speaking in clicks

[March 11. 2010]

In advertising, the winds of change blow constantly. That’s a good thing. If life weren’t dynamic, it wouldn’t be life at all. Accepting that, however, is not always easy. It takes a certain courage and, especially in a field where cause and effect is hard to pin down, it’s easy to see why so many people are desperate for The Answer.

Enter the theory of disruption, a tidy package of ideological toggle switches, which, like any philosophical system, promises a comfortingly reliable yardstick against which to measure success and failure.

As I see it, however, “disruption” itself has no inherent value. Like all ideological stances it’s simply the last resort of a bankrupt imagination. Look at it this way: If I start my creative process by noting aspects of the competitive market that might have become routine—that doesn’t mean I can revitalize my approach by arbitrarily running in the opposite direction.

Obediently defiant?
That’s because the opposite of a stale train of thought is not the opposite stale train of thought. The opposite of stale is fresh. Freshness can express itself in an unlimited number of ways, one of which is to take the traditional approach back to its roots and reinvent it. That is, not oppose it, but simply clean out the cobwebs and the mold, recaulk the tiles and open up the windows.

Or not, and that’s the point. Blind obedience to a belief system can’t produce a creative solution. A true creative solution connects on a deeper level than the Rule-Book-Of-The-Month Club allows. Sure, you might have a few successes. Shock value often leads to a spike in ratings. You might even start a cult of personality around the magic mantras that “guarantee results.”

Trouble is, over time, the results you get through animal magnetism aren’t sustainable—either with consumers or your colleagues. The mask slips and people begin to ask about the man behind the curtain—and, by the way, his broken promises.

Tools, not rules.
Now, as a way to jumpstart the imagination, there’s nothing wrong with ferreting out competitive trends. It can help you flesh out your understanding of why all the obvious messages aren’t cutting through. You’ll have learned something invaluable, even if—as often happens—you discover the source of the trouble in the hackneyed realization of a sound insight.

But none of that is meaningful unless it builds a lasting connection with consumers. Of course, in a world that celebrates stupidity, the most disruptive thing about “thinking differently” is that it involves thinking at all. But this is hardly a vote of confidence for Disruption’s dogma.

Touching a nerve.
Besides, it’s no revelation that shaking up cherished assumptions is a sure-fire way to attract attention. In the past few years, we’ve seen a gorilla pitch investment strategy, a duck hawk medical insurance and a gecko shill for Geico. Different, yes, but only effective because, beneath the startling surface, the message is clear as a bell.

These campaigns not only overturn the tried-and-true but also make a sincere effort to touch a nerve. Whom the gorilla, as a gorilla, speaks to most deeply is the advertising community. We, the bored, salute the new for its own sake, if only because it provides us with a fresh search term for the stock art engine.

At base, however, the only thing essentially disruptive about these campaigns is that they work. It wasn’t the trip down the rabbit hole to “Oppositeland” that provided insight. It was a grasp of the human equation, expressing itself, on the surface, as a twist on the ancient folklore tradition of talking critters.

Instead of saying: “Nobody’s doing geckos, so there’s our aperture.” someone realized they could connect to consumers by tapping into deep-seated cultural archetypes”—of which “Operators are standing by” is decidedly not one.

[March 8, 2010]

Into the life of every copywriter a comes the chilling wind of self-realization. Despite years of practice, tireless self-discipline and an undying love of language, mistakes can and will creep into your text. Go ahead: click “spelling check,” have the text read to you by Natural Reader software and, while you’re at it, read your document aloud, backwards, from the bottom up.

It doesn’t matter. At some point, a mistake will take up residence in your document. That’s the reason every writer, from EVP to intern, needs another pair of eyes to go over each and every block of text before it’s printed, mailed, broadcast or posted to digital space.

Now in the last few years, I’ve encountered those who, using a penny-wise model of efficiency, aim to replace a proofreader’s professional expertise with sheer pluckiness. “If everyone pulls together,” this line of logic goes, “we can catch all the mistakes ourselves.”

