The 2012 Tanner Family Christmas Card

Branded

I am going to exploit this blog space to do my marketing homework (in case you missed my previous post, I'm an MBA student now). Assignment formalities first:

1. Your Name:  

BRIAN DAVID TANNER 

2. Your picture(s):  

Here's my official MBA headshot:

And here's a collage with lots of pictures of me from my 250th blog post "clip show":

3.Your section number and team number:

Section 1, Team 8 (a.k.a. Team George*) 

Okay, now for the meat of the assignment: I was asked to identify five brands that are a part of who I am. I decided to do this assignment as a blog post because over the years I have already devoted a lot of space here to many of my favorite brands. Below I have selected five brands that I have written about numerous times (there are 75 entries in the Sesame Street Tuesdays series alone), and for each brand I have chosen one salient passage from one relevant post (click on the links to read the full posts). Here goes:

The Utah Jazz (from April 23, 2008)
"The Utah Jazz are looking primed to sweep the Houston Rockets in the first round of the NBA Playoffs, and I've been rapturously watching every second of every game and then relentlessly searching out every word that has been printed about the Jazz the day after the game. But then again, I've been doing that for every Jazz game for the past five years... It may seem silly for to be so emotionally invested something as trivial and random as the flight of a ball, but caring so much about it is exactly what gives me so much joy. The Jazz are a constant in my life - I loved them when I was a kid, I love them now, and I hope that I still love them and still go nuts when my boys are up 2-0 over the Houston Rockets in the 2058 NBA Playoffs."

Nintendo (from February 13, 2008)
 "I love my old Nintendo. I bought him when I was 9 years old with money that I worked for almost a year to earn. I raised $100, and my dad was so surprised that I had managed to earn that much that he pitched in the extra money to get the deluxe edition with the Power Pad and Zapper (both of which I still have). The home movie of me busting out my Nintendo for the first time has become a Tanner Family classic, boasting such classic lines as "This is the happiest day of my life" and "It's like an awcade fow yow house" (I had trouble with 'r's as a youngster). I gave my Nintendo the name Conrad and I used to celebrate his birthday every August (I've forgotten the exact date - I think it was somewhere in the 20s). I've never bought another video game console after Conrad, and he's still going strong after 22 years. The two of us still kick some serious butt at Dr. Mario."

University of Michigan (from September 11, 2011)

"I feel a tremendous amount of pride to be a Wolverine, and though I know but a small fraction of them, I feel a strong connection to the 460,000 others out there. Michigan football is one of the primary channels through which I feel that connection. It's not like I have a strong connection to football in general - I had never actually watched a football game of any sort before I moved to Ann Arbor, and the team had three of the most regrettable seasons in its storied history while I was a student there. Regardless, Michigan football seems to transcend time and circumstance and reach into something deeper inside me."

Sesame Street/The Muppets (from January 20, 2009)

"I don't know about you, but Sesame Street had a profound impact on me and helped shaped my personality and worldview. The timeless lessons found in the songs and skits will stay with me forever (at least I hope so - I would hate to suddenly forget the alphabet). I lamented to hear my sister tell me over Christmas break that her kids just aren't drawn to Sesame Street because everything is so flashy and in-your-face nowadays that Sesame Street's gentle charm just can't compete (no wonder the show has been taken over by the annoying Elmo - it's just Sesame Street's attempt grab the new generation's attention)."

Brazil (from June 9, 2008)

"As the end of my mission was approaching I simply did not want to leave Brazil, so I extended my mission for another six weeks. I probably would have extended again but my visa would have expired, so they had to ship me home. As the wheels of the airplane lifted off the runway I felt like I had lost something, and I promised myself that I would go back some day... When it comes to Brazil, it feels like I always have unfinished business."

Honorable mention: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pixar

*The first time I got together with my group, one of my team members told a story about how he has a cousin named Tyson, but he went by George. So when they asked us to come up with team name I said, "Let's be 'Team Tyson,' but we'll go by 'Team George.'" And the name stuck.

Back to School

Last Sunday night just before bedtime I found this arrangement on my bed:

Balloons, pencils, and chocolate truffles courtesy of my BYU-employed wife.

For anyone who hasn't heard some of the recent developments in my life, this picture may raise some eyebrows and/or questions, such as:

1. Brian is going back to school again? Doesn't he already have enough freaking degrees?
2. BYU? Seriously? Hasn't Brian voiced some dislike for BYU in the past?
3. So what is he studying this time around?

