For The Cause

It is Saturday and we are out in the desert to attend the Coachella Festival. Denise and I come every year and we hope to keep doing it as long as the festival exists. It is hard to explain why the Coachella Festival is so great if you haven't been here. For us, when the sun sets and the weather cools and the music surrounds us, we're in heaven. But this year will be a little different. We have a 5 month old with us. We don't have a babysitter and we are planning on taking him with us tonight to see Prince. I hope he likes being there. More about that tomorrow...

At the moment, we're relaxing at a borrowed condo. It's about 99 degrees outside so we decided to watch one of the Netflix movies I brought with us. We chose a documentary called The 11th Hour. Part of the Coachella experience is the fact that the festival embraces environmental change and awareness. So, watching this movie seemed appropriate.

The film is great. I'm not going to tell you it is groundbreaking or something you haven't seen or heard before, but it moved me. Half way through the movie Denise asked me if it made me want to do something, to do my part. It did.

About 60% of the movie shows all the disasters that climate change is causing. It paints a very bleak portrait of corporate America and the corporations of the world. How population growth has led to the depletion of our natural resources. How the consumption of fossil fuels is damaging the earth in so many different ways.

But, like a good documentary does, it spent quality time showing how all is not lost and that change can happen. And that is where I got inspired. What can I do in my life?

Denise asked, "makes you not want to eat beef, huh?" I said, "Yea. But I love it so much." She agreed. "Maybe we could eat it just once a week." I suggested.

What if there was a law that stated everyone could eat beef just once a week? Nope, that won't work. Laws are a funny thing. They are set up to protect us from hurting others, but if you tell somebody that they can only eat something at specific intervals, then they'll claim their Constitutional rights are being attacked. And I don't disagree. There was a statement in the movie that someone said which was interesting. According to this person, he said that Thomas Jefferson suggested that the Constitution be re-written every generation. Regardless, the point is that it made me want to be better about my role in providing a better world for my son and his children and so on.

My favorite quote in the movie came from author and environmentalist Paul Hawken:

The great thing about the dilemma we’re in is that we get to reimagine every single thing we do. In other words, there isn’t one single thing we make or systems that we have that doesn’t require a complete remake

There are two ways of looking at it. One is, ‘Oh my gosh, what a big burden.’ The other, which is the way I prefer to look at it is, ‘What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive.’ Because this generation gets to, essentially, completely change this world. The great thing about this age is that we get to re-imagine every single thing that we do."

Make Them Laugh

My friend Russell Scott who runs an amazing web design and marketing agency called, Jetset Studios was just featured in the latest iMedia Connection newsletter. Russell is brilliant and funny as heck. He and his company have created some of the best movie websites ever, including my favorite, the website for Superbad.

Hanging out with Russell will find you spinning off into conversational tangents that will take you light years away from whatever the original topic was that began the discussion. In fact, if you put me and Russell in a room together to talk business, two hours will pass by and nothing will have gotten done that will make us more money. But all of the troubles in the world will have disappeared for a good chunk of time.

The article he wrote called How To Be Funny Online is fantastic.

Here are a few of my favorite points that Russell makes about how to use humor to promote your products online:

Rule #1: Be as funny as you need to be
Something memorable that makes people laugh and want to share it with their friends is about as good as it gets.

Rule #2: Don't be a fool
The online world is much more forgiving, not to mention starved for distracting entertainment. Here, a new car can be a toy, an insurance premium can become impenetrable video game "armor" and even the once staid world of banking is now cheerfully irreverent. Why? Because online, brands can take more chances and experiment like a curious college student who suddenly finds himself alone for the weekend with his girlfriend's hot older sister, a fully stocked wet bar, dad's credit card and Timothy Leary's chemistry set. In this brave new world, the only real fools are those who remain dry.

Rule #3: Even serious topics can use humor
So, the only real guideline for an online comedy campaign is how far is too far? Can you have fun with anything?

Personal hygiene? Certainly. Axe leads the way. Household products? Yep. Brawny reinvented itself with its now legendary Brawny Academy. Food and beverage? Burger King is edgier than ever online and the efforts have given it a level of street cred that few brands in its category have ever enjoyed. Insurance? Absolutely. Remember, at one point, Geico even had its own sitcom based on its funny hit campaign (ok, so the execution of the sitcom wasn't very funny, but Geico can't be blamed for that).

How about if your brand is a funeral home? Can that be funny? Probably, if handled correctly. It could look something like this:

When Gramps passed on, we were faced with a choice we couldn't make. So, much like a reality show, we decided to let YOU, the American people, decide.

To inter Gramps, press 1.
To cremate Gramps, press 2.
To make Gramps dance madly to "Dance Dance Revolution", press 3.

Everyone would press 3 first. Everyone. Even Gramps, if he could, would want to see himself dance like a mad skeleton just one last time before the big sendoff.

