Lessons From The Superbowl – The Climb #922

Wednesday 1st September 2021

There are a number of reasons I’m doing so much at the moment.

Back over (gulp!) 20 years ago when I started Action-Figure, I did not know what I was doing. Back then, I just went for it; sucked up how silly I felt trying to run one of these new-fangled websites and just went for it.

A decade later I would be doing consultancy work for a firm that had spent $6 million on a superbowl ad to advertise their website. I would tell a team of highly skilled engineers that their load balancing plans were wrong because they had scaled for the traffic to come over a period of 24 hours, rather than expecting 90% of it immediately after the ad had run. I had to explain how I could possibly know this, and told them that I’d been in similar situations during the US ToyFair when every geek and fanboy would hit the website trying to see pictures of the latest collectibles.

Naturally most of them scoffed and explained this was a Superbowl campaign not a ‘little fan site’. Except, everything I predicted happened and I ended up getting dragged into a post-mortum. They showed me their data (which was considered a massive success despite the servers falling over) and I showed them mine. Which was when I learned that the US Toyfair delivered 5-10x what a $6 million dollar ad could.

The experience taught me that just because something is a bit weird, and a bit rough around the edges, doesn’t mean it’s not valid. And so with the work I’m doing for the new video series, I’m reminding myself of this.

I’m not happy with my production qualities of Write Productively. The one I filmed today was a massive step up from the previous one that went live, and I’m sure they’ll continue to improve as I produce more, but for now I’m really having to silence my inner critic.

The major part of the reason for doing this series is, of course, because I think there’s experience I feel I can share. But there’s also part of me that wants to comfortable with putting something out and improving as you’re going along. This goes counter to everything I do as a writer, where planning has become key for me.

I certainly don’t want to change my approach for writing, but what works for writing doesn’t necessarily work for everything else. Being able to be spontaneous and feel confident enough to just try a project is something I need to be more willing to do.

Likewise, I have a livestream tomorrow, planning out The First Draft. Whilst I’m excited about it, and have long felt there was a need for something that livestreamed writing, I’m still nervous about it. Publishing is quite traditional and can be slow to adopt new ideas. As a result, authors tend to be quite traditional as well.

So I’m going to try livestreaming, as well as recording videos and see how it goes. I have no expectations whatsoever. One or both series could fail to take off, in which case I’ll move on and try something else.

But if I get nothing else out of this, I’ll get the experience, because just like the Superbowl campaign, who’s to say that something couldn’t come along down the road where this experience will prove invaluable. And if I could take my little idea for a collectibles website 20 years ago and take it to a level where it outperformed Superbowl ads, who’s to say I couldn’t take a Youtube series for a quirky concept and make a success of it?