Welcome to Issue #1 of Inc!
Let's hope it was worth the wait.
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Dear readers,
Thank you for signing up for this newsletter. I’m currently typing with a combination of excitement and fear. My hope is that this will become a welcomed distraction from your day-to-day life with a mixture of humor and useful insights. Here goes nothing.
One of my favorite surrealists, Andre Breton, once said this:
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
Excuse the pronoun in the above quote, but if you can’t picture a horse running on a tomato, then this newsletter isn’t for you. If you can, welcome to Inc!
You down with NFT? Yeah you know me
NFT, how can I explain it.
Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Stonks, NFTs. I knew nothing about them until I challenged myself to create an NFT. Yes, a non-fungible token. What is that you ask? My answer is this: it is the unique, original ownership of a digital asset. It can be a drawing, photo, signature, meme, Tweet, and so on. In my case, I chose to NFT (not sure if that is a verb) one of my art concepts from my Italian Collection, featuring such classics as The Leaning Tower of Pisa Vacuum Cleaner or The Gondola Skateboard. For just .3 Ethereum (or about $1000), you can now obtain exclusive owners rights to The Roman Coliseum Hot Tub.
Intrigued by my experience? Read more here, where I take you through my process, step-by-step, including purchasing Ethereum and creating my own NFT collection, and living to tell you about it. If I can do it, you can absolutely do it better.
Leadership Series: The talented Jennifer Magley
You don’t need to hear me talk about Leadership. You need to hear from a diverse group of leaders across different industries, featuring varying perspectives, experiences and lessons.
Episode 1 features Jennifer Magley, a force of positive energy, an Indianapolis author, athlete, coach, mentor, leader, speaker and much much more. I had the pleasure of spending a Friday afternoon asking her questions. And you get to soak up 18 minutes of her takes on adversity, finding your voice, writing a book and dessert.
Do you think Jennifer is awesome too? I’m giving away (5) copies of her recent book, How to be a Queen: A Leadership Fable. I’ll be picking the first 5 people that share this post, gets someone to subscribe, or does something else to help Inc! become a billion dollar brand (🤣).
Texts with a Marketer
This is a simple concept. I text a marketer about a timely topic, project, launch, you name it. I then put the text message content in this newsletter and you’re blown away.
First up is Katie Snider, VP, Creative + Web, Cloud Marketing at Salesforce. I had the honor of working with Katie during my time at ExactTarget/Salesforce (2012-2014) and we have remained friends. You may have seen the latest character from Salesforce, Brandy the Marketer. Brandy joins Appy, Einstein, Brandy, Astro, and Cloudy in the Salesforce family. Katie authored the official blog on this launch, which is kind of a big deal. Let’s text Katie for some insider information on life at Salesforce and the creative world. (BTW: I learned how to record my phone screen and feel so young again).
Some excerpts from our exchange:
The process around selecting Brandy the Marketer
We definitely considered many animals before landing on a fox. We have an extensive process for developing new characters - of mapping our market research around marketers, their pain points and what they think about and look for, plus our positioning of our marketing products, and then mapping back to different animals that align and those animals specific character traits. Our initial list of characters that we all liked came down to around 12-15. And then we narrowed to a top 4. But the 🦊 kept rising to the top for everyone we surveyed.
Her advice for creatives
Invite themselves to the table. Don’t wait to be invited. Be proactive, not reactive. For years I had to constantly ask to be included in certain meetings or to put creative first. Just continue to beat that drum. If you see an opportunity to optimize a project/message, pitch a solution, even when it wasn’t asked of you. I feel like most of my biggest project successes were not assigned to me, or weren’t on the road map.
I hope we’re all lucky enough to work with Katie.
Behind the lens
For those that don’t know, I’m a photographer that hasn't really taken a photo in a long time. I’d like to change that, so I’m pulling from the archives to showcase some work, but also give myself a friendly nudge.
Picture this: a desert near Palm Springs. At the time, I was employed at IndyCar, running all digital & content and the title sponsor, IZOD was shooting a commercial involving Weezer. I’m serious. Here’s the finished commercial.
And here’s the photo. I love this image because it was so unexpected and the crew was scrambling to finish shooting before all light vanished. I’m a sucker for a sunset and I love the silhouette of the 2 people running, holding hands. I hope you do too.
Consumption
Let’s start with all of the things I’ve been ingesting in terms of education, entertainment and creativity.
Books: I’m listening to Atomic Habits.
Video games: The new F1 game for PS5 is probably the best racing game I’ve ever played.
Music: I’m really into Billie Eilish at the moment. In other news, there is hope that we will get access to De La Soul’s volume of work soon.
Watching: Elaine Welteroth on Masterclass. Jagame Thandhiram on Netflix. Season 2 of Ted Lasso. And I’m very excited about La Casa de Papel (The Money Heist) Season 5 Trailer.
Drinking: Smeraldina whenever I can find it.
All good things must come to an end. Issue #1 is a wrap - life, leadership, marketing and a little bit of surrealism.
Thank you for reading and subscribing. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments or ideas.
See you in a month!
Daniel
Your next NFT: 🍅🐴.
Really like this flow and insight into different content plays