Hello.
My name is Matthew Carlin. I am a digital consultant fascinated by the intersection of creativity, productivity, innovation and collaboration.
LinkedIn- @matthewcarlin
- Blog Posts @ Undercurrent.com
- Cargo Collective
- Instagram
- Tumblr
- Get in touch.
-
Info
- Summary
I am a digital consultant with a wide range of experience as a producer, project manager, writer, strategist and creative lead with a passion for creating innovative products and engagements, and a collaborative spirit.
Specialties: digital, social, video, audio, rich media, concepting, strategy, content, making cool ideas happen
Education-
1995 - 1998American UniversityBA in Communications
Activities: columnist at The Eagle newspaper
Additional Information-
Websites:
-
-
Tweets
- New X-TREME shit - luxury edition. http://t.co/jLY7chHfkDMay 22, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Matching #amysbakingco tats - who's in? http://t.co/BxWru5rPunMay 15, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- May 14, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Corporate merger idea: Dockports. #m&a #nobrainer
- Observation/warning: it's butt crack and muffin top season in the bike lanes of NYC. Keep your eyes on the road, cyclists. #bikenyc
- Fun fact: there is a thing called a swag hook. Home furnishings x youth culture. #swag #marthastewart
- . @TheIdeaLists representing on @Forbes - Five Lessons Ad Agencies Can Learn From Hollywood http://t.co/QWcAJC6Uy9Apr 15, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @VICE: Last Winter I Hitchhiked to Texas and Almost Joined Black Flag http://t.co/uZxykRavBm
- Posted for @freelancersu on behalf of @TheIdeaLists: 5 tips to better position your pitch http://t.co/0vBzsPHjyd #business #listsApr 04, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
-
Posts
- Jan 22, 13
This installment of Five Questions and One Link requires full disclosure: Undercurrent worked with Unpakt to help conceptualize the product and place the key creative and technical partners. But regardless of our personal connection, Unpakt is the disruptive kind a startup we always admire. With the goal of bringing transparency, simplicity and accurate pricing to the arduous process of moving, the service lets users search, compare and book movers online. Daniel Cooke, General Manager of Unpakt, took on this batch of questions.
1) In 140 characters or less, what problem is your company solving?
Finding a great mover and getting pricing is a time-consuming, difficult process. Unpakt is a digital service that makes it fast and easy.
2) If you could travel back in time, what would you do differently?
Start Unpakt two years ago, in time for my last move!
3) What do you think your company will look like in one year?
Our goal is to be the nation’s one-stop-shop for all things moving.
4) What’s the one piece of advice you’d give an aspiring entrepreneur?
Get started. Don’t wait any longer, just start.
5) Lean, agile or waterfall?
Lean and agile make the perfect pair.
One Link
The cool motion controlled screens from Minority Report will soon be a reality! A company called Leap Motion is developing a device and SDK to make this possible:
Undercurrent readers – visit Unpakt.com to save 10% on your next move with promo code “UNDER10″. (Expires 3/31/2013.)
- Jan 03, 13
Welcome to Five Questions and One Link, a new feature that gives a quick look inside some of the most interesting startups. This week we’re talking to Neil Baptista, the founder and CEO of Riffle, a new social web app that helps users discover great books. Read on and see below for a special link to jump the beta queue and join the community.
1) In 140 characters or less, what problem is your company solving?
Riffle is the future of book publishing. Connecting readers with books they’ll love, anywhere they’d like to read them.
2) If you could travel back in time, what would you do differently?
Personally, travel internationally for a year after high school rather than waiting until I was 28.
3) What do you think your company will look like in one year?
We’ll still be a bustling newcomer, but the vanguard of the publishing world and a fountain of amazing books.
4) What’s the one piece of advice you’d give an aspiring entrepreneur?
Never discount the incumbent.
5) When was your last pivot?
In February 2012, we figured out Riffle. It wasn’t an epiphany, but really the result of a rigorous adherence to lean startup methods. Now we’re like Kareem making a sky hook.
