speaking in clicks

[October 4, 2011] 

On an intuitive level, offline PR events and digital sharing/commentary make perfect partners. It’s a global kind of thinking that can yield solid brand-building results because it revolves around concrete experience. Done right, you can achieve a natural confluence between what’s real and what’s digital and add a degree of credibility to your oft-repeated claims of “value.”

In terms of the digital/social side of this relationship, integrated campaigns give the social component of your efforts the focus they would otherwise lack. Visit the majority of branded Facebook pages and witness the wall of sameness that greets you.

Without checking the logo, you’d never know whether the happy couple posing with a car wants to share a car experience, a travel experience—or model the clothes they bought for the trip. Asking consumers to ogle such a faceless array of jpeg+text pairs on Facebook gives them no reason not to buy Brand X.

As I see it, this lack of differentiation is a major obstacle to marketing effectively in social space—where the boundaries between the real and the promotional ooze and run together like colors on a tie-dyed T-shirt. And recent developments are blurring the line further. Now that mechanical “Like-ing” has become the point of entry for many online promotions, the value of consumer advocacy has been dangerously diluted.

Jody12 Likes the chance to win 1 million dollars.
In a practice analogous to the selling of indulgences in medieval Europe, businesses that demand this upfront payment in “Likes” are polluting their own promotional ecosystem. Do John and Jill like your brand or merely Like it to enter your sweepstakes? If your only business goal is a higher head count, you’re wasting the opportunity to gather real time impressions of your impact on consumer culture.

Complicating matters, the hive mentality engendered by social networking—the “John-likes-Jill’s-repost-of-Jerry’s-comment-on-Judy’s-vacation-pix :-)” phenomenon—has a splintering effect on online communication. So if your goal in social space is to make a specific point about your product and make it stick, you’re wasting your time. 

The most you can hope to achieve is an increase in good will toward your brand. In that sense, as I see it, social space is far more suited to reaffirming the brand loyalty you’ve earned than it is to acquiring new customers.

To do is to value.
That is, at least. if you do the bulk of your communication with words, jpegs and the occasional moving picture. Give visitors something to do in your social space and it’s much easier to shape the discussion.

Now, if you hold to the utopian belief in “post-interruptive consumer engagement,” I suppose any talk of discussion-shaping will rub you the wrong way. Me, I believe consumers are realists. They know that anytime a brand walks into a Facebook page the subtext is sales. Video? Sales. Game? Sales. Cause? Sales. It’s the only reason a business spends money on anything.

So unless you’re a time-traveller from the ’80s when “live stamps” and cheesy handwritten fonts were considered sure-fire conversion tools, you must realize that consumers already know what your branded Facebook page is for. Once they’re there, you need to structure the experience for them—or they’ll wonder why they bothered. After all—as cellphone companies rejoice every day—aimless blathering is already America’s favorite past time.

Of course, structure comes in all forms: A loose set of premises may be all you need. While some brands consistently launch total immersion experiences in Facebook, the success of such flash-rich environments is still dependent on whether the interactions they make deliver what your audience values.

Give them something concrete to tweet.
Which brings me to Wendy’s, whose current Facebook activity page links directly to the offline 26-city tour that currently promotes their eats. Unassuming in the extreme, it does one thing well, i.e., give fast-food fans who attend tour events the ability to post their pix, vids, tweets and so on into the night. 

It makes, in other words, a tangible connection, not to attributes associated with the brand, but with the brand as they experience it offline. As such, it successfully integrates the offline promotion with the features of digital space many people crave almost as much as red meat.

OK, so it’s not the alpha and omega of social marketing but, as I see it, by limiting the scope of the conversation to a real-time event, it gives the incessant flow of digital chatter a shape, a function and, as a by-product, a welcome dash of meaning. It also helps Wendy’s share of the social sharing market from dissolving into a blob-o-sphere of aimless, undifferentiated communication.

[September 24, 2011]

Though the different branches of advertising have many points of disagreement, they usually find common ground in one area. Everyone grasps that motivating an audience begins with understanding it. So whether you’re meeting about branding, messaging, media strategy—or the mundane aspects of copy and design—you’re liable to entertain a discussion of “tone,” “voice,” “identity,” “persona” and, depending on the age of your CEO, “psychographics.” 

What a strange, disembodied way to talk about ourselves. 

After all, the audience we hope to motivate is not made up of members of a different species. Maybe in some remote era of the future, marketers living on the moons of Jupiter may wonder how to sell a DustBuster^® to a family of sentient crustaceans on Gilese 581g. But until that time, advertising firms and the brands they advise will be people talking to people about life on Earth.

How do you do that? It’s a question the advertising-marketing subspecies of homo sapiens has been asking for over a century. Since so much of the terminology we use seeks to define character and personality, I wonder whether acting training should be added to the Communications and MBA curricula. 

