The Civic Lubbock, Inc. Board is pleased to announce the upcoming inductions into the West Texas Walk of Fame for 2023.
Civic Lubbock, Inc. Announces 2023 West Texas Walk of Fame Inductees
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Experience the Future of Upgradeable Appliances With Signature Kitchen Suite
It barely warrants mentioning that upgrading the kitchen often ranks high on every homeowner’s wishlist. In reality, when the day arrives, the task is often daunting and stressful. That’s because everyone wants to make the right choices – picking the best appliances to fit our everyday needs today, and also hopefully for many years to come. It can be a lot of pressure when you’re weighing options about buying big ticket items such as a new range, refrigerator, multi-cooker, or other large kitchen appliance. You’re essentially committing to a long-term relationship with those specifications and features attached to your eventual choices. Like we said, stressful.
Luxury kitchen appliance maker Signature Kitchen Suite wants to change the narrative with the announcement of ThinQ UP, an additional set of features expanding LG ThinQ powered appliances to evolve according to users’ lifestyles, all easily downloadable from the LG ThinQ app.
With ThinQ, you can control and monitor your Signature Kitchen Suite appliances right from your smartphone or any other ThinQ-enabled device.
So, how does ThinQ UP future-proof the kitchen? It all starts with ThinQ, a platform which provides a simple way to monitor, control, care, and customize, allowing for easy upgrades and enhancements over the span of the appliance’s lifetime. This means as time passes, you won’t have to replace your entire appliance to gain access to new features as they emerge.
An important byproduct of this platform’s upgradability is a more sustainable life cycle. With ThinQ UP, the brand is prioritizing reducing waste by minimizing the need for complete appliance replacements and establishing a more environmentally-friendly approach to appliance ownership, extending ownership and, in turn, reducing electronic waste.
But it’s not just about future upgrades. ThinQ-paired appliances are designed to serve your needs in purposeful ways within the kitchen in a myriad of ways today, boasting extensive connectivity and smart capabilities, and integrating seamlessly with a greater smart home ecosystem. The ThinQ platform is designed around the ability to control and monitor compatible appliances from anywhere using a smartphone, or with voice commands using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. You haven’t experienced “the future is now” convenience until you’ve commanded your dishwasher to start from another room.
The ThinQ ecosystem extends into nearly every part of the home, including the living room, office, and even the laundry room, thanks to its integration throughout Signature Kitchen Suite and LG’s product lines.
Imagine being able to check whether you left the refrigerator door open while at the grocery store, see if the dishwasher is finished running, or be notified when it’s time for your water filter to be replaced. For those who enjoy wine regularly, picture storing and keeping inventory of your favorite vintages within a connected wine cellar with its very own label scanner. Over time it can not only learn what you like to drink, but can even recommend new wines, like a personalized digital sommelier.
The SKS oven and range hood can be connected to automatically turn on, adjusting ventilation settings to keep the interior air clear and smells to a minimum.
You can also use the ThinQ app to keep track of your groceries. The Signature Kitchen Suite refrigerator not only keeps food fresh, but the ThinQ app can suggest recipes based on what ingredients you have using ThinQ Recipe. LG’s Scan to Cook feature can supplement over 10,000 one-click shoppable recipes.
And who hasn’t been stumped about what to make for dinner? ThinQ’s LG Original Series recipe collection solves meal time indecision with a digital cookbook of delectable dishes developed by SKS’ own Executive Chef Nick Ritchie to add to your cooking repertoire. Learning a new recipe can be daunting, so each recipe is accompanied with a how-to video to stream to your mobile device and help along the way, from preparation to plating your restaurant-quality meal at home.
If you have a Signature Kitchen Suite oven, there is even less guesswork involved while cooking – the appliances actively adjust settings according to the recipe and ingredients, ensuring perfect results every time. With ThinQ appliances, it’s like having your own personal assistant in the kitchen, guiding you through culinary adventures, continually adapting to what, when, and how you like to cook.