Guidelines
Funny is subjective. What is funny to a teenager is on a completely different astral plane than what is funny to a middle-aged professional, but both are equally valid. Arguably the teenager is the more desirable audience, and so the guidelines become crystallized, if not oversimplified:

• People in pain are funny.


• People who fail are funny.


• Average guys who can't score with the ladies are funny.


• Impotence is also funny.


• Extreme discomfort is hilariously funny.


• Parody is funny, and "Star Wars" parody is even funnier.


• The '80s are funny. The '90s are just now starting to be funny.


• The '70s are kind of funny, but in that scary way that clowns are funny.


• Drunk people are especially funny (especially in conjunction with any of the first five guidelines).

Rule #4 - Jokes don't kill people (people kill people). But fear kills ideas.

Read the whole article, you'll be glad you did.

Something Good Today

My wife Denise and I were watching Diane Sawyer interview Dr. Randy Pausch tonight. If you don't know about Dr. Pausch, he is the 47 year old Carnegie Mellon professor who is dying of Pancreatic cancer and gave "The Last Lecture" at his university which has been viewed well over a million times. If you haven't seen the lecture, I recommend the abridged version he did on Oprah.



In the Diane Sawyer interview, Dr. Pausch is shown tucking his kids into bed. Each night he asks them what was the best thing about their day and what was the worst.

After the show was over, Denise asked me, "What was the worst thing about your day?" I couldn't think of anything. Strike that. I thought of a lot of things. But it turns out, none of them were that bad. I thought of unhappy employees, phone calls not returned, long meetings, impending taxes. But nothing was that bad. "Just think of something, even if it wasn't that bad." She urged. "I guess it would be that I was so tired this morning that I couldn't play with Brandon."

When asked what was the best thing about my day, all of a sudden there were a hundred things.

Work days can be long, tough, often debilitating. When you are in them, they can often seem miserable. But after you've gotten home, eaten a meal, and relaxed on the sofa, ask yourself what was the worst thing that happened that day. Then ask what was the best. I wonder if you'll get the same results that I did. I wonder if I'll feel the same way tomorrow.

Keeping Up

Blogging is like an addiction. Not a bad one, but it is like an addiction.

If you are an addict, you know what it is like to want to do something so bad, and try so hard not to do it. Addictions aren't all bad. So I'm not just talking about things like drugs. When I was younger, I was addicted to work. I wasn't happy unless I was working. I still found time to hang out with friends and do lots of "kid" type stuff, but I loved to work. I couldn't wait til the next day to start work again.

Now I'm addicted to my son. I can't wait to see my son every day. He doesn't even know who I am, but I don't care, I want to see my son. I want to hold him in my arms and carry him around the house.

But I find myself addicted to bad things too. My biggest addiction. Haagen Daz coffee ice cream. It may actually kill me. I can polish a pint of that off in 10 minutes and still want more. Do you have any idea how many calories are in a pint of Haagen Daz coffee ice cream? Over 1,000. Carbs = 84g. Fat = 72g. You get the point.

So every now and then I go on a crash diet and I stop eating ice cream and about 1 million other foods that are horrible for me. I know, I know, diets are bad, it's all about changing your eating habits. Blah, blah, blah. I'm an addict. Don't try to reason with me.

It took me 30+ years to figure out that I'm an addict. I used to tell people that I didn't have an addictive personality and that I could quit anything. To some extent that is true. But I'm not kidding anyone. I have addictive tendencies. Plain and simple.

Which brings me to blogging. I love this whole blogging thing. I want to blog all the time. I think about blogging every time I see something interesting. It is an addiction. It's not necessarily bad for me, but I am addicted. The tough part is that I can't always find the time to blog. If you look at my last post, it is from nearly a month ago. Pathetic! I've been going through serious withdrawals. I dream about blogging. I make lists of things to blog about.

But here is my dilemma. When I started blogging, I would just post random thoughts. I figured no one was reading it anyway. But then people started to read my blogs and I figured that I had to have something to say. So I started putting hours into my blogs. Yes, it actually takes me hours sometimes because I'm researching and revising and trying to structure my blog post like a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. And then guess what? I stopped blogging. I couldn't find the time to think through my thoughts. I felt that I'd built up a level of expectation and I couldn't go backwards. Next thing you know, a month has gone by.

"Why aren't you blogging?" I'd be asked. "Oh I want to," I'd say. "I'm just swamped, and with the baby and all..." But what was really happening was that I couldn't sit still long enough to think through a blog.

So here I am today. April 9, 2008. My name is Larry Weintraub and I am an addict. A blog addict. And a Haagen Daz addict. And a Brandon Weintraub addict. And that is ok. I'm dealing with my addictions. I'm going to blog more, but they won't always be the most poignant blogs. I just need to say what is on my mind. And you can tell me you like what I say or don't. I'm ok either way.