Get into character.
Think about the number of times a day we’re enjoined to understand the mindset of The Consumer. In its evocation of behavioral psychology, this quest for understanding reminds me of the way some actors prepare for their roles. Using a kind of anthropological research, they unearth detailed clues to a character’s thought processes, emotional life and environment.

Other actors, by contrast, seem to take a more physical approach, mimicking the stride, breathing patterns, speech rhythms, body language or facial tics of “typical” representatives of the character’s cultural group. Still others rely on improvisation, finding the character’s characteristics “in the moment,” using the tightrope wire of adrenalin to tap into their deepest perception of the human condition. 

No matter how they achieve the results that make us laugh, cry, rage or rejoice, they’ve found an entry point into the human psyche that, as I see it, is many times more definitive than anything we currently achieve, particularly in digital space. 

Personality, charisma are like…you know…sales?
Despite the real difference between a Drama Team and a Marketing Team, to the extent that they both aim to evoke a predictable range of responses from everyday people, the analogy is worth exploring. Certainly, in their drive for commercial success, films in the action/adventure genre mirror our work more closely than we’d like to admit. 

Like a successful director, we want the final product to be engaging, gripping, motivating and to pique enough interest to justify a sequel or two. Not, despite what we hear at award ceremonies, because it “serves the client,” but because it reaches out to real people and makes their hearts race.

And yet, in countless creative presentations I’ve witnessed, we rarely offer our clients anything more thrilling than a flash marquee with—perhaps—a groovy swirl pattern. Certainly nothing so charismatic as a quirky adventurer or as powerfully moving as a distraught mother searching for her lost child. 

On the contrary, the theme of these presentations revolves around the surgical precision with which we’ve “executed against the strategy.” If only. Imagine cutting edge thinking that actually included a cutting edge, an execution that actually spilled a little blood—OK, maybe ketchup instead—we might finally have a chance to rivet the attention of our audience. 

Act now.
At the sober, practical level, a move in this direction might not require too big a leap or—shudder—expense. Chances are, there’s a local arts education non-profit in your area that could offer a bi-weekly improv class—for less than the cost of that awful pasta salad you serve up at client meetings. Or you could postpone the purchase of another state-of-the-art-teleconferencing-center-no-one-will-ever-use and have more than enough in the budget to sponsor an annual, semi-staged play reading. 

Sure, it would shake up your professional paradigm, and some of your key players would be way too cool to participate. But for the rest, the experience in delivering a message through gesture, pacing, rhythm, facial expression and voice—i.e., anything but text and graphics—would open them up to a new understanding of their role as communicators. If you think this an unnecessary exercise, ask yourself: When was the last time you waited all summer for a Web site premiere?

[Semptember 17, 2011] 

Before you spend six figures testing your copy in focus groups, ask yourself this: Is the bottom-line subtext “Us” or “You?” Depending on the answer, you could save a bundle in test dollars by going back to the drawing board.

For some brands, the temptation to rattle on about “our fine products” is as irresistible as it is antediluvian. Back when advertising was young, spinning your brand yarn into a pledge narrative might have seemed central to the art of persuasion. But today, this approach has a serious drawback: It’s all about “Us.” Take a look at an exceptionally well-preserved specimen from the fossil records, on display at Progresso.com as of 9-16-11:

Our story is all about quality.
We craft all our soups, broths and foods from authentic recipes using only the highest quality ingredients. We are dedicated to making better taste better for you. We believe that food should always be delicious, and there is no reason that delicious food can’t fit within your diet. At Progresso, we love great food. It’s been our passion for more than 50 years.

As if suspended in amber like a 100-million-year-old termite, this classic pledge message lacks only the phrase “That’s our promise to you.” Maybe that bit got snapped off when this copy stumbled into the tree sap. Nevertheless, it bears the stamp of its ancient origins. In one paragraph are four instances of “we” and one of “our.”

Now ask yourself: What’s your favorite topic?

If you answered “politics;” “fashion,” “cars,” “sports,” “hip-hop,” or “electromagnetic resonance,” think again. These might be favorite topics of conversation, but I’ll bet my eye teeth your favorite topic of all time is You. Sure, other topics can grab and hold your attention, but only for so long. Your first love is that sweetheart in the mirror.

Playing to the balcony.
So, what’s wrong with Progresso’s approach? For starters, if “we” take pride in our soup that says nothing about how it tastes to “you.” The net result of such Us-centric patter is a message only tangentially related to our everyday experience. Like an ancient Roman theatrical mask, phrases like: “the highest quality ingredients” appear before us as ritualized stand-ins for emotional connection.

