What’s On Your Desk? With Shane Mahoney
Note: What’s On Your Desk? is a series of interviews with friends who are doing interesting things. The dialogue always starts off the same way, by asking the subject to describe their workspace. The fifth in our series is with Shane Mahoney, a guy I first met on the pit lane of an American Le Mans Series race in 2003 when he was running marketing and PR for The Racers Group and I was at Corvette; we’ve been friends ever since. He is the person I turn to with my ideas — most of them idiotic, barely a handful worth saving — who’s advice I treasure (and use). Under his eponymous marketing company, Mahoney + Company, his hard work has gone to bat for clients in activities as disparate as tech startups, motor racing, the published memoir of a porn industry worker, and countless others. Shane is a true doer. Chuck Close says “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” That’s Shane.
What’s on your desk?
1. Four (4) three-packs of Field Notes
2. One (1) Moleskine notebook (sadly, not the Ghostly version)
3. One “Mater” tape-dispenser from Pixar exhibition at Oakland Museum of California
4. Six (6) Field Notes “Clic-Pens” with “miles of ink” in “Gary’s nose black”
5. Luxo L-1 task lamp (Target knockoff version)
6. 40-year old antique Persian rug, exact replica of the rug that The Dude stole from The Big Lebowski’s house in The Big Lebowski.
7. Glass statuette given to me by a guy who I saved from drowning, Pacific Grove, CA, 2006.
8. One (1) autographed photo of Patrick Long
9. Two (2) identical framed photos of myself and RJ Valentine
10. Autographed Jeff Clark / Mavericks poster. Inscription: “Shane: Go Big!”
11. Two halves of one broken surfboard (2004, Ocean Beach, CA), one In-N-Out Burger sticker
12. Kleen Kanteen stainless steel water bottle. California totally rubbed off on me.
13. Business cards for two separate companies: Mahoney + Company and Swift.fm
14. One (1) canine - Husky / Australian Shepherd mix, Harvey. Not posed. She just walked in and plopped down as Jenn took the photo.
That’s a great desk area. When you get up in the morning (or, whenever you get up), how do you get in sync to start gobbling up the day?
I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but every day’s the same. After performing the ritual of the Three Esses, I quickly scan my email for emergency-type stuff to make a mental to-do list, then walk out for coffee, and eat breakfast at my desk while reading the 10 or so websites I look at every day. Because I’m a relentless creature of habit, unless I’m traveling, it’s literally the same every day. Racing and automotive news are first, then scan the NY Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Lately, one of my projects involves Twitter to a large degree, so I’m spending a lot of time trolling Twitter searches and follow lists for links and interesting blurbs. It feels simultaneously very prepubescent and inefficient to do so - I can envision that if my parents watched me work, they’d just marvel at how much time I spend doing what they must think is goofing off.
Once all that information’s assimilated, it’s plunge back into email and start working off of my hand-written to-do list. I’m trying hard to get more into using digital calendars like I would if I worked in a big corporate office, but I’m decidedly a hand-written to-do list kind of guy. Because I’m at least a little bit obsessive compulsive, my lists have to be created using the same pen - I can’t mix and match ink colors or even the size of the ball tip.
To be honest I think the days I get the most useful stuff done, I’m using hand-written lists as well; the digital calendars just help remind me of specific meeting times. I want to focus on how you edit all these interests because I know you value learning from the cheap seats as much as you do from the vip box. Paradoxically, the older you get the more diverse your interests become and new media forms sprout every day (whether someone’s Twitter feed or blog), creating a reproductive virus effect on good stuff that’s out there for the taking. How do you edit this down and decide where you want to “fish”?
Well, I think that inherently, I’m a very curious person, and despite the fact that it’s not the most efficient or profitable way to work, I rely to a great degree on my gut. My Step-Dad is a Ph.D., and one of the most natively intelligent people I’ve met, so growing up everything was about investigation and discussion, and most often, only for the sake of learning. Having a relentless curiosity for the world around me - whether that’s music, “business”, fly-fishing, technology, cooking - keeps me mentally receptive to interesting stuff. My Dad is also highly social, which is sort of rare for the bookish scientist type, and that rubbed off on me too. Being blessed with the gift of gab - to some extent - keeps me constantly meeting new people and getting new ideas.
That said, there’s a lot of crap content out there, and I’d like to think I have a fairly well-tuned bullshit-o-meter. As digital citizens, I think we all consume a ton of information, but rather than get bogged down by it, I think my scanning mechanism is pretty good. I read a ton of websites, am fairly addicted to my iPhone, Twitter, etc., but being able to assimilate information and make connections from the data is I suppose some sort of innate skill I’ve got.
Also, and very importantly, I’ve got an incredible network of smart friends who all filter stuff my way. Honestly, there are probably five more Reilly Brennans in my network who send me offbeat or just plain interesting stuff, and a mess of Reilly Brennans Lite who share some sort of industry or interest-specific stuff with me.
