Al McWilliams can't get the folks at the Michigan Film Office to return his calls. Ever since the tax credit commonly known as the Michigan film incentive was passed into law last year, granting up to a 42% rebate to productions that go down in the mitten, McWilliams has salivated over the boost such a break could bring to Quack Media, the entertainment mini-empire he founded out of his Eastern Michigan University dorm room six years ago. So naturally, he's a little frustrated.
"I'm in New York last week and see this commercial trying to get companies to come work in Michigan," McWilliams says. "And yet for me, whose company has always been here and will still be here long after the incentive is over, it's like pulling teeth to get them to help us out."
Still, McWilliams doesn't seem to be losing any sleep over the perceived slight, or even his home state's limping economy for that matter. He says business is good for the upstart multi-media group, which moved into its Ann Arbor offices in 2005.
Though McWilliams shies away from giving any figures, he claims that sales have doubled each year. One thing is for sure. With a brand-new television series currently in development, a buzzworthy release by one of its flagship rock bands, The Hard Lessons, about to drop, and the eminent publication of a book by comedienne Maria Bamford McWilliams has been editing in his in-between hours, Quack's 1,700-square-foot production facility is not likely to lack for use any time soon.
Knowing a little about his past, it's not a stretch to find McWilliams parenting a company like Suburban Sprawl Music, a small but classy nest for some of Michigan's finest indie bands (Javelins, The Pop Project, Childbite). His parents are business owners and McWilliams didn't even wait until he got out of high school to get his entrepreneurial feet wet with a little record label he started out of his locker.
What is more startling is the scope of Quack's total media synthesis, and the abrupt trajectory from three-person crew of recent college grads making low-budget high school educational videos to burgeoning one-stop shop of content creation and marketing. And all in just half a decade. A visit to Quack on any given day in recent years might have found them hard at work on one of the four series they produced for the Cartoon Network's brilliant Adult Swim slot; booking a club tour for Tally Hall or Great Lakes Myth Society; or putting the finishing touches on the latest issue of Found Magazine.
They've recently added an advertising wing which, with its instant access to the Quack family roster and on-site production facilities, McWilliams says will be able to produce campaigns far more cheaply than competitors forced to outsource their creative and production work. Not exactly a predictable path for a guy who raced bikes to pay his way through college.
If McWilliams is shocked that his career has undergone such wide transformations in such a short amount of time, he's equally surprised at the simplicity of it. "You've just got to do it," he says. "That's my big secret, and you can publish this because nobody's ever going to believe it. When you have that idea - and everyone has it - you just go out and actually do it. And then keep doing it if it doesn't work out the first time."
He laughs at the idea that he is somehow special. "If I have an aptitude for anything it's that I'm energetic and I don't know any better. When we first started doing TV I just called up the president of the Cartoon Network because nobody told me that you weren't supposed to do that. She's a great friend of mine now."
Not every idea is going to work, he says, estimating the number of successful concepts to bombs at about one in five. But he adds that seeing those odds play out can happen only after a little risk taking. "All you have to do is not know so much about your industry that you're afraid to do something."
McWilliams knows he is living in strange, pivotal times. Brutal times, in some ways, to be in the business of creating and selling anything, let alone entertainment. He's mindful of the changes happening to the music industry in particular and says he's doing his best to remain patient while staying proactive as he watches it all play out.
McWilliams concedes that in some ways the industry shot itself in the foot through greedy and short-sighted practices, but isn't afraid to put a large share of the blame in the lap of ordinary consumers who siphon music and films on a regular basis via the Internet. "At some point people stopped caring about the difference between stealing a Metallica or a Ted Leo record."
He doesn't claim to have all the answers and says he's experimented with different marketing models with various degrees of success, including the recently popular approach of giving away recordings for free online in hopes that it will translate into other streams of revenue like concert ticket sales. He discredits that strategy now. "We've tried it, and the results were inconclusive. I really do feel that if you don't ask for at least some money for what you do, it tells people, subconsciously, that it's crap."
The solution, McWilliams says, will come naturally given time. "People will always want music and so always be willing to pay for music. When you have those end points, between someone doing something and the person who wants it, a structure will grow organically between the two to make that happen."
As a businessman, McWilliams' guiding philosophy is one of tangibility and simplicity in practice. "There are so many companies nowadays that can't really tell you what it is they do. And that's always been a pet peeve of mine. My goal is to create something and sell it to you for a little more than it cost me to build it. That is the essence of commerce."
Whereas the BitTorrent phenomenon has created a situation in which thousands of artists are slaving away to make something and then having trouble finding ways to get people to pay for it, McWilliams is more concerned with the opposite problem: too much money changing hands over things that don't even exist. He cites the troubled history of the stock market and how repeated attempts to regulate it have failed to eliminate what he calls "fake money," -- a major cause of the current recession.
"People were borrowing money they could never pay back to buy houses that weren't actually worth what they were paying for them. Then the people they owed that money to sold those loans and bought stocks with it. You have this huge spiral of perceived value and then one day somebody wakes up and says, 'Hey, we as a country didn't actually add any value over the years."
"There are a lot of people whose only goal in starting a company is to sell it. Or to get users, whether those users are ever going to turn into profit. And they're not terribly concerned with whether or not their business makes money. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but that's not very satisfying to me. I very much want to keep things grounded in my world. I buy this for a dollar, I sell it to you for two, and hopefully I've added something of value in the process."
Daniel Johnson likes to write, among other things. This is his first article for Concentrate.
Photos:
Al McWilliams Hiding in Plain Sight-Ann Arbor
MacGruber?
Quack Media Is More Than Just Al-Ann Arbor
Busy, Busy, Busy at Quack Media-Ann Arbor
Ducks-Ann Arbor
I Don't Even Know How to Describe This One-Ann Arbor
Nope. Definitely Not MacGruber-Ann Arbor
All Photos by Dave Lewinski
Dave Lewinski is Concentrate's Managing Photographer. He shoots a ton of other stuff too AL MCWILLIAMS! Go look at his website or his blog.
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