Selling a Good Time: Inside the Wild, Wacky World of Minor League Baseball Marketing

Today, arguably the most effective branding in the world is coming out of small towns across America. We’re talking about those places like Binghamton, the Quad Cities, and other hubs of minor league baseball. The league of maybe-someday big leaguers is giving an experience a name. Its kooky marketing ways are branding “fun” in ways that any company–selling anything, even something as objectionably boring as minor league baseball–can use.

First, though, it’s important to understand the legacy of minor league baseball as a business. Historically, MiLB, as the stat nerds taking over baseball call it, was, on its surface, a lousy business model. Minor league teams didn’t really make money. They were money sinks. They were a place to develop talent. A big-league team like the New York Mets would own a minor league team such as the Binghamton Mets as an investment. Players in the minors today may be useful in making the team real money as a major leaguer down the road. Not anymore.

Yes, MiLB is still an investment, in the sense that professional teams develop young talent at the minor league level, but turning a profit in a place like Binghamton is much more important these days. The Binghamton Mets don’t exist anymore. But the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, a minor league affiliate for the Mets, do. They’re the same team, but they’re in the early stages of a marketing experiment, and they’re your teacher for the first of three lessons on how you can market, well, just about anything–even if you’re strapped for cash and talent and looking to bring some buzz to Binghamton.

Lesson 1:  Create an experience (not just a product)

The Binghamton Mets were sold to a new owner in 2016, and the owner, according to Eddie Saunders, director of marketing and promotions at the Rumble Ponies, saw a real lack of enthusiasm in the community. He did see people wearing the gear, but businesses in the community didn’t have signs up in their windows. This was a problem.

The team consulted with a rebranding company, Brandios, and developed an idea to get the community involved right from the start: Rename the team! The fan-generated team names boiled down to six options: the Bullheads, the Gobblers, the Stud Muffins, the Timber Jockeys, the Rocking Horses, and the Rumble Ponies. The last two pay homage to the city’s historical production of carousel horses. Inarguably, this is a more fun legacy to play up than other industrial naming possibilities, like, say, the Big Blues (IBM has played a large role in the area).

Even with this approach of letting fans have a voice, not every voice was one of support. “There were a lot of traditionalists here who said, ‘Hey, the Binghamton Mets have been here 25 years. Why mess with it?’” Saunders says. But the franchise still went through with it, and let’s just say Rumble Pony fever has hit this northern New York hamlet.

Last year, the Eastern League, the league the Ponies play in, had 15 rainouts, a record. Even with all those missed opportunities for ticket sales, the Rumble Ponies set a 10-year attendance high.

Saunders and his colleagues know the work is far from over. “Now we have to continue to build the brand,” he says. And with the new name, the Rumble Ponies’ story is about more than baseball: It’s fun for the whole town.

Let’s be honest, this  mascot is way more fun than Mr. Met. Also, the winning name was Rowdy. Image via the Rumble Ponies.

Lesson 2: Make that experience one of a kind

Some people get excited when a team’s playing schedule is released. But for the Charleston RiverDogs, the real excitement comes when they release their promotional schedule. Over the years, it has included such themes as “Prostate Cancer Awareness Night,” where all male fans could get free prostate exams (via a pin prick). Or the time the franchise turned their ballpark into a waterpark for “Big Splash Day.” All this leads to a natural question: What’s the connection to baseball? Nothing, and that’s the whole point. The goal is for there to never be a dull moment in a slow-paced game. 

“We want to create enough of a buzz that our stands will be filled with not just locals but those coming to town,” says assistant general manager Ben Abzug. “We target the homestands and try to get one promo per month that will get national attention.” 

Despite the team’s average record over the past five years–the RiverDogs have lost about as many games as they’ve won–annual home attendance has increased from 254,000 to 305,000, a 20 percent uptick.

Creating national attention isn’t easy, though, and trying to outdo oneself for absurdity is a challenge unto itself. Think we’re kidding? There was once an idea to drop a baby grand piano out of a helicopter onto the field. The groundskeeping crew mercilessly nixed that plan and gave us all a red line to draw on what constitutes going too far in the world of harebrained branding boondoggles.