These are all real world features available today, thanks to ThinQ. Each feature has been thoughtfully conceived to take out the guesswork and give you peace of mind… even when you’re away from home. It’s all made possible by ThinQ’s connectivity technology, weaving Signature Kitchen Suite appliances and other compatible devices into a fully connected ecosystem, where appliances collaborate into a seamless user experience.
Wine connoisseurs will appreciate the option to scan wine labels to keep track of their collection within the connected wine cellar from the ThinQ app. And to help find new favorites, the app also offers aggregated ratings and reviews, and can even recommend new wines based upon user preferences and searches.
More features alone do not define a luxury experience, something Signature Kitchen Suite emphasizes through its curated and accessible simplicity. Instead of fumbling through a confusing nested menu system, this new generation of appliances allows users to easily adjust settings, receive notifications, and even diagnose and troubleshoot issues remotely in a manner we’re already used to navigating daily.
Via ThinQ Care Alerts, ThinQ connected appliances can provide informative data about performance and efficiency with Usage Reports, troubleshoot problems with Smart Diagnosis and Trusted Advice features, and even summon expert help via an integrated Concierge Service – all to your mobile device.
Overall, Signature Kitchen Suite attracts plenty of attention with its combination of luxurious design and category leading features. But what you may come to appreciate most with the brand’s ThinQ technology powered appliances is the seamless convenience and connectivity they add to the overall smart home environment. With remote control and monitoring capabilities used in harmony with other ThinQ smart home devices, Signature Kitchen Suite has designed a solution for keeping up with rapid advancements in technology, ensuring your smart home remains intelligently aware of your personal preferences and needs for years to come. To learn more about Signature Kitchen Suite’s products with ThinQ technology and to see how they can fit into your lifestyle, visit www.signaturekitchensuite.com.
Assa Ashuach Wants Footwear to Evolve With Every Step
Assa Ashuach of London-based Assa Studio Limited may not be a household name, but the designer has been at the forefront of additive manufacturing 3D printing since the early 2000s, invited by the likes of Nike, Samsung, and IDEO for his innovative approach with novel materials and utilization of pioneering fabrication methods. His latest project – the Evolve Footwear Collection – is characteristic of Ashuach’s embrace of the speculative, this time leading at the forefoot of footwear.
A “biometric evolutionary” gel midsole shoe embedded with network of 3D-printed sensors, the various prototype iterations of the Evolve look less like typical athletic footwear and more like something grown from a petri dish (or perhaps even a form inspired by this transparent-domed denizen of the deep).
The matrix of sensors are positioned to collect step-by-step biofeedback, not only to improve the wearer’s own fit, but also to inform and shape future iterations as the shoe’s namesake communicates.
The fabric uppers of one version of the Evolve also includes color-changing particles integrated into a conductive fabric upper.
The shoe itself is made from thousands of gel particles manufactured by Sratasy, a multi-density polymer engineered to tailor cushioning to the gait and weight of its wearer. It’s also an ideal material for embedding with sensors to gather specific data.
Ashuach imagines the Evolve or its eventual successors to be equipped to inform its wearer of changes in weight, foot strike, or other indicators communicated by the weight distribution during movement or at a standstill, creating a “dialogue between the physical and virtual” – a category of wearables that is surely guaranteed to evolve into a mainstream option for athletes and the public alike.
AI art, a refuge for techies
Half a year into the AI boom, the artists embracing AI in San Francisco’s Mission District generally have a tech background.
“I’m here for it,” said Ashley Herr, who’s visibly excited for the prospects by incorporating AI into her art. Herr’s AI art installation, recently displayed at Gray Area in the Mission, types out letters by recognizing a person’s posture. On June 21 the screen showed a disproportionately large number of Ms and Gs — an indication that it might have been melding different postures together.
While instructing visitors on how to interact with the installation, Herr kept a computer and the codes by her side. Most tools for AI art require some basic programming skills to maximize its potential. And most, like Herr who is a marketing professional for an NFT marketplace in terms of her day job, share a familiarity with tech.
