Posted by Chris Walbert on December 27th, 2011 and has no comments.
It’s been 383 days since I’ve posted to this blog. A lot has happened in that time and I hope to get back to posting here with some regularity in the New Year. Until then, be sure to check out one of the projects I’ve been working on recently that I’m extremely excited about, Confirmed Stock.
Along with the team at Drexler and our good friend Neal Shaffer, we’re really excited to launch this new venture this spring and bring something really cool to Baltimore. Take a look at the site and be sure to sign up for important updates via email.
You can even watch the trailer video that we shot, directed and edited ourselves.
Posted by Chris Walbert on December 9th, 2010 and has 2 comments.
I have been thinking about and unconsciously planning this post since January. Since then, at least once a month, I have written it in my head, adding and subtracting albums as I first hear them or slowly grow tired of them. 2010 has been a great year for music and this list was edited right up until today.
This is the one post I write year after year and enjoy more every time. I think my favorite part is the discussion and friendly arguments it always starts and the great suggestions I get for albums I missed. So, thanks for reading. Hopefully you also find something great that you missed or turn me on to something new.
Beach House - Teen Dream
I got Teen Dream the day it came out (ok, maybe a few weeks before it came out) and didn’t put it down all year. The songs on this album are beautiful, lush, rich and feel perfect for those cold winter evenings. This video (I didn’t shoot it) is from their May Webster Hall show that I had the pleasure of attending.
The National - High Violet
The National is one of those bands that people either love or hate and I think it really comes down to Matt Berninger’s baritone voice, which I happen to really enjoy. On High Violet, The National pulls together a masterful collection of great songs. I saw them this summer and was impressed by how much energy and rock they add to these songs live.
The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
The Suburbs was probably the most anticipated album of 2010. Funeral is still one of my favorite albums, so I was really looking forward to this new record as well. While there are some really great songs on The Suburbs, I found myself not really drawn back to it after the initial 2-3 weeks that I had it on repeat. But, it’s the Arcade Fire and the album is really strong, so it deserves a high rank. Plus, they collaborated with Chris Milk and Google to create one of the most amazing and emotional videos I’ve ever seen. Watch below, or experience it for yourself.
Posted by Chris Walbert on November 23rd, 2010 and has 1 comment.
There is a certain warmth and texture that only comes from film and an SLR camera. For all that it lacks in convenience, my trusty Pentax K100 more than makes up for with really interesting, colorful and rich photos.
I also really enjoy the challenge of not using a flash or any lighting other than what is already available in the environment. While the photos sometimes lack a bit of clarity, there is a depth and wonderful grittiness that I just can’t stop staring at.
Posted by Chris Walbert on November 20th, 2010 and has no comments.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of checking out the fine goods at the Pop Up Flea. The Pop Up Flea experience is a nearly overwhelming level of awesome. Defined by its creators as, “part flea market and part pop up shop”, the Pop Up Flea featured both well-known and smaller brands, all selling excellent menswear.
With the caveat that I really know nothing about fashion, the Pop Up Flea was, to me, exactly what men’s fashion should be. The clothes sold there were all high quality, classic, and without pretense. I also really enjoyed getting a chance to talk to some of the guys who actually made the clothing and learn more about their companies.
Congratulations and thank you to Michael Williams and Randy Goldberg for putting the event together. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did.
Posted by Chris Walbert on October 20th, 2010 and has no comments.
In our modern era, it is not only possible, but actually quite simple to be constantly aware of everything that is being said about our companies, our products or services, and our brands. We can listen to, analyze, and dissect every blog post, tweet, or comment coming from every corner of the world. As professionals involved in marketing, we have access to more of this information than ever before.
And this is a great thing. If someone has an issue or is unsatisfied, we have the chance to rectify that and show that we care about and appreciate them as a customer.
The problem, though, comes about when trying to determine which people talking about your brand are customers with an actual gripe and which are just outsiders indulging their inner critic. The most obvious recent example of this was the new not-long-for-this-world Gap logo. As soon as the internet found this gem, every designer, marketer, and Twitterer who hasn’t stepped into a Gap since college jumped on the bandwagon of critiquing it to death. All of this was with good reason. The logo was bad and Gap needed to hear that from this specific community.
But is this the audience they should have looked to for approval to keep the logo?
Posted by Chris Walbert on September 8th, 2010 and has no comments.
One day in college, I was sitting outside with some kids from one of my classes and just sort of listening to what people were talking about. No one really knew each other that well, so it was little more than small talk. I’m sure it had happened before, but this was the first time I consciously paid attention to the fact that the discussions were centered around things we all hated - a boring teacher, some annoying classmate, or our lame part-time jobs.
Since that day, now nearly 10 years ago, I have always been interested in and surprised by how often people attempt to begin relationships based on common hatreds. Perhaps hatred is the wrong word, because I don’t mean actual, pure hatred. I mean hate in the way we all saw, “I hate this.” “I hate this band, they suck.” “I hated this event/commercial/website/whatever.”
What we really mean when we say we hate something this way is, “I am part of the group that doesn’t like this.” Or, “I could have done it better.” It’s not so much hate as a an attempt to connect with people or a veiled promotion of the image we are attempting to present.
