This blog is a part of a series highlighting the perspectives of partner marketing executives across the globe. You’ll hear our guest writers’ experiences facing challenges in the partner ecosystem and their insights from their years of experience.
The typical preamble of a partnership agreement reads something like this: The parties agree to work together, develop joint solutions, enable joint sales and marketing and help each other gain entry into markets that provide incremental and new opportunities for business growth and customer success.
To fuel alliances and partnerships, it’s fundamentally important for two or more companies to develop joint messaging and content that empowers marketing departments to deliver awareness and demand generation activities. Joint messaging enables sellers to present a pitch to customers and prospects that resonates as a solution that comes from one company.
In my career I’ve seen many examples of partnerships with powerful joint messaging. For example, in the 2009-2010 timeframe VMware, Cisco and EMC created one of the first versions of a private cloud solution. The messaging creators developed a potent triumvirate that launched an entire industry around hyperconverged infrastructure. In 2016, AWS and VMware developed a powerful message for VMware customers to operate in the world’s most prominent cloud. In 2022, a very powerful relationship was ignited as NVIDIA and Deloitte collaborated to help enterprises easily build and operate AI and Metaverse services.
One approach to create joint messaging for a partner solution compares the compelling value proposition of a solution with priorities, trends and spending data from analyst and CIO surveys, like Oracle Cloud and VMware did for their combined solution. As a result, control, security and predictability were top of the list in 2021 analyst reports and videos.
I’m proud to be part of the Partner Marketing Visionaries community. On March 29, 2023, I had the opportunity to discuss my favorite topic – partner messaging with my industry colleagues Annie Martin (Microsoft), Lena Wiegering (Dataminr) and Tyillere Hansen (Slack). In the panel discussion, Messaging: The Art & Science of Building, they shared their expert opinions, perspectives and guidelines for developing joint messaging with alliances and partners. Here are some key takeaways from our conversation.
What do you think about when formulating the “together is better” message with a strategic alliance?
Annie Martin: “The first step should include definition from people involved in the partnership to define what ‘better’ means in ‘better together.’ Joint branding and messaging is more than just putting two logos together. We need to ask, what would compel a customer to work with us together? We need to articulate a joint-value message at the beginning of the partnership. Slowing down to define what better is sets us up for success.”
What is the typical process and approach for developing joint messaging?
Lena Wiegering: “The first discussion should involve product marketing teams from both partners and ask, ‘What type of partnership is this?’ In some scenarios, the partnership is an integrated solution. In other cases, it’s a partnership where a customer would buy two products together to create a solution. Gaining executive sponsorship and involving sales leadership is fundamentally important to developing strong partner messaging. Other elements include building deliverables and establishing a feedback loop for sales and marketing campaigns is part of the process. It’s not a one and done routine. Messaging needs to be adjusted and optimized over time.”
How is messaging documented and ultimately enforced with sales and marketing?
Tyillere Hansen: “Documenting a list of assets and how they will be used is a first step. Typically, a list of go-to-market assets includes creating modular slides that allows integration into pitch decks for sales and solution architects/engineers. Other assets include sales battlecards, customer solution briefs and website pages. Setting expectations up front with Sales and Marketing helps to enforce how messaging is used. The teams should understand how documents will reviewed. Defining expectations for a partner program needs to clarify how the joint-brand will be represented, considering how competitors will perceive the joint-brand, specifying when review cycles will occur, gaining support for legal and other teams to review the joint-messaging. If people understand all of these elements, then enforcement will not be a surprise.”
Annie, Lena and Tyillere also shared some best practices when creating joint-value messaging.
At the end of the session, an interesting question from the audience was asked: “How does ChatGPT and Bard influence messaging development?” Annie said, “I’m so excited about it. This is going to save time, I can ask the deep questions, it can be a collation service so I can then add and my apply my thinking and personality.”
Tyillere has used ChatGPT to help create a script for a podcast, which provided topics ideas and saved hours of time. Of course, the process wasn’t perfect, and Tyillere clarified the ChatGPT output and refined it with points that the AI did not include. Lena said, “This technology helps to eliminate some of the initial work that is a slog. This capability allows people to focus energy on other things such as, measurement and optimization. I see a lot of benefit here.”
