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It’s Time to Recognize Your Marketing Is Not a Gumball Machine

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

The Gist

Market limitations. Focusing solely on demand generation leaves businesses open to a smaller portion of the market, neglecting the importance of building brand awareness.
Gumball mentality. The dangerous mindset of expecting immediate leads from marketing campaigns overlooks the value of long-term brand building and awareness efforts.
Brand revival. To achieve a balance between brand and demand, marketers must invest in comprehensive branding strategies, appeal to buyers’ emotions, and modernize content and measurement approaches.

Recently, most of the marketers I’ve spoken with feel like none of their tactics are working like they used to. There are multiple reasons for this, including the macroeconomy and buyer indifference to traditional tactics, but I believe one of the main reasons is that the demand gen model we’ve collectively built over the last 15 years has been prioritized at the expense of (more traditional) brand building.

When you look at it from an aerial perspective, it’s clear how this happened. Marketers were told to drive revenue, then held accountable to their performance (or lack thereof). This was a good thing, but as a side effect the industry became hell-bent on leads measurement above all else and, as a result, lost the art of building the larger brand.

This might not seem like a big deal, but I assure you it is. In fact, every aspect of your go-to-market, from pipeline creation to win rates to retention and more, will either be strengthened or weakened based on the caliber of your brand. So, how do you get back to the right balance of brand and demand? Here’s my take.

Realize That Demand-Only Limits Your Market

A significant part of the problem with the demand-only approach is that it leaves you open to a very small portion of the market. When you’re not building brand awareness about the problem in your category, you’ll forever be stuck with the small pool of your market that happens to be actively in-market for your solution right now. But guess what? That’s the exact same pool of accounts that your competitors are also fighting over.

Instead, think about expanding your market. By speaking to accounts that aren’t in-market at the moment, and then educating them about the problems you solve, you open up a much broader pool of prospects. This is especially important given the fact that today is the age of the anonymous self-service buyer. When potential customers aren’t downloading your e-books like they used to or flocking to other highly measurable tactics that were previously popular, you need to rely on more of the softer, less easy-to-measure brand activities to bolster your progress.

Get Rid of the Gumball Machine Mentality

Over time, executives from CEOs to CFOs and beyond have come to think of marketing like a gumball machine. You put a quarter in, you get a gumball. You put a campaign in, you get pipeline. This is a dangerous mindset to have since it prioritizes marketing that is measurable over marketing that is hard(er) to measure but more effective in the long-run.

If your entire focus is on executing the campaigns that will result in immediate leads, you’re going to miss the ancillary factors that amplify the results of your lead-gen efforts, namely, brand building and awareness. In other words, without good brand support, even the greatest demand gen programs will struggle to hit their goals. For example, a study from Comscore showed US Internet users are 49% more likely to visit an advertiser’s site if they have previously been exposed to display ads, and research at University of California, San Diego by Hoban and Bucklin found that exposure to advertising increased visits to the firm’s website up to 74.7% for previous nonvisitors. Put simply, investing in your brand equals better demand gen ROI.

Bringing Brand Back

The next logical question is how to get back to building your brand and awareness while not losing ground with your demand activities. But first, what is a brand? There are many definitions but my favorite is the one that says, “brand is what people say about your company when you’re not in the room.” And brands are built by the sum of every interaction a consumer has with your company.

With this in mind, here are the steps I recommend for making brand once again a focal point:

Recognize the scope of “brand.” It’s more than your logos, messaging and position. It’s also not a “set and forget” activity. It’s an always-on, comprehensive strategy that requires intentional action and investment.
Appeal to buyers’ reptilian brains. B2B buyers are people. People are emotional. And the fact that B2B buyers have emotions means that no matter how disciplined a buying process is, they will use emotionally driven heuristics to simplify complex decisions. In fact, whether the buyer realizes it or not, the decision is often made long before the buying process is completed. And when this happens, even subconsciously, much of the buying process ends up being an effort to justify the initial emotional decision. This is where branding comes in because brands inherently operate on an emotional level by stimulating the amygdala portion of the brain (part of the reptilian limbic system).
Make the investments.
- You and your executive team must commit marketing program dollars to messaging and positioning in the marketplace, even though it’s harder to measure. If you’re struggling to get buy-in, learn about how to set and defend your marketing budget and ROI with this updated mindset.
- It’s also essential to invest in your customers and advocates. They’re the ones who can go out into the world (even into “dark,” private communities where users are anonymous) and evangelize on your brand’s behalf.
Modernize your content strategy. Yes, you need content marketing but no, you can’t just gate e-books like we used to. Today, compelling thought leadership requires sharing insights that help your buyers perform better in their roles through accessible reports and guidance, not held behind gates. If you want to see masterful execution of this, take a look at Gong Labs.
Change how you think about measurement. Branding works by creating patterns of associations that have emotional force and, therefore, influence purchasing behavior, often unconsciously. This means that a large part of the impact is unconscious, making it harder to explain and measure how and why it works. The goal is not about getting a person to click, or download your e-book, or any of the traditional calls to action. Success means dropping traditional B2B demand generation metrics such as cost-per-click and cost-per-lead. The goal is better engagement over time, which can be measured using “test and control” groups (accounts exposed to your ads versus accounts not exposed).

When you realize that brand is just as important as demand, you’re already on your way to improving your initiatives and bolstering your results. Getting this right is crucial to your success. It’s a balancing act, but it’ll be worth the time and effort it will take to get others on board.

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In Focus: Sanford Health Recognizes Native American Youth Photographers

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Native

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The halls of Sanford Bemidji Medical Center now feature photographs from local Native American artists.

“Eagles Come Telling Stories,” or Bi-Dibaajimowag, is a collaboration between Sanford Health and the Watermark Art Center that spotlights Native American culture and art.

When it comes to holistic healing, this practice can go past the physical. For area hospitals like Sanford Health in Bemidji, they are considering the cultural aspects of the process. By integrating Native American practices like smudging or photographs by up-and-coming artists, these efforts can work to create a more inviting and educational environment for all patients.

While the main exhibit is through the East Entrance at the hospital, more photographs are scattered around the halls. One other practice To help make things more inclusive, Sanford is also planning is to hold a discussion with patients about their treatment.

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Focus on a personal photography project

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Photography

If you feel like you haven’t seen many articles from me, you’d be correct. I’ve finally decided to focus on a personal photography project.

To be honest, this has been in my head for about four years. Many of you are likely similar to me in the fact that you tend to have several projects going on at any one time. Website updates or creation, submitting images online to sell, contacting design firms and commercial art agencies, and the list goes on. With that comes anything that might be a distraction or excuse to NOT work on it — well for me anyway.

Arctic iceberg ice personal projects — Iceberg details Arctic

Antarctic iceberg ice personal projects — Iceberg details Antarctica

Personal photography projects help us focus

I’m done not working on my own work. Personal photography projects can help us refocus, get us back on track with our own work and veer us away from the distractions that surround us. While writing articles is part of my work, it is still a turn off the path of my own personal projects and photography.

I happen to be someone who is constantly looking for something to distract me from what I really should be focused on. Trust me, it doesn’t take much.

So, as I’m working on this project I thought I’d share some of the process and hopefully it’ll help you move forward on your own personal projects.

Arctic Puffin personal projects — Arctic Puffin

Antarctic Gentoo penguin personal projects — Antarctic Gentoo penguin

Some steps you can apply to any personal project

Come up with ideas

Coming up with ideas seems like the easy part. I have a never-ending list of ideas. Ideas wake me up at night and keep me awake. Do yourself a favor, write them down or record them somewhere. It doesn’t matter how silly or unobtainable they seem, keep track of them. They may not come to fruition right away, but they never go away and this way you’ll be ready to tackle whatever it is when it comes up again.

Research what you need to

Thankfully, we have access to so much information (too much so I think) that we can get help easily. Do you need to figure out how to self-publish a book? How about finding out what you need to do to start leading local photo tours and all that comes with that? Do you want to create a series of images and exhibit them at a gallery?