More than meets the eye.
Trouble is, “we” consistently lack the skills to do so. In the first place, it takes a lot of training to correctly identify mistakes. Sure, plenty of people can spot a typo or even a true spelling error, but that’s simply not good enough. Even those with an eye for what passes for grammar tend to know it only as a series of artificial rules, mechanically applied.

In fact, grammar doesn’t exist in the abstract. The abstract models used in elementary school are—and have always been—merely intended to sensitize children to the concept of grammar. In reality, a major part of a real writer’s job is to build a customized grammar for each text, a grammar uniquely suited to its style, substance and flow of ideas.

Far from simply “checking off the boxes” a writer’s craft is a complex alchemy of personal style, regional speech rhythms and nuances of meaning. From the order in which topics are presented, to the weight they’re given, to the emotional charge carried by each semantic unit, writers weave a highly individual fabric each time they type, scribble or dictate.

Sensing that, it’s no wonder the average marketing major feels ill-prepared to comment on copy even in the narrowest sense. Far easier to trust to the winds, and hope the writer in question wasn’t distracted by simultaneously writing three other Web sites from scratch. Far easier to submit the copy to the client without reading it at all. So much for pluckiness.

An eye for (meaningful) detail.
Now should you find yourself in an environment that understands the value of proofreading, there are still a few pitfalls to be avoided. Most importantly, a clear distinction needs to be maintained between proofreading, editing for “brand style” and copy editing. Unsolicited copy editing is simply arrogant and a gross waste of precious time. Suggestions are one thing, dictates another.

Proofreaders must also understand how their task changes as they move from industry to industry. Those accustomed to working in publishing need to orient themselves to the peculiar way advertising copy is “brokered,” often through a series of touchy negotiations with the client.

As a result, I caution proofreaders to read first and mark up later. There’s no point correcting copy that clients or their legal counsels insist on. There’s also no point in applying the standards of, let’s say, journalism to advertising copy.

That’s because advertising copy is meant to be read quickly. It’s called upon to make immediate, motivating impact. That, and that alone, is the reason copywriters often resort to elliptical phrases, sentence fragments and word play—techniques that concentrate meaning into the smallest possible space. It’s also the reason advertising copy may, rightly, flaunt “the rules.”

So before covering a page with red ink, check with the writer. You may be holding the text to an irrelevant standard, as if re-engineering an oven to do the work of a refrigerator.

On the other hand, as every copywriter with an ounce of humility knows, occasionally the mad dash to compress meaning into bite-sized chunks can confuse the reader. In such cases the objective eye of a proofreader is simply invaluable.

Finally, a word on punctuation. As everyone with a dog-eared copy of Strunk & White knows, there’s a rule for everything. Trouble is, because of the emotional impact advertising copy is charged with making, it exists in a twilight region halfway between the spoken and the written word.

An extra comma here, an atypical clause there—or an em-dash not sanctioned by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences—are all essential components of this hybrid idiom.

Is proofreading essential? Oh, aye.
As I see it, proofreaders are an invaluable asset to the Copy team. As such, proofreaders should work in close conjunction with the Copy lead for each project and not be managed by project managers more concerned with task management than with motivating consumers.

In the end, it all comes back to values. Unless we’ve finally decided that language is simply an Inconvenient Truth, an obstacle to “award-winning design,” proofreaders ought to be considered a key part of every agency, as essential to the creative product as they are to basic quality control.

[February 20, 2010] 

[Though Aflac’s site design has changed, the thinking behind it, reflected here, is much the same]

Is there anything more boring than insurance—that is, unless you’re an AIG field rep? Last year’s horror show aside, as a topic it’s one of the more potent sleep aids known to man—with the snores starting long before you get to the fine print.

My confidence in this as a consensus point enables me to make a leap of faith and suggest that this is the reason Geico and Aflac use anthropomorphic animals as celebrity spokes creatures. The one, a talking lizard, doles out common sense in the affable tone of an emotionally centered, rational adult. The other, a talking duck, is a bit less wordy but still more articulate than many a former US president.

