from a different place than the “they are taking advantage of the artists” people, because the market is changing and it won’t be going back to where it was. Try looking at it as a collaboration where all parties are interested in the same thing – making a saleable product.

I hope you can hear the keynote here:  the attitude that you CAN do it, you GET to do it, will make you far more valuable than those who are selling outright, working the crowd sourcing channels, or even throwing hissy fits over the changes because they miss the opportunity to provide exceptional service to their clients. If you can see that as an advantage your time in licensing should be less frustrating, and your efforts more successful.

And if not and it still galls you to no end…well, good luck with that….