Making Money.

I remember my first paying job very well. Not the one where your parents pay you an allowance or the neighbors gave you $5 to mow their lawn, but the first job where someone I didn’t know paid me money. I got a 2 week job at the Minnesota State Fair when I was maybe 13 or 14 working at a food stand. I am pretty sure I was making $4.00 an hour but ate my way to a bonus every day. To this day I couldn’t even guess if the booth made a profit.

For well over a decade I worked for other people / companies and never put much concern into the bigger financial picture that kept the machine running. This should be expected I guess from a youth of my generation, we aren’t the most fiscally concerned people to have been born, but once I worked my way up to a more senior position I began to apply a cost / benefit analysis to every spend; it seemed important. Once my brain had been trained to obey positive sum arrangements I began to look for “money left on the table”.

This was one of the many great lessons I learned because of my jobs working for various record labels but also one of the things that drove me crazy working there. With the struggle between art (artist) and profit (record label) the rules for appropriate ancillary income were always changing and many times irrational.

When I see a great example of money NOT left on the table, when a brand properly takes advantage of the desires of their audience, I get excited.

Halo Screen Shots in conjunction with Bungie and Microsoft “are bringing the artistry and almost infinite content of the Halo 3 world into your world. For the first time ever, custom screenshot images created on the Xbox 360 console during Halo 3 gameplay are available as remastered fine art products, and delivered ready to hang on your wall.”

Starting at $16.99 and going up to $119.99, maximizing the hard work put in by the game developers and designers to build one of the most loyal consumer audiences in the world… the table is clean.