Like an eight ounce glass of water in a desert, they make the unbearable bearable, if only for a moment. As such, they cross over from mere advertising to become a branded experience. In digital space, Aflac has found an especially engaging way to continue that experience and, in the process, exploited the medium’s potential as few comparable sites do.

Idiomatic. 
It’s not about the duck, although that avian presence, discreetly animated, does help set the tone. Rather, the site succeeds because of the effective way it stages its messaging. Here, interactive flash development, combined with a beautifully backlit color palette, create an environment that grows directly out of the basic building blocks of digital technology.

The total effect is something no other medium can achieve, giving users a new way to read. While conveying all the information needed to make the sale, it does so outside of traditional text-slab-and-jpeg tabling.

The site is equally remarkable for borrowing bits and pieces from gaming design without losing focus. Nowhere, even in the serious fun of the interactive quiz, does the user experience stray from its one and only purpose: enticing you to sign up. And while we’re on the subject of enticement, one of the most successful aspects of the site is its sense of humor.

Human.
By that I mean it succeeds precisely because its humor is neither a bad imitation of faded standup comedy stars nor the smudgey xerox of underground social commentary found in South Park or The Family Guy. Instead, the site’s humor expresses itself through a quiet understanding of the struggles of everyday life. Like Daffy Aflac, we’re all straining to be heard over the din of mundanity that surrounds us.

But the site mines this vein more deeply and, in fact, this view of life emerges as the brand’s “deep structure.” What we all need, Aflac wants us to know, is something to fall back on when life—as it will—goes all screwy. Enough of denial, it seems to say, enough of the cowboys and hardboiled dames of the last century. When there’s trouble, it’s OK to quack about it and, more importantly, to prepare.

In fact, the site’s messaging strategy has been thought through—and felt— so thoroughly that even on the grittiest of drilldown pages, the spirit of the home page prevails.

Fresh.
A significant part of site’s success, as I see it, lies in the staging and pacing of the text. In a marvelous confluence of proportion, color and weighting, the eye always knows where to look. Besides, even the scariest percentage points look good enough to eat. One emerges from the experience with the feeling that, arcane as the backend number crunching might be, the product is accessible, practical, “doable.”

Now, I’m in no position to evaluate Aflac’s brand promise. What I know about actuarial tables would fit inside a gnat’s whisker with room to spare. But I do know this modest site opens a window onto what the digital experience could become—once more brands transcend the tattered legacy of print, TV and telemarketing and have the courage to strike out into fresh territory.

[February 19, 2010]

Back in the early gold rush days of Internet marketing, I’m sure banner ads must have seemed quite an amazing innovation. Those glimmering rectangles of interaction: how enticing they were. Surely, people would find them irresistible, studded with the most motivating call-to-action every created.

“Click here” read the shiny button, sometimes enhanced with a Disney-esque twinkle harkening back to the era of Tinkerbelle and “Bibbidi-Bobbiti-Boo.” Entranced by the magic of hyperlinking, designers and marketers no doubt believed the urge to click would be so compelling, audiences wouldn’t notice the lack of value on the other side.

Flatland.
Today we know better. Fact is, it takes more than mechanical trompe l’oeil effects, jiggling credit cards or shimmying suburbanites to drive traffic to a landing page—and far more to convert that click through into a sale.

Yet strangely, the banner remains the less-than-gold standard of digital interaction on many Web pages. In many cases, at least, the number of banners per page has dropped, resulting in a proportional drop in distractions from the main content. In essence, however, their impact is still not too far removed from their ancestors, the painted signage that once graced Manhattan store fronts in a bygone era. It’s enough to shake your faith in marketing theory.

Of course, as the wizards at PointRoll will tell you, there are many potentially entertaining options that were not available even a decade ago, both in terms of video content and levels of interaction. Despite this, there’s one technology that still eludes even the sharpest of flash programmers.