When brands favor You-centric messaging, the impact is more immediate—even if the copy isn’t original, witty, or hip. Here’s what I found at Campbells.com:

Serve up satisfaction.
Campbell’s^® Chunky^™ soup has the stuff you’ll love,
like big pieces of meat and hearty vegetables. It’s a
filling stand-alone soup, or can make a great dinner
when poured over mashed potatoes or rice.

Award-winning prose? No. It has the dutiful flow of language enslaved to a pixel-perfect design matrix. But the impact of You-oriented messaging lies in its intent. Campbell’s strategy is to address consumers in a human voice.

This copy doesn’t discuss Campbell’s wish to serve “your busy lifestyle”—or recite any other duh-infested observations from Advertising’s sacred Book of Wry. Yes, you hear the voice of a merchant. But at least that merchant is talking about you—and that’s the crucial difference. In fact, this dichotomy between “Us-ers” and “You-ers” is played out across digital space. I’ll leave it to you to compare the approaches taken by Amy’s and Stouffer’s.

One being, indivisible.
The debate between appealing to reason (Us) and appealing to emotion (You) is rooted in American culture. We tend to envision ourselves as having a rational side and an emotional side. And as evidenced by the either/or way brands choose to address their audiences, it’s clear there’s also a split between those who believe we’re persuaded by logic and those who believe we’re persuaded by emotion.

As I see it, the idea that the human brain is divided into “sides” is merely a comfortable delusion. As the recent discovery of a “secondary brain” in our guts suggests, we’re one entity, in which rational, emotional and somatic impulses intertwine in an unfathomably dynamic dance. Appeal to a consumer’s rational side? Good luck finding it. For all you know, it could reside in his or her belly, right next to yesterday’s lunch. In which case, you better hope your target ate something sensible for a change.

Armed with the realization that traditional models of audience engagement are flawed, we desperately need a new voice, the “new way of walking” that the ’60s promised but never quite delivered. We’ll find it the moment we tear down the platitude-encrusted walls of promotional lingo that separate brand and audience. In 2011, if you want to sell me something, your logic will be suffused with emotion, your feelings will well up from a commitment to rational principles—and your subtext will be “You.”

[September 4, 2011]

Look at a wide enough swatch of Web site copy and you’re sure to encounter one of everything. That is, if you’re toting a machete sharp enough to chop through the thousands of acres of wild, uncultivated words that carpet digital space. 

Most of the time, you’ll also run into a fair amount of “astro-copy,” the pre-fab drivel that threatens to “Welcome,” “Please” and “Thank” you all the way to your grave. It’s copy touting the benefits, offers, ease, convenience, confidence and peace of mind that every product from mini-biscuit waffles to “non-abrasive blast finishing” purports to provide. 

What gives this copy its disposable, weed-like quality? Its utter disregard for the power of subtext to make a message memorable, moving and motivating. 

At Maytag.com, as of 9-4-11, the danger of leaving subtext to chance is on display in the following follow-up lines to subheads in the main message flow: 

“Count on the PowerWash^TM Cycle to give you the best cleaning in the industry” 
“Count on dual temperature cooking to get every bit of your biggest meals done at once.” 
“Count on the extra-large pantry drawer to keep all their favorites in reach.” 
“Count on Silverware-Blast^TMjet sprays to make sure your silverware starts each meail clean.”

Dolled-up like headlines, the cumulative effect of this copy is a classic list of “bene-bullets.” The parallelism achieved with the repetition of “Count on” adds not a whit of aerodynamic drag to the copy’s headlong descent into substandard communication. 

“Our products work good.” 

…is all these statements aver, the one message every consumer expects to hear. So much so that, years ago, in an era when brand advertising garnered the respect it still deserves, the self-deprecating ads of Volkswagen sparked a revolution. I can’t say it often enough: In 2011, Americans “get” advertising. It’s no good hoping your ad placements will be interpreted as selfless purveyors of “solutions.” Consumers know: if you’re doing it at all, you’re doing it to sell. 

If it’s not affective, it’s not effective. 
Meanwhile, Maytag’s one-dimensional approach merely attests to the product’s functional capacity. It conveys no emotion. With proper care of the subtext, a messaging strategy can guide consumers to arrive at a feeling about the brand. Don’t look for that here. In this case, the problem runs even deeper, all the way to Maytag’s self-identification with the concept of “dependability.” 

While this may have been a workable strategy when the Dependability campaign launched 50+ years ago, the connotations surrounding “dependable” have shifted since then. Living more than four decades after the founding of the consumer movement, we’re no longer grateful if a product works. We expect it to work. Besides, in many circles,” dependable” and its cousins “faithful,” and “reliable” have become synonymous with “boring,” “servile” and “unimaginative.” 

In the Maytag example, the problem is compounded by the pointless micro-branding of “PowerWash Cycle” and “Silverware-Blast jet sprays.” Leaving aside the amateurish quality of this effort, (right down to the inconsistent capitalization of “Cycle” and “jet sprays”) I doubt these phrases mean anything to consumers. 

