MARKETING

​Sell Me this Pen

Video | LJB Focus

I have never seen the movie "Catch Me if You Can," but I am very familiar with the sales teaching they illustrate in it. This teaching is the concept and activity called "Sell Me This Pen." It's an activity that separates people who understand sales marketing from those who don't, and it's one I like to revisit every now and then in refresher.

The concept is simple: ask questions to your audience in order to understand their needs; then, if they're a persona fit, reflect the information they shared with you back to them in order to build empathy, and then sell the pen.

It's important to remember that in marketing you can't (and shouldn't) sell to everyone. Articulate your persona, understand them and sell something more meaningful than a physical product. There's a lot of pens out there. Make yours matter.

DESIGN

​Disney loses famous Mickey Mouse copyright in 2024, along with many others

Video | CBS News

I remember watching the early film "Steamboat Willie" when I was a child. I thought it was a really old film, but I was mesmerized by its simple animation. It was cartoons like this that inspired me to write a handwritten letter to Disney as a kid about how I had planned to work for them. (They actually wrote back, telling me to go to art school first.)

As of this year, Disney's exclusive control over the 1928 film and its early Mickey Mouse has expired and is now in the Public Domain. So what does this mean?

Think of it like a recipe. Disney invented the "Mickey Mouse" recipe with Steamboat Willie as the original prototype. Now, that old recipe is in the public cookbook, and anyone can whip up a basic Mickey for themselves ("Oh boy!). —But Disney still owns the rights to all the upgraded recipes with later ingredients and modifications – the red shorts, that iconic voice, the personality.

So, while others can make a similar dish using the public recipe, Disney's perfected versions remain unique and protected. It's not a free-for-all and is still very limited. It's a legal twist, not a full copyright loss for Disney.

DESIGN

​I'm on My Own, Again

Video | Matt D'Avella

I've been following Matt's work for many years, enjoying learning about his productivity hacks, his style on storytelling and approach to filmmaking. You may also recognize the Netflix documentaries he created, Minimalism and Less is Now (which are both great btw). Matt turned into a top YouTuber quickly and in the same ranks of the other YouTubers he notes in this video (of whom I've also followed for years).

This video by Matt confronts the questions I personally think about at times in my own creative work:

Am I creating because I want to or because I have to?

Does my success look like scaling big or staying small?

Matt thinks about these questions and asks for advice from his colleagues about the true challenges in growing too quickly and the power in solopreneurship.