Timeshifting, or The Concert that Almost Wasn't

I had a horrible afternoon but at least it got me thinking. The short version of my mishap was that at 2:45pm I realized that the post office closes at 3pm. This is important because the post office is 15 minutes away, and they had my overnight'd Weird Al tickets. (Yes, I'm seeing the concert again.)

I made it, by the skin of my teeth. And on the long and heart-pounding ride home it made me realize what a backseat time has taken in my life.

Of course it's technology's fault. As the days roll by I get more and more accustomed to things working on my schedule. I timeshift my favorite shows with DVR and watch them when I'm good and ready. I buy books and music online whenever it strikes my fancy. I can do my work during business hours or on Saturday nights if I so choose. While there is a basic human schedule that ties pretty strictly to daylight, at this point it's only a suggestion.

So it's a rude awakening when I physically need a ticket in my hand to get into a concert, and the post office refuses to just shove the lightweight envelope in my mailbox or in my front door. And while I can't blame the venue or the USPS, I have to say that I do prefer the kind of situations where it's on my time. I'm thinking about how I bought my tickets online for Dark Knight and didn't have to turn my room upside down looking for them-- they were at the theater. I'm thinking of the sites that let me print off my own bar-coded ticket five seconds before I leave for the event.

Today was a wakeup call-- a hard, cold realization about how my own expectations have changed. And now it's time to breathe deeply and get ready for another leg of the Straight Outta Lynwood tour.

My love for you's like diarrhea (I just can't hold it in)

I need an excuse to blog about the Weird Al concert that I went to last night, so I'm going to pull out Jeff's PIP model and show you how it got so many danged teenagers out to see his show. Bear with me on this one.


It starts with Recognition, which I misspelled the first time because it's 2am. I think that often businesses want a quick fix when it comes to this first step in the PIP-- saturating a TV station with your spot, sending out samples, etc etc. But the good, meaty recognition is the kind that has time to steep-- the brands that you've known since you were young, or in this web world, the ones with at least a few years behind 'em. Weird Al has been producing music since before I was born, and you could say that all that recognition has been building to culminate in this one concert (and then the next one, and the next...).

The teenagers who are there probably learned about Weird Al through their parents, or their friends who learned from their parents. They are most familiar with his current work (I know because of which songs they were lip syncing to) but I'm guessing recognition started a generation ago.

Then comes Relevance,which is where Al shines. I mean, think about his music: it's popular because he takes the most popular songs of the day, from "My Sharona" to "Trapped in the Closet," and riffs on them. The songs and artists are already relevant-- that's what pushed them to the top in the first place.

Unlike me, the teenagers who were there were familiar with the original songs before they'd heard Weird Al's parodies. Weird Al is also great at keeping up with the marketing trends of the moment-- he could easily lapse into the older ways of thinking that got him where he is today, but by releasing songs early on his MySpace page, engineering awesome viral campaigns, creating fan videos and all the other ways that he embraces the web (hell, he even writes up-to-date songs about the web), he drives relevance to a slightly different generation with each album he releases.

And then it's Reward, which for me comes from the plain awesomeness that is every song, every video, every Al-TV episode, his appearances on The Simpsons, his short-lived television series... alright, I'm rambling, but basically the humor is the reward. It's why people come back, and why his fans are absolutely diehard. Reward in advertising isn't always so vague-- it can be a prize, a free sample, unlockable content, information, whatever. But hopefully with artists, they art is the primary reward. Right?

Finally, Relationship. How many bands do you listen to? Of that number, how many have you seen live? A fraction, right? There are a number of reasons for that... geography, time, money, possibility. (That last one is for my brother, whose favorite band is Queen.) You choose the bands you (want to) have a relationship with. They change over time, like so many things you care about.

And once you're in the seat (and you can imagine this for all advertising), that show should continue to foster that relationship. Weird Al's concerts are not just him on a stool singing his songs. If I want that I'll go to a Dylan concert. No, Weird Al's performance includes wearing a full fat suit for... well, "Fat." It includes huge video displays of cartoons that reference him and clips from his movie UHF. He comes into the audience during "Wanna B Ur Lover" and schmoozes with about 3 minutes' worth of audience. His encore is a crowd favorite: "Albuquerque," which on the album is over 11 minutes long and live is much longer (to our delight, of course).

In the end, if you've done it right, you won't have to do it all over again next time. As with any relationship you will need to maintain it... you will need to stay present and current and accessible... but it should not be from scratch. Your b(r)and should leave a legacy... if you're lucky, the kind of legacy that geek girls will spend their Friday nights blogging about for years to come.