For more insights and best practices around creating effective joint messaging, watch Messaging: The Art & Science of Building. And once you’ve built out your partner messaging, watch Creating a Successful Marketing Plan with Partners to explore critical elements of a successful partner marketing plan.
partner marketing, partner marketing ecosystems
Photographer Peter Miller once traveled the world for periodicals ranging from Smithsonian to Sports Illustrated. But the Waterbury resident, seeing professional cameras give way to personal cellphones, struggled to make ends meet this past decade upon turning 80.
“I was thinking of leaving Vermont to live in a less-expensive state, but many emailed me and said I couldn’t because I am … a Vermont treasure?” he wrote inquisitively in a 2016 commentary. “I thought about that, and in a way it is true. My calling is to document the culture of Vermont.”
And so the old-timer learned some new tricks. Logging onto the internet, the self-described “nonviolent anarchist” launched a crowdsourcing campaign that raised enough money to self-publish his sixth book, “Vanishing Vermonters: Loss of a Rural Culture.”
“My people, I call them, seem to have been priced out of our state,” he wrote in the foreword, “as taxes and the cost of energy escalated and real-estate prices soared.”
Miller’s latest title would be his last. A vanishing Vermonter himself, the 89-year-old black-and-white photographer died Monday at Morrisville’s Copley Hospital, his family confirmed without elaborating.
“His consistent approach to producing authentic depictions of the Vermont way of life is unparalleled,” former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said of Miller in a 2013 congressional floor speech. “He gives a face, and a voice, to Vermonters.”
Born Jan. 6, 1934, in New York City, Miller moved to the Green Mountain State at age 13 before buying his first camera at age 16.
“I have no idea why,” he once told this reporter about the purchase.
Miller nonetheless focused his lens on retired Weston farmers Will and Rowena Austin, not realizing the resulting photo would grace the cover of his 1990 book “Vermont People” as well as a sign advertising his longtime Route 100 home and gallery in the Waterbury hamlet of Colbyville.
Moving on to the University of Toronto, Miller met Armenian Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, best known for his 1941 “Roaring Lion” portrait of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The Vermonter assisted Karsh on shoots with the likes of French philosopher Albert Camus and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso — “arrogant and wanted to control the sitting,” Miller said of the latter artist — to discover the master’s secret.
“Forget about the camera,” he learned. “Talk to the people.”
Miller did that as a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer in Paris, then a Life magazine reporter in New York from 1959 until returning to the Green Mountains five years later to freelance for a variety of national publications.
Most longtime Vermonters recognize Miller for his iconic image of the late Tunbridge farmer turned “Man with a Plan” film star Fred Tuttle holding a picture of his father holding a picture of his father.
“I set up my tripod and … 120 years of Tuttles in the same photograph,” Miller said of the shot.
But when Miller approached more than a dozen publishers in hopes of releasing his first book in the 1980s, all dismissed his proposed collection of black-and-white “Vermont People” photos as a Works Progress Administration project a half-century too late.
“They said there wasn’t any color,” he recalled, “and it was too regional.”
Publishing the book himself in 1990, Miller sold out his first 3,000 copies in six weeks and an additional 12,000 since, spurring follow-up titles including “Vermont Farm Women” and “A Lifetime of Vermont People.”
Miller’s fortunes changed with the new millennium. Turning 80 in 2014, he pivoted from camerawork to commentaries as he turned his house into an Airbnb and tapped his local food shelf.
“It is tough all over for creative people,” he wrote in an essay for VTDigger. “New business models created by CEOs with the expectations that every intellectual property is as free as the internet has crippled the photography, illustration, writing and music creators.”
Miller would not go gentle into that good night. Self-publishing his 168-page “Vanishing Vermonters” book in 2017, he shared the stories of more than two dozen portrait subjects.
Take Clem Despault, a fellow octogenarian and used car salesman, salvage yard operator and stock-car racer just down the road.