Even assuming “Silverware-Blast” refers to a major design innovation, such innovations are outside most consumers’ direct experience. As such, these micro-brand names register only as noise—one more thing site visitors will bleep over as they struggle to parse out Maytag’s meaning. Here, a poor surface realization of an intended subtext 

“Check out the cool features on our advanced-design products.” 

…actually impedes communication. 

Of course, it takes no leap of imagination to recognize that visual assets are also shadowed by subtext. You see it in action every time a department store uses attractive models to sell casual wear. At Whirlpool.com, looping videos of clean clothes, fresh foods and delicious meals hover behind still frames of a washer, refrigerator and oven, respectively. While these aren’t the subtlest examples, Whirlpool’s awareness of visual subtext reminds us of simple pleasures and brings the subject matter to life. 

It’s in this sense that a well-crafted subtext has the greatest impact on the success of any campaign. For there, in the deep recesses of the imagination, are the things that make us human. It is, after all, not the stuff we buy that we remember, but how we use it to live our lives. The more nearly your message maps onto that memory, the harder you can sell—even if you never once raise your voice to scream, “Act Now!” 

[August 28, 2011] 

As great comedians seem to know innately, we communicate through a variety of means, including word, gesture, facial expression, tone, volume and accent. They’re also acutely aware of the interaction of text and subtext. In its crudest form, we’re conscious of subtext whenever we hear a clever play on words. 

Whether we laugh or flinch, a pun’s hidden subtext jumps out at us, jack-in-the-box style. While it’s easy to see the relationship between text and subtext in humor, many people are less conscious of that relationship in everyday communication. The way language works, however, everything we can say, write or act out as text is shadowed by its subtext. 

How we read that subtext depends most significantly on the cultural context we inhabit. A sample song lyric from the 1930s bristles with innuendo that might well have been lost on its original audience. For all that its intent is lighthearted “suggestiveness,” I doubt we hear the lyric in exactly the same way in 2011: 

You’re an old smoothie, 
I’m an old softie, 
I’m just like putty 
In the hands of a girl like you. 

You’re an old meanie, 
I’m a big boobie, 
I just go nutty, 
In the hands of a girl like you. 

Poor me, you played me for a sap; 
Poor you, you thought you’d laid a trap! 
Well dear, I think it’s time you knew, 
You’ve done just what I wanted you to. 

Silly old smoothie, 
Crafty old softie, 
I’ll stick like putty 
To the hand of a girl like you. 

(Lyrics by B.G. DeSylva—from the 1932 musical Take a Chance) 

Clearly, the subtext has changed over time, in ways subtle and overt, depending on your reading. Yet, again, without the heightened diction of poetry or the visual cues they receive from comedians, many Americans find subtext difficult to perceive in everyday language. 

This is due to the word-by-word way they are taught to read and write. As a result, a mastery of word order, vocabulary and a few of the finicky rules we teach children to help them develop a rudimentary grasp of grammar, is all most people absorb about how language communicates. 

Trouble is, our industry demands more than a vague sensitivity to language. Knowing the difference between “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” is not enough. As communication managers, an ability to perceive, shape and control the subtext of the message we send to consumers is essential. The truth of this easiest to see when things go wrong. Consider the headline on view as of 8-26-11 on Volvo.com: 

There’s no place like a Volvo. 

A play on an adage made famous 72 years ago in the film version of The Wizard of Oz, the subtext of this headline is simply too vague to have impact. Are we saying a Volvo is a home where consumers can seed cherished memories? Or is it “special” for no particular reason, neither fun, cool, exhilarating nor enlightening. 

Besides, the idea of a car as a place is badly misplaced. If the underlying thought is, “There’s no experience like the experience of driving a Volvo,” Volvo undoubtedly assumes consumers will arrive at the site with a complete set of mining equipment—so they can tunnel down to this level of meaning. 

By grafting the brand name mechanically onto a phrase no longer on the tip of people’s tongues, Volvo fails to define the attributes consumers can retain, recall and, ultimately advocate for. Suburu, on the other hand, with the line: 

Experience Love that Lasts. 

…manages to balance text and subtext more successfully. While its message is still quite generic, this line offers a clear approach to its meaning: “Subaru delivers long-term satisfaction.” Also based on familiar phrases, this line succeeds by not falling prey to a venerable cliché: that every headline just gotta have a pun, homonym, phrase inversion or goofy rhyme, Preferably. Separated. By. Periods. 

As layered as this discussion is when we stick to headlines, creating and maintaining a functioning subtext within body copy is still more complex. This is partly a matter of sheer volume—the more words, the more they’re open to interpretation—but it also involves the dogged persistence of outdated promotional idioms, those undead relics of the ’60s that rise from their coffins at the start of every project to strangle innovation and stoke the fires of Marketing Anxiety. 