I’m talking about relevance.

False parallels.
Part of the legacy of magazine and newspaper design, the online banner is, in essence, a space ad. But what has always passed as a mildly irritating interruption in print is transformed into an irrelevant blot online. On the face of it, you might expect the parallel to be perfect. In both cases a swath of text sits next to a rectangle of ad space.

As always, the crucial difference lies in the context. Some exceptions aside, print magazine ads have always tended to have higher production values than the article copy they jut into. Whether a shiny car or the darting eyes of a couple on holiday in Bermuda, print ads add luster.

In digital space, the distinction between content and intrusion is harder to maintain, as the same tools are equally accessible to each. Besides the average digital marketer is shilling online precisely because costs are often significantly lower. They’re not about to invest in state-of-the-art design for a banner ad—it would only defeat the purpose.

Tired angles.
The result is a flat and often garish box filled with anything from blinky buttons to a squwunched up approximation of the brand’s current broadcast campaign. If anyone believes a badly cropped photo of a minor celebrity hawking a major car manufacture’s latest sale-a-thon is attracting much attention, I can only hope they won’t be out driving tonight. Worse still is the budget padding “media strategy” of placing minor variations of the same banner in two different locations on the same page.

In contrast to that appraoch are attempts to engage two different page areas in a kind of dialogue, as recently attempted by Apple, in which the “PC” character seemed to “run upstairs” to dissuade consumers from switching to Macintosh. Leaving aside, for the moment, Apple’s unbearably smug brand persona (ready as they are to stand in for the Dalai Lama at a moment’s notice), I’m not convinced that antics of this kind really do much to engage consumers.

For one thing, the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign was already tired before its Web integration began. For another, consumers come to digital space to do stuff. Who has any interest in another installment in this faded reminiscence of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road pictures of the 40s?

Box-cutters, anyone?
But I digress. The issue here is the future viability of the banner, this petty annoyance that does little to earn brands much in the way of equity with consumers. What’s the solution? Experimentation. What about corporate underwriting of a Web page? What about subtler forms of design that integrate themselves more seamlessly into a particular Web presence, mirroring it in copy tone, design standards and content?

At the very least, the spandex-model of banner advertising, stretching itself all out of shape to appear wherever today’s plucky media buyers can squeeze them should become a thing of the past. Like a factory spewing wastes in a residential neighborhood, ugly, flat and boring banners only pollute digital space, mooring it to a toxic past most of us only are too anxious to sail away from.

[February 16, 2010]

As a barometer of technology’s impact on everyday life, the triumphant progress of mobile telephony is already an epoch-demarking phenomenon. Forty-four years ago, this was the stuff of fantasy. We’d only just stopped chuckling over Don Adam’s “shoe phone” when William Shatner first said “Kirk to Enterprise” into an improbably thin handheld device.

Anyone who also remembers Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist radio, or Robert Vaughn and David McCallum’s “cigarette-pack” transmitters, knows just how long American culture yearned for a convenient portable phone.

Naturally, when the communication millennium arrived and mobile devices started reproducing like rabbits, it wasn’t long before they became another medium for consumer engagement. Texting a number to a number—to vote on This or get a free That—is now as routine as brushing your teeth. Besides, there’s also a Mobile Marketing Association overseeing the medium, laying down guidelines and pushing this approach as the wave of the future.

The Next Generation.
But in a reversal of fortune strangely reminiscent of a sci-fi time-travel subplot, mobile marketing’s evolution may be cut short by the very hardware developments it precipitated. After all, as smart phones become the standard, and continue to blur the distinction between TV, PSP and AT&T, it’s doubtful we’ll ever need to text so-and-so to such-and-such again.

As today’s high-end becomes tomorrow’s ho-hum, your audience will have hand-held access to the same Facebook app or whatever you originally built for a “computer.” In fact, with the advent of cloud computing, as many have already noted, the word “computer” is sure to become as obsolete as the word “manuscript” ought to have done 20 years ago.