Lesson 3:  Brand the experience (not just the team)

You’ve heard of Sunday Funday? For some, it’s a boozy afternoon to close out the weekend, but to the Richmond Flying Squirrels, it is now part of their identity. “Funnville is a philosophy of who the Flying Squirrels are,” says Jay Burnham, the team’s director of media, broadcasting, and marketing. “This all sort of started with the Lehigh IronPigs, which have become Bacon, USA. It gives the entire experience a name.”

Just as with the Rumble Ponies, when the Flying Squirrels started their process, half the community hated it and half the community was onboard. But as the team won people over, they were able to slowly sell Funnville (And, yep, it’s spelled with two “n’s.”) This means that on Sundays, the team forgoes its standard uniforms and wears ones lettered with “Funnville.” Don’t get us started on the game-day slogan, “Have Funn, Go Nuts!”

Have the Flying Squirrels taken it too far? “We’ve definitely gotten away from the baseball part of it and are now focused on the experience,” said Burnham. “We are here to sell a good time. The pendulum may swing back one day.”

Be it painting the upper decks crazy colors, doing a “Bobble Mustache Night” for onetime native Edgar Allan Poe, or having baseball legend “Crime Dog” Fred McGriff carry a lucky rabbit’s foot to the pitching mound on Friday the 13th, Richmond residents are getting what they expect. “We don’t have anyone asking, ‘Why are you doing this?’” says Burnham. “It’s easier now that it’s Funnville.”

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The First Five Years: What Should be in your Portfolio?

Getting started in your creative career is tough. You’ve got boatloads of ambition and energy, but you lack experience, the kind of knowledge that feels like you can see into the future because you’ve been there before. So we’ve introduced a new column that will allow you to get the benefit of hindsight before you’ve actually gone through the experience. Welcome to “The First Five Years” where Mitch Goldstein, a professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, answers reader questions related to the unchartered waters of beginning a career. This month, Mitch answers a question about putting together a winning portfolio.

What should be in my portfolio?

A portfolio is not just a representation of skills and abilities, or simply a checklist of things you know how to make. A good portfolio also represents your opinion on design, what you think is and is not important. It is the story about the relationship between you and design. Companies and clients do not hire a portfolio; they hire a person, therefore it is important that you are represented in your portfolio.

Mitch and his wife and creative partner Anne Jordan showcase book cover designs in their portfolio because this is the work they want to do.

Employers will see a ton of to-do list apps and craft beer labels in portfolios that come across their desks — what makes yours unique? Portfolios should have a few things: first, I want to see that you are capable of creating refined, clear, down-to-the-last-detail work in your portfolio.

I want to see excellent work, which is why you should never add sub-par work just to fill up space — I would much rather see five excellent projects than five excellent projects mixed with five mediocre projects. It is very important that you are able to clearly explain the hows and whys of each project. The portfolio itself might be what gets you in the door, but the conversation about what you did and why you did it gets you the job. Make sure that you are able to justify your decisions and explain your choices.

Julie Campell’s portfolio shows bright, visually assertive work that features motion and often references pop culture.

The first set of work helps me understand that you can do the job. Secondly, I want to see you in your work. This is why another key part of a good portfolio is work that is more personal, experimental, and possibly less refined or polished. If you have work that you are obsessed about, work that keeps you up at night, I want to see it. Do not let labels get in your way — it does not have to be “design” to be included, it just has to be something you care deeply about. What work have you done outside of your design classes? Painting, sculpture, photography…all of it counts if it is important to you and your relationship to creative practice.

Finally, you should include the kind of work that you want to do more of, and you should leave out the work you want to do less of. You will get back what you put out — if you do not want to design websites, don’t put websites into your portfolio. If you want to design more book covers, make sure plenty of book covers are included. Having a clear vision of what you want to do as a designer is important, and your portfolio should reflect that in its content. It is always obvious to someone looking at your work which stuff you care about, and which stuff you don’t care about. Part of having an opinion about design is including work that matters to you, instead of including work just because you think that is what you are supposed to do. Always remember: it is not just a portfolio, it is your portfolio.

Got a question for Mitch? Tweet it to us @99U and we’ll pose them to him in the coming months.

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The First Five Years: What Should be in Your Portfolio?