Soon, however, the tools to create AI artwork will likely be available to a wider range of users. “My feeling or my intuition is that over the next few years, or maybe even a few months, we’re going to see more and more tools that are made user friendly,” said Karim Jerbi, a professor at the University of Montreal and an associate professor at Mila, one of the world’s leading AI institutes based in Quebec. Jerbi’s team is currently trying to answer the question of whether ChatGPT is creative by measuring its creativity.
For now, however, the AI tech world seems most embraced by the tech savvy.
Like Herr, sculptor Sophi Kravitz, who is an electrical engineer, is also thrilled about the AI boom. She’s used Midjourney, a San Francisco-based generative AI program, as a source for inspiration in the past seven months. Uniquely, on Midjourney, the process of generating images is open to the public, meaning users can potentially see the creative process of artists they enjoy.
Kravitz’s latest series, “ChimerAIs,” depicts modern day mythological creatures. But to start out, she hunts for inspiration in the work of other artists on Midjourney, attempting to transform and modify certain elements even as she blends them with the work of a dozen others.
For her, this is a way of capturing the collective imagination she’s seen on AI image tools. “Things change,” she said, sounding like an early cubist making the realization that an object can be depicted on the same canvas from different points of view.
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Herr’s AI art installation types out letters by recognizing a person’s posture. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 21, 2023. -
Cristina Isabel Rivera’s latest work combines a short film of the Amazon rainforest with images of passion flowers generated by AI. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 22, 2023. -
Images created by LeiaDream using prompt, “Mission District San Francisco during sunset trees.” Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 22, 2023. -
Sophi Kravitz’s latest series, “ChimerAIs,” depicts modern day mythological creatures. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 21, 2023.
“For me, AI is just a tool like anything else, like WiFi, like social media, like all these different things that we use,” said photographer Cristina Isabel Rivera, who works in digital production for tech. Her latest work combines a short film of the Amazon rainforest with images of passion flowers generated by AI to raise awareness for environmental protection.
Currently, she’s looking forward to what she will discover about her own work after training an AI model with her 15 years archive of photos.
An individual style is what most art departments hope to develop in their students, said Kurt Ralske, department chair of media arts at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. “The thing that we do in art schools — students come in and four years later we want them to have their own style.”
Nat Schager, a former software engineer at TikTok whose background is in programming, enjoys the feeling of losing control and ceding part of the decision to AI, but he acknowledges how different this is from the traditional experience of making art. “I tried to embrace the chaos,” he said. Recently accepted into Parsons School of Design with a full scholarship, Schager plans to continue exploring making art with code — and he won’t be the only one.
At Tufts, according to Ralske, art professors even planned to offer a course to teach how to write prompts, as AI art is generally generated from a user’s written text. But their failed search was a clear indication of the field’s growth pangs, as they couldn’t find the right person to bridge the fields of art and technology.
Meanwhile, dramatic policy changes have taken place at the Columbus College of Art & Design over the past few months, according to Charlotte Belland, chair of its animation program. Controversially, countless original works have been used to train the AI model without the artist’s consent, but it’s become difficult to treat the resulting student work as plagiarism.
In classrooms, professors are also delving into the legal and scientific aspects of AI, but a course on how to make better use of AI in art? “It’s about time,” said Belland. “In academia, we also have that problem where we move like a turtle. We will get there eventually, but we move a little slowly.”
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AI almost feels like a buzzword now, said Quinn Keck, a data scientist and artist, and consequently players in this new market “can get away with insane things like no other industry.” Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 21, 2023. -
Emeline Brulé and Michelle Venetucci ask AI models to design decorative letters on fabric, and mistakes come one after another. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 20, 2023. -
Emeline Brulé and her nine-month-son Orion at hackerspace NoiseBridge. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 20, 2023. -
Photographer David Aughenbaugh is amazed by AI’s potential to produce photos that can be enlarged infinitely, which performs especially well on the abstract images he takes. Photo by Yujie Zhou, June 21, 2023.