Cortex Messaging.
But now that I think of it, at the pace electronics and bio-engineering is developing, I wonder if we’d do better to plan farther ahead—and start developing the first generation of Direct to Cortex campaigns. For if the shoe phone was a joke, chances are the “brain phone” may not be.

Such a device would change not just the definition of marketing, but of humanity. Just imagine it: The transformative power of a human brain connecting directly to digital space would be staggering. As it is, we’ve already seen how connecting “the old fashioned way” is affecting our children—as rehab centers for video-game addiction spring up in South Korea and around the world.

Synapse Me No Questions. 
Of the many things that these emerging technologies suggest, the most relevant to this forum is the idea of transparency.

If, in the decades ahead, marketing itself survives, its phoniest ploys will have nowhere to hide. In a world of infinite cross-reference and instantaneous retrieval, the god of sales will take up permanent residence in the details of everyday life. Whatever doesn’t ring true will make a racket loud enough to drown out even an orchestra of Terms-&-Conditions-laden benefits.

Today, in this digital stone age we now call home, the clamor for accountability already requires us to think more deeply before speaking to consumers. In light of that, it’s time we prepared ourselves for the “mentalnet” to come. Because when the final barrier to communication comes down and we understand each other instantaneously, the only kind of deception left will be self-deception.

[February 9, 2010]

Back in the early ‘60s, when the protest movement was in its infancy and “folk music” (i.e., a comercialized similacrum of traditional American idioms) was one of its leading voices, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes.” The song decried the sameness of Los Angeles area tract housing.

As such it became a symbol of mindless conformity to what a later generation would call “The Man.” The mocking refrain contained these telling words:

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

Looking at current Web design, I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Reynolds was more prescient than she realized. More likely, she had simply honed in on a basic tenet of modern life: Rootless, cultureless people running frantically from one ideological safe haven to another. In the financial world this has recently lead to the near-collapse of our economy.

And in the world of digital marketing, too, nothing sells like conformity.

Behold the Box, Keeper of Content.
Doesn’t matter what kind of content, doesn’t matter what kind of Web presence. Boxes are everywhere. Despite a dozen years of “user experience design” theory we still seem unable to accomplish anything approaching true out-of-the-box thinking.

So, site after site, boxes reign supreme. Take a careful look and you can find many site designs that at least mitigate the problem with judicious attention to proportion and spacing. More often than not however, the average Web site is a crazy quilt of misaligned quadrilaterals offering new visitors no sense of hierarchy, no clear point of orientation.

Oh, yes, font sizes help, as do color schemes and decorative design elements, not the mention the archaic, yet strangely persistent “Click Here” (911,000,000 results).

Somehow I doubt this is what Don Norman had in mind when he inaugurated a new era of design in the ‘90s. In any case, no aspect of Web design suffers more from this fundamentalist “box-ology” than copy. Jammed into ill-fitting columns, subjected to bad line breaks, superimposed on neo-psychodelic backgrounds, copy becomes unreadable.

Language: The Ultimate Non-Conformist.
Of course, in the boxological worldview, copy has only itself to blame for being composed of Language. Language has the audacity to follow rules of its own that exist outside the confines of cherished usability studies. “I mean, come on,” goes the unstated complaint, “what was Language doing for the last 10,000 years that it didn’t come up with a decent design strategy for itself?”

Now, if the only issue were copy I wouldn’t expect anyone beyond a few copy fundamentalists to care. But when digital space is dominated by a design strategy that virtually disables one of its key components, everybody loses.

Does Nielsen assert people jump away after only 56 seconds? Let’s not be so quick to attribute it to ADHD, which, despite its seriousness as a medical condition, hardly affects every member of your target audience. The root cause may be simple aversion—to row upon row of identically weighted little boxes, that all look just the same.