Getting started in your creative career is tough. You’ve got boatloads of ambition and energy, but you lack experience, the kind of knowledge that feels like you can see into the future because you’ve been there before. So we’ve introduced a new column that will allow you to get the benefit of hindsight before you’ve actually gone through the experience. Welcome to “The First Five Years” where Mitch Goldstein, a professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, answers reader questions related to the unchartered waters of beginning a career. This month, Mitch answers a question about putting together a winning portfolio.

What should be in my portfolio?

A portfolio is not just a representation of skills and abilities, or simply a checklist of things you know how to make. A good portfolio also represents your opinion on design, what you think is and is not important. It is the story about the relationship between you and design. Companies and clients do not hire a portfolio; they hire a person, therefore it is important that you are represented in your portfolio.

The portfolio of Mitch and his creative partner and wife Anne Jordan showcases these book cover designs because that is the work they want to do.

Employers will see a ton of to-do list apps and craft beer labels in portfolios that come across their desks — what makes yours unique? Portfolios should have a few things: first, I want to see that you are capable of creating refined, clear, down-to-the-last-detail work in your portfolio.

I want to see excellent work, which is why you should never add sub-par work just to fill up space — I would much rather see five excellent projects than five excellent projects mixed with five mediocre projects. It is very important that you are able to clearly explain the hows and whys of each project. The portfolio itself might be what gets you in the door, but the conversation about what you did and why you did it gets you the job. Make sure that you are able to justify your decisions and explain your choices.

The first set of work helps me understand that you can do the job. Secondly, I want to see you in your work. This is why another key part of a good portfolio is work that is more personal, experimental, and possibly less refined or polished. If you have work that you are obsessed about, work that keeps you up at night, I want to see it. Do not let labels get in your way — it does not have to be “design” to be included, it just has to be something you care deeply about. What work have you done outside of your design classes? Painting, sculpture, photography…all of it counts if it is important to you and your relationship to creative practice. 

The theme of Julie Campbell’s portfolio is bright, visually assertive work that feature motion and often references popular culture.

Finally, you should include the kind of work that you want to do more of, and you should leave out the work you want to do less of. You will get back what you put out — if you do not want to design websites, don’t put websites into your portfolio. If you want to design more book covers, make sure plenty of book covers are included. Having a clear vision of what you want to do as a designer is important, and your portfolio should reflect that in its content. It is always obvious to someone looking at your work which stuff you care about, and which stuff you don’t care about. Part of having an opinion about design is including work that matters to you, instead of including work just because you think that is what you are supposed to do. Always remember: it is not just a portfolio, it is your portfolio.

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Perfecting Your Sales Pitch to Get Your Ideas the Green Light

Artists and designers, for the most part, strive to create beautiful products and solve an array of visual, aural, and tactile challenges. They don’t often pursue their careers with the hope of becoming professional number crunchers. And yet, as more designers strive to build businesses and brands of their own, many find they need to be fluent in more than Photoshop to spark the interest of the investment community.

Veteran investor Tige Savage, who co-founded venture capital firm Revolution and co-leads the firm’s early state investment fund, Revolution Ventures, knows a thing or two about what it takes to successfully grow a business. And he’s willing to look anywhere for a good idea. One of his most recent investments is the design-focused start-up Framebridge, a direct-to-consumer custom framing company that just announced a $30 million Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price.

In the interview below, Savage offers keen insight to creatives on how they can perfect their sales pitch.

When somebody is coming to you with an investment proposal, what do you look for?

The key things that you really want to articulate to your investors are your background, your team, and the elements of the team. There is a tendency to get into great detail. Take it to the high level. Say, this is what our thing does, this is how we monetize it, and here is what the competition look like. An investor will ask who your competitors are. Many people will say “our product is so new and different we have no competitors.” This is not right. VCs want to understand your awareness of the competitive environment. They want to know why you think you have strengths that carve out a reasonable niche versus the rest. 

Then you need to explain how you expect to deploy capital. How, ultimately, you expect for the investors to get their money back? Know your numbers; investors will want to see objective evidence of success. Ask yourself: What’s my customer acquisition cost? How is that trending over time? How did those customers acquired at different points in time behave vis-a-vis each other?

