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The Art of Marketing

The companies that today hire for marketing leads and value their seniority over their art talents missed the point. Marketing essentially is persuasion with visual and a voice playing in the deeper layer of the human mind — emotion, and it causes behavioral changes in the long run. The colors and words send the brains and hearts messages, reforming a profile in your mind associated with the company, which becomes the “brand”.

Like how literature and movie form emotions and people’s own imageries in their minds, marketing is art and magic but with a focused agenda.

Let’s just call it, mArgtketing. Pardon my German.

There are rules on colours, wordings and story angles applied to mArgketing milking your behavior changes without your knowledge.

But if I break all the rules and make beautiful work and have people subscribe just because they genuinely like it, that is art. And this is the new kind of mArgtketing I want to bring to businesses. I believe art smells like freedom and people would love it.

First, know the rule, and break the rule.

The first two questions any CEO needs to think about when they create their websites are: first, am I a B2B or a B2C company? Second, what is the story that I am anchoring on? –go back to the truthful, quintessential Me when I look at this problem with Anger and want to solve it.

When I was working at Tencent America, I noticed the company’s interesting struggle, the intriguing position they hold in transiting from this world’s most successful B2C company into fighting for a share in the B2B business. This is a side note: yes, B2B is the future. The next 5-10 years are about a few tech giants converting the real world onto the internet base layers, Cloud for IoT and the Banking System, and the top layer Applications follow suit.

They did it so well in the last ten years by dropping social media apps with fun aesthetics and engaging functions to end-users. But B2B is a different animal. Google Cloud Platform does not gain much money from individual users. It loses money to individual users in the first year of membership. It’s about winning the big corporation clients, through sales and connections. External marketing did not matter as they absolutely were everything in 2C business. Our only external marketing work was for conferences, where sales fish their clients. And ironically it was the compartmentalized internal teams that needed marketing — hard to get information fly in a behemoth when KPI goals from the development end and sales end are not exactly aligned. They hated the bugs but we needed the new products. (No offense. This is so common)

About the difference between the two business models in visual designs, check the foot bar of your computer, and see all the social media applications are all using bright colours. The ones in the information business are using blue, light blue: Twitter, Telegram, Word, Messenger, MSN, Internet Explorer.

Here is some free colour psychology for tech entrepreneurs reading this, Blue is the color for knowledge, Message, which extends to today’s world, are tech and information. I can’t prove it to you here whether it’s insidious knowledge built-in in our consciousness or it’s a reflex from ad blasts living a social life too long. It’s both. It’s known archaic knowledge used for a gain in the mass communication department. The human brain unconsciously picks this up, without you saying a word.

As I write this I look at Wechat. What is bubbly dwarf Hulk doing here mixed in with the Smurfs? Then I remembered the talk we had in the company. it’s all about the mini-programs. It’s the Chinese version of the big you-know-who. It’s a marketplace, which brings us to, money.

The colour Green is for money and art — Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, dollars, Robinhood, Douban, Spotify. The difference being, the Shade of the colours gives the brand a personality. Grass green or Teal makes all the personality differences — the invention of which depends on who your customers are.

So colour brings out the role/functionality and shade brings out the personality.

It is interesting to see this colour theory plays out unconsciously when I was working at Tencent, the young Cloud team, which consider themselves a Startup in the Bay with two footholds in Palo Alto and Cleremont, trying to figure things out. They were using a bright popping blue, the QQ blue on a massive scale on their website. It’s not a good idea for a B2B company. It was the 2C thinking. I noticed today that they changed it into a deeper greyer shade of blue. That was the reliable decision.

Now, about the Shades of the colour. Here is the gist. If you want your customers to like you and play with you, if you provide FUN, choose a bright shade. — That is all the social media and gamified apps. But if you want your costumers to trust you with their money, their life, and rely on you, if you provide a SOLUTION and want to show establishment and authority, choose a dull middle-aged man shade of the color (however my grandfather is the most humorous person in my family by the way), — this used to be Fidelity (but it looked so old. they changed it too), and this should be used by most finance-related Big institutional-like companies. Can you imagine your bank turn into the bubbly Robinhood green?

Next, on to why using popping bright colour over a large scale on your website isn’t a good idea. The readers lose their focus. But you want to guide them to focus on your Subscription button isn’t it. The large scale neon color makes that area popping out visually like floating on the surface. You can’t read the words on it, and it’s way too exciting to be taken seriously. You want to be taken seriously and pop the most important information. So, dull/mute the background elegantly, and save the bright one for the buttons, with a contrast/opposite colour from the palette (a concept you learn in art classes) — they make harmony. I want to show good and bad examples but I don’t want to make enemies or advertise for free.