[February 5, 2010]

On the face of it, testing creative concepts in a focus group before developing them fully might make sense. In theory, you should save oodles of time and money and guarantee that nothing you produce will turn off your customers. As I see it, however, the premise is false for two reasons. First, you’re not actually testing the finished product. Second, you’re gauging audience reactions in a completely unrealistic setting.

As with every other form of human communication, creative ideas take their meaning in large part from their intended context. At the same time, asking consumers to evaluate a rough mockup assumes they have both the training and the creative intuition to fill in the blanks. You might as well ask medical patients to evaluate their own surgery. Whether they feel better or worse, their evaluation is meaningless in medical terms.

“Artificial Intelligence.”
Besides, there’s no correlation between how consumers will react to creative on their own, unobserved, and how they will react in a focus group. Sitting in a fishbowl, knowing their responses are being monitored, the temptation to grandstand is irresistible. Goaded on by a moderator’s leading questions, people in groups are prone to seek a group consensus. After all, nobody wants to be known as the loser who can’t see the emperor’s new clothes.

At the other end of the spectrum are the classic egomaniacs focus groups attract. They’ve learned long ago that the best way to grab attention is to buck the trend of the room. They’re all too eager to usurp the role of a creative innovator without the requisite expertise and without accepting the concomitant risk to their reputations.

Questionable Answers. 
Finally, let’s consider the impact of interrupting the creative process by putting a teams’ incomplete work up for evaluation. Once “the feedback’ has been absorbed, that process is forever disrupted, as the creative team is urged to ignore its instincts, honed over years of experience, and “go with the data.”

Now, don’t get me started on whether this “data” is even remotely analogous to true scientific data. The samples are too small and the conditions aren’t tightly controlled. Science? I don’t think so.

So as far as I’m concerned, creative concepts modified to conform with doubtful “research findings” are always suspect. Tainted goods, they’re potentially toxic to a brand’s relationship with its audience—as the sour taste of poorly conceived messaging slowly undermines consumer appetite for the product.

Lessons Lost. 
Marketing to consumers means accepting risk. Giving anxious clients false reassurance with doubtful “clinical trials” is irresponsible and bad for business. The only way to know what works is to try it out on the big stage. Anything less cheats agency and brand alike of the invaluable lessons we can only learn from unfiltered failure and honest success.

[February 2, 2010]

Since their origin in the 18th century, print magazines have captured the attention of millions of subscribers, offering news, gossip, advice, entertainment and even spiritual guidance.

Over time, magazines thrived, generating billions in advertising income. Initially, I’m sure, publishers assumed it would be easy to duplicate that success in digital space. Putting a popular product in a popular medium ought to have been a no-brainer.

It hasn’t worked out that way, but I’m not convinced it has to do with an actual lack of interest in reading online or off. Or rather, it’s not so much about reading per se, but about format and presentation.

Take, for example, the layout of People Magazine’s digital counterpart. Here’s an inchoate mishmash of mismatched sizes and styles. It’s a look one could easily achieve offline with a pair of scissors and a jar of what used to be called “library paste.”

Calling California Closets.
Where does the publisher expect users to look? Despite decades of market segmentation theory, there’s no effort to guide targeted users to targeted segments. Oh, sure, there’s a navigation bar, but this confusing array of misaligned photos competing with undifferentiated stacks of story links is an invitation to click away.

Though similarly cluttered, the grid-like design of the Sports Illustrated home page divides the page more convincingly into interest areas. Instead of compelling users to take everything in at once, the layout encourages them to take it step by step. Meanwhile Time’s judicious use of white space and better feeling for proportion creates a buffet effect: disparate items arranged in a slightly more appetizing way.

A different tack is taken by O Magazine, where several featured items are each given the same weight, making them easier to grasp. Fighting this somewhat more elegant look is a feature found in Web sites of all categories: the independent right sidebar.

Often, such sidebars are in an unrelated style and crammed with an unpleasant jumble of offers, promotions and teasers. Here, at least, there’s an effort to give this sidebar material a unified look but, as a whole, it simply does not resonate with the remainder of the home page.