No matter what the project is, look up what you can and make the phone calls you need. Talk to others who have done similar projects. All of this research will help your project come together more quickly and go much more smoothly.

screen shot of Lightroom catalog — A view of my project images

Just start your personal project

This can be the hardest step. Start. Now. Do one little thing that gets your project going. Once you start you’ll get excited about it. When you’re excited about it you’ll want to work on it and you’ll (I’ll) stop looking for distractions.

Then just keep going. One little step at a time. Edit an image. Write the text that goes with an image. Create a mock-up book cover. Write your artist bio. Commit yourself to working on your project every single day. Even if you do something you think is so minor, it’s still progress.

Hold yourself accountable

Not good with accountability to yourself? Find a way.

Ask a friend, fellow photographer, coach or mentor to be an accountability partner. Have a plan for yourself to share with others either publicly or privately, so you are accountable to them and yourself for having to make progress they can see.

Write about your project. Post updates on social media, your blog, or you know, even write an article about it.

Ask for help

Make sure whoever you are telling about your project knows it’s ok to nudge you once in a while. Ask them to check in with you every so often to ask how your project is going.

If you are feeling you’ve hit a wall, reach out to someone and ask for some help to just talk you through whatever it is that has you stuck.

What are you waiting for?

Arctic waters wave personal project — Arctic waters

Antarctic water waves — Antarctic waters

OK, get going. Start.

Then share your project, the progress or when it’s finished. Tell us about it in the comments or share more about it in the Photofocus Community. These things are always easier when we share.

Woman demands full refund from wedding photographer after divorce. WhatsApp chat goes viral

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Photography

ByArfa Javaid

May 08, 2023 03:48 PM IST

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Four years after her big day, a woman contacted her wedding photographer demanding a full refund. She cited divorce as the reason for her request.

People hire wedding photographers to capture the moments from their big day that can be cherished for years to come. Some couples appreciate the work of their photographers so much that they contact them again for future events. However, a woman contacted her wedding photographer four years after her big day with an unexpected request. She demanded a refund, citing divorce as the reason. Yes, you read that right!

A screengrab of the viral WhatsApp chat. (Twitter/@LanceRomeo)

At first, the photographer thought that it was a prank. However, he later realised that she was serious and believed that she was ‘entitled to a refund’ because of her marital status. The photographer denied her request and shared the screenshots of their WhatsApp chat on Twitter. As expected, they went viral and received numerous responses from netizens.

Also Read: Katy Perry reacts to her clip from King Charles’ Coronation

“I swear my life is a movie. You can’t make this stuff up,” reads the caption of the WhatsApp screenshot shared by Twitter user Lance Romeo Photography. In the screenshot, the woman says, “I don’t know if you still remember me. You did a photoshoot for me at my wedding in Durban in 2019.” She adds, “Well, I’m now divorced, and those pictures — I and my ex-husband don’t need them anymore. You did a wonderful job on them, but they went to waste as we are now divorced. I will need a refund of the amount we paid you because we don’t need them anymore.” The photographer then asks if it was a joke, but the woman insists it was not. The photographer denies giving her a refund, saying he ‘can’t untake the pictures.’

Also Read: Woman’s farewell dance to Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai goes viral. Seen it yet?

The exchange continues with the woman saying she is ‘entitled to demand a refund’ as she no longer needs those pictures, but the photographer refuses to budge. The woman then threatens to take a legal action, to which the photographer agrees.

Also Read| Viral Brain Teaser: Can you solve this maths puzzle before the clip ends?

After the screenshots of the WhatsApp conversation went viral, the woman’s ex-husband contacted the photographer. On the condition of anonymity, he shared, “I read the articles. I apologise on her behalf.” He also added that it is “embarrasing”.

Since being shared on April 11, the primary tweet has accumulated over 3.8 lakh views, and the numbers are still increasing. The share has also prompted many to leave their thoughts in the comments section, with many saying that they are waiting for the woman to say that ‘it’s a prank’.