Yes, I'm going back to school again, and yes, I do have way too many degrees already. Yes, it is at BYU, which I would have never imagined even six months ago. And finally, I am going back to earn an MBA (gasp!) in marketing (huh?). Trust me, it all makes sense.

After I graduated from Michigan in 2010, I didn't have any idea what the next step would be. I was very proud of my accomplishments and felt that my studies and experiences as a music student had been enriching and valuable, but I felt like I had come to a dead end with music and I needed to find a new direction. I eventually ended up at Yahoo!, which was a great place for me. I really loved the work I was doing and the atmosphere at a big tech company (even a flailing one - I saw two CEO changes while I was there). I discovered there that I could still feel creative and fulfilled outside of music and the arts, and the lifestyle was much more stable and predictable.

Flash forward to March of this year - all of a sudden I found myself leaving Oregon and Yahoo! and coming down to Provo to get married. After I got here I learned that as the spouse of a BYU professor, I could go to school for free if I so desired. That was a real game-changer, so as soon as I got here I started talking to academic advisors to figure out what career path would make the most sense for me. Although I had made fun of BYU in the past, I found it refreshing to be able to speak openly about my spirituality in the context of an academic conversation (that certainly never happened at Michigan or the U of U). I had some amazing experiences with the BYU faculty that helped me get some mental clarity at a critical juncture in my life.

I had previously given some thought to studying business, but I dismissed it pretty quickly because I just couldn't see Brian as a businessman. However, a light bulb went off in my head when I met a guy in Amy's previous ward who had graduated from BYU with a degree in film. He felt that he had important stories to tell that would further the mission of the Church. However, twelve years after graduating he still had not found work in the film industry and he began to question why he had felt inspired to study film. He then completed an MBA degree at BYU and soon thereafter was hired as a producer by the Church Media Services. His degree in film had prepared him to work in the field, but he was not able to fully harness his abilities until he paired them with the solid business and management skills that a producer position demands. Hearing his story, I came to believe that an MBA would allow me to harness the skills and knowledge that I have obtained through all my previous degrees.

Upon applying for the MBA program, I had to specific a academic focus from several disciplines: human resources, supply chain management, finance, and marketing. I chose marketing because it seemed to play to my strengths most directly and it would seem to be the most valuable skill if I were to end up going back into the arts in some kind of administrative capacity. One of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations nowadays is just getting people to show up. I have already had some success in this area through my involvement with a little upstart non-profit opera company called Zero Budget Productions.

The Zero Budget Productions logo.

I co-founded Zero Budget Productions with my fellow student/best friend Anthony T. Buck at the University of Utah in the early months of 2004. As our name suggests, we started with no money, but we had a vision of independently producing small-scale operas that would complement the large operas that were officially put on by the university. Anthony and I both wore many hats as we launched Zero Budget, but Anthony had much more theater savvy than I did at the time, including several previous stints as a stage director, so for our first production he naturally assumed many of the artistic duties of the company. That left me to handle much of the company's business-type stuff, most notably the company's marketing efforts. My first step was to recruit my sister Amy, who has a graphic design degree from BYU, to be our graphic designer. This was a partnership that lasted for the duration of my tenure at Zero Budget and yielded some very fun posters and other promotional materials:

A few of my favorite Zero Budget posters that my sister Amy designed.

Our first show was Amelia Goes to the Ball, a one-act comic opera in English by Gian Carlo Menotti that had seven solo roles and a small chorus. My marketing campaign consisted of strategically placing posters all over campus, doing some newspaper interviews, passing out fliers, sending out lots of email invitations, and performing some scenes from our shows in music classes to raise awareness of our company. We weren't sure how much interest we would actually attract since a student-produced opera was unprecedented at the U of U, and because it was an opera, after all. And then there was a blizzard on the night of the performance, which we figured would keep people away from the show. We performed the show inside of a ballroom in the U of U's music building, and before the performance we thought we would be lucky to have 50 people show up, so we set out about 50 chairs in the ballroom. I was performing in the show and I had to make my first entrance from a balcony off of the ballroom (I entered by swinging on a rope made out of bedsheets - it was awesome), so I had to preset myself there a half hour before the show started. I sat out there waiting and waiting and waiting for the show to start - it seemed like over an hour. I couldn't see what was going on in the ballroom, but it was pretty noisy so I figured that we must have gotten a decent crowd.

