What's In A Name: An Interview With Sutton & 58
Q : Hi. How are you doing today?
A: I'm doing great! Just relaxing after a long week. I got married last weekend so it feels good to have some down time.
Q: Oh yeah, I bet! So, how did you come up with the name, Sutton & 58?
A: I grew up spending my summers in New York City. When I was younger I used to dream of moving there and becoming a professional fashion photographer. Everything about the city excited me. It was awake and vivid and always changing. It was a live art form. Sutton Place and 58th street are at the far east side of what is considered midtown; the center of Manhattan. Home to architectural marvels such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and wrapped up in the world's most famous commercial playgrounds such as, Time Square and Rockefeller Center. Midtown New York is the country's largest commercial, entertainment, and media center. I really wanted to keep these elements in mind when creating Sutton & 58. That pull and push you see in art. The rough edges of a major city bustling with culture and raw, unsifted beauty set against the sleek marble of upper east side lobbies where residents pay to be key holders to Gramercy Park. Sutton & 58 merges culture and humanness with sleek and modern design, leading to innovative and cutting-edge marketing infrastructure.
Q: I love the picture that paints. New York is such a fun place to visit. If you could sum up what you do in just one sentence what would it be?
A: Okay..give me a second to think about that. " We are a digital marketing agency with a twist; we believe in relationship building and real connections "
Q: Yeah, it's crazy how this day in age we're losing actual human contact.
A: Wait..sorry to interrupt, but I actually have a theory on this..I think people are lonely and want to feel special and actually want to be vulnerable but don't know how or are scared, so they form these online relationships and invest all this time in those, collecting Facebook friends and likes and shares like canned goods for an earthquake survival kit. But in reality, they are just getting more lonely. There is nothing equivalent to human contact. That's why Sutton and 58 is so unique actually (see you didn't think I could bring it back around) but we're working online all the time and helping our clients build their brand, etc. but we are equally invested in relationship building and the value that we know comes from forming real connections. Ok, I've said my piece.
A: That's really cool. There's lots of digital marketing firms popping up all over these days, why should someone choose to work with Sutton & 58?
Q: Our experience. Collectively we are such a rad team. Really, that I have to say first. We are an innovative bunch who value beauty and interconnectedness. We also work on a sliding scale so that no matter what your budget is, we are a firm that is accessible to anyone.
A: Ok, one more question, just for fun.
Q: Shoot.
A: You have a blog post entitled, " 5 Images That Will Make You Rethink Everything You Know", ( which is awesome by the way) . If you could buy one photograph right now what would it be?
Q: Ha! Surprisingly, not any of those images I mentioned. Although that Sally Mann one is an all time favorite of mine. Right now I've been obsessing over these photographs of wild mustangs by Kimerlee Curyl
They're hanging in Wendy Foster's Santa Barbara store right now and will soon be shown in my friend, Cate Claydon's brilliant gallery, Inez in Los Olivos. Totally obsessed.
15 Images That Will Make You Rethink Everything You Thought You Knew
Photographer Matt Molloy experiments with time-lapse sequences by taking hundreds of images as the sun set and the clouds moved through the sky.
Based in Solvang, California, Elizabeth Alvarez is a practicing fine artist and educator whose works range from mural sized paintings and large charcoal drawings, architectural renderings, sculpture and photography. Her most recent investigations includes the study of light on the built form and molecular crystallography.
Morgan Massen is a photographer and film maker who lives in Southern California.
Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers.
If you thought that it takes the last word in gear to create incredible work, think Again. Ukrainian artist, Oleg Oprisco uses a $50 Kiev 6C and a strong vision to create photographs like you’ve never seen before.
If you thought that it takes the last word in gear to create incredible work, think Again. Ukrainian artist, Oleg Oprisco uses a $50 Kiev 6C and a strong vision to create photographs like you’ve never seen before.
By John Stanmeyer. African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. Djibouti is a common stop-off point for migrants in transit from such countries as Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, seeking a better life in Europe and the Middle East.
West Bengal, India
Blind albino students stand in a dorm at the Vivekananda Mission School, a boarding school for the blind. The school teaches vital skills to blind children from underprivileged backgrounds, who might otherwise have to beg for a living.
Li Chen. China.
17-year-old surreal photographer, Maria Sardari
The Best Advice I Ever Got
I remember about 7 or 8 years ago, shortly after the peak of Facebook. I was just shy of 26 and ready to reinvent myself. I had just left the fancy corporation I'd been working for the past several years in an attempt to be a self-starter (as my dad called it). The entrepreneur blood ran through my veins. I'd spent my life watching my parents, both successful business owners, set their own schedules and set their own wages and I wanted in. My experience was in print marketing and design, but I was ever aware of the potential digital marketing presented.
Keep in mind this was before Facebook became a public corporation. Before viral marketing was monetized. In the beginning, Facebook was an open source playing field where content was liked and shared organically. The word organic doesn't even exist in today's online arena. So, like any novice would, I wanted to capitalize on this organic exposure.
I created a Facebook page, website and began blogging. When Twitter came along, I jumped on that bandwagon too. Before long I had my first few clients and was slinging content across cyber platforms faster than professional baseball pitches. My clients businesses were gaining more awareness and growing. They were happy and I was happy they were happy.
After almost a year of this. I received an email from someone who had been following me on Facebook. In this email I received the very best advice I have ever gotten in my professional life. It changed me almost immediately and I have benefited from it ever since. This near acquaintance proceeded to tell me that I didn't truly understand what social marketing really was and that I was going about it all wrong. How could that be? Here I was, clearly successful. My clients were ecstatic. I was so busy I was having to turn people away. I created my own schedule and was getting paid what I wanted. Finally. How could I have it ALL wrong? Except, I did.
Here is what I have since learned: Social marketing is about building relationships. It is about investing time in creating an engaging brand. You need to be just as good of a listener as you are a good talker and you need to share meaningful content, not just share for the sake of sharing. This kind of marketing takes time to grow, just as you would grow an in-person friendship or business relationship. It is a give and take and there is an exchange of trust that occurs. With so much information overloading our screens daily, meaningful content is more important today than ever before. Today there are geo-targetting tools that can help us initiate conversations, but once that initiation takes place it is up to us to remember that social marketing is a two-way street and that actively listening to the voice on the other end of the line makes all the difference.