And about Shapes. Twitter is a bird put together by all perfect circular lines. All the lines in that logo, are a section of a perfect circle. It feels harmonious. Linkedin however, is as squarish as you want a professional to be, as the word “square” describes the type of personality in English.

Lastly, the Story. The story is the voice of the company and the CEO. This is art on a new abstract level. I spend my life extracting the stories out of clueless chaos. First, you have to listen to the social sentiment, the voice of the world, then hear the voice in you, and when they converge, you have an exploding marketing effect.

The importance of storytelling? It’s been larger than the actual tech. It hasn’t been the tech that’s driving an economical growth in this cycle; It was the Silicon Valley Storytellings that drove our income growth and the past stock boom.

A painful deleverage process we are in right now because of this. Good luck America.

Want to do some good with this Power of stories? We absolutely Can and attract Revenue at the same time. The Good Artists vs. Bad Artists game is everywhere. This consumerism-driving, compulsive-behavior-enticing field needs to Breathe. It needs Real Art to fill it up and Rock it.

Someone needs to Care for and Listen to the End User Human Beings when Their Choice as a Consumer is No Longer Needed for the big Revenue. (I’m going to write another article about how the machine grew so huge and it now owns most of us.) Sense the danger here.

Fuck Edward Bernays.

Bring on Debussy, Banksy, Dolores O’Riordan, Handel, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte. And bring all the underground artists musicians above ground, with a revenue — the ones that are chased off the grid by gentrification and governing. They are the songs of our hearts and soul. Stop withering.

It needs a renaissance for the people.

Let’s talk about this on another day.

Cheers.

— Your atypical Artist in the Bay

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How to cook in Quarantine – Paella Recipe

A Loveletter to all that I care during the Covid19 outbreak, or so they surged

The second month in quarantine from San Jose. How are you doing? The Planet Lockdown has put two things in shortage — fresh produce, and human contact. This puts us in the two corresponding challenges — how do I swallow the frozen veggies cooked by myself everyday, and is the person I miss missing me too?

Yes, they do. Our emotions are stripped to the bare core now that we send supplies and messages to those who we really care about. When it was bad in China, my friends and I bought masks somewhere there online and sent them to our parents and grandparents. Today my mom and her friends are Fedexing masks to us.

Know that dealing with yourself, the void in the room is much easier than dealing with the other person in the room who you happen to dislike in a lockdown with No Exit.

So, let’s see how we can deal with the lesser ones of the issues.

Fresh produce. We mostly don’t have fresh produce but the closest thing we have is frozen veggies and fruits. The fast frozen locked in the nutrition. They last. They are economical. They fit the situation.

Veggies, fruits, and love, three things known to boost immune and mood, like sunshine in the east coast – fictional fairyland existence to busy city hustlers. We don’t lower our bar for anything ingenuine even in a time like this. No bottled vitamin supplements or Vitamin D milk as antidepressants.

An inch a day, a mile south tomorrow. With that much of an open mind, we will be licking milk from the floor at the year-end.

By the way, this is a long ride. The virus mutation waves and the social-economical impact of it shoot up to December. I’m planting two types of potatoes and butter lettuces in the backyard.

The Labour Department reported on Thursday that 10 million people filed for unemployment insurance over the past two weeks, an 8.5 million increase from what you’d call a healthy situation. And more are falling.

NYT estimated this with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; Historical Statistics of the United States (annual estimates before 1948

Santa Clara is pretty high on the Covid19 most infected area list. Saw that coming, I told friends around me one month before the shelter-in-place order to store up. Buy frozen veggies and fruits. They last, and they are unemployed-friendly. Or very carefully supply your provision with mask and gloves on is ok, only if you are 6 feet apart from other Kamikazes. Soap the packages, hot water the fruits, cook the veggies, or just leave them alone for two weeks.

So that is pretty cool. I removed the ice maker from our fridge, emptied the Baroque ceiling to cramp in frozen greens for two months. End time mode on. Been preparing this over the course of a month like a Squirrel when Santa Clara is dead silent in sleep. Because news is always late to the events formulating underneath; it’s a Beethoven’s shocking accent in a Schubert’s Serenade. An aftershock. Ain’t serene anymore!

Why Paella? A friend cooked that for us in a home banquet once. He roasted Spanish short rice, salmon, chicken sausages in a pan. Dinner was served with red and white wine and salad. Business starting, blueprint forming, bank accounts are afloat, enough budget for time and finance to go wrong in trials, at that time.

Paella is loved by Europeans, Middle Easterns, and Asians across the continent. We love FISH and RICE~! FISH and RICE~~! it’s a melting pot of seafood and sunshine, perfect healer of the situation we are in. It’s easy to cook and hard to get bored with. Just swap the ingredients when you do.

Ingredients. I made that pink pastel petal bowl by the way.