The opera finally started and when I finally made my entrance into the ballroom 20 minutes into the opera, the balcony doors swung open and I saw the reason they had delayed the start: they had gathered every available chair from the whole building, and there were still dozens of people standing in the back - over 300 in total. It was such a startling and triumphant moment to swing in on the rope and see six times more audience members than we had imagined in our most optimistic projections. The show went spectacularly and before the end of the night we had a bunch of voice students lining up to beg Anthony and I to cast them in our next production.

Anthony and I masterminded several more shows over the next few years, and we were able to fund our productions entirely through donations. When I left for Michigan in 2007 Anthony ran the company by himself (directing and starring in a production of The Mikado that I wish I could have seen). Anthony graduated and moved away after that, so I figured that Zero Budget would just end there, but a few of our colleagues that had participated in a few of our productions and learned the Zero Budget way of operating kept the company going for a few more years after that. The fact that Zero Budget continued after Anthony and I left gave me a tremendous amount of pride - it showed that we had not only put on a few fun shows, but we had changed the culture at the university and left a legacy of empowering students to create their own performance opportunities.

My work with Zero Budget was the most satisfying experience of my academic career, and looking back at this experience I can see that I kind of stumbled into marketing by accident. I certainly didn't know anything about marketing at the time (and I still don't know very much - I've only had one week of classes), but the tactics we came up with worked pretty well for our little company. Beyond just making and hanging up posters, the very founding of the company was built upon my analysis of the market that revealed that a need for small-scale comic operas was going unmet, and through some rudimentary market segmentation we were able to find audiences interested in our little niche product.

So as unlikely as it may seem that I am here at BYU studying marketing, I feel very blessed to be here. So many doors all opened at once to make this opportunity possible and I am looking forward to all the growing experiences that will come over the next two years.

P.S. - All of a sudden this blog post seems pretty myopic :)

Sleeptalk With Me

"Conversation" between Amy and I, circa 2:00 a.m.:

Amy: This room was for my ear, too.
Brian: That was nothing like the bowl I felt. Wait... (making hand gestures in the shape of a bowl)... like that. It feels like someone's touching my ear. Like a little person. Oh my gosh, I'm losing my mind, Amy.

Special thanks to Amy for having the presence of mind to write down that exchange before drifting back to sleep.

SST: I Love This Boat! (Revisited)

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

With thousands upon thousands of Sesame Street clips to chose from, it feels inexcusably lazy to repeat myself. However, it has been three years since I used this clip and it did come to mind several times over the past week:



This was the boat that I loved:

The Carnival Sensation, seen from the dock in Nassau, Bahamas.

For any of you out there contemplating a honeymoon, allow me to recommend a cruise. While Amy and I were brainstorming destinations for our trip (believe it or not, Columbia, South Carolina was shortly a contender) we saw a blog post from our friend Stephanie that made us consider a cruise. We were sure that a cruise would be way outside of our budget, but we browsed online anyway. We couldn't believe how affordable they were, especially considering that the price of a cruise covers all your food, lodging, and entertainment expenses rolled into a single cost. We ended up getting a good deal on a 4-day cruise to the Bahamas. (The low cost might also have been related to last year's highly-publicized Italian cruise disaster and it being the end of the off-season.)

It was absolutely perfect because every day we could do as much or as little as we wanted to. Every night we got a schedule of the next day's activities and we'd pick three or four to attend, and in between we had plenty of time for reading by the side of the pool, relaxing on the beach while we were in port, or just chillin' in our little cabin. And despite the fact that the boat was full of people, it felt like everything was about just the two of us. Plus the weather was absolutely perfect.

Speaking of being lazy, I'm just going to turn this into a picture-dump post of cruise highlights. Here goes:

• Amy did karaoke for the first time - a "Twist and Shout" duet with me. It was fun to see people (some of them with a few drinks in them) get up and start dancing as we sang. After that I did a solo number - Prince's "Kiss," my patented bring-down-the-house karaoke song of choice. The crowd went nuts and people kept shouting stuff at Amy like, "You got him, girl!" For the rest of the cruise people came up to us and complimented us on our karaoke prowess.

• We went on a snorkeling excursion on a coral reef outside Nassau. I had never been snorkeling before and it was amazing to me that from the boat there didn't appear to be much going on in the water, but once you dipped your face under the surface there were suddenly hundreds of brightly colored fish inches away from your outstretched arms.