In my next post, I’ll have more to say about text/subtext relationships as applied to body copy. Though more often cobbled than creatively conceived, body copy is where the relationship between a text and its shadow has the most impact on the success of the entire project. 

[August 22, 2011]

Years ago, the pioneering English marketer, William Lever, is supposed to have said, “I know half my advertising isn’t working, I just don’t know which half.” More than a century later, the issue is still irresolvable. That’s because advertising is a process, not a one-shot quick-fix for slumping sales. It’s only one of many contributors to the ambient emotional, cultural and intellectual atmosphere surrounding every product. 

By corollary, buying itself isn’t a decision, but a reflex—a response to a body of stimuli, including previous experience, word of mouth, cost and brand identity. Accordingly, you can’t tell “which half” of your advertising drives sales because that’s not what advertising is meant to do. At the same time, without well-crafted advertising, your sales would be hobbled by the absence of a key-influencer. Because advertising does work, just not like a magic wand. 

Despite the claims of placebo-toting consultants, the impact of advertising is ambiguous—and, as I see it, that ambiguity is its greatest asset. In light of that, there’s something both charming and sad about the quest by Yahoo Research to analyze the impact of advertising on sales. 

This ongoing project is flawed, in part, because it fails to define a coherent quality standard for the advertising it plans to test. To yield meaningful results, Yahoo can’t study the impact of Advertising as an abstraction. It can only evaluate the relative impact of one particular ad at a time. Without a mechanism to ensure the ads meet industry standards, the resulting data will be completely meaningless. After all, we can’t expect a smarmy, pretentious ad for the iPhone to sell…wait, bad example. 

Methodology aside, a deeper problem lies in the misuse of words like “data” and “analysis.” 

Objective questions, subjective answers. 
For starters, everyday experience teaches us that the worst way to find out what motivates people is to ask them. The immense social pressure applied to every aspect of American life means an honest answer is unlikely or even impossible. A mind shaped by the lifetime of denial required to meet our strict social norms can’t be expected to deliver objective observations. 

That means any data acquired through a question/answer process—whether “cross-checked” or not—can’t claim the mantle of scientific rigor. Yet as AMC’s Mad Men reminds us, we’ve been fooling ourselves on this score for decades. 

That’s not to say there’s no value in gathering information and trying to interpret it. What else to we have to work with, now that American society is fractured by an incredibly obtuse political discourse about its identity? But the key word here is “interpret.” Qualitative or quantitative, marketing data delivers only a fuzzy snapshot of reality that can’t be analyzed with scientific precision. 

So given that the course of American culture is now about as predictable as the shape of molten lava, I have a hard time understanding why we continue to clamor for such specious statistical rigor. Maybe it’s a measure of the anxiety this state of affairs produces—a “rage for order” that’s sweeping the nation. Or maybe it’s a reflection of the decades-long trend toward injecting pseudo-science into all aspects of American life. Either way, the belief that human behavior follows a predictable curve is inherently toxic. 

The side-effects of a doubtful prescription. 
Between those who advocate interrupting a brand narrative with the literal repetition of search terms, and those who hear the voice of God in user-testing, we’re drowning in rigidity. Clearly, in the trickle-down process between valid scientific research and its assimilation by advertising culture, an essential bit of perspective has been lost. 

It boils down to this: No matter how careful you are, the act of observing human behavior transforms it. Besides, in user-testing facilities we can only observe how people behave in an artificial setting, not in their “natural environment.” Between the social pressure to perform—we are, after all, asking people to test something—and the social pressure on analysts to justify their paychecks, the resulting data is hardly pure and objective. 

Results like this are not rigorous enough to justify multiple, panicky revision cycles until everything fresh, engaging, intriguing, mysterious, thought-provoking—human—has been erased from our work. It’s time to acknowledge that the unsatisfying gruel we serve up to consumers is the direct result of this infantile longing for absolute, lifeless safety and comfort.  

In spite of that, we continue to produce reams of work that mirrors the mentality of our test subjects—people in the prime of their lives with nothing better to do than lounge around in a conference room and complain. Sad to say, with our reliance on pseudo-science, we’ve not only failed to evolve past the era of snake-oil advertising—we’ve turned its harmful influences back on ourselves.  

[August 19, 2010]

[This post reflects the state of the sites discussed at the time. The issues raised are still relevant to the discussion of digital financial advertising in the US.]

Of the finance-oriented sites I’ve examined so far, both PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Goldman Sachs do a better job than most of conveying their respective vision. Of course, it helps that they both might actually have a vision for the future of finance as it relates to the global economy. 