“An investor will ask who your competitors are. Many people will say “our product is so new and different we have no competitors.” This is not right.”

What are some of the most common mistakes you see?

One of the greatest mistakes first-time founders make is thinking they need to know the answers to everything, and that VCs are just out to fire them if they don’t. Neither of those things is true.

Nobody expects you to know the answer to everything. What they are expecting is that you hire the best people. Often, founders feel that hiring super qualified people somehow undermines them. They think, “maybe this person knows more than I do and the VCs are going to want these guys to run the company and I’m gonna end up with some political fight.” The truth is, nobody ever gets fired because they have a great team. It’s the opposite.

“One of the greatest mistakes first-time founders make is thinking they need to know the answers to everything, and that VCs are just out to fire them if they don’t. Neither of those things is true.”

It’s also important for founders to remember that when companies mature, the needs of the senior team change. Often, you can hire a better person when you’re a bigger, more established, better capitalized, higher growth company. But what happens is that founders who have a very small team of two or three people early on feel too great a sense of allegiance to these people. They think: “Gosh, they got me from A to B. I need to give them a shot to get to C. If they fail, then they fail.”

In reality, once you get to B, you can hire a person with the necessary skills set and find a new role within the organization for the other. Put them underneath a highly qualified person to learn a new skills set, empower them, but don’t let there be room for ego. There’s no room for the attitude “I was the chief product officer at a three-person company and now we’re a 100-person company and I’m not giving up that title.”

One of Tige Savage’s more recent investments, framing start-up Framebridge, just received a $30 million Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price. Image courtesy of Revolution Ventures.

How do you go about figuring out how much money to raise?

Raise enough capital to achieve an important business milestone that is an inflection point in the business. Plus, enough capital for a little variability around achieving on the timeframe that you think. Plus, enough runway to raise your next round of capital.

Hypothetically, if you’re an entrepreneur you might think: “Hey, what I need is 10 customers, each of whom is at least $100,000 in sales, and I need to populate my database with these people and I need to find a business development deal with this important partner.” Now you have to think, what’s the sequencing for me to be able to achieve these things?

So, I’m going to get my first customer, then second, then eventually five. That’s going to be enough leverage for me to start my negotiations for this important business partnership. I’m going to hire somebody to populate that database and, by the time they bring us up to our tenth customer, I should have that business partnership done and that’s going to allow me to hire this many people. And I’m going to have to make some investments in order to do it. It’s going to take me 15 months.

Again, all hypothetical. You add it up and say “Oh, that 15 months is going to cost me $450,000, or $30,000 a month.” How certain am I that I’m going to get that? Let’s say I’m pretty certain; I have a list of 20 customers and we already have a conversation going. I’ll give myself 18 months to give just a little room.

“Raise enough capital to achieve an important business milestone that is an inflection point in the business. Plus, enough capital for a little variability around achieving on the timeframe that you think. Plus, enough runway to raise your next round of capital.”

It typically takes six months to raise capital. You say 15 months, I’m gonna make it 18 to give myself a little bit of room, plus another six is 24 months total. If I estimate $30,000 a month, that’s $360,000 a year, or $720,000 for two years, so I want to raise $720,000. What that all does is it gives me certainty that I hit these inflection points.

It can feel like creatives and VCs speak two different languages—right brain, left brain. Do you have any recommendations on how creators can best communicate ideas to investors?

VCs aren’t looking for a business plan; they’re looking for a pitch that’s crisp, tells the story well, is well presented and is substantiated by data. Stress test your pitch with everybody you know. Put it in front of as many people as you can. Ask them to ask hard questions. Come up with answers to the hard questions. Practice and be ready.

Two, consider a co-founder. If there’s a real vacancy in the skillset—if you just have the right side of the brain and you need both—go find the left side of the brain to fill that in. Incubators and accelerators are good places to go looking for a co-founder. They’re also good ways to be put through the paces to refine an idea into more concrete set of business opportunities.

What was your fastest ‘yes’ to an entrepreneur that pitched you?

The company is called Framebridge—they do custom framing of either physical or digital goods at great price points and with incredibly good customer service. It’s a very design-oriented business. The founder is Susan Tynan, who I’ve known from a few prior lives. She had worked with us, then left to go to the White House, then ran business development at LivingSocial. We met for breakfast to talk about other opportunities and part of the way through she said, “I have this idea. It’s this custom framing business.”