Here I present, an easy and lavish, restyled, Spanish paella, cooked in one pan. I hold many of my friends at heart for these special days, who’ve been surfing life with food deliveries and restaurants. I don’t know how they are pulling through this. So I’m writing this as dumb-proof as possible. Here is what we use for this Mediterranean love signature.

  • Forbidden rice from Amazon, because that’s the only organic rice left online after Amazon Wholefoods and Fresh delivery slots went grey.
  • Peas, frozen, good with rice.
  • Salmon, frozen.
  • Sausage, freeze it.
  • Colorful peppers, frozen.
  • Carrot sticks.
  • Brussel sprouts. (easily swappable)
  • Pink Himalayan salt (tastes better).
  • Whole black peppers.
  • Oil.
  • A porcelain art you created (optional) This is Artisan paella by artists.
  • Organic, everything organic.

Usually, chefs pan-fry fish first to solidify the shape, then follow with a stew. Not today, not in a lockdown, if I have to do this every day for two months and also tend to my wellbeing. (It’s a lockdown, not a breakdown.) I will not pan fry the fish and cook the rice in a separate rice cooker.

So here we go, rinse and clean the rice. Rub, rinse, polishing, whatever. Drain the water. Pour in new filtered water to three times higher than the rice level. Purple rice is hard to cook. Set in low heat, so you don’t need to touch it again before it burnt to the ground. Then go write.

Thirty minutes later, wake up from a writing flow, or block. Good, the rice is not burnt to carbon. Now the water has vapored much, the rice is flapping in the moist like stranded fish, you pour in the oil. Three stroke.

Oh hastily chop up the fish, sausage and carrots. Did you wash them? and the black peppers? ok dump them in. Stir the pot.

Forgot the salt! a pinch.

When the fish turns paler, add in soy sauce. I only have soy sauce for sauce now. Stir.

Make sure they don’t dry up and bbq. Throw in peas, sprouts, peppers, things that are easy to cook through. Heat kills the virus and we don’t eat anything raw without applying some sort of heat to it now.

Sample, cool it and taste. Low in salt, another pinch. Stir.

Done. Confession time: I think what Paella really needs is shrimp. We can style it exotically but it essentially needs shrimp.

So, paella is the cure to a bored palate. What is the cure to emotional isolation? Creation.

I thought of this a year ago, two things that give your life an anchor or meaning — Create or Procreate. So Art, or Love. They both are love and creation.

You’d be warmed knowing that the person you are missing is missing you too.

Stay productive. Love you all.

— A Writer in the Bay

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Documenting the Current Armageddon since 2017

I happen to be awake throughout the night on Mar. 11th, and saw in the market a candlestick freezing on top of a circuit breaker. It’s been three years since the talk goes around town, about our debt piling up reaching a dangerous breaking point per its ratio to GDP.

And it’s been three years since my friend introduced me to the term Apocalypse and Armageddon, not as Bible stories, but as forecasts. I thought he could be a bit lunatic. I didn’t understand the Bible as a screenplay of world events.

But indeed everyone felt it’s a strange time we live in, drama surfaces, casino owners showing their cards. Zoom outside of looking at just one arena, be it financial, economical or political, just for a moment, to gauge it all as one orchestra, you saw the eerily loud prelude in 2016, where the reality TV actors of politicians steered the mass consciousness into two extreme ends.

In 2017 Trump tweeted about an act under a code name, Covfefe. Nothing like the interpretations on Wikipedia, it doesn’t have to do with his “feud” with the press. No one has a feud with anyone in a good cop bad cop play.

However, some of us understood that Covfefe triggers the speed up of the endgame. Anticipating an economical and social collapse since 2017, we forgot about it in the long waiting. Even when Coronavirus spread in China, it did not come to us that this is it, the black swan.

Lately, an open-source engineer who built Apache, Jon Stevens, shared this video on his Facebook.

Count 90 years as a cycle, for human to repeat their mistakes. Herding with the alternating fiscal policy and monetary policy — the first 45 years, grow the crop; the next 45 years, reap the crop. The pendulum, with this pumping force of the productivity and the reinforcement of a molded group consciousness to direct this productivity propels us along an agenda.

Slumbering Americans bounce between a short spectrum of greed and fear. On the way to the stupid Singularity they will cut our connection as One. The spiritual dimension of this cacophony, stands almost at the center of it all, I will explain in the last part of the article.

We entertained the idea of all the worst-case scenarios, of a very segregated and totalitarian world. In concerning war and chaos, I invite the math minds and intuitive minds to join to understand the grand scheme and get the social discourse going. (Clearly there isn’t enough time for me to understand the current finance world before the next change hitting us, so I will keep coming back to expand this writing as I learn. This was supposed to be my fiction material, and now I’m throwing it out for free as Gonzo journalism in Medium. (And so far they won’t publish it. Sensitive info? ) Because changes happen in a matter of two days. At this rate, in one month, instead of writing sci-fi, I would be writing history and feeling loss that it didn’t help to actively forge the path at this critical time.)