Read me (Some assembly required).
Ultimately, what these layouts have in common is an atomization of content, resulting from an unreasonably dense array of content modules. While I understand the desire to lure users into interior pages with the promise of riches to come, I believe a home page has a more important task: To create a welcoming environment.

In other words, brands need to recognize that a successful Web site is a multidimensional experience, not a static list of “offerings.” People come to People magazine for gossip. There’s a buzz, a thrill that people.com lacks entirely. If, instead of that excitement, users find a slapdash array of words and pictures, is it really any wonder “no one reads online?”

Dictating copy with “natural law.”
As I see it, this confusion of cause and effect is destined to perpetuate the very trend publishers and journalists bemoan. In the last few years, for example, a well-regarded user experience theorist has conducted what appear to be exhaustive eye-tracking studies, demonstrating how people read online. Based on such evidence he has developed an exhaustive theory of how one should write for the web. In fact, he has a rule for everything.

As cogent as his analysis might be on one level (and perhaps some of his insights may prove useful in some contexts) it has a fatal flaw. His conclusions take no account of the impact of visual organization on readability, comprehension or retention. It’s as if he believes that current Web design practice were born of some immutable Natural Law to which Copy must conform.

Excuse me, but that’s absurd.
If we believe people have trouble reading online, the solution is not to “write for the Web,” but to create layouts that actually function, layouts that allow people to do what they have done since the first magazines were published over 200 years ago: Read.

While it’s true that digital space is a new medium and, as such. is rapidly creating its own written idioms, we can’t address the problem by subjugating Copy to the demands of Design. And certainly not Design as practiced byNewsweek, where boxes of content appear in a jumble of weightings, categories, sizes, proportions and meanings. If we really believe the consumers aren’t paying attention, we’ll need to take a better read of the challenges ahead.

[January 29, 2010]

Between the kickoff meeting and the final round a series of subtle shifts occur in the basic premise of a project’s copy development. What begins as a loose set of parameters becomes increasingly specific as, step-by-step, the amount of required content expands.

I suppose this is partly born out of a collective inner dialogue that runs something like this:

Hey, it’s just another project and we’re all professionals, right? Let’s not sweat the details! We’ll deal with them when the time comes, when VP X gets back from vacation and SVP Y comes off jury duty. And, really, why reinvent the wheel?

So the meeting adjourns and everyone walks away from the table with, unknowingly, a completely different idea of how the copy will read. So seductive is this collective mindset that these differences can take several rounds to surface. If your client or Account Director is a member of the species toplinicus cannotdealiensis, the camera flash of last-minute realization may be delayed even further.

Categorical imperative?
I don’t think so. The source of the trouble? Unexamined expectations, arising from the mistaken belief that every product category has one and only one appropriate copy style. The arcana of genre rules extends to every product and service category. For many people, following them is the very essence of the copywriter’s craft. Given category A and deliverable B, copy style C is inevitable, n’est pas?

Ironically, however, the one thing common to every kickoff meeting is a request for a fresh, original approach. Taking the request to heart, an earnest Copy Creative creates a new voice for the project, complete with a carefully selected vocabulary and a custom-crafted grammar to move the key points of the engagement at just the right rhythm.

Yet, how quickly the Gods of Practice exact their terrible punishment: A searing hot boilerplate of mechanical sales ploys. The fact that none of this imposed language conforms to the stated intent of the creative brief is apparently irrelevant. And so begins several agonizing rounds.

On a scavenger hunt for meaning.
Regrettably, there’s still a larger issue at stake. Because when Copy goes through so many rounds it also means there’s also no basic agreement about the underlying message to consumers.

In a way, it’s easy to sympathize with all the players in the drama. Messaging strategy is an abstract expression of the brand’s identity. If your clients are conflicted about that identity and lack the skills to articulate it clearly, they can only resort to a continual process of writing and revision until—somehow—it just feels right.