As I listened to her, I realized it’s exactly the kind of thing I like. Custom framing is a big category, $5 billion in the United States a year. There’s only one scale player, which is Michaels, the crafts store, and prices are extremely high. The customer experience is downright terrible. You have to go in, you make all these choices, you wait three weeks, you have to go back and pick the thing up, you find out it costs $400 and you’re like “Gosh.”

So Susan was describing this terrible experience and I could see how technology could make it better. And it was coming from a person whom I knew, who had learned the demand for this kind of thing exists from her experience with LivingSocial. I like disruptive consumer-oriented products, so it was right in my sweet spot, I told her, “I think it’s a great idea and I want to invest.”

You told her you’d invest before she even asked for an investment?

Yeah. I thought it was a great idea. I told her she ought to do it. I wanted her to go back and do a little bit of homework but I said, “I love it. We’ll find a way to make it happen.”

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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How One Design Studio Uses Sound to Brand Everything from the Super Bowl to Electric Cars

If you’ve ever driven a hybrid or electric vehicle, one of the first things you’ll notice is that the engine makes almost no noise at low speeds. Refreshing as it may be, the silence is a hazard for pedestrians: If they can’t hear a car coming, how will they know to get out of the way?

Joel Beckerman is on the case. The sonic branding firm he started 20 years ago—Man Made Music—is working with Nissan to come up with a sound that not only complies with regulation (the U.S. government says automakers must add noise to all hybrid and electric vehicles by September 2020) but is also recognizable to the consumer and embodies the brand.

“We don’t want people to say ‘What’s that sound?’ and get hit by the car,” says Beckerman, 54. “We want them to say ‘Oh, there’s a car coming,’ but [also recognize] there’s a unique personality to that car.”

As Man Made Music has grown from one employee to 26, the company has scored everything from the Super Bowl to hospital alarms to HBO’s feature presentation opener (below), proving that the branding power of sound can impact any experiene. In a recent interview, Beckerman reflects on his work and discusses where it could go next.

You’re a musician and composer. When did you get your start?

It was back in grade school during an assembly. Usually assemblies were kind of boring but this time there was this man standing in front of us talking about the history of gospel music. I was struck by how this music was so alive and constantly being reinvented. During his talk he’d sit down and play some examples on the piano. As soon as he started playing, the whole room just filled with sound. It was so inspiring and amazing to me the amount of emotion he could coax out of this one instrument. I remember going home that night and begging my parents for piano lessons.

Where’d you go from there?

I originally went to Union College in upstate New York to study chemistry. I found was I was doing what I needed to do on the sciences, but I was spending all my time writing music and playing in bands, writing little avant-garde musical theater projects And I was like, I need to do this. I remember speaking to my parents about it; of course like every other rational set of parents, they completely freaked out. I ended up transferring to New York University to study music and business. It was kind of the best thing I could’ve done.

In college, I was working as an intern at this recording studio that focused on publishing demos—demos that help sell a song. A songwriter would come in; I’d have eight hours to learn the song, arrange it, bring in the players, record it, and push it out the door. It became my first full-time job out of college. I think my first year I made 250 publishing demos. That was the way I cut my teeth on production.

How did Man Made Music come about?

I was doing the publishing demos and was the night manager at a recording studio. That’s where I learned about the craft of sound and music production. Then I got into working on commercials. Eventually it felt a bit cookie cutter—it felt like I kept walking the same path. At that point I got a little taste of television. I was freelancing for some of the music companies in town and met people through ad agencies. At some point I said I’m doing all this work for other people, but I felt at arm’s length from the process. I felt like I wanted to get in deep—not just be taking direction, but actually being part of making the creative direction of things.

What is it about sound that makes it so impactful from a branding perspective?

We don’t necessarily realize it, but every moment of our lives is scored with music and sound. Some of it is human manufactured and some of it is just ambient—it comes with being part of an analog world. The reality is we respond to sound quicker than any other sense—quicker than touch, which I didn’t even know until I wrote my book (The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy). Since we respond quicker than any other sense, sound actually becomes an organizer for all the rest of our senses…if the rest of the experience is in sync with the sounds we hear, that generally tends to result in a more pleasurable, fruitful, useful experience.

