Marketers are Artists and Artists are Marketers

Please note that this is a cross-post with my other blog: 52 Short Stories

Last week, I wrote about the story behind launching my new side project, iL-Logic the webcomic.  However, I thought of myself as a writer long before I launched iL-Logic with Paul.  I’ve been writing outside of work and school for pleasure or for money since the age of about fourteen. While I’m much more satisfied with my career now than I was upon graduating law school, it’s still a far cry from the artist’s lifestyle that I fantasized about as a teen, and yet, I wonder if I didn’t end up exactly where I needed to be.

As much as any artist will tell you that the work itself is the reward, there’s still a big part of himself (that he’s probably buried) that longs to have his work in front of hundreds of eyeballs.  That’s why many aspiring artists end up giving up their craft. They never get there.

I’ll use the launch of iL-Logic as an example.  On March 1st, the day the webcomic was launched, it went quasi-viral.  Before I could announce it on Facebook or Twitter, or even tell friends about it, someone had come across it and submitted it to social bookmarking site Stumbleupon.  On that first day, Stumbleupon accounted for 80% of the site’s traffic, and that first day saw twice as much traffic than my best day on any of my other sites.  If you don’t think Paul and I were elated by that day because we were just doing it for the art, you have too high an opinion of us, and probably of all artists. The bottom line is that all artists get off on seeing their work in front of others.

And what’s the best way to get content in front of eyeballs?  That’s right, marketing.

With the highly competitive nature of just about every industry, the main differentiator between two options will always be the quality of the content, product, service, etc. The best people to create great content and products are the artists and craftsmen (and the best craftsmen are artists). But even a great product needs attention, and for that, artists must once again rely on marketers.

Marketing is becoming a numbers-based science, and that’s a great step for advertisers. Advertisers are sure to get their money’s worth when they’re paying for performance, rather than conjecture. However, it’s not very appealing to artists, who generally speaking don’t love numbers. Talk to a lot of old school ad men, and I bet that a fair bit of them are nostalgic for the times when clients like John Wanamaker knew that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s because old school ad men were artists at heart, trapped in the bodies of marketers.

Still, “true” artists have always had a certain disdain for marketing.  Whether this stems from a mistaken belief that commercial marketing cheapens the work, or that it equates to “selling out,” or simply because marketing was associated with business, and business was not art.  And so, artists have traditionally stuck to making art, and letting someone else sell it for them.

Agents, publishers, galleries, and other entities whose goal is to take the work of artists and sell it have left most artists poor and desolate. Unless an artist becomes a part of the top 1% in his field, he is unlikely to make a middle-class living off his art using the traditional models.  This is simply because the entities that have existed to sell artists’ works on their behalf have become so bloated that they absorb all of the revenues of the work.

As an example, a writer who spends a year of his life writing a novel can expect to get a paltry advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 on the book, and then will receive royalties, that if he’s lucky may go as high as 10%.  This means the publisher, who is taking the expense of marketing the book keeps 90% of the revenues.  The writer’s agent will then keep 10-15% of whatever the writer makes.  Despite this model, publishers are going out of business, and writers can’t find anyone to publish their work. The model is broken.

The good news is there are alternatives.  There are so many examples of artists doing well for themselves by embracing online marketing techniques:  Hazel Dooney, Hugh Macleod, and John T. Unger, JC Hutchins. To name only a few whose stories I’m familiar with.  These artists have stepped away from the traditional model and market their own work.  They are both artist and marketer.  In so doing, they turn the traditional model on its head, and make it so that the person producing the work is actually receiving the majority of the revenues from its sale.

They are not doing anything magical.  They are simply taking advantage of the cheap publishing platform that the internet has given them and used marketing techniques, many of which are the same ones I write about on a weekly basis, and have enjoyed the fruits of their own labours.

Doesn’t it only make sense that artists should be the marketers?  Who knows the target audience better than the author of a work?  Who is best suited to sell it, if not the person creating it?  If artists want to thrive, they need to become marketers. Not only will it benefit their work, but their previous work as artists will make them better marketers than the rest – their imagination and craft will set them apart.

If you’re a writer, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, or any other kind of artist, drop me a line.  I’d love to discuss what you’re doing to market your work.