This behavior is even more prevalent on the internet. Go to your Twitter feed or a favorite blog and count how many times people you pay attention to say they hate something. When you read that, do you feel a small sense of camaraderie if you also hate that thing? Are you more likely to reply that you hate it too?
Posted by Chris Walbert on July 13th, 2010 and has 3 comments.
“You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f-ing Khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
You are not a personal brand.
If Fight Club was written today, I imagine that famous Tyler Durden monologue might include a simple reminder for us that we are not, in fact, personal brands. As so often happens, the marketing world has latched on to this idea of people becoming their own brands. On the surface, it sounds simple enough. But if you dig a bit deeper, the concept of a personal brand becomes something much different than what most people actually want from their lives.
Brands require promotion. So, if you consider yourself a personal brand, that means you have to spend time promoting yourself. Like any brand, if you do something good, you need to tell as many people as you can, as many times as you can.
A brand has to advertise, be written about, have a large following, and be patronized in order to be significant. But the most significant people are those who go about their work without fanfare and praise from people they don’t know.
The people that matter - your parents, your husband or wife, your kids, your friends, your colleagues - these people don’t give a shit about your brand. They care about what you do and how you treat people.
We already have the right word for personal brand. It’s reputation. Your reputation is built by doing good things, caring about people and your community, and working hard.
Reputations are built by what you do. Personal brands are built by what you say.
Now, this may sound like arguing over semantics. But I think there is an important distinction here. If you view yourself as a brand, even a personal one, you end up acting like a brand. Instead of doing something for your community because you feel it’s the right thing to do, you do it because it’s a mini, personal PR stunt.
You are a person. You are not a brand, no matter how hard someone tries to convince you that you need to be.
Posted by Chris Walbert on May 25th, 2010 and has 1 comment.
If there is one thing that is true about my grandfather, it’s that he loved to tell stories.
He was famous for these stories. Or perhaps infamous is the right word. There was never a family dinner that did not end with a 20-minute story about his life or a tale about a long-deceased family member.
As a young child, I remember being fascinated by these stories and playing them out in my head as he spoke, picturing every vivid scene and thinking about these stories long after he was done telling them. As I got a bit older, as so many of us do, I grew low on patience and was anxious to leave the table and do whatever it was I wanted to do. I guess, in my mind, I had more interesting things to do than listen to old stories.
I’m not sure quite when it was, but maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was sitting at that same table listening to my grandfather tell the story of losing his mother when he was still a very young man. There was something about the humility and emotion with which he told this story, more than 60 years after it happened, that I just had not experienced before.
My grandfather was not a soft man. Most of his stories sounded like they could have been the basis for an epic Hollywood action movie. Thomas Walbert was born to a middle-class family in Western Maryland, but soon found himself the man of the house when his father left the family before his 10th birthday and amidst the Great Depression. At this young age he quit school and began working to support his mother and younger sister. Before his 18th birthday, my grandfather was traveling the country as a professional boxer. A few years later, as an Army Ranger, he stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
These were the stories that I had heard so many times throughout my childhood and I admired my grandfather for living such a brave and amazing life. But it was the story about the death of his mother that captivated me like none of the others.
Like I said, my grandfather became a professional boxer at the age of 16. One night, he was fighting in Detroit and after the fight, his manager told him to get back to Maryland as fast as he could. His mother was on her deathbed and did not have much longer to live. He told us, with tears in his eyes, how he raced home as fast as he could, and was able to tell his mother goodbye just before she passed.
It was this story that really made me appreciate the gift of storytelling that he possessed. From that day on, I listened intently to every story he told and prodded him to tell more. And it’s through many of my grandfather’s stories that I learned not only about my family and where I came from, but about the desires within myself to live a life worthy of great stories.
My grandfather would not have been able to tell these stories if he had not lived the way he did. You cannot tell a story of bravery unless you have acted bravely. You cannot tell a story of loss unless you have suffered it. And, you cannot tell a story of love unless you have experienced it completely.
Bucky Walbert, as he was known to his friends and family, passed away on Saturday at the age of 90. While we cannot possibly remember every detail of every story, I will always remember the lessons these stories taught me and will continue to be inspired by them to live a life worthy of great stories.
Posted by Chris Walbert on April 22nd, 2010 and has 5 comments.
There is no doubt that the changes announced yesterday at Facebook’s F8 conference will have a major impact on the web, how it looks, and how we use it in the coming months and years. The prospect of an open graph with the ability to transport your personal interests and preferences around the web with you is quite intriguing. This could also end up being the tool marketers have been clamoring for for years. They may now finally have the ability to hyper-target potential customers online at a scale large enough to demand huge advertising budgets.
But you can never gain one thing without losing something else. The web experience at large may benefit significantly from this, but it will be at the peril of the actual Facebook experience.
First, let’s look at who comprises the majority of a typical person’s Facebook friends. Most of our friends lists include not just family and good friends, but also former and current coworkers, some people we went to high school with, and a few random people who snuck through our approved friend requests. Whatever the reason, we are connected to these people because we, at least on some level, know them.
The point here is this - Most people care about the things shared on Facebook not because of the content itself as much as because of who is sharing that content. For example, I don’t necessarily love looking at pictures of babies, but will gladly spend time looking at pictures of my cousins baby because I love her. What I am not interested in, however, is seeing every site my cousin ‘likes’ across the web that features pictures of cute babies.