The resulting set phrases, hammered out at such a cost, quickly become objects of unquestioning devotion.

What part of “insight” don’t you understand?
All the same, I have to ask: Of what use is your MBA in Market Research if your fresh insights are reduced to commonplace statements, handed down from generation to generation?

Or, in the words of the Bard,

Worn out phrases and longing gazes
Won’t get you where you want to go, no!
Words of love, soft and tender
Won’t win her

You oughta know by now
You oughta know, you oughta know by now…

The power of language is a terrible thing to waste by writing drivel. It’s time to set it free to motivate, inspire and win consumer trust—openly, honestly, as one flawed creature to another.

[January 27, 2010]

Over the last few years, the word “convergence” has gained a certain cache as a symbol of the intersection between technology and society. In our heart of hearts, it seems to me, we’re still daydreaming about “The World of Tomorrow,” a concept of the future as old as the past (see also the 1964 version).

But a visit to the YouTube presence on Facebook will quickly bring you down to earth. Suddenly, everything feels out of kilter, as if the Force of Gravity had started hanging out in Electromagnetism bars on weekends. That’s because media convergence is meaningless in the abstract, without a guiding social and cultural context. Caught in the vortex of such titanic cultural forces the content’s original meaning is quickly atomized.

A Walk on the Strip.
Step back for a moment and admire this Möbius strip of promotion as consumption and vice versa. Suppose I post a video on YouTube which you share with your Facebook friends. Back on Facebook you visit the official YouTube Facebook page, comment on my video and—before you can say “grandfather paradox”—your comment can appear on YouTube proper.

All I need to do is repost your comment on FriendFeed and the continuous recontextualization of my original video is carried a step further. Is this a good thing, an interesting thing, a relevant thing? Well maybe, but I won’t know for sure until our entire exchange is recapitulated on Mashable.

Done right, I suppose, this game of post and repost as a series of ripostes could become a sport or even an art form. We’ve already seen how effective recontextualization can be with “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” of a few years back. But can it be more than a game, more than a way to tweet about making toast or make a toast to your latest tweet with a Facebook beer?

To me, that’s a key question. If, as media experts, we want clients to believe that positioning themselves next to Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager will help move the needle, we need to convince them that social networking can be more than idle chatter.

Delusion by Dilution
The mere presence of cause marketing apps on Facebook isn’t enough. We have to establish that consumers do more in social space than provide background data for future anthropologists. While YouTube’s appearance on Facebook feels as inevitable as traffic jams on Thanksgiving, it’s not a model for meaningful media convergence. It’s merely the watery gruel of substance by association.

To create meaningful consumer interaction with brands we need to give consumers something to do besides gossip, share gossip and gossip about the sharing of gossip. Even in cases where we ask people to share their personal experience with a serious topic, we must give their responses shape, context and purpose.

Simply compiling vast libraries of such responses and displaying them in the order received is of little value. All it does is create a weak, generalized sense of empowerment. Like YouTube and Facebook themselves, such libraries can only function as a kind of “random access memory” for an online community.

What’s needed, as I see it, are the structures to drive user-generated content into coherent channels. The more coherent online discourse becomes, the more it can serve a real function: Not merely to help brands “keep up with the millenials,” but to shape perception and motivate consumers to take action.

Fine Tune the iTune.
At a simpler level, I believe a more structured approach to online engagement would increase response, quantitatively and qualitatively. There’s nothing more discouraging, for example, than firing off a heated response to a New York Times article just to see it languish as Comment 532 of 897. Knowing in advance that their contributions will be effectively channeled to others with a similar mindset, need or personal commitment, people are much more likely to contribute, and contribute something relevant.

So as much as we continue to marvel at the impact of social media outlets on public opinion and brand marketing, it’s time we began to manage this burgeoning natural resource. Otherwise, that vital impact will soon be lost, as the sheer volume of random electronic call and response turns an ocean of cultural vitality into a desert of cultural trivia.