“Them Motor Vehicle people got this new car-inspection system,” Despault is quoted as saying of a program that can mandate expensive repairs. “I got people who can’t afford to hardly live and they need a car just to drive a couple of miles to work or to buy food. This is a rural state, we’re poor and everyone’s got to drive, don’t they know that for God’s sake?”
Miller photographed both “people who are really upset and people who’ve had to reinvent themselves.” He was both, selling his work on a website from his 160-year-old farmhouse before moving to a senior apartment in Stowe last fall.
“They keep saying they’re going to raise taxes again because we need a doggie park, we need a hockey rink, we need, we need …” he lamented. “I have to stand up for my people — me included.”
When describing students and their work, it’s easy to fall back on words like “aspiring,” “hopeful” or even “amateur.” There’s the impression that they won’t be prepared to make a significant contribution until sometime in the future. That it won’t happen until after they receive a degree and secure a job that kicks off their career path. While in school, a student is still incubating, awaiting the time when what they dream and do begins to change the world.
This is far from the case for the innovators enrolled in the Music History and Industry degree program at UCLA. These students are leading a revolution right here, right now. An event on Sunday, April 30 offers attendees the chance to experience first-hand the creativity and drive of the graduating seniors presenting capstone work.
“Drop the Needle: Remixing the Music Industry” will present a line-up of performances, music videos, podcasts, panel discussions, short films, and compelling discussions. Free and open to the public, the event will take place in Lani Hall from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
26 students are completing this capstone course as a requirement for their Music History and Industry undergraduate degree. The course empowered them not only to hone their passion project but also to sharpen skills to garner critical support for that project—generating marketing materials, building websites, taking advantage of social media, and navigating other ways to boost the project at hand and empower them well beyond graduation.
Lukas Castro describes his project as “a full immersion into the resources one needs as an aspiring ‘artistic’ or ‘creative’ entrepreneur. My goal is to provide independent artists and music students alike with the support they need to begin developing new approaches to self-promotion and pragmatic business models upon entering into the music industry.”
Quinn Campbell is prepared to talk about the all-important marketing and release plan that follows the creation of an album, punctuating the presentation with a screening of a music video. Brooke Maytorena’s presentation will span the process behind her first EP “I Don’t Remember,” from concept and demos to artwork and marketing, while Jonathan Tsai discusses the process behind his EP “Teenage Nightmare!”, followed by a performance of a track off the record. Katsura Uthus will offer a multimedia presentation about the EP “Bedroom Rock,” an aural exploration of the subject of mental illness.
With a focus on the technical side of music, Antonio Estrada’s company ProSoundly looks to transform the music production services market and innovate how music producers approach their craft. Estrada’s pitch reads, “We plan to increase the convenience and creativity of music making by offering music production packs, educational videos, mix/master services, original track production, and an AI synthesizer all on our website.” During the event on April 30, Estrada’s presentation will include audio and visual examples of the website’s products.
In perfect step with raging debates about AI, Tara Tempesta’s presentation will examine music creation by artificial intelligence and issues of copyright, asking, “What is the impact and how does legislation need to change?”
These burgeoning creators are wise to the power of music to propel social justice. “Pink Is Power”, led by Lulu Dawson, is a female-fronted music festival furthering opportunities in the music industry, celebrating women’s contributions to music, arts, and culture with a full vendor fair and festival lineup. Annika Dudley’s Elevator Music is a diverse programming initiative aimed to allow diverse artists to be properly compensated for their work while providing free performance art to community members.
“This programmatic initiative comes as a result of many of my experiences as a young musician growing up in Los Angeles,” Dudley posted on Instagram. “Through this journey, I hope to inspire new audiences, provide budding BIPOC and Queer artists with a platform, and elevate our community through sound, visuals, and more!”
Samantha Heller’s Sam X Sam Productions is a not-for-profit production organization dedicated to creating community and opportunity for female, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ creatives within the music industry. “Through our Music for Movement benefit concert series, we aim to provide a platform for our female and gender-nonconforming artists while raising funds and awareness for women’s right to bodily autonomy,” Heller wrote.
