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Perpetual War

Perpetual War : Current Issue, Issue 34, Volume 2, for October, 2011. New Issue published every month, and updated throughout the month. Next issue due online November 2011.

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INITIALIZING

ISSUE INTRODUCTION BY EDITOR AND PUBLISHER C. A. PASSINAULT

Please Note: This will be a short issue, because all of my time is being spent on business, transferring and organizing files, and on building and deploying an array of 16 photography and design marketing and support sites. This post will, however, be interesting, because it will let everyone know what is currently going on with my projects and career. The next issue, issue 35, for November, 2011, should be published in early November, and it will be about slander being used as a form of discrimination, a topic which is long overdue to be addressed (and one which I will be able to take a little time to address).
Regarding the term “War”: The term “War” as used in these examples, is a metaphor describing a fight for change. It is not a threat, or any sort of admission of wrongdoing, and any war that I describe is legal, professional, and ethical. These are wars for change in industries, and are strictly non-violent; they are wars fought with ideas, and with superior business models. Thank you.

Back in Issue 9 of Frontier Pop, “Three Front War”, for September 14-20, 2010, I reported on waging a three front, multi industry war in modeling and talent industry, photography services industry, and in indie film.
I can report at this time that the three front war is ongoing, despite my efforts to tone them down or call for truces, because of issues beyond my control. As a matter of fact, I am, at this time, inclined to resign myself to continuing to fight these wars in all three industries, as I do not see an end anytime soon, and am beginning to believe that fighting these wars will be a normal part of doing business in these markets. Basically, there are elements to these markets which don’t know when to quit, and which continue to do whatever it is that they are trying to do, even among those whom realize that they are beat, and continue to be beat. I’m winning, and while I am making enemies because of my efforts, I’m a leader among both my allies and my enemies. Everyone reacts to what I do, and follows my lead, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this claim.
I’m now in a state of perpetual war in, mostly, those three industries.
When Frontier Pop launched last year, it almost became a four front war, with the fourth front being the rival Tampa pop culture web site, although that web site had a lot to do with the war in Tampa indie film. The rival pop culture site, despite a rather brilliant re-design and re-launch a few months after Frontier Pop launched and showed our hand, failed to come back and fight, though, and quickly folded. It was a case of too little, too late, and the owner threw in the towel and announced his retirement at the end of this year. It gets worse, too, as he handed down what was left of his pop culture site to a vindictive, petty, balding punk, and that punk was the main cause of all of the problems and the fighting with that rival pop culture site which inspired the creation and the launch of Frontier Pop. The angry punk, however, isn’t as smart as the original owner, and is not nearly as friendly, so that site is expected to decline, and to not pose any competition to Frontier Pop at all.
Not that Frontier Pop works to compete with the rival pop culture site, or reacts to anything that they do. We are just better by default. We won, after all, and continue on under our own direction, and with concepts and content well beyond anything that our competition can come up with.
This said, I am aware that Frontier Pop needs a lot of work, despite being the best. Some sections are not finished, and entire issues are still works-in-progress. I will be spending time the next few months, after I get some sites up and running, leisurely taking the time to go back and finish the issues and supporting sections, as well as polishing the site. It’s just going to take a lot of time, and Frontier Pop should be completely done and up to spec by late next year. At any rate, as issues, sections, and other content are completed, current issues will link back to them; I will keep everyone informed.
The loss of the rival pop culture site, however, make me laugh. I’m disappointed, too, that the other site would give up so easily, after being beat back and repeatedly put in their place and humiliated.
Enough of that, though. It’s time to see what has progressed in the last year, and why the fight will continue for several years to come. It might be fair to say that, although some of the wars could be concluded in a few years, that I expect to be still fighting in at least one of these fronts a decade from now. I’d put money on all three fronts, though, as I really do think that this perpetual war will be a part of doing business and in working in these industries, especially when I am rocking the boat by revolutionizing those industries.

Modeling and Talent Industries
Things have been relatively routine on this front, with a lot of advancements made on the part of myself and my allies, especially with my talent resource sites bombarding the industry on a 24/7 basis. A large part of this fight has been in combating and in undermining modeling and talent scams, and this has proved to be spectacularly successful in the past year, with at least one major, and two minor, Tampa talent scams now out of business. Are “models needed for major department store fashion shows”? Well, ask the former owner of that talent school when they used deceptive job marketing to sell training and career services to aspiring models and talent. Ask them if their fraudulent, deceptive marketing, which is what made them a modeling and talent scam, finally caught up to them, especially with many of my powerful web sites, all of which are the top results in search engine inquiries for anything related to local modeling and talent, exposing their unethical tactics.
This year, I was very happy to learn that I was directly responsible for shutting down three modeling and talent scams, and one of those being a major one.
In the next year, expect the fight to shift to new directions, such as addressing unethical businesses which rip off models and talent by convincing them to work for free (this is especially true in events and in so-called fashion shows where models are exploited by working for free, under the guise of “charity”, while the event planners make a lot of money), as well as finally putting the modeling and talent agencies in their place. Another thing that will be addressed are models and talent who feel that they do not have to invest in their careers; these foolish amateurs are about to be schooled hard when my models and talent move in and take jobs away from them, leaving the un professionals to be stuck working the events where they are not paid, where the organizers walk away with all of the profit. It will be exactly what they deserve.
Of course, some might consider photographers to be “talent”, which brings us to the most furious fight this year.