Historically the Public Debt to GDP ratio peaks at the time of Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Now.

In history, a sudden dramatic money multiply happens before a war to fund the war. It results in wealth transfer (the Mystery of Banking by Murray Rothbard). Though purchasing debt through repo market took place of federal reserve banking, but notice the direct relation between money printing and militant expansion throughout history. 

Three zenith points make 2020 comparable to 1930S, an era faded into black and white picture and only a few alive to remember: the gap between rich and poor, the debt to GDP ratio, the rise of populism.

Toolkits that the central bank uses:  We currently are witnessing a great wealth transfer where Fed is owning the industries through stock market bail-out. This measure in reality just worsened the wealth distribution. The large asset holders just got bailed out with many sold their stocks low.

As some have said, it resembles a socialism society. But Fed is not a government agency. There is yet any term for this newly emerged Cthulhu type of thing.

Fed adjusted to 0 interest rate desperately in trying to stimulate the spending and generating paychecks, which, smacks on a pandemic lockdown where people are not spending (this is fresh).

Despite all the money printing, the money supply is not enough. The liquidity shortage will bring a deflation and the current financial toolkits are losing it. 

Is there a war and revolution looming in the coming decade? We stand right at the edge of it.

As we already predicted, from the early news on Central Bank Digital Currency, and the cover of a 1980’s Economist magazine, a global currency is in the making. A central bank puts money directly to your pocket without using the commercial banks for expansion and contraction. What does this mean?

Would it really be a peaceful transition? And surely down this road, there is AI lurking in the horizon asking more from you, probably bio implants to merge with the network of intelligence. Just like how we predicted the downfall of the economy since 2017, we see an underlying theme here. It wants more order and control, and we are entering into the era of AI and Space.

The push and pull of Populism and Communism might emerge again, but this time do you need to tread on the old Lenin Stalin path again? It’s not even that different from the extreme right. Every thought experiment came after the Great Depression failed us by missing the middle path. The lack of a constructive practical social economical model in the group minds prevents us from bringing it into reality. Just, the fact that everyone is lashing out on Fed yet No One has came up with a replacement plan is like a society being blindfolded from dreams.

If we are unhappy with one entity exploiting us using money, how does a community of people maintain markets and trades without that money? Do we need everything built with global supply chain? How do we sustain an industrial world globally?

With all these questions calling for answers, I asked some smart friends to come up with a practical economical model that’s not promoting the current pyramid structure.

It’s not easy. For the economists just don’t have a panorama of how things coming into being in this universe, and don’t yet boldly hold on to the magical possibility, that by changing minds, you change the reality.

There is some scientific spiritual preaching we need to do before getting everybody on board to lift us up from the pit.

See the story under, how manipulation of mass psyche and energy being used by Edward Bernays, the father of Mass Communication and nephew to Freud, in self servitude.

As a law of the universe, this kind of manipulation produces backlashes. In an individual, it’s your personal emotional off-balance and plight; on a massive scale, it’s Depression and war. We’ve been locked in this pendulum for over 5000 years in mass hypnosis — at the lower part of the composition of human nature. You, as a beast, and you as a soulful being, pans out in totally different behaviors. One of you could be tucked in anxiety and the feeling of incompleteness and the consequent depression or aggression, and the other you could be just chilling in Baroque music. As a group, you can imagine. And last century the pendulum was just swinging higher and higher.

Where is everybody at in this organized chaos.

Marc Fleury released Two Prime FF1 on Mar. 10th, right on the crash. He responded to the situation with this 39-page pamphlet, mentioning AI and Peaceful transition. You can get it here or ask him for a copy. As Fleury is known for interacting with mystic energies, he continues to perform rituals in progressing the projects and receives 6666 in response in his Google authenticator.

Archer Norton, spiting out Robert Anton Wilson level of truth to Robert’s research subject at Occupy Denver 2011 — a movement grew out of Fed’s response to 2008 Financial Crisis.

Meanwhile, just before the market freefell, former OTO student Archer Norton voted with his feet and moved from the occult capital Denver to Oklahoma the capital of bison to grow plants, getting shared supplies from neighbors and the community.

The anarchist density in him is dangerously high. The hazardous amount of TNT in the box could knock us back into the stone age, where we all enjoy barter economy and robbing coffee from neighbors. As usual, he self-triggers on the word money or blockchain and performs social shaming.

“Money is enslavement. Money is energy. Bank is the bank that guides water, it guides money through society.” he rants to my earphone in two two-hour calls, “Work does not need the reward of money. I work because I want to. Native Americans in South America live a good life.”

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