 • Breakfast in bed.

 • Every night we would return to our cabin and cute little animals made of towels had magically appeared on our beds. So when they offered a class on how to make said animals we were all over it.

 • In between the officially scheduled activities there were plenty of other open activities, such as miniature golf, waterslides, a gym, and a running track. It was fun to get up early and go running with Amy every morning with the infinite blue sea or distant Bahamian islands as a backdrop.

 • I suffered a crushing defeat in the first round of the hairy chest contest. Seriously - look at this picture and tell me I'm not the hairiest guy up there. I think it may have been a Southern bias, since I was the only guy up there not from Georgia. I felt vindicated by all the booing from the crowd when the judges voted me off the stage with my consolation medal, and several ladies told me they thought I would win in a landslide, including the wife of the guy who won (in the middle) who said that she thought that I easily win and that her husband only won because "there's more of him to have hair on." Too bad it wasn't a "Most Sunburned Shoulders" contest - I would have had that in the bag.

• Said sunburn occurred at the beach in Freeport. We got all lathered up with SPF 50 sunscreen before we left, but we forgot to bring it with us to reapply. Oops. Funny tangent - on the beach we approached a random couple and asked them to take our picture. Later on we wanted to get in the water, but didn't want to leave our wallet, towels, etc. alone on the beach, so we went back to the same couple and asked us if they would watch our stuff. The lady asked, "Did you ask us because we are also Mormon?" She had noticed my CTR ring earlier. Turns out they were down from Mesa, AZ with a group of graduating seniors from the local institute. It seemed incredible that of all the people we could have talked to on the beach we honed in on them.

• Amy and I are not the dancing kind, but we saw "Thriller Dance Class" on the activity schedule and couldn't resist.

• Lots of people have asked me about the food and about the overheard legends of everyone stuffing their face all day long on cruises, so I'll illuminate a few myths. Yes, I suppose you could eat all day long if you wanted to, but the restaurant stations only opened up during mealtimes, so in the interim your choices were limited to pizza, sandwiches, or self-serve ice cream machines. Also, at dinner time they did not make us sit awkwardly at a big table full of strangers - we had a table for two every night. Overall the dinner meals were very good and beautifully plated. A lot of the food choices were surprisingly adventurous, such as alligator fritters and shrimp ceviche. I loved being able to try the types of foods I normally only see on Top Chef without having to worry about exorbitant prices. And if you didn't like what you ordered, they were more than happy to bring you something else instead.

So yeah, definitely loved the cruise. We felt so pampered and relaxed, and everything was taken care of for us so we could just enjoy ourselves on our honeymoon. In the words of Ernie, we loved that boat.

SST: Luis and Maria's Wedding

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

For many people (around 30 million, to be more specific), General Hospital's Luke and Laura had the ultimate 80's TV wedding. However, for those of us who were seven in 1988, that wedding's cultural impact was completely eclipsed by the wedding of Luis and Maria on Sesame Street. They built up to the wedding for months and I remember having an incredible sense of anticipation leading up to the actual event. It's weird to think of Sesame Street pulling something akin to a ratings stunt, but I was definitely glued to my TV, so it must have worked. You can see the wedding ceremony here - I couldn't figure out how to shorten this super-long clip when embedding, plus that clip has far too much Elmo to slide past my usual no-Elmo policy (although Elmo's fear of dropping the rings was the only part of the wedding that I actually remembered, aside from the general rooftop setting).



Still, Luis/Maria is only my second-favorite Muppet-related wedding of the 80's:



Note: I may or may not have sung that song to Amy when I proposed to her :)

Our Story

My poor blog has been a casualty of the major upheavals in my life in the past few months. For those of you who don't already know, in mid-February I got engaged to Amy Jeppsen. In mid-March I left my job at Yahoo!, moved away from Oregon, and moved into an apartment in Orem, Utah to be close to her. And in less than three weeks were are getting married.

I recently wrote a few short pieces about our dating and engagement story for our wedding website, and I thought I would cheat by having them double as a blog post:

First Date:

Amy and I used to be part of an informal group that occasionally got together to play games on Sunday nights in Michigan. On one particular occasion the boys in the group began planning a group date and Amy, the only female present that night, took advantage of the opportunity to suggest that one of the boys present could potentially ask her out. At that point I had been thinking for a while that I would have liked to ask Amy out, and as we came up with a plan for a hypothetical group date I was simultaneously excited because I finally had an excuse to ask her out (I was pretty shy about that) and threatened by every guy in that room because I thought they might try to ask Amy before I could. So right as the game night broke up I made a beeline for Amy so I could ask her out before they had a chance. 