Ubiquitous concerns about AI’s ethical downsides
AI almost feels like a buzzword now, said Quinn Keck, a 33-year-old data scientist and artist, and consequently players in this new market “can get away with insane things like no other industry.”
In particular, she said, many AI companies even try to make it seem like the model is alive without being under anyone’s control. She sees this as a way to avoid culpability. “Like, what if you went to a restaurant and they couldn’t tell you what was in your food?”
A couple blocks away at hackerspace Noisebridge, Emeline Brulé, who teaches human-computer interaction and design at the University of Sussex, and Michelle Venetucci, a Yale Ph.D student who focuses on anthropologist of technology, are figuring out the edge of AI model by using it in nontraditional ways.
Instead of making photorealistic images, they ask AI models to design decorative letters on fabric, and mistakes come one after another — the J is reversed, the E has additional loops, and the numbers are never quite right. “I’m working on how we use art to make the general public more aware of the ethical limitations of AI,” said Brulé.
For photographer David Aughenbaugh, who also works as a visual effects artist in the film industry, the ethical burden of using AI was once so unbearable that when the AI boom first came, he was even hesitant to continue using it because of fears of the backlash. “I didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, he’s one of those AI artists,’” he said. Still, he remains amazed by AI’s potential to produce photos that can be enlarged infinitely, which performs especially well on the abstract images he takes, and the potentials of the technology remain undeniable.
So far, most say the artist remains critical. “The human element of the artist putting in there is what can make it happen. But once you pull the humans out of the equation, the computers can’t do it,” said Steve Piasecki, venue manager and program manager for Artists Incubator, Gray Area.
The Museum of the Big Bend Gets a Gorgeous $11 Million Expansion
Art
The Museum of the Big Bend Gets a Gorgeous $11 Million Expansion
The Museum of the Big Bend Gets a Gorgeous $11 Million Expansion
Long an under-the-radar destination, the Alpine museum is transformed by its graceful new addition and the West Texas artworks inside.
Rebekah Antrosio
Mitre Peak cuts a striking figure against the West Texas sky, its angular summit piercing the desert mountain landscape between Alpine and Fort Davis. Nearly a century ago, the landmark captured the imagination of San Antonio artist Julius Woeltz, who painted a large canvas of Mitre Peak looming above a colorful foreground of boulders, oak trees, and a glimmer of water.
Woeltz’s seven-by-five-foot work, created in the early 1930s, gives viewers an intimate look at the peak, as if they were approaching on foot and stopped to rest along a shady stream. For a broader perspective, however, you can step out onto the sunny porch of the painting’s home—the Museum of the Big Bend in Alpine—and see Mitre Peak itself about ten miles to the northwest, a jagged tooth against the vast Davis Mountains horizon.
Such is the case with many of the artworks featured in the Museum of the Big Bend’s new Emmett and Miriam McCoy Building, which celebrates its grand opening June 23 and 24. The 10,000-square-foot, $11 million expansion doubles the museum’s size and includes multiple galleries that showcase artworks interpreting the landscapes, cultures, and history of far West Texas.
“The museum is now able to tell not only the history of the Big Bend but also the story of the artists who came to this area to experience the vast landscape and big skies,” says Mary Bones, museum director. “You’re getting a fuller story of the people, the history, and the art of the area.”
Located on the campus of Sul Ross State University in Alpine, the Museum of the Big Bend has long chronicled regional heritage, particularly since the restoration of its 1937 native-stone home and the debut of new historical exhibits in 2007. The museum welcomes about 20,000 visitors annually, a fraction of the 500,000-plus who make the trek to Big Bend National Park, located about an hour to the south. But for those in the know, a stopover at the Alpine museum offers an illuminating look at the people who have shaped the region, from Indigenous inhabitants to explorers, soldiers, ranchers, miners, and the National Park Service. The new expansion amplifies an artistic viewpoint of its Chihuahuan Desert surroundings and elevates Sul Ross’s long, storied connection to the Texas art scene.