Also Read: Viral video shows ‘Grim Reaper’ at King Charles’ Coronation

Here’s how people reacted to the viral tweet:

“I can’t untake the pictures,” posted an individual with laughing emoticons. “There is noooooo way she is serious! The lawyer in me now wants to do a self moot and see how I’d deal with it if she was my client… but again… I suspect she wouldn’t be able to pay my fees… or later ask for a refund after we lose,” joked another. A third added, “It’s not a refund that’s needed here!” “Waiting for the part where she says it’s a prank,” added a fourth. A fifth commented, “I love how professional you were with your answers. But it was a prank, right? Cause wow! This is so wild. I have a friend that got divorced even before her wedding pics came, and she didn’t even ask for a refund, cause that is just not how it works!”

Also Read: Netizens react to street vendor’s fruit chai with ‘RIP tea’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arfa Javaid

Arfa Javaid is a journalist working with the Hindustan Times’ Delhi team. She covers trending topics, human interest stories, and viral content online.

Opinion | Photographing child workers helped change the law. They need help again.

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Ken Light is a documentary photographer and professor at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is author of the forthcoming “Report to the Shareholders,” about the Rust Belt in America.

Recent headlines about the widespread exploitation of children in America’s workplaces shocked me as it did many in our country. It was all the worse that the exploitation targeted undocumented migrant children who had recently entered the United States, seemingly abetted by a Health and Human Services Department determined to clear unaccompanied children from detention.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. As a documentary photographer of nearly five decades’ experience, I had witnessed similarly cruel treatment firsthand in the late 1970s when photographing migrant workers in the agricultural fields throughout the United States for my first book, “With These Hands.” This news story drew me to pull up film contact sheets from the work I had done all those decades ago.

Even then, what I was seeing in the fields had much older echoes. I found inspiration in the work of one of our country’s most famous social documentary photographers, Lewis Hine, who in 1908 became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor to aid the NCLC’s lobbying efforts to end the practice, photographing in coal mines, meatpacking houses, textile mills, canneries and many other workplaces.

Hine’s photos played a significant role in exposing the harsh realities of child labor in the United States during the early 20th century. He wanted to show both what had to be corrected and what had to be appreciated — namely, that our market full of goods depended on hard labor by some of the country’s smallest inhabitants. His photographs helped to pass the first federal child labor laws in the nineteen-teens. In 1938, finally, the Fair Labor Standards Act set new standards for the hours and conditions under which children could work.

When I started to photograph agriculture workers in 1979 and found children as young as 5 working in the fields, I was stunned. I had thought that Hine and his fellow social advocates had effectively eradicated child labor. But now it was my turn to travel across America to document this phenomenon.

Alexandra Petri: We must protect the children by … rolling back child labor laws

I got up early in the morning to see children working out in the fields. Entire families were picking together, because there were few child-care facilities and the family needed the extra income to eat. Often the children were swaddled in blankets half asleep as their parents began work, then slowly joined in, picking onions or tomatoes or strawberries or blueberries or other crops. These children were exposed to pesticides and savage conditions — heat, lack of water and toilets, constant bending — that are so much a part of agriculture. I met a 7-year-old boy being paid 30 cents a bucket to pick tomatoes in Leipsic, Ohio. As I raised my camera, his eyes met mine. I could see his tiredness, and his childhood being stolen by this hard labor.

I remember showing my photographs to editors at numerous publications in the early 1980s. “Oh, we know that children work in the fields,” some told me. To many, it was not a sexy enough story.

The Post’s View: The rollback in child labor laws is disgraceful — and short-sighted

Today, if we show my photographs from more than 40 years ago alongside Hine’s work of more than 100 years ago, it is not because the phenomenon of child labor in America is a new one. It’s because it continues, often with minimal consequences for the companies that benefit, bolstered by the efforts of a conservative advocacy group that is actively trying to roll back labor protections for kids. As Cesar Chavez wrote in the introduction to my book: “Exploitation of farm workers and their children is just as real today as it was twenty years ago. The fight is not over — it has just been renewed. You see, time does not heal injustice; only people do.”