The group date turned out to be a visit to a cider mill (a Fall rite of passage in the Midwest) for fresh doughnuts & apple cider, and then a trip to a corn maze. At the outset of the corn maze there was a small stand where they were selling coloring books filled with fun facts about corn. Each time we reached a checkpoint in the corn maze I rewarded the group by reading a fun fact about corn.

Our first date grew out of a group game night, so to reduce it to game night terms: Brian and Amy, in the corn maze, with the coloring book.

Engagement:

By my reckoning, Amy and I had two engagements separated by one month, 800 miles, and two holidays that we barely missed spending together. The first engagement happened when Amy came up from Utah to see me in Portland over her birthday weekend back in February. We had a great time together visiting the Oregon coast, dancing to a live Brazilian forró band, and meeting my friends and family that lived in Oregon. Over that weekend it became pretty clear to both of us that we were going to get married eventually, but I anticipated that we would continue our long-distance courtship as we had done up to that point – every few weeks one of us would take a trip out to see the other as we continued our courtship. However, on the day before Valentine’s Day as we embraced in the car together before I dropped her off at the airport, I unexpectedly found myself saying, “So, we’re going to get married, right?” She said yes, and I told her that I would propose for real with the ring and everything later. She then got on the plane back to Utah and I immediately called my parents and sisters to tell them the news, after which I panicked because I wasn’t sure if Amy knew I was serious. But I called her that evening and much to my relief, she did know I was serious, and yes, she really did want to marry me.

The second, official engagement happened a month later, just a day after I had wrapped up my life in Oregon and arrived in Utah with my car filled with all my belongings. It was just a few days after Pi Day (3/14), which is a big day for math-savvy folk like Amy. So to commemorate the missed holiday I took her to The Pie, my favorite pizza place in Salt Lake, and then across the street to Gardner Hall, the building where I had all my music classes at the University of Utah. I took her on a tour of the building, ending in the spacious atrium where a small table with two pies (pumpkin, Amy’s favorite, and chocolate silk) had been set up by my friends Anthony and Desiree. As Amy ate her pie, I pulled out my guitar and serenaded her, and then got down on one knee, gave her the ring, and asked her to marry me. There was a concert in the building that night so there were quite a few people milling around us as all this was happening, but fortunately Amy still said yes.

Amy and I after right after she finished her marathon last Saturday

Favorite Memories of Amy:

Amy and I have known each other for about four and a half years now, and during that time we have had plenty of adventures and fun memories:

• Spring break road trip in 2010 to Atlanta (world’s largest aquarium, hiking Stone Mountain, and Varsity hot dogs), Huntsville, AL (NASA space camp), and Nashville (Honky Tonk Row, the Parthenon, Andrew Jackson’s plantation)
• Two trips to Cedar Point, even though Amy doesn’t love roller coasters like I do
• Convincing Amy to play hooky and go see Coraline while working on her dissertation (and spilling a carton full of blueberries all over the movie theater floor)
• Amy attending every “Brian Presents:” film presentation since the beginning of the Michigan era
• Co-inventing Choco Ramen (uncooked ramen coated in chocolate and peanut butter – trust me, it’s awesome) at FHE
• Sprinting several blocks alone back to a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake to rescue Amy’s purse for her
• Sneaking into a performance of The Pirates of Penzance through the stage door
• Awaking one Easter morning to a scavenger hunt surprise prepared by Amy
• Watching seven seasons of Buffy together over the course of a year
• Amy making me a birthday mix CD that opened with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (inside joke – trust me, it was hilarious)
• Amy fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams by giving me a Gatorade shower (she’s a good sport and has a good sense of humor)
• Sitting beside Amy at a Jazz-Pistons game in Detroit and explaining the proceedings
• Amy making math study guides for my GMAT preparation that included story problems about Breaking Bad and Buffy characters
• Seeing a Brazilian film at the Sundance Film Festival together and meeting the director
• Amy explaining the logic behind dividing fractions at a ward talent show in Michigan
• Amy and I getting married in the Bountiful Temple on May 25 (projected)

No - Thank You, Oregon