Today, when you think of West Texas and fine art, you probably think of Marfa. But in the 1930s, Alpine had a small but thriving visual arts scene centered around a workshop called the Summer Art Colony. In 1932, what was then known as Sul Ross Teachers College hired Woeltz to direct its art department. Working with his San Antonio friend and colleague Xavier Gonzalez, Woeltz launched a summer painting workshop with courses open to students and the public. Woeltz and Gonzalez left in 1936 and ’38, respectively, but they laid the groundwork for a series of high-profile Texas painters of the ’30s and ’40s, including Otis Dozier, William Lester, and Harry Anthony DeYoung, who all served as summer instructors. The workshops focused mostly on outdoor painting, known as en plein air. The classes traveled to practice their craft at places such as Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande and the historic Fort Davis frontier military post.
“You had this opportunity to work with some of the best early Texas artists in the state,” Bones explains. “There was studio painting and classroom instruction, but they also did a lot of traveling in the area and exposed students to this beautiful country—the light, the sky, and the great topography and geology that you can’t really find in any other part of the state.”
The museum’s new building highlights four large artworks that came from the Summer Art Colony, including Woeltz’s Mitre Peak and Branding Scenic Cathedral Mountain. The latter depicts cowboys working with cattle on a ranch south of Alpine. In the same hallway, visitors will find two six-by-fourteen-foot paintings by Gonzalez. Moonlight over the Chisos, painted in 1934, depicts dramatic clouds in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park; his Davis Mountains conveys the landscape of Davis Mountains State Park and shows the first McDonald Observatory dome completed on Mount Locke in 1939.
A highlight of the new exhibit is Tom Lea’s eleven-painting series, dubbed “Western Beef Cattle.” Following World War II, the intrepid El Paso artist spent a year traveling and documenting the North American cattle industry for Life magazine. The paintings—on long-term loan from the Dallas Museum of Art—chronicle the history of cattle in the New World. Lea imagined the livestock across time and territory, from Spanish conquistadors unloading cows from a ship at Vera Cruz, Mexico; to wild-eyed Texas longhorns on the range; to the goings-on of the Chicago stockyards.
“There’s a real heritage as far as artists who’ve gone out to the Trans-Pecos and done work there,” says Ron Tyler, a board member of the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art and past director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. “But at the same time, the Big Bend doesn’t really fit the definition of regional because it’s such a spectacular place and has drawn artists from many different countries.”
Fred Darge straddles the line of regional and international artists in the Museum of the Big Bend’s new galleries. Born in Germany in 1900, Darge immigrated to Chicago in 1923, attended art school, and ended up in Dallas in 1935. He made extended painting excursions to the Big Bend over the following decades, capturing scenes of ranching life, goat herders, and sheep shearing.
“I have seen some exceptionally good paintings by Darge,” says J.P. Bryan, a well-known collector of Western art and artifacts who founded the Bryan Museum in Galveston and serves as executive director of the Texas State Historical Association. “He captured our culture at an important time just like Tom Lea did, and so did José Cisneros.” Two Cisneros watercolor paintings—among thirty-plus artworks on loan from the John L. Nau III Collection of Texas Art—are part of the Museum of the Big Bend’s opening exhibit. “Those guys gave us a real gift in terms of translating the past to the present.”
The historical theme links the new art galleries to the Museum of the Big Bend’s original building, which holds a collection of historical maps and the sweeping “Big Bend Legacy” gallery. “There probably won’t be another museum that will have the art and artifacts and other things to express any better the history of what happened in the Trans-Pecos region of Texas than they have,” said Bryan, who also owns the Gage Hotel in Marathon. He’s in the midst of a project with local officials to renovate the vintage Marathon Museum, near the Gage, with art and artifacts from the Bryan Museum’s collection. “I think both what the Big Bend museum seems inclined to do, and what we’re getting ready to do in Marathon, is to tell a story to help people know a whole lot more about the place they’re visiting and hopefully inspire them to want to come back.”
The Museum of the Big Bend broke ground on the $11 million expansion in August 2021, following a four-year fundraising effort. It’s the latest chapter for an institution that started with the collection of a single arrowhead from nearby Sunny Glen in 1921.
