Last Sunday, I was fortunate enough to be able to fly out to Boston with some coworkers to attend the ACCM Conference. The largest conference for catalog, internet, and multichannel merchants, the ACCM Conference highlighted some of the new ideas (in the case of blogging) and some of the more traditional ideas (such as maintaining your brand loyalty) present in the direct marketing world today.
If you don't care about what I have to say about my trip to Boston, scroll down to the music section and check out some great Boston area bands.
The trip out to Boston went pretty well, as we flew from Wausau-to-Minneapolis-to-Boston without much of a hitch. Once we got to Logan in Boston, we had to wait a pretty long time in line for a cab, but eventually we got to our hotel, the Radisson on Stuart, at around 11 pm. The first thing I noticed was the view I had from the balcony. All the rooms there have their own balcony, and mine overlooked a nice view of the city.
Another view from the balcony:
Monday morning we woke up and trekked over to the Boston Plaza Hotel to catch the free shuttle there to the convention center. The drive over was very cool, going through Chinatown and past some really cool sights of that area of the city. What's great about Boston is how fantastic all the architecture is, no matter where you are it seems. Even the convention center had a neat design to it:
We grabbed coffee and donuts at the Dunkin' Donuts stand inside the convention center and settled in for a long day of speakers and sessions. When our day concluded at 4pm, we went back to the room and changed before hitting the town to see some sights.
Our first trip was over to Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall. Can you tell we are tourists? Quincy Market was really interesting, with all the shops and a replica "Sam's Place" Cheers bar (the real one's in Beacon Hill). Faneiul Hall would have been neat too had the historic section of it been actually open, not just the shopping part.
After a little shopping we grabbed a drink at "Sam's Place" to sample the Sam Adams Summer Ale (very tasty) before heading out to dinner at Legal Sea Foods on the Wharf:
We did the very touristy thing and took a horse & buddy ride over to Legal Sea Foods for dinner, where the five of us rang up a bill over $200 dollars.
Our chariotI didn't think my meal was all that extravagant, but damn was it tasty. I had the crabcakes, with shrimp and scallops. My fellow coworker Jeff splurged on the lobster dish. As an appetizer we ordered a plate of raw oyesters, and I reluctantly tried one. I didn't hate it, but it was way too salty for me, and I didn't see the draw.
Jeff, graphic designer extraordinare, prepping for his duel with the lobster.
On Tuesday we attended another full day of shows at the conference, my favorite being the keynote speech by L.L. Bean Chairman Leon Gorman, author of L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon. His speech about "sticking to your guns" in all facets really rang true for me in a number of ways.
After the day's sessions Jeff and I went walking around Boston Common and the nearby sites, taking in some of Boston's history:
My favorite part of the walk was by far the Granary Burial Ground where we got to see some gravestones from the 1600's and grave sites of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams:
Paul Revere's Grave
Granary Burial GroundAfter our little trip around the city we got dressed in our Sunday's best again and headed to the RR Donnelley reception, where we wined and dined our hearts out on our last night in Boston.
Oh yea, about that conference...
Having never attended a business conference before, I was a little unsure what to expect. What I was treated to was some very informative sessions on catalog creative, web site design, and blogging, to name a few. Definitely a good learning experience to someone as new to the catalog industry as I am.
Perhaps the most informative session for my own personal reasons was the session on Making Blogging and RSS Pay Off for your website. Rok Hrastnik speaks about this also in his Marketingstudies.net blog:
The Crazy Idea of Using Blogs for Business
posted by Rok Hrastnik in Various Marketing Ramblings
Times change. Today, blogs are more or less everywhere. From geeks to politicans to marketers and to CEOs, not to mention constant mainstream press coverage.
But the truth is, although business blogging is getting much coverage, we are still far from seeing it reach mainstream marketing, regardless of what we wish to believe. Mass advertising is still the name of the game.
As a direct marketer, I'm naturally not too happy about that, but that's the way the wheel turns, and direct marketing is slowly but surely getting its right place in the marketing mix.
Returning to blogging, a comment I received from a friend in Slovenia a couple of months ago (but never got 'round to publishing it due to time constrains) demonstrates quite nicely the sentiment about blogging in advertising circles.