When I was photographing these young children at their work, I often asked myself, where was the empathy for them? A lost childhood is something that can never be regained. Whether in Hine’s era, in mine, or now, children who work in these oppressive conditions need witnesses, and ones who are willing to fight on their behalf.

SVA Continuing Education Offers Summer Courses, Workshops, and Artist Residencies

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Andrea De Luigi (Artist Residency Alumnus ’22), “Against All Odds” (2021), acrylic, ink, relief, and collage on canvas

Ready to take your practice and creativity to new heights? SVACE has the resources and expertise to help you go to the next level. With a diverse range of more than 200 courses and ten artist residencies, you’ll find everything you need to achieve your goals and actualize your potential. Whether you’re looking to advance your career, explore new artistic avenues, or simply deepen your practice, our experienced faculty will provide the guidance and support you need to grow.

Head to sva.edu/ce to explore our offerings and register for upcoming free events.

Artist Residency Programs & Intensives

Online and on-campus courses are available in:

Free Virtual Events & Information Sessions

Registration Details

Course Advice
If you need advice or have questions, please email ce@sva.edu to connect with one of our course advisors.

About the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers, and creative professionals for seven decades. With a faculty of distinguished working professionals, a dynamic curriculum, and an emphasis on critical thinking, SVA is a catalyst for innovation and social responsibility. Comprising 6,000 students at its Manhattan campus and 35,000 alumni in 100 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. For information about the college, please visit sva.edu.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article SVA Continuing Education Offers Summer Courses, Workshops, and Artist Residencies appeared first on Colossal.

A Photographer Embraces the Alien Logic of A.I.

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Photo Booth

A Photographer Embraces the Alien Logic of A.I.

Charlie Engman’s experiments with Midjourney have yielded fleshy distortions, peculiar make-out sessions, and unfamiliar pictures of his mother.

By Chris Wiley

May 8, 2023

“Horizon Horse,” 2023.Photographs by Charlie Engman

The Pope is wearing Balenciaga. Donald Trump is resisting arrest. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version of “Tron”? Looks amazing. But, of course, none of these things are real. As A.I. technology advances at a queasy speed, all manner of artificially generated images are flooding the Internet, adding sludge to an already super-saturated visual soup. They fool credulous social-media users and threaten to put people out of work. An A.I.-generated image recently won a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards (the author rejected it); another won an award at the Colorado State Fair. Such incidents have prompted a lot of hand-wringing among artists and critics. Will computer-generated art mean the obsolescence of the artist?

Many working artists—3-D modellers, graphic designers, illustrators—have good reason to fear that much of what they do day to day could soon be accomplished by machines. But it’s also true that all “art” made by A.I. is derivative—the programs generate imagery by drawing upon enormous “datasets” of already extant images—and, perhaps as a result, little of it so far rises to the level of audaciously original. The film director Bennett Miller, who spent five years making a documentary about A.I., recently exhibited a collection of nineteenth-century-style A.I. images at Gagosian. A girl in one portrait looks like a mutant version of a Julia Margaret Cameron subject. Another image could be an Edward S. Curtis or a Carleton Watkins. This is neat, I guess, but I can’t get too excited by the idea of using new tech to make fake versions of old things.

The artist Charlie Engman is one of the few photographers who have leaned into the alien logic of the new machine age and found a way to make something that feels new. Previously known for his theatrical, provocative photographs of his mother, Engman has in the past year turned his attention to producing work with the A.I. image-generation software Midjourney. To my surprise, when I reached out to Engman recently, at his Brooklyn studio, he described himself as a “technophobe.” A native of the Chicago suburbs, he studied Japanese and Korean at Oxford University and became interested in photography after stumbling on a book by the Japanese artist Rinko Kawauchi, who makes lyrical pictures of nature and domestic life. In a sense, his foray into A.I. started with a similar process of accidental discovery. On the recommendation of a friend, he started toying around with Midjourney. “For the first while, it was just novel to me—Wow, you can make these funny pictures. But it wasn’t good,” he recalled. “And then, one time, I randomly did make something that I was, like, This is maybe cooler than anything I’ve ever made. How did that happen?”