Marlee Orr’s project is centered upon a live performance of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” as an exemplification of emotion underlying the Civil Rights Movement. Emmon Amid will perform tracks off “Generation Lost,” an EP based on lost stories and generational trauma among the Persian community following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Joshua Sung’s EP “Good Intentions with Bad Habits” reflects the perspective of Asian Americans, made in collaboration with other Asian American artists alongside him. Sung will also perform tracks from the EP.
The first student-run record label at UCLA comes out of this capstone as Cherry Pop Records. During the capstone event, Aliah Gaoteote will talk about the label’s mission to empower students with hands-on music industry experience working directly with local artists. Audience members will get a first listen of a song from the label’s debut release.
Radius Music Group (RMG) is a modern music management agency representing artists needing a team. “At Radius, we support our musicians by providing booking services, creative direction assistance, and project rollouts. Our goal is to continue to build our artists and the community around them and, for us, that starts in our home of Los Angeles,” said founder Kelsey Kelly, who will present a discussion with one of the agency’s artists.
Podcasts are becoming an increasingly significant piece of the music industry pie which students in the capstone are capitalizing on. Kryztyna Hernandez’s “The Cliffnotes Podcast” offers the opportunity to discuss personal music ideas and opinions. A sample of the podcast will be played for the Lani Hall audience after a presentation about the genesis of the project.
Film and music often go hand in hand. Remember Me, a documentary by Samantha Najemy (aka Sam Alon) and Annabelle Hendrickson, follows the latter as she takes on the LA music scene as an independent artist with important discussions about identity and sexism alongside other challenges of “making it” in the scene. A live performance by Hendrickson’s band will follow the screening.
The list above skims just the surface of an event rich with entrepreneurship, research, dedication, and passion. Visit the Drop the Needle website for the latest updates to the event line-up, including announcements about special guests, and learn more about the incredibly talented students behind the event. They’re gonna change the music industry one day.
Scratch that. They already are.
Two new anthologies on South Asian photography and cinema will be launched next week at a symposium at Columbia University in New York City. The two books — “Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema” (Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin Publishing) and “Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia” (Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and HarperCollins Publishers India) — provoke a new look at questions of artistic practice and its relations to collaborative world-making, knowledge production and archival memory, according to a university description of the event.
“Bombay Talkies,” launched previously at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Delhi earlier this year, presents rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of the cinematographer Josef Wirsching who moved from Munich to Bombay during the Nazi takeover of film studios in Germany. The book is rare because it gives access to the aesthetic decisions, creative communities, and cross-cultural exchanges that were vital to filmmaking in late colonial South Asia. Also, as is common with literature on Indian cinema, Wirsching is not an actor, filmmaker, or musician, but someone who dictates the overall look and visual style of the production.
Most of the photographs in the book were taken in the 1930s and ’40s when Wirsching was employed at the legendary film studio, Bombay Talkies Ltd. Shot across film sets and outdoor locations they convey a world of meaning that ran parallel to the world of the silver screen. As a specific genre, the “behind-the-scenes” photo expands the limits of the film frame by showing us that which lay just outside, adjacent to, and beyond the movie camera. Shot primarily on a Leica camera, and preserved by Wirsching’s grandsons, Georg and Josef (Jr.), these images not only unsettle the boundaries between film and photography, Indian and foreign, but also give rare access to the aesthetic decisions, creative communities, and cross-cultural exchanges that were vital to filmmaking in late colonial South Asia.
“Unframed,” which includes an array of essays and interviews, hopes to “give the extent to which images may be productively and ethically produced in an era of volatile ‘post-truth’ mass media/social media ethos, the university says.
Speakers at the event include Rahaab Allana, curator/publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi; Iftikhar Dadi, John H. Burris Professor and chair of the Department of History of Art and Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell University; Noam M Elcott, Associate Professor for the history of modern art and Director of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University; Chitra Ganesh, a Brooklyn-based visual artist; Bakirathi Mani; professor of English and co-director of the Tri-College Asian American Studies Program at Swarthmore College; and Sudhir Mahadevan, associate professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and adjunct professor in the South Asia Center at the university’s Jackson School of International Studies.
“Camera South Asia: A Symposium on Cinema and Photography” will be held on April 27 at 4:00 p.m. at the Altschul Hall, Lehman Auditorium (Room 202) at Barnard College.