One Link:
Obviously, rifflebooks.com, but also, for a little fun, I still get a laugh over this skit.
Special for our readers: jump the queue and get immediate access to Riffle here.
- Jan 18, 12
“Everything is different, but the same… things are more moderner than before… bigger, and yet smaller… it’s computers… San Dimas High School football rules!”
—Ox, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
One thing you can be fairly certain about when it comes to marketing and digital is that your competition, by and large, relies on the same measurements and near-term goals that you do. These goals predominate because they are simple to understand and commensurate with traditional measurements and goals. But rarely do they reflect the changing fundamentals of marketing, which results in a status quo that feels somewhat disconnected from the best new opportunities, despite the ever increasing speed with which marketers adopt new buzzwords (usually from a “guru”) that talk to changes wrought by digital. It’s become hard enough to keep up, in other words, but the value of thinking differently about digital has increased, not diminished.
Combating the malaise of this status quo and the inertia behind it requires organizational chutzpah — the willingness to question accepted wisdom and behavior, and to entertain unconventional ideas. Startups typically overflow with chutzpah, but it dilutes as they grow. Today’s most competitive businesses embody it through adulthood, however, and Amazon’s Price Check app constitutes a recent and succinct example. The Price Check app rewards users for scanning merchandise prices in retail stores with their phones, allowing Amazon to offer a lower price on the spot while collecting valuable competitive intelligence. This attack on the biggest remaining advantage physical stores possess caused no small amount of outrage. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) decried Amazon’s incentive-driven promotion to encourage use of the app as anticompetitive: “Small businesses are fighting everyday to compete with giant retailers, such as Amazon, and incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far.” Implementing the future at someone’s expense alway results in backlash, and you have to be particularly fearless to do it to a sacred cow like small business, of course.
As a counterexample, startups are also falling victim to incrementalism and the status quo and now behave much like anyone else. Let’s call this “Grouponitis.” The symptoms include a laser-like focus on maximizing revenue and market share with nary a thought given to the eventual profitability of it all, combined with a lack of a distinct offering to consumers (despite leading the market, there’s little to distinguish Groupon from its competitors in the eyes of consumers, a fact that is diminishing their first-mover advantage rapidly). Many startups now just amount to new forms of advertising, audacious only in trivial ways. This is the same kind of convergence prominent in established industries, but it is taking place in nascent ones faster than before.
Organizational chutzpah requires committing to a vision of the future you want to see. Developing a marketing strategy based upon that constructed future is a delicate balancing act between recognizing and adapting to the inevitable while remaining distinct and uniquely valuable. Furthermore, lots of marketers trip up and actually end up reinforcing the status quo by trying to derive a sense of the inevitable from an examination of the competition: we rarely see a sufficient level of insight about the future arrive from analysis of the immediate competition. A broad and lateral analysis is essential to determining how the cards are going to fall.
Instead of focusing solely on catching up with the competition (although by all means do that too, if you can afford to), think about what distinguishes you in the eyes of the consumer, and how that unique part of your value proposition will be changed by digital and the impending future. It’s not as hard as you’d think for one major reason: unlike Silicon Valley, which places risky bets on early adoption of truly untested ideas, marketers at established firms have a bit more breathing room before the future arrives. William Gibson said it best: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Maintaining the status quo is no longer an acceptable strategy in a world where you could be on the waning side of an unevenly distributed future. We believe the most successful firms will have a broad view of the future, a narrow view of themselves, and the organizational chutzpah to begin enacting that future as soon as possible.
-
Cargo Collective
-
Photos
-
Posts
- Sell Yourself: 5 Tips to Better Position Your Pitch
Over the past 10 years, I’ve sat on all sides of the marketing table, from being a freelance creative associate selling concepts to senior level clients, to running RFPs for FORTUNE 500 corporations in search of global agencies. During a recent stint at The IdeaLists, a company that acts as a liaison between all of the above, my vantage point became even more interesting.