An AI image of three woman kissing a white ghost shaped doll.

An AI image of a figure draped in black cloth merging with a chair.

An AI image of a person merging with a chair.

The image in question was of a pair of ginger-haired boys perched on a couch with what looks like a miniature horse. One boy is affectionately nuzzling the other’s face. There is a distant resemblance to Dorothea Tanning’s surrealistic scenes of people and their animals, perhaps, but on closer inspection Engman’s images reveal layers of A.I. oddities. One boy’s legs appear to be merging into the sofa, and his hands have too many fingers (an easy A.I. tell). The lower halves of the second boy and their equine companion both seem in the process of being swallowed up, like loose change, by a black hole between the couch cushions.

An AI image of two boys kissing a horse on a couch in a home.

An AI image of a child and a horse sitting inside a home.

Engman continued to make variations on the “couch with a horse” theme, each one stranger than the next. Like the Midjourney program itself, which responds to prompts with batches of four images at a time, Engman as an A.I. artist is dizzyingly prolific. “The amazing thing about A.I. is that I can make, like, three hundred pictures a day,” he told me, “And every single one of them can be an entirely different set of characters, and new location, and new material. I’m not constrained by physical reality at all.”

Physical reality, of course, is something that A.I. is completely unfamiliar with, a fact that Engman exploits to his benefit. “There was a while where I really loved how it iterated bodies in space,” Engman told me, “I was, like, How does it understand how people sit in chairs? How does it understand how people hug each other?” One series of images he made shows contorted, malformed human figures sitting in and often merging with various chairs, like a freaky update of a series of hilarious photographs by the artist Bruno Munari titled “Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair.” Another features groups of businesswomen amorously engaged with a motley collection of semi-humanoid inflatables. My favorite series shows groups of middle-aged suburbanites standing in parking lots kissing. Each configuration looks like a hybrid of an erotic-contact improv troupe and a swarm of feeding lampreys.

An AI image of three men kissing each other in a parking lot.

An AI image of three men kissing each other's shoulder in a parking lot.

Elsewhere, Engman goads the algorithm into creating creepy malformations of digital flesh. In one image, a fried egg perches atop a sickly shiny, headlike glob, which has a nose and a mouth but no eyes. In another, also reminiscent of Tanning’s work, a woman stands in a field with her face not so much obscured by a sunflower as grotesquely grafted to it. Such scenes call to my mind both the new-flesh body horror of David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” and the disturbing corporeal distortions of the photographer Asger Carlsen. They also evoke the tech-world ethos of bodies as outmoded encumbrances, mere “meatbags” to be sloughed as our consciousnesses fuse with the digital pleroma. At their best, Engman’s images feel like bizarre new icons of a future that’s already upon us.

An AI image of a woman with a sunflower merging with her face.

An AI image of a person with a fried egg on their head.

Engman has a cavalier attitude toward the thorny copyright issues surrounding how A.I. programs draw upon image datasets. To him, such “borrowing” is not much different from the way he cherry-picked from a range of aesthetic influences to make his pictures of his mother, or, for that matter, the way that any artist is trained by studying the work of others. Arguments about sampling, appropriating, or remixing artworks or the flotsam of popular culture seem to him painfully retrograde. “Y’all, we are all trained on, like, everything,” he told me. Recently, he has been combining his real-world and computerized photographic interests by making A.I. pictures of his mother. To train Midjourney’s algorithm, he’s been feeding it his old photographs as prompts, resulting in such newfangled scenes as a glowering facsimile of his mom emerging from what appears to be an oozing wheel of soft cheese. I asked him if he had ever tried just writing a prompt using the phrase “Charlie Engman’s mom.” “I have tried that,” he said. “I don’t think I’m famous enough.”

An AI image of a person whose face is merging into a horse embracing a horse at sunset.