Tell us about one of the notable projects you’ve done.

iMax is this amazing technology and brand that is in service of filmmakers, trying to bring their vision to life in the most pure way possible with visuals and sound. But this was one of those situations where the cobbler’s children had no shoes: iMax had a visual identity, but no real sonic identity, no sound or music that really gave them credit in the theater experience. We developed this sonic identity system for them, which was based on a simple question: “What should iMax sound like?” We knew it should sound like pure experience, but what did “pure experience” sound like? We set out to discover that and created 10 different solutions. It’s like making pancakes— sometimes you have to throw out the first batch and try a different recipe.

We ended up creating a long-form piece of music, which is an anthem for iMax that shows up in different places. We created a countdown version of the anthem, which is shorter. Then we created this little pneumonic, a little hook called the iMax “drop”—it has musical elements but it’s not a piece of music, it’s more like a gesture. That gesture, in a very economical package of three seconds, triggers memories: it brings you back immediately to that iMax experience. The sum total of all the iMax movies you’ve seen rushes back to you.

How is sonic branding being used outside of entertainment?

As much as I love all the the work we do in entertainment and devices, the work we do in health care is the most important work we will ever do as a company. Take for example this problem of hospital alarms: Who says an alarm has to scare the crap out of you? Can’t we have alarms that are more informative? The horrible soundtracks that are in hospitals right now scare patients, create cortisol reactions, and make patients sicker.

We believe you can bring together the different data streams in almost a symphony of health care. It’s about asking, “What does a proper heart rate sound like? What does a proper blood pressure or oxygenation of the blood or respiration sound like?” How can we connect those sounds together in a pleasing soundscape so that a nurse could walk past the hospital room and know whether or not a patient needs attention?” We believe we can use sound to make alarms and soundscapes much more purposeful.

Edited for length and clarity.

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Rick Webb, on Why Our Assumptions of Digital Advertising are Complete and Total Bunk

It’s a time of upheaval for internet ads. Recent convulsions in data usage and targeting beg questions like: Are ads killing the internet? Are they the only way media will stay alive? Does that make them worth it? And do they actually work anyway? Rick Webb, co-founder of the Barbarian Group and COO for Timehop recently sat down with Gawker.com founder Elizabeth Spiers at the Northside Festival in Brooklyn for a conversation on the degrading value of online advertising. “Normal people go to a bar and talk about their exes,” Spiers said of her long friendship with Webb, “Rick and I go to bars and talk about digital and economy.”

Spiers and Webb unpacked how online advertising affects our offline social fabric, why we shouldn’t fear regulation in the age of GDPR, and why all of our assumptions of how the internet works are complete and total bunk.

Read on for some big picture insight into exactly what’s happening on your little screen.

Digital ads didn’t change our world.

“Almost everyone working in this industry is working under a bunch of false assumptions,” says Webb. The fact that the internet created a new world of ad spaces, doesn’t mean that those ad spaces are more valuable. How does Webb know? He compares it to the first appearance of TV ads. “The ad spending level in the US has historically been 1-2% of GDP and it hasn’t changed except for one time: television,” says Webb. “[TV advertising] worked demonstrably better, so [companies] all notched up their spend.” But when internet ads appeared, the advertising industry’s numbers didn’t mimic that game-changing TV moment. A metrics-based marketer might be able to tell you a whole lot of numbers, but if those numbers aren’t dollars it doesn’t matter. If you look at the U.S.’s spend on advertising like an economist, Webb concludes that digital advertising doesn’t add demonstrable value to advertisers.  

Targeting may all be myth.

If Webb has one mission to fulfill, it’s to proclaim that targeting—the same issue that has the world up in arms over data protection—is overrated. In fact, it may not work at all. Sure, marketers can target a campaign to your age, size, weight, non-binary gender, and what you had for breakfast. But, so what? Granularity of targeting may just be an unnecessary layer of empirical rationale. “The data is kind of useless,” says Webb. “The difference between three people, when I try to sell a toothbrush, is zero. I don’t need to know anything about you guys except that you want to keep your teeth clean.”

Reevaluate regulation.