One of the most common questions I got from our creative community was how to position their offering to better appeal to clients. Here are five tips that I’ve picked up myself after watching thousands of others pitch their services over the years.
1. Get Your Story Straight
While clients respect the deeper philosophical underpinnings of your work, they are busy and need to quickly understand exactly what you do and how you do it. If you’re a UX designer, say so – front and center on your homepage and in the first paragraph of your proposal/email/deck/etc. Save the details of why UX is the path to spiritual enlightenment for a follow-up meeting or blog post.
2. Lead with What You Do, Not What You Don’t
Clients want to hear what you’re doing now, the exciting things you plan to do in the future, and where you think the next smart moves are going to happen in your industry over the next few years. Beginning your presentation with a history of what your company used to do, but doesn’t do anymore can be confusing. Your background is important, but not at the expense of distracting your audience.
3. If You’re Not Qualified, Sit It Out
As an open marketplace, one of the ongoing challenges The IdeaLists faces is striking the balance between offering our creative community exciting new opportunities and making sure our clients only speak to fully qualified candidates. When a client has specific needs that require specialized skills like e-commerce, mobile development, or high-end luxury branding, you absolutely must have demonstrable skills in that area. Spin things too much and you lose credibility, which decreases your chances for future work. In other words, be ambitious yet realistic.
4. Spell Check!
Being a visual thinker is no excuse. Even minor typos broadcast a lack of attention to detail. Proper spelling and grammar is a deal breaker for many people, but is easy to avoid. Always have a second set of eyes look at anything and everything you’re putting in front of a client.
5. The First Answer Is Always Yes
In improv comedy, one of the first lessons is called “Yes, And.” In a nutshell, no matter how crazy the scenario you’re presented with is, the answer is “yes,” and you build on that. Saying no shuts the scene down and leaves nowhere to go. Even when you disagree with a client, there is almost always some valuable information you can extract by keeping an open mind and letting the dialogue continue. Build on that seemingly outlandish question or idea; if you’re a real pro you can even steer things right back to where you want them.
(This post originally appeared in slightly different form at freelancersunion.com.)
- This Agency Model Is Broken, But Should We Fix It?
Product development is the new marketing strategy. Innovation is the new creative currency. Curation is the new content. Marketing and advertising have evolved over the past five years and the shift is accelerating faster by the day. Networks like SAY Media and Glam Media are working directly with brands, giving them direct access to content. Disruptors like BuzzFeed and Percolate are taking it a step further by co-creating new content and curating entire social footprints.
Long story short, the traditional client to agency to media telephone game is a broken model. And everybody knows it.
The alternative models for success are obvious with brands like Burberry, Nike and Levi’s making great content, creating digital products with real utility, and truly partnering with their agencies. But for every Red Bull Space Jump, there are still hundreds of campaigns that are dying on the vine because consumers are exhausted from years of being talked at rather than being engaged with.
What’s the solution? Taking a page from the startup scene and borrowing liberally from The Lean Startup methodology, it’s time for agencies to pivot, test new ideas, and be ready to fail upward.
What’s Your MVP?
The first step for any startup is to define its minimum viable product (MVP) — the simplest, most concise and compelling version of the product offering. Deceptively simple, this is no easy task.
Let’s apply this methodology to agencies. Is a viable MVP writing 30-second TV spots and then outsourcing the actual making to a production company? Is it designing print ads for magazines with fewer subscribers every day? Is it creating Flash banner ads that the most affluent demographics can’t watch on their iOS devices? Framed this way, it doesn’t sound very compelling.
Now let’s take a closer look at what agencies do best: They understand brands better than anyone else and they know what consumers like. They’re also full of creative, talented people. Put that together and there’s an MVP in there somewhere. Perhaps it’s making the creative director a curator-in-chief and starting a dedicated multi-channel content factory for the right client. Or maybe it just means giving your tech director six months of freedom to create a game-changing mobile app.
The good news for agencies is that the cost of most of these experiments is basically a rounding error for your holding company. So why not invest in their own talent and put some skin in the game?