The Poet Writing on Prison Underwear

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Printmaking

For his next book, Reginald Dwayne Betts cooks up a batch of handmade paper, formed using T-shirts and undergarments donated by incarcerated people.

‘It is a healing process’: 3 Mother’s Day arts events in Hong Kong

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Two Creative Directors on Sports, Hip-Hop and Faith

May 8, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.

The birth of the partnership between the creative directors Free Richardson and Phil Cho hinged on, of all things, their shared faith. In 2018, Mr. Cho, the founder of NoLedge Productions, pitched a collaboration between his company and Mr. Richardson’s creative agency the Compound.

“I go to slide two, and he goes, ‘Yo. Turn that off,’” Mr. Cho recently recalled. “He’s like, ‘Do you love God?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I’m a believer,’ and he goes, ‘All right. We’re good.’”

Of course, it wasn’t just spirituality that brought them together. Mr. Richardson also was impressed with the effort Mr. Cho showed when documenting an event through photos and videos at the Compound’s art gallery. “Phil has something special about him,” Mr. Richardson said recently. “You can just feel a good presence of energy.”

The two companies are now a major force in the world of marketing, particularly around the intersection of sports and hip-hop. Together, they have curated an impressive portfolio of campaigns for brands including the shoe company Clarks, ESPN, the software company Niantic and DraftKings. Last year, the duo won two Cannes Lions and one Cannes Dolphin advertising awards and five Muse Creative Awards, given for inspirational marketing campaigns. Last month, they won 12 Clio Awards, given for creativity in advertising.

Mr. Richardson, 50, also known as Set Free, is African American and was born in the Bronx. He grew up in Queens and Philadelphia and was deeply involved in the hip-hop community and the world of street basketball culture. In 1998, he created the AND1 Mixtape, a video compilation documenting a traveling basketball competition, and in 2007, he founded the Compound.

Mr. Richardson’s story has helped shape and inspire many, including Mr. Cho.

Born and raised in Edison, N.J., Mr. Cho, 33, is Korean American and grew up with a passion for both basketball and hip-hop music. He was a middle school student when the AND1 Mixtape Tour debuted. (“Some moms in Korea probably know about AND1,” Mr. Cho said about the tour’s reach.) Since starting NoLedge at the age of 26, he has collaborated with a variety of brands including Toyota, the record label 300 Entertainment and musicians like Akon and Year of the Ox.

Today, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Cho are innovators in the crowded landscape of creative marketing, and consider themselves family as they “navigate the invisible handcuffs of corporate rule,” as Mr. Richardson put it.

“Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our industry,” Ari Weiss, chief creative officer at the advertising agency DDB Worldwide, wrote in an email. But “you’re either authentic or you’re not. Mr. Free Richardson and Mr. Phil Cho are pure authenticity.”

The two spoke at the Compound’s headquarters in Brooklyn to discuss remaining authentic to their craft, being relevant and their shared faith. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

An illustration of two figures against a light green background: On the left, Free Richardson, a Black man with a graying beard, wearing a peach hoodie with red and white stripes. On the right, Phil Cho, an Asian American man, wearing a dark blue T-shirt and ball cap. — Adriana Bellet

How do you stay current?

FREE RICHARDSON I think it always goes back to staying authentic and storytelling. Everybody has a story, and you can tell it through A.I., pictures, music, all the creative elements. Look at the NFT [nonfungible token] world. It came, and though it’s not gone, the whole time, I was like, I’m still going to go with touchable, feel-able art. Authenticity within. Look at a tree. The leaves will die before the root of the tree dies. A lot of things are happening through technology, and a lot of things are going to happen, but I don’t know anything that is bigger than the Mona Lisa. No matter what happens in technology, the root of creativity will always be around.

PHIL CHO The root of what we are is: It’s always been about relationships. When I walk into the Compound, and I see all this artwork, like Jonni Cheatwood, and you see how long it took for them to come up with these ideas and wasn’t A.I.-generated, I feel like that’s what drives more value.