If targeting is a myth, then user data and personalized strategy isn’t as valuable as advertisers think. That’s partly why Webb isn’t alarmed by the new regulations from GDPR. “Everyone is like, ‘This is terrible. The sky’s going to fall.’ And I’m like ‘I don’t care,” says Webb, going back to his point that targeting isn’t effective. “We don’t have to use all that data. We don’t do anything with it.’” If the advertising industry is built on a false premise of targeting, then personal data regulation won’t affect anything other than the house of cards that personalized metrics are built on. That’s why Webb embraces course corrections like GDPR. “I want to lay out the case for people to understand why regulation is good. It won’t hurt the industry, because we don’t need to be doing this targeting stuff.”

Ad money affects social institutions; think hard about where you put your ad spend.

Webb doesn’t just care about this because he’s an econ nerd. “The migration of ad money from offline to online parallels the migration away from news,” says Webb. As money leaves legacy print organizations like newspapers, their funding goes down. That downgrade in funding is pegged to the degradation in news literacy and public discourse.  “All this sh*tty stuff on the internet is because of the financial drivers around the age of data: these ‘things’ seemingly being important to people. But what’s also obvious is that it’s not true,” says Webb on that state of his beloved internet. “They’re ruining our lives on a fundamentally flawed premise.”

Ads can have moral value. What are they worth when they don’t deliver?

Webb outlines three periods in U.S. history when we’ve had a reckoning with advertising. The first, he says is patenting and the invention of the Federal Trade Commission. The second came with the rise in conspicuous consumption and economists who pegged the functions of advertising into the pillars of supply and demand. “There was a big call for regulation again,” says Webb. Both times, he says, advertising wasn’t regulated because analysts advocated that it had a moral value because it funded news and encouraged trade. Now we’re in a third ‘convulsion.’ The big difference staring us all in the face? Advertising doesn’t fund the news anymore. If the moral argument for advertising has been thrown out, what other changes will follow?

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Christine Sun Kim: Your Work Is a Product of Your Experience

The work of Christine Sun Kim is inspired and informed by her experience of the world as a deaf woman, artist, mother, and partner. This 99U talk, delivered in ASL and interpreted live at Alice Tully Hall by Beth Staehle, asks all creatives to consider how their outputs are colored by their own experiences, abilities, and empathy:

• How empathy for her hearing partner and baby informs her work
• How she better understands sound through illustrated diagrams
• Why a framework of “house rules” is essential to any creative process

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Adam J. Kurtz: Perfection Is a Myth

About this talk

The often humorous, sometimes dark work of the artist known as ‘adamjk’ can be seen everywhere from tote bags to enamel pins to his books on creativity. Yet the prolific Kurtz doesn’t claim to be an expert: in this uproarious talk, he offers some useful panaceas to the pressures of creative perfection:

• Why execution should be only half of your design focus
• How honesty and kindness have propelled his career
• What factors (besides talent) contribute to creative success

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John Maeda: Designing Inclusive Teams and Products

About this talk

The prolific John Maeda—whose career has spanned Cooper Hewitt, MIT, and KPCB—now leads computational design and inclusion at Automattic. In this conversation with Adobe VP of Design Jamie Myrold, Maeda shares his insights from a long and varied career on the history and current state of diversity and inclusion in the design industry, including:

• The traits in leaders and teams that promote inclusion
• How Automattic’s remote-work practice helps its teams develop empathy
• The surprising history of design’s impact on business
• And how he harnesses his “secret power” to make immediate change

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Audrey Liu: Incentivize Creative Teams with Meaning, Not Perks

About this talk

Audrey Liu, Director of Product Design at Lyft, takes issue with how companies incentivize creative teams. Instead of dangling perks like kombucha and in-office massages, Liu asserts the need to connect designers with the fulfillment of solving real problems. In this insight-packed talk, Liu advises leaders on:

• How to connect your team’s accomplishments to real world impact
• Why creatives need to do the right thing, not just the most measurable thing
• How to activate empathy by literally putting your designers in the driver’s seat

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Marcelino J. Alvarez: Be a Designer of Community

About this talk

Uncorked Studios CEO and co-founder Marcelino J. Alvarez has worked on projects and products that took him to communities in Cuba, Lebanon, and Japan. In this talk, he explains:

• How his own Cuban heritage inspired his design philosophy
• How designers and entrepreneurs can produce work that truly benefits communities
• And why mundane solutions are often the most necessary

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Tina Roth Eisenberg: Leading with Joy

About this talk

As CEO of Creative Mornings, Tattly, and the newly launched Creative Guild, Tina Roth Eisenberg oversees some highly creative teams. Rather than follow traditional leadership practices, she’s writing her own rules that prioritize joy, generosity, and confetti. In this inspiring talk, Eisenberg explains how she’s building a workplace her employees are excited to go to every day, including:

• The non-traditional interview questions she asks job candidates
• How to show up to work as your authentic self, and help your team can do the same
• How she infuses her workplace with surprise and delight

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Todd Yellin: Create a Culture of Iconoclasts

About this talk

As VP of Product for Netflix and self-proclaimed “enabler of iconoclasts”, Todd Yellin leads the team that helps millions of people find something great to watch. In this talk, Yellin explains his unique approach to leadership, which includes:

• Why leaders should never say never
• How to empower your team to make decisions (and mistakes)
• Why a simple hand-raise is fundamental to the diversity of voices and ideas at Netflix
• Plus, what we can learn from Titus Andromedon, Michael Scott, and Paul Blart Mall Cop

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Tea Uglow: How to Lead When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing

About this talk

Tea Uglow gave herself a unique and imaginative title to match the unique and imaginative work she does at Google Creative Lab Sydney. As “Experimental Person-in-Charge”, she has worked with artists, writers, and performers on seven books, 17 websites, six apps, a feature film, three plays, two concerts, four museum exhibits, and a teddy bear that talks. In this talk, Uglow explains why her success as a leader is rooted not in what she knows, but in what she doesn’t know:

• Why the best creative leaders value the skillsets they don’t have
• Why creatives shouldn’t have to-do lists
• And how her journey as a transgender woman shows that you can’t truly plan your life or career

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Tiffany Dufu: Drop the Ball Instead of Trying to Do It All

About this talk

Businesswoman and Drop the Ball author Tiffany Dufu may seem to do it all, but for years she hampered her own growth with the expectation that she must do it all—be the perfect woman, mother, wife, mentor, and author. In this talk, Dufu shares her manifesto on how doing less allowed her to feel more fulfilled. Her hard-won insights include:

• Where unrealistic expectations for our work and personal lives are rooted
• Why we need to ditch the to do list
• Why the key to delegating is clear communication

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Ashleigh Axios: How Selfish Design Can Save the World

About this talk

After breaking ground in government as the creative director for the Obama White House, Ashleigh Axios is now working to democratize publishing at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. In this passionate talk on the role of design in social change, Axios asks creatives to embrace the good feeling that comes from helping others, even if chasing that feeling can seem self-centered. Her primer to doing good with a creative skillset includes:

• Why the problems that keep you up at night are your best motivators
• How to scale your vision for a better world
• And how the Obama White House empowered social change with impactful design

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Jason Mayden: Designing for the Next Generation of Superheroes

About this talk

Whether working as the CEO behind Super Heroic, a mission-driven business focused on providing quality play-performance for children, or in his former life as Senior Global Design Director at Nike, Jason Mayden believes the mindset of playfulness can make heroes of us all. From the joy of Haribo gummy bears to Batman, Mayden’s true purpose is play and designing products that make the most vulnerable among us—children—embrace their inner hero. In this lively talk, Mayden shares:

• How his incredible design career started with a 1-800 phone call
• How he finds design motivation and inspiration in fatherhood
• How design solutions can equip kids with empathy and kindness

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Scott Belsky: Lessons from the Messy Middle of a Startup’s Journey

About this talk

Behance and 99U co-founder Scott Belsky is often asked about the inception and acquisition of the companies. But the biggest lessons are found in the sometimes-messy, oftentimes-exciting, and always-challenging experience between those bookend moments. In this talk, Belsky shares his perspective on:

• How to sustain momentum, and morale, during periods of uncertainty
• Why resourcefulness is the ultimate future-proof skill
• What circumstances inspire true innovation
• And how to spot the best opportunities

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