(Photos are from the collection of photographs from Josef Wirsching author of “Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema” displayed at the Art Heritage Gallery in New Delhi.)
Three blocks in the Gilman District will be closed to traffic Sunday as the decade-old shopping district debuts a new street fair.
Put on by the commercial district’s business association, the event will bring together 70 vendors, including jewelers, potters, artists and 10 food trucks, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 23. Fifth Street will be closed between Gilman and Camelia streets, and Camelia will be closed from Fourth Street to Sixth.
SHOH Gallery owner Julie McCray, who helped start the Gilman District business association, said the goal of the family-friendly fair is to celebrate the neighborhood’s creative spirit and working-class roots. Organizers hope to hold the fair annually.
McCray, a lifelong Berkeley resident, said she moved her fine art gallery from San Francisco to Gilman Street in 2016 because “it’s where the art is being made.”
In the 1800s, much of what is today West Berkeley used to be Ocean View, an unincorporated blue-collar settlement whose residents mostly worked in manufacturing plants, mills, and lumber plants. Later the area became a hub of West Berkeley’s “smokestack” industries, exemplified by Pacific Steel Casting, which closed its Second Street factory in 2018.
McCray said the street fair aims, in part, to honor the area’s history.
“This area still has that vibe,” McCray said. “It’s still multicultural makers [and] people doing things with their hands.”
Visual art will be a focus at the street fair. Berkeley artist Nigel Sussman will do live mural painting on plywood, and kids and adults will be invited to make chalk drawings on the pavement and participate in an interactive mural-making activity led by artists Joey Rose and Alexandra Underwood.
While the district has become known for its wineries, many of which will be doing tastings, the fair itself will be an alcohol-free zone.
A DJ will play music aboard the Pacific Neptune Chariot, a giant “mutant vehicle” with enormous seahorses decorating it initially designed for Burning Man. (Dancing is encouraged.)
The fair will cost around $4,000 to host, McCray said, with vendors paying between $50 to $100 to book a spot. The arts nonprofit Commotion West Berkeley provided $3,000 for art and marketing purposes, and Gilman District will cover any remaining costs using $10,000 the city of Berkeley gave the group in 2022.
The Gilman District is working toward solidifying itself as an official business improvement district, McRay said, with a goal of giving the district’s business owners, artists and builders more say in city government. The Elmwood and Solano business improvement districts, for example, are enshrined in city code and have the power to levy annual assessment fees from its businesses to spend on events, entertainment, marketing, beautifying efforts and more.
The mural will be painted on the side of the 10th Street YMCA.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — While some will be downtown preparing for Thunder Over Louisville, artists will be memorializing Louisville’s own Muhammad Ali on the side of the 10th Street YMCA.
The seven-story tall image of Ali will cover the East wall of the historic Chestnut Street Family YMCA , which is just two blocks from Ali’s alma mater, Central High School.
The mural will be painted by Shepard Fairey, most widely known for his iconic “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as well as large-scale murals around the world.
Louisville native Eddie Donaldson, also known as the artist GuerillaOne, and the nonprofit Artists for Trauma have spent months bringing the project together.
Organizers and officials from the YMCA say that the image can serve as a motivation for anyone coming into the YMCA, and also a symbol of peace for the community.
“After the mass shooting on Monday, I’m devastated for the victims, their families, and the entire community of Louisville,” Fairey said. “I believe art is a tool of healing and peace so I hope the mural I’ll be painting of Muhammad Ali, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, will serve the moment as well as encourage thoughtful reflection about peace and Ali’s ideals into the future.”
The painting will begin on April 22 and is expected to be completed in a few days.
Officials say the mural is based on a photo by Ali’s “personal photographer,” Howard L. Bingham. Bingham is estimated to have captured a million images of Ali over three decades.
Following the completion of the mural, community organizers will be hosting an art show at PORTAL in the Portland neighborhood.
That show will feature work by Fairey as well as other local artists.
Make it easy to keep up-to-date with more stories like this. Download the WHAS11 News app now. For Apple or Android users.
Have a news tip? Email assign@whas11.com, visit our Facebook page or Twitter feed.