The new building got its name based on a $5 million gift from Miriam McCoy, the late widow of Emmett McCoy. Emmett McCoy was a San Marcos–based entrepreneur who grew his father’s roofing company into McCoy’s Building Supply, one of the nation’s largest family-owned vendors of construction materials.
From above, the new building looks something like a triangular wing attached to the museum’s historic native-stone home, which was built in 1937 with funding from the Texas Centennial Commission. Rather than trying to match the historical stone, Bones said, designers chose a treated corten steel exterior. The siding is weathering into a reddish-brown that offsets the deeper burgundy of the native stone.
Designed by Larry Speck of Page Architects in Austin, the new building contains other nods to its older sibling. Half-moon window bays harken to the curvature of the 1937 building’s exposed lamella arch roof. And in the museum’s new entryway, where the two buildings converge, the old stone exterior meets the floor-to-ceiling windows and woodwork of the new building.
Even the new flooring is deliberate—the polished concrete contains local aggregate to imbue it with the grays and reds of the surrounding volcanic mountains. “We kept it a very simple design and used simple materials so we could ease the pressure of maintenance for the building,” Bones says.
The windows and patio are perhaps the building’s most striking features, because they capture the West Texas light and open to vistas of the Davis Mountains. Perched on the side of Hancock Hill (not far from its beloved desk), the location looks across Alpine to the ranges beyond. The landscaping around the building also leans on the natural surroundings, utilizing boulders and native plants including ocotillo, palo verde trees, and basket grass.
There’s also a new event space that the museum plans to rent for parties, workshops, and the like. “The idea was not only would we have gallery space and collection storage, but we’d also have a cultural event center, which could become a revenue source to support the museum,” Bones says. “The event center will give us more programming opportunities for the community and visitors.”
Now that Bones has shepherded the Emmett and Miriam McCoy Building to fruition, she’s setting her sights on upgrading the museum’s original building with a $750,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project includes the creation of a Texas Map Research Center, upgrades to the museum’s education center and utilities, and a refresh of the “Big Bend Legacy” permanent exhibit.
Tyler hopes the Museum of the Big Bend’s growth will enable it to entice more people as Big Bend National Park continues to see surging attendance. “This may very well lift the museum to another level and attract a larger public,” he says. “There’s enormous potential because the national park continues to be an attraction, and that’s only growing. The museum has been a part of that equation and will become an even more important part of it now.”
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Negligent Storytelling: The Heart of Cannabis Marketing Failures
Despite its many challenges, cannabis is supposed to be one of the most exciting industries in the modern age.
And make no mistake, safe access to cannabis is exciting. But you wouldn’t know it by the lackluster marketing efforts coming out of the space.
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Perhaps you’ve heard the complaints: tight budgets, regulatory restrictions, crazy tax laws, and understaffed teams. As painful as these realities are, they shift focus away from the heart of the matter.
The real issue in cannabis marketing: negligent storytelling.
Storytelling is as important as language itself. It’s one of the few things that unites us as human beings. It’s how we achieve clarity and meaning. It’s how we make decisions and inspire action in others.
Nothing happens without a compelling story—except apathy, boredom, or confusion.
And confused people never say yes to something.
By the way, how many people do you think are still confused about cannabis?
Missing in action: story-driven marketing
Storytelling is the backbone of great marketing, but very few cannabis marketers have actually mastered the principles of story.
Pull up the social media channels for almost any brand, and you’ll mostly find announcements for discounts and special offers or an endless line of product glamor shots and other storytelling fails.
Here’s another glaring instance: a dispensary website full of blog posts about quarterly financial updates and recent additions to the board of directors. Instead of targeting prospective customers, investors are the target audience.
“Cannabis brands struggle with storytelling for a few reasons,” said Brad Bogus, a fractional chief marketing officer in multiple industries including cannabis. “For one, most companies struggle because almost no one teaches storytelling in business school or when coaching entrepreneurs. It’s a skill of art, not business, and is left out of most education, training, coaching, and mentoring. Most people just don’t have experience in it.”