Leaving aside whether one likes everything about that vision—and given recent events, there’s plenty of room for doubt—in terms of presentation and scope, each site in its own way offers far more than “investment tips.” 

Not that global ambition is in itself a driving force behind effective Web design. There are plenty of smaller sites built by smaller entities that are equally effective. The key ingredient is the realization that digital space speaks to consumers in its own unique idiom. And the key to grasping that idiom lies in understanding its essential fluidity.

Because a good Web site, like an ecologically healthy river, is always in motion, always teeming with life, always ready to reward an explorer’s keen eye.

A few decisions taken by the designers of either site automatically cleared the way for a more satisfying experience than can be had at e-trade.com or schwab.com. As an outgrowth, I assume, of a positioning based on the concept of “breadth of service/breadth of vision,” each site is organized around wide swaths of uncluttered space. 

Even on a purely text-based page, for example, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers site creates a feeling of inhabiting a wider world. At the same time, the site is responsive, in the sense that user selections impact the look of the page. On an interior page of the careers section, a flash animation responds to your area of interest by darkening the other options.

Nothing’s new until it’s done right.
Not that these technologies were just invented yesterday. But the artful way they’re put to use is something new, precisely because, for a change, it serves a creative vision. Swing back to the home page and see how the menu selections beneath the marquee respond to mouse over. Yes, it’s a small thing but, like many a human social gesture, it means a lot, because it acknowledges your presence. 

And in a world where, increasingly, one is told the individual does not matter, in an economy where many people feel extremely “replaceable,” the fact that the site seems to notice you’re there is a subliminal inducement to keep the conversation going.

Delve deeper into the site for even more responsive pages. These little participatory cues not only encourage interaction, they create an aura of intelligence and give the site a distinct personality. It becomes less of an information center and more of a presence.

While it achieves these same aims in different ways, goldmansachs.com seems to arise from a similar train of thought. Here the same feeling of breadth is achieved even more fully, with screen-spanning images and navigation that gets beyond the top bar and the button.

Though rectangles are everywhere, this is one of the least boxed-in sites I’ve seen. From the full screen image on the home page to the continued use of sweeping views throughout the site, the sense of global perspective and encompassing vision radiates out long before any copy block might appear saying, “At Goldman Sachs, Global is Our Middle Name.”

And to an even greater extent than pricewaterhousecooper.com, the GS site is responsive. Big, broad context menus sprout on every page at the top and, in a few places, users can conveniently choose the level of detailthey want to absorb on a given topic. 

Not enough of a good thing.
While the copy on neither site is particularly exciting or original, it at least has the distinction of avoiding, for the most part, the sing-songy hucksterism (“Get a great rate on a great loan for the holidays”) or pretentious palaver of textbook copywriting.

What it lacks in both cases, is endemic to our largely illiterate age: the flexibility to speak in more than one voice. As it stands, expertly edited into a not entirely earned crispness, the copy on both sites at least has the momentum to carry each page forward into the next. 

All that’s missing is the variable, unpredictable element that, at least for now, still distinguishes human intelligence from the emerging artificial kind. In their striving for “objectivity,” which flat out does not exist, both sites lose a powerful advocate for their profession at a time of grave doubt. Are the decisions made at such firms made by human beings? A visit to these sites neither confirms nor denies that rumor.

In any case, the real message isn’t expressed in words directly, but emerges convincingly from the total impact of every element of these sites, acting in concert as no other presentation medium can. I promised myself I wouldn’t call the effect “symphonic,” so I won’t. But the temptation is just about overwhelming.

[August 14, 2011] 

In many bee-busy agencies, to the extent that anyone focuses on the copy at all, they focus on output. “Is it done yet? Is it proofed? Is it approved?” Whatever the copy is, in this mindset, the only thing your colleagues want it to be is finished. 

In such an environment, no one’s concerned about what the copy actually says. That is, as long as its pedigree can be traced back to an approved source. That’s like saying you don’t care what color the paint is, as long as it comes from the right can. Not that you’d ever think of saying that to your interior decorator—let alone the guys at Liberty Painting. 

One by-product of this output-focused orientation is the dreary mediocrity that greets visitors to countless Web sites, openers of innumerable envelopes and oglers of thousands of hours of TV. Another is the almost total ignorance of what a writer needs to do the job right. 

This ignorance is particularly evident in the endless rounds of revisions that accrete to every project. It’s a snowballing effect that can begin as early as Round One, and usually starts no later than Round Three. Often, the first sign of trouble appears in client comments. You’ll find it in a scribbled marginal reference to an existing campaign. 

Of course, the fact that client comments are coming to you unfiltered, unexamined, in the form of scribbled marginal notes, is a sign of a deeper process issue that’s a topic for another time. 