Now Pivot!
“Lean.” “Agile.” “Pivot.” Agencies use these buzzwords liberally and often advise their clients to make aggressive moves and embrace drastic change. So why not apply these principles to the agency itself?
Winston Binch and Bud Caddell are trying just that at Deutsch LA by putting digital at the forefront of the agency and refusing to separate creativity from technology. Alex Bogusky got to the top of the mountain and then ditched it for the Common project. But for every agency leader who’s ready to make a major pivot, there are ten Global Strategy Directors pitching innovation at client meetings, while secretly outsourcing the actual work to three guys in a loft in Brooklyn.
Agencies need to be ready to fail upward by experimenting, learning from mistakes and making smart pivots.
Partners Not Vendors
Of course, no agency is set up to be quick, nimble, or great at everything. In fact, as consumers’ attention becomes increasingly scattered, and campaigns become microtargeted, it’s impossible to do everything well.
Agency producers have been quietly amassing Rolodexes of secret weapon vendors for years. Now that brands are actively seeking out media opportunities with the aforementioned disruptors, and working with non-agencies like Breakfast and Fake Love, the curtain is starting to lift. It’s time for transparency and scale.
Once again, startups have benefited from this communal worldview for years — quite literally with open source frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and more recently with the increasing popularity of shared spaces like WeWork.
Exposing these relationships, and treating them as partnerships rather than procuring services from vendors doesn’t mean cutting agencies out of the equation. Nor does it mean resorting to gimmicky crowdsourcing stunts or simply awarding jobs to the lowest bidder on oDesk or Elance. It means we are entering a new era of transparency with a wide array of in-demand specialists collaborating with brands and agencies to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
(This post originally appeared on Adotas.)
Five Free Medically Themed Punk Band Names
1. The Organ Donors
2. Carpal Tunnel
3. Scalpel
4. Induced Labor
5. Blue Kross(painting by Richard Prince; jpg stolen from nj.com)
(Excerpt from my post at http://undercurrent.com/post/hindsight-from-the-hurricane/)
Hindsight from the Hurricane
by MATTHEW CARLINHurricane Sandy whipped through New York on Monday, doing a number on all the boroughs, leaving large sections of the city flooded and without power. Undercurrent HQ, located in Soho, was included in the mess. Still without electricity, the office has been shut down all week. But, along with much of digital NYC, the work continues.
Much of this dichotomy is a case of the haves and the have-nots. Traversing lower Manhattan in the days following the storm offered a poignant cross-section. While food lines snaked around the projects on the Lower East Side, the West Village was all but deserted – the more affluent inhabitants having likely fled uptown or across the river to stay with powered up friends and family.
Sh*t Got Serious
Online, things were also different. Social media turned from the usual mix of LOLs and self-expression into a way more serious communication tool. Open APIs, rapid development cycles, and crowdsourcing efforts enabled everything from gas finders to the MTA’s remarkably fast distribution of service advisories and an updated recovery map for the subway system.
Twitter became a lynchpin of urgent dispatches, as organizations such as the Red Hook Initiative (@rhookinitiative) used the service to solicit donations and coordinate volunteers. The Occupy Wall Street movement morphed almost instantly into “Occupy Sandy,” using its extensive existing networks to organize first responders and fill in the gaps of the Red Cross and FEMA. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal dropped their paywalls to keep readers updated frequently.
Continued at http://undercurrent.com/post/hindsight-from-the-hurricane/
(photo by Russell Stainer)Thank you so much to everyone who has donated at www.bike4chris.com . We have raised $12k and I have enough cash to move 226 miles, but… I’ve gone 330 miles. That means I’m about 528,000 feet or $5,280 ahead of your donations. I waited in SLO for almost 3 days to get enough to move on, but I…
Deciding between the “Wham, Bam, Thank You, Mammoth” and the “Mr. Pestato Head” is bound to be an XTREMEly difficult decision. (thx for the scoop @kingstonmassive)