Photography Services Industry
This really heated up this year. With most of my fight in the modeling and talent industries focusing on modeling scams and agencies the past few years, with little fighting between myself and other “photographers” since the last major photographer battle in 2005, this one took front and center this year. Ground zero: Tampa Bay shootout and workshop events.
I’ve been having a sort of cold war with photographers in the Tampa Bay market the past six years, with most photographers keep quiet as they studied what I did and stole what they could; mostly from my web sites and blogs. Of course, in 2008, there was a major online conflict between myself and several other photographers on a classifieds site, where my allies and I ended up flagging and removing so many ads over TOS violations that the site malfunctioned and did not show up correctly (even today, I police that site, and flag and remove shady ads routinely. A few months ago, I even managed to removed several weeks of posts in just a few minutes, so I suppose that you can say that this is one active, and hot, battlefield currently being fought on presently!). Not counting the online battles from 2008 to the present, and the SEO 2008 issue where photographers who aspired to compete with me spammed search engines (this has, to date, largely been rectified, with the road paved for major online operations in the next two months with the development and deployment of an array of 16 marketing and support web sites; See my blogs for more, being the Tampa Designer Blog, the Tampa Photographer Blog, and the Tampa Photography Blog), there were a few incidents where I caught photographers stealing, and using, content from my talent resource sites, and at least one photographer stealing one of my ads and recoding it for his use. Of course, there was also a lot going on where I could not directly see what was going on, with photographers spying on me and trying to figure out ways of competing with me.
With some of this fight heating up in 2008, there was a reason that I took my time addressing what some of these photographers were doing. First off, the economy crashed, and there was little point is working to address what was going on, showing my hand, before it could really be used; with no one buying anything, having the best business operations and marketing is self-defeating as your competitors learn from you. So, I took my time and idled my business, still out booking other photographers. Also, I took that time to properly research, develop, and prepare support infrastructure for what needed to be done. That support infrastructure is now complete, and I did it systematically over the past three years. With all of the support infrastructure, and planning, it is highly unlikely that any of my competitors, and especially my aspiring competitors, can even begin to adapt and compete any time soon. I will have the market advantage for several years, and by then, no one will be able to touch me in the market. How and why? I cannot say. Just wait and see what happens. That array of 16 photography and design marketing and support sites, which are new Mosaic Class sites, are just one facet of a very large, very complex, puzzle of a diamond. My latest tactics and technologies are designed to be resistant to theft, reverse-engineering, and copying. They are also designed to be extremely tough to adapt to, and even myself, knowing all of the details, would have a tough time competing with my own tactics if I did not have my resources.
This year, though, the fight became red hot. After spending six years researching shootout and workshop events with the idea of eventually starting my own, I attended a shootout workshop back in May 2011. Despite what the organizer and his minions are probably claiming, too, I did not go with the intention of spying or competing with them, and I was, in fact, invited by the organizer. My plans for doing my own shootouts and workshops were still on hold at the time, and years off.
Things change, though, especially when you are misled, lied to, and treated rudely, and the experience convinces me that something had to be done to set standards in the market.
So, my plans for my own photography shootout and workshop events were greatly accelerated, and many details had to be worked out, such as making such endeavors worthwhile, as well as completely compatible with my photography business.
The first phase was to set up the photography shootouts as a separate business, as well as the workshop events, and to make sure that each had a specific purpose, using some ideas that I had developed over the years with my film festivals, conferences, networking events, and in the indie film war. That done, I figured out a way to make them compatible with each other and cross-supportive. The shootouts would be used to evaluate subcontracted professionals to work the workshop events, as well as to promote the workshops. Because of that evaluation purpose, photography shootout events which were used to evaluate professionals would have to be free of charge. The workshops, on the other hand, set up as a business, and a more cost-effective and professionally relevant alternative to schools, would be businesses which would provided paying subcontracted jobs to the working professionals who instruct the students, and would make money by students paying to learn.
With those details solved, I attempted my first shootout event on September 25, 2011, depending upon strangers to attend, with no core staff, as I did not want most of the models who were affiliated with my other business interests participating. Well, only one person showed up, and we cancelled the shootout due to lack of participation. Later that day, I got with the one model who was affiliated with and did a shoot with her.
The failure of that first attempt made me realize that you had to have a core staff in place, and that you could not rely upon strangers to make an event happen. The key would be that, with a core staff in place, you could proceed with the event regardless of the participation of outsiders; additionally, with your own models in attendance, it would give photographers, models, and others much more of an incentive to get involved. Problem solved, once I figured out a way to bridge my models and talent from my other business interests to the shootouts, in a way that there would be no conflicts of interest or any security issues. Well, within days, I did figure it out, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The main resolution is that once the shootouts are staffed, and you get other to attend, the shootout event dies its job, and there are no similar issues at the workshops, which are different business models entirely. The key to that, though, is that they shootouts have to do their job well in order to enable to workshops, which made the shootouts the main piece of the puzzle.

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