Archaic, manipulative, insulting… 
Nevertheless, you’ll ask to see the existing material. And when the missing “asset” arrives, I’ll give you 10-to-1 odds it’s a shapeless blob of marketing treacle, dolled up to look like a print ad, brochure or even a set of Web banners. 

At this point, you have the unenviable task of squeezing it into your creative concept whether it fits or not—the concept the client approved without reference to existing material. 

And though this development also affects the art/design team, it’s the archaic rhythms and manipulative promotional style of the copy that offers the greatest “challenge”—as you struggle to edit text that would offend the intelligence of a rhesus monkey. 

Nor are matters helped by the toe-tapping impatience of your Account team, who can’t understand why this isn’t a simple cut and paste operation. The copy is, after all, from an approved source. What’s the problem? Ego? Narcissism? Oppositional defiant disorder? 

Hands over your ears, you soldier on. You negotiate enough wiggle room to bring the project up to the standard of Early 21st Century Blah—even if the ensuing back and forth eats up four to five additional rounds. You now have a shot at creating a functioning messaging platform that won’t bore your audience to tears. 

If killing your nights and weekends for six or eight weeks at a stretch to produce something merely functional is your idea of job satisfaction, I guess we’re done here. Otherwise, I’d like to offer a remedy, based on a simple realization. 

Your clients are inarticulate. That’s why they need you. 
We need to train our account executives to know there’s more to a brand message than the mechanical repetition of a tagline, benefit bullets and “a strong call to action.” 

They also need the expertise to dig deeper, to uncover the client’s true business goals, which in this case, perhaps, involves leveraging existing material in a misguided attempt to save money. Finally, they need to realize that a typical marketing manager, by training and experience, views consumer messaging not as a narrative, but as a patchwork of comfortable buzzwords. 

Equally important, creatives need to know when they have enough background information and when they don’t. Sure, no one wants to be the curmudgeon who points out the flaws in the game plan. But to start tunneling into a project with no knowledge of the mandates that govern your output is a soul-crushing waste of time. 

As a result, writers, you must demand not just the physical assets, but also the intellectual assets you need before you set to work—no matter how much harrumphing you get from Project Management. 

Because anything you don’t know now will surely erupt in Round 9, when your client’s CEO returns from vacation and asks, “What’s wrong with last year’s campaign—the one with the Penguins?” 

[July 23, 2011]

Beer. Despite the acknowledged subtleties of taste obtained by artisanal micro-breweries, it’s a fairly generic commodity, consumed for a fairly generic reason. Relatively cheap, it’s also a socially acceptable—even “manly”—beverage evoking memories of Youth, casual family gatherings and girth-enhancing binge behavior.

So while beer as a category needs no introduction, branding a beer requires an elaborate arsenal of meta-communication assault weapons, the kind of thing that goes way beyond package design and logo styling. Add to that the challenge of competing for attention online and the decision to create a Web presence for a beer is a dare worthy of Sir Edmund Percival Hillary himself.

Not surprisingly, as of July 2011, the results vary widely. Coors.com, for instance, barely makes it to base camp. “Grab a Piece of the Legend,” the home page proclaims, before sending you to its blander than bland Facebook page. Of course, you do have the option of clicking through lifeless promotional stills. The site also includes a brief tribute to the company’s’ founding brew master. Leaving aside the sheer improbability that a beer first made in the 1880s would taste anything like a beer made in 2011, I can’t see what this accomplishes.

Can’t sell the sizzle if the concept’s a fizzle.
After all, we live in a culture where a grasp of history is as uncommon as a distaste for beer. When the average high school student can no longer retain basic facts about America’s historical record, a marketing message based on “our proud history” seems hopelessly dated.

Yet over at Budweiser.com they’ve taken dated messaging strategy back to the future with a rambling encyclopedic rollout that, at one point, effectively links founder Adolphus Busch to the birth of freedom. Imagine pitching beer as a catalyst for fundamental American values.

If I had a tail, I’d wag it.

Seriously, I can’t imagine what audience this Bud narrative addresses. Certainly no one who just “grabbed some Buds.” You have to wonder about a digital marketing strategy that actually interferes with the enjoyment of its product. After a few pints, I doubt anyone’s going to wade through the site’s claims of environmental responsibility.

A beverage campaign that doesn’t grasp at straws.
Corona.com takes a more promising approach, simply by making no extraordinary claims for its product. Acknowledging that the purpose of beer is to be beer, it positions Corona as the bringer of Joy to Your Life. It then gives you the digital tools to create and post a photo montage, celebrating your own good times. By allowing users to associate themselves with fun and fun with Corona, the brand gives consumers a reason to care about it.

Eventually, however, Corona finally gives in to the urge to chatter narcissistically about itself. On Corona’s About page, consumers are led on a trip to 1925 when, I have no doubt, no one cared about the History of Beer, either. But at least this site has the sense not to hang its branded voice on the false assumption: “We’re good ’cause we’re old.” Funny how that works. In a country obsessed with youth and youth culture, many brands still expect that sales strategy to fly.