People in my position - small businesspeople - by nature have to be somewhat opportunistic, in that they take what leads they find and invest some amount of energy determining what the potential will be. So, intellectual curiosity + appetite for consumption + well-oiled bullshit-o-meter + external, trusted filters + opportunism = my special sauce.
You’ve been invested in building brands and projects and I’d love to hear from you which one you think has been the most successful and why?
I consider the work that I did with Flying Lizard Motorsports at Le Mans in 2007 to be my most successful project, not only because our program exceeded the tangible marketing goals we’d set but because we did something really impactful.
I was consulting to the team at the time, and my client (the marketing director) had gotten a directive from ownership to do something memorable for the 24 Hours of Le Mans that year, so we thought to pay homage to the long tradition of one-off cars there by doing an ‘art car’. I contacted Troy Lee Designs - the motocross / lifestyle / paint company - and I persuaded a very skeptical Troy himself to take a meeting and hear us out and out of that meeting came this huge proliferation of creativity from Troy. To the team’s credit - from a starting position of relative conservatism - they greenlit a really, really wild, flashy design. It was incredible to see come together, but we created a whole package around the car design, which is what made it work.
We created, promoted and sold a huge quantity of merchandise at the event, from our own self-staffed little store in the midway, we created and gave away a whole raft of fan goods - posters, pubmats and stickers. When we roughed out the numbers, we figured we’d made nearly 150,000 marketing impressions just at the track, not to mention press coverage and all that.
So, why it was so successful, I think, was that it was a smart decision to do the project in the first place, it attracted the right mix of creative people, the actual artwork that resulted was mind-blowing and really, really well executed and probably most importantly, the resources were in place to do it “right.” It was ambitious, a bit audacious in scope and execution, it was well outside the team’s comfort level, but the ownership was 100% behind the vision that we laid out. We exceeded all our marketing objectives - grew the fan base, made something memorable, added to the history at Le Mans, and came back to America after the race with a pretty solid afterglow.
Two events at the race that year, though they were totally intangible, really cement the feeling for me that it was a success. First, when we pulled the cover off the car at scrutineering - in the midst of this huge crowd of hundreds of people in downtown Le Mans - there was an audible “Ooooh!” that immediately happened. We literally took people’s breath away.
Secondly, on the morning of race day, just opposite the pit structure, some fans had made a banner on a bedsheet and hung it from the front of the grandstands. There’s a ton of these at Le Mans - in support of Audi or Tom Kristensen or whoever - but this one was ours, and it just had a picture of the car and the words “Allez les Lézards!” on it. It was really an emotional moment, because all of our effort had made some new fans for the team. I felt very responsible for that, very proud. And to this day, though I’m no longer directly involved with the team, they’re known for being ultra-friendly to their fans. I’d like to think that I had a lot to do with the DNA of that attitude with our project in 2007.
That is the response I think a lot of us are looking for in our jobs and side projects, when someone cares enough to contribute. Did that experience give more fuel to want to do things that were built to elicit a response from the audience?
At the risk of sounding like a walking business aphorism, I really think that the key to building any brand today is to get participation and emotional investment from your customers. Whether you’re a payroll processing company, you’re an author who writes a salacious book or you’re a sports figure, the moment you emotionally engage with your audience, you drastically increase the odds of success - whatever you measure “success” to be.
The most useful thing about “social media” to me these days is that one-to-one connection that’s possible, and the resulting viral spread of your brand, your message. Certainly, to answer your question, when you design something to be evocative and it actually evokes some response, it’s satisfying. I believe that while marketing is the act of manipulating one’s message for an express (and often crassly commercial) purpose, there’s a way to do marketing in a way that genuinely adds value to a project. More importantly, good and savvy marketing can add substance and even meaning to that crass commercialism.
I could go on about this, but a great example is the TV spots that Nike has done with Lance Armstrong. They’re pretty universal in message: “I’m a badass, I am willful, but you can be too,” but they add to the association that people have about him as a sports figure, and about Nike. While I don’t buy Nike anything, I have a strong affinity for the brand, and it’s the evocative marketing - with a polarizing, inspirational athlete - they’ve done that’s largely responsible for that.
These days, there’s the annoying metric of “followers” and “friends”, but I’ve learned to look past how many retweets or comments something gets, and to look for actual interaction. Getting a reaction is good, getting collaboration is way better. Just as those intangibles with Flying Lizard at Le Mans were the metric by which I judged the success of that project, it’s been similarly satisfying to look at the hard data associated with our user growth at Swift.fm, to have Sam Benjamin’s book purchased by Simon & Schuster and to get introductions made from people I admire and have interviewed for TravelsofJohn. After a while, it feels odd not to have intimate ownership of some of those projects - because there’s an associated community or it’s now in someone else’s hands - but it’s immensely gratifying to have created something that resonates with an audience.