The other big issue, Bogus continued, is a lot of cannabis operators simply can’t afford to hire a storytelling specialist. The economic struggle for the majority of operators is very real.
“Most operators have to scale way back on their marketing budget, leading to mostly entry-level hires who don’t specialize—great at executing on tactics, not great on strategy and messaging,” he said. “With more budget to work with, one can expand the marketing team to include specialists capable of great storytelling.”
The disconnect between brands and consumers
Even when funding is available for robust marketing efforts, many cannabis brands don’t have a clue about how to truly connect with consumers.
“Many times I’ve had to create stories out of nothing,” senior brand strategist Bri Smith said of clients who invested in cannabis with no previous point of reference to the plant. “No personal connection to cannabis, no lifelong mission of advocacy, no unique offerings solving a problem. Some brands don’t have a story to tell.”
Brands also struggle with creativity and finding the best ways to reach their audience.
“Billboards and crappy programmatic ads are horrific at storytelling,” said Scott Jennings, founder and chief executive officer at Pantry Food Co. “They’re low-level ads that aren’t convincing a large percentage of potential customers to come into the industry.”
Indeed, demand generation is practically nonexistent in cannabis today, which says a lot when you consider how many people are still trying to overcome 80-plus years of harmful misinformation.
It’s ironic. While cannabis legalization efforts call for powerful storytelling and a relentless drive to change hearts and minds, this intense focus abruptly vanishes after legalization.
Getting clear about your target audience
Who’s your target audience? If it’s “everyone who smokes weed,” you’ve stumbled into the same pitfall as many other cannabis marketers.
Cannabis consumers come from all different backgrounds, and trying to lump them together is trying to be everything to everyone. You’d think cannabis operators would have enough business acumen to avoid this trap, and yet it’s quite common throughout the industry.
“I think there’s a belief that the cannabis consumer is a part of the ‘cannabis community,’ as if we all exist in the same places with similar interests, beliefs, and style,” Bogus said.
Cannabis consumers actually don’t identify as “the cannabis community,” he continued. Some like to mellow out around jam bands; others are into punk and street protests. They’re corporate professionals with minivans full of kids, or they’re weekend warrior outdoors junkies.
“What will make your marketing the most effective is to pick one or two target customer profiles and absolutely nail it with your marketing and messaging to them,” Bogus advised. “If you can slam dunk for those customers, you can expand and win others. Focus. Be something specific to someone and you’re likely to pick up others along the way. Stand for something or stand for nothing. Those are your choices.”
Along these lines, most cannabis marketers are guilty of the same oversight that plagues marketing departments in many other industries: not talking to the customers. Is there a worse blunder in marketing than not knowing your audience? If you want to compromise your marketing efforts from the very beginning, that’s how you do it.
“I’d also blame investors, distributors, and sales reps,” Jennings said. “A well-known [consumer packaged goods] expert pointed out to me how all of these groups are incentivized to push operators or brands to grow as fast as possible and into as many accounts, stores, or markets as possible. Meaning sell to everyone because everyone is your customer. How wrong that is.”
Guiding people toward your brand
“Oh, but come on! It’s weed! It’ll sell itself,” said countless cannabis stakeholders. That sort of attitude is probably why the cannabis industry has yet to achieve any real market penetration.
According to a 2022 Gallup poll, only 16 percent of Americans consume cannabis. Meanwhile, the country is evenly split regarding cannabis’s overall effect on society—49 percent say it’s positive and 50 percent consider it negative.
Imagine the successful marketer as a safari guide who knows the terrain and the wildlife (the product) inside out. They’re also deeply attuned to their guests (the audience)—their interests, fears, and expectations. The guide creates an unforgettable experience by skillfully navigating the landscape and its creatures to match their guests’ desires.
Now imagine the opposite with a safari guide who doesn’t know the lay of the land and/or is clueless about their guests. You see these sorts of trainwrecks in cannabis marketing all the time.