When over thinking bottles up demand.
Not that I expect a campaign based on the message, “We’re a totally Modern Beer,” would be more effective. To the extent that the Corona site succeeds it’s because it grows directly out of the product’s main attributes, rather than an appeal to history or any other abstract concept.

More interesting, perhaps, but no more relevant, is the approach taken by Beck’s Beer. At the moment, its site showcases Beck’s Green Box project, an ambitious program to promote graphic artists. While this has the advantage of drawing attention to a unique aspect of the company, the site says nothing that might encourage me to watch a Brewers game with a Beck’s in my hand, let alone visit an art gallery. It merely celebrates corporate sponsorship as a category.

And what, by the way, is a green box? Even if the answer proved plausible, the fact that I have to deduce it makes me wonder if there isn’t something better to do than visit this Web site. Like drinking a Grolsch, for example, whose home page offers a true Web experience in the form of a virtual walking tour of Amsterdam. Then again, most Americans don’t know much about Geography either.

[July 2, 2011] 

Site maps and content outlines, those venerable staples of Web manufacture have been around just long enough to take on a patina of tradition. For reasons practical, political and ideological, we have sanctified a process in which the bones of the beast are laid down first and then “fleshed out” with content. It’s a process desperately overworked Web designers depend on to make every stroke of the tablet stylus count. 

I sympathize. I do. But in most ways that matter, this process has become so ossified as to be obsolete.

To understand why, imagine how a benign being might set out to create animal life to inhabit a newly formed blue-green planet. Like a site architect, such a being might also be aware of the need to give each creature a solid structural underpinning. 

And yet, on our own planet, bone and flesh evolve and grow together, simultaneously, in an interdependent relationship. Plus, they always come together with an eye to function. That’s why equine bone structure differs from human bone structure—and why ancient mythological images depicting horse-bodied warriors, or similar monstrosities, are biologically untenable. 

It’s also why so much that passes for information architecture is essentially unwritable.

Writable architecture? Exactly. A content outline and the architecture that supports and amplifies it, are only as good as their potential to be realized as viable, living creatures. Creatures, that is, with enough vitality, charm and personality to motivate, entertain, and reward your audience. Yet, at the end of the decade-long codification of Web site code, many aspects of site architecture have become the ritualized components of an agency’s “house style.”

About…uh, give me a moment.
Consider the ubiquitous About page. If the only function of your About page is to rattle on about “the finest ingredients” or “leading-edge technologies” such a page is unwritable. 

Why? Because it can’t be filled with meaning; it can only be filled with words, design elements and brand-sanctioned stock art—that depicts a diverse array of grinning crash dummies on the road to Personal Fulfillment. 

Sure, you can hire a writer to write such nonsense. You can give the unenviable drone a sheaf of “back up copy,” sanctioned by your legal department. But such pages are only empty calories, the first among many destined to make your site hopelessly obese.

You want to rephrase that?
No less unwritable are pages requiring so much legal qualification they can only deliver the verbal equivalent of elevator music. Needless to say, this applies to thousands of pages of pharmaceutical copy currently straining the servers at the W3C, but they’re not the only offenders. Such pages stand as a reminder to everyone mapping out a Web site: A content strategy’s sole purpose is to convey a single, clear message. 

Web pages that cavort awkwardly on a razor’s edge of credibility, veracity or manipulation are more than useless. They do as much damage, or more, to your brand as any shocking indiscretion by your CEO—considering they lack the glamour attached to steamy revelations on the evening news. 

In such cases, no “word-smithing” exercise can save you. Nor can words conjure life into another iteration of the ritualized “advice and tips” pages that blemish many healthcare-related sites. Believe me when I say no one facing a potentially fatal illness has room in his or her heart to download your Nutrition Tracker, much less pin it to a refrigerator. 

Besides, if you think a proactive, disease-Googling user doesn’t already get the bit about “eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of rest and taking steps to reduce stress,” you need to look up from your iPad more often.

Copying the copy of the copy a copywriter copied before.
Week in and week out, writers are asked to crank out unwritable drivel and make it fun, positive and empowering. How much better if a fraction of that effort went into creating a coherent brand message, and a fresh tone of voice to deliver it. By consigning writers to the drudgery of writing the unwritable, you’re wasting one of your most valuable resources: A creative mind capable of bringing your brand—and your business objectives—to life. 

Instead, in an obsessive compulsive bout of Marketing Anxiety, many brand managers can’t rest until every copy check-box has been checked. And while we still rattle on about “the clutter,” it never occurs to us that the most cluttered thing of all is our own bloated, obsolete site map.