RICHARDSON Yeah, I think it’s a lot of relationships. That’s with everything. The two things in life are communication and relationships. If we don’t communicate, you can’t make the relationship. Creativity is a revolving door. I still work with people that I worked with 20 years ago. It’s the reason we still hear Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye songs in the same rotation that you hear Drake. And so when things are authentic and true, the creativity never goes away.

How are you navigating challenges and opportunities facing the advertising industry?

RICHARDSON I think the ratio of African Americans and Asians is very small. I don’t blame everything on race, but I think it’s a tougher role for me and Phil being a minority, because there’s not a lot of dominance of minorities in the advertising agency world, especially with Fortune 500 companies, C-suite level and businesses, especially small ones. [According to a 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, of workers in “advertising, public relations, and related services,” 7.8 percent were African American and 6.6 percent were Asian American.] We’re kind of small, SWAT-style — boutique-small.

That’s what I consider Compound and NoLedge. It’s a strategic partnership that executes some of the same things that big advertising agencies execute, without the red tape.

CHO Before doing Compound, there weren’t people telling me how to facilitate production, and I felt like I had to just learn from trial and error. And a lot of the people that I would meet, they did happen to be white. So again, I’m not trying to make it a race thing either, but I just felt like there’s not a lot of people with my skin tone that are doing this and can help me out. So I think even merging with the Compound, it was a whole new world for me of just trying to be confident in what I’m doing and understanding that.

What’s a lesson that you learned from your staff, team or peers?

RICHARDSON At the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes. And myself, just looking people in the eye and just being like, “All of us are the same.” I think learning and working with NoLedge, it takes time. Everybody needs time — to execute a task, to learn, to communicate, to talk. To respect time and respect people and giving them time. Not to where you just want to get them to or the client, but just everybody needs time.

CHO With the guys that are in NoLedge, for me, it’s patience. I’ll say this, but it’s harder to practice it. You might be able to do X, Y and Z, and you want the same from your guys, but you got to understand that they also need to learn X, Y and Z first. So you can’t expect people to move how you move.

Adriana Bellet

How do you keep campaigns authentic and meaningful?

RICHARDSON I try to give everybody their own white box. When you go look at an apartment, you’d rather see the apartment empty so you can dream of how you’re going to decorate and design it. But if you go into a home that’s already furnished, it already blocks you in. You can’t really put your ideas on it. And so walking into brands and working with companies, I try to give them the white box and tell them, “How do you want to design this?”

And then my job after that is just to put a magnifying glass on your ideas. You’re there to help the brand, not really to put your ideas on their brands. And doing it that way, it always helps expand what the goal is. The goal is not for my ideas to be presented. The goal is for my ideas to latch onto your ideas and make them bigger.

CHO I really do feel like Free kind of sets his own trend. And I think that’s what a real creative is, right? To me, the better creative director you are, the more you don’t care about what other people think about you, and I think that’s given me confidence, too. It’s just what comes out of when we facilitate a project — just do what we feel would be dope. Just be comfortable with it.

What are the challenges of a partnership?

RICHARDSON Time. We can’t do everything we want to do. I mean, you have to understand what you’re going into with partnerships. It’s like a marriage. Phil, I love him. He’s my brother, my little cousin and a son. Then there’s times that he’s my uncle. I got to look up to him in certain areas.

CHO It’s always about communicating. People have different work flows. It’s not like mine is exactly the same as Free’s. But I think the reason this works is so many young guys want to run the ship, right? So even while doing production, there’s certain things that I would do differently if I was shooting. But at the same time, a good leader is a good follower. I feel like these years right now, I’m soaking up the game. The same way Free was talking about clients and how you got to support their vision. I’m kind of doing a similar thing with Free. I’m supporting his vision.

How do you stay inspired?

RICHARDSON God. I want the world to understand that. He’s just the creator of all. If you can’t be inspired by thinking of that, I don’t know what else you’re going to be inspired by. God is my source of creativity.

CHO I agree. All the stories in this world from different people and backgrounds — he’s the biggest artist.