“For a lot of the early brands on shelves in legal states, I think it became easy to believe that none of this disciplined brand-building really mattered. They probably felt they were going to do well no matter what,” noted Tim Naughton, founder of Heady, a cannabis digital marketing agency. “And instead of the ‘green rush’ drawing in competitors that were better at storytelling, the space became saturated by lots of brands that didn’t have much unique about them.”
Naughton believes the problem is compounded by brands overthinking content creation.
“They think they need production value and creative agencies, rather than just getting started with simple, authentic stuff,” he said.
In essence, it’s not just a marketing issue or a content-development issue.
It’s not just a public relations issue.
It’s a storytelling issue.
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Stagwell (STGW) Agencies Win Off the Beach with 12 Cannes Lions Awards
NEW YORK and CANNES, France, June 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW), the challenger network built to transform marketing, took home top honors at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the largest gathering in the creative marketing community. Network agencies including 72andSunny, Allison+Partners, Forsman & Bodenfors, and GALE won a combined 12 Cannes Lions awards across the categories of creative, design, digital, entertainment and PR.
“I want to applaud our team and amazing agencies for an excellent showing at the festival in our second year. The success of Sport Beach was widely recognized as a clear demonstration of our creative ingenuity,” said Stagwell Chairman and CEO Mark Penn. “As we do for our clients we challenged the conventional,” he added.
Overall, Stagwell agencies including Anomaly, Doner and Observatory were put on nearly 40 shortlists.
Cannes Lions Winners
Gold Lions
- Creative Data: GALE – “Chipotle Doppelgänger”
Silver Lions
- PR: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”
Bronze Lions
- Creative B2B: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Pure Waste”
- Design: Forsman & Bodenfors – “The Shuffle Ticket”
- Design: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”
- Digital Craft: Forsman & Bodenfors – “Kami”
- Entertainment Lions For Music: Forsman & Bodenfors – “The Shuffle Ticket”
- Industry Craft: 72andSunny – “The Cathedral of Diablo”
Stagwell Agencies Credited on Integrated Work with Non-Stagwell Agencies
In addition to the above, Stagwell agency Allison+Partners supported PR efforts for several winning campaigns with non-Stagwell agencies:
Titanium Lions
- Titanium: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”
Silver Lions
- PR: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”
Bronze Lions
- Creative Effectiveness: Allison+Partners and Corona – “Plastic Fishing Tournament”
- Creative Strategy: Allison+Partners and Budweiser – “Bring Home the Bud”
About Stagwell
Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 13,000+ specialists in 34+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.
Media Contact
Sarah Arvizo
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SOURCE Stagwell Inc.
Sculpture Walk draws travelers over the weekend
Ott Jones got a first look at his sculpture “Queen of the Waterway” in the Mount Pisgah Cemetery on Saturday.
Incredible Composite Lightning Photography Lights Up Turkish Sky
Lightning is no doubt one of nature’s most impressive creations, from the 11-hour lightning marathon after the Tonga eruptions to bright green lightning bolts captured on Jupiter. Down on Earth is no exception with this spectacular composite image taken in the Turkish sky.
Amateur astronomer Uğur İkizler made this incredible image by combining images of the different lightning strikes that lit up the sky in Mudanya, Turkey. On June 16, between 10:58 and 11:48 pm, Uğur photographed the night sky and the different lightning bolt patterns as they struck over the water.
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This video shows the different elements that make up the final image.
Lightning is a rapid discharge of energy from the clouds, usually formed when negative charges in the bottom of a cloud are attracted to positive charges in the ground; these charges have to be great enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air. When a connection is made, the positive and negative charges rush to meet each other, and lightning heats the air along its path, making it expand. Thunder is the sound of the expanding air. According to NOAA, lightning can occur between charges within a cloud, known as intracloud lightning, or between opposite charges in the cloud and the Earth’s surface, known as cloud-to-ground lighting.
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Research has shown that lightning was crucial to the formation of life by converting nitrogen into a usable form. Lightning has also been found to create new materials even recently like this new phosphorus material that was created in Florida.
