Thursday, May 05, 2016

Marketing vs. Art

We promise up not to rise against you - AZR-0 - Support adorable robots - illustration by Cesare Asaro - Curio & Co. ( Curio And Co. OG - curioandco.com)


I’m not a marketing guru, I’m a creator. I design, illustrate, conceptualize things that others want to sell or that later will be sold. That’s what I’m good at.

That’s not enough these days, however. You’ve got to be selling. You’ve got to be selling your product, yes, but also selling your brand, selling your image, and selling yourself.
At Curio & Co., we launched our first Kickstarter campaign on Friday, and boy what a lot of work to put together. It wasn’t just development of the content, character design or even planning the production, it was also research on the process and contacting blogs and journalists and crafting the message for the marketing campaign. And any marketing message really boils down to a call for action.

[Call for Action]
Curio & Co. needs your pledge to send our AZR-0: Robots in the Wild book to print.
[End of Call for Action]

It should be very clear to the consumer what the ad is asking them to do – simple to understand. (Buy it now!) But we get so many of these messages all throughout our day that we don’t even see them anymore and just dismiss them. Let alone share them with our friends and family.
People share what they want, and what they want is content. We all want to be entertained with brand new content, free from ads and calls for action. People just don’t want to share marketing messages.
So for a creator who is finding his way through marketing in the age of social media, how do you find the balance between plastering your project name everywhere, and just giving the people what they want?

If you’ve got any success stories here, I’d love to hear them for inspiration. I hope someone is finding a way! In the meantime, I’ll keep fumbling my way through marketing, and dreaming of the day when I can get back to doing what I do best.

(And don’t forget: Pledge now to send our AZR-0: Robots in the Wild book to print!)