Zoran Savin, the IAB representative in Slovenia and the Creative Director of a Web agency in Slovenia, is an ad man bringing cool internet marketing ideas to traditional advertisers, and doing a good job of it.
Here's his input on blogging:
"Crazy idea, using blogs for marketing. In fact, how many of you were surprised when businesses went towards corporate blogs? Well, the simple logic of these investments is now getting clearer day by day.
Of course blogs are very much like the traditional "mouth to mouth marketing", but faster and easier to reach, available 24 hours per day, giving thought-leaders even more power to influence people around the world.
But there's more to it than this. As comScore Networks just reported this week, bloggers have a wonderful audience. There are about 50 million of them in America representing about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population. And they are, in comparison to the average Internet user, significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections. Pretty impressive. Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many websites as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online. So, do not wonder why any more, use them to your advantage."
True to the above comment, Zoran's agency recently helped the largest Slovenian newspaper publisher launch their own blog service, going the way of Blogger and other services, but in this case with mainstream media support.
It was particularly interesting for me, a blogger, to try and wrap my mind around how we as a company could utilize blogs for our company website to help drive links and provide new content.
MUSIC
Since I was just in Boston, I figured it might be nice to feature a few Boston area bands that are breaking ground in the music industry.
Featured Artist: Helms
Helms has its roots in the Massachusetts peninsula of Cape Cod, breeding ground in the early-to-mid '90s for a surprising number of quality "post-rock" musicians who later went on to comprise such other bands as Victory at Sea, Robots, and Lynx. Sean McCarthy's first notable band appearance was in 1994 as guitarist for Milkmoney, seemingly a forerunner to the rock sub-genre of slowcore that gained popularity as the decade progressed. His brother Dan drummed for Dagobah, whose sound was an instrumentally heavy marriage of progressive rock and hardcore. By 1996, Sean founded The Television Set with Tina McCarthy (at the time Tina Helms) making her debut on bass, and this band eventually transformed into Helms when Dan replaced their drummer. There was one name stop along the way as The Swimmer. This moniker was dumped when a major label band released a record under a similar name. The Swimmer eventually became the title of their 2000 debut album on Kimchee Records, released following an EP shared with Victory at Sea. A second full-length, McCarthy, had a November 2002 release.
The Helms experience often consists of equal amounts delicacy and power. The band expertly veers from softer hypnotic passages into precipitous cacophony, all the while maintaining total navigational control. Accompanying these sonic vestments is what appears on first listen to be somewhat inconsequential lyric imagery using the ephemera of modern-day culture. Closer attention can lead one to the big picture truths such fables portend. Helms' musical narrative, although marinated in that post-something aural tradition, is original and always compelling.
Helms - "The Kindness of Automatic Doors"
Helms - "It Takes Skin to Win"
Helms website
Featured Artist: Christians and Lions
Chris Mara, Matt Sisto, Chris Barrett, and brothers Sam and Ben Potrykus layer electric and acoustic guitars, electric and upright bass, drums, trumpet, singing saw, and vocal harmonies that harness that elusive, eerie familial connection to create smart, quirky indie-folk songs with nods to everyone from theorists like Althusser and MacLuhan to artists like The Zombies to The Tennessee Three. Their debut album, More Songs for Dreamsleepers and The Very Awake explores topics of displacement and alienation with both an intrinsic self-awareness and a tenderness that is "somehow comfortable, yet unsettling...like a Cadillac someone died in"
Christians and Lions - "Skinny Fists"
Christians and Lions - "Gimmie Diction"
Featured Artist: Ho-Ag
"There are plenty of connectable dots from Ho-Ag back to Devo: Both bands share high-art production values that violently collide with their mutual taste for the degeneration of modern man. Devo did this by mixing the brash energy and analog warmth of punk rock with the sterilized calm and synthesized serenity of new wave. Ho-Ag takes another step after that and smashes Tom Waits' bohemian Americana into punk's dangerous anarchy-and, you know, sometimes a theremin and a Moog sneak their way into the mix." -The Weekly Dig (Boston)
Ho-Ag - "Into the River"
Ho-Ag - "The Straight Shaker (Live)"