World Cup Mad...(yawn)...ness

I want to start right off by admitting that I'm not a soccer fanatic. I'm not even remotely soccer literate. I watched the last game of the last World Cup in South Africa, and the last game of the last Women's World Cup in Germany between the US and Japan. I have a few friends who qualify as soccer (or "futbol" to them) fanatics and know the nuances of the game enough to scream obscenities at the officials. Also I stood around in the rain on the sidelines of my daughter's games (I mean "matches") when she was in middle school...mostly not paying attention. So I want to get it straight before I go off with authority on this rant about how hypnotically dull and pointless soccer is; I don't know what I'm talking about.

Oops, I tipped my prejudice.

 I, American patriot and  loyal friend to my soccer aficionados that I am, watched every grueling second of the interminable final match between the women's US team and Japan on Sunday in the FIFA World Cup. I wanted to participate in my friends' critique of the game--er--match. I wanted to be able to make sage points about the effervescent playing style of Lauren Cheney versus the relentless attacks of Abby Wambach.

But even I could see that the American team were playing rings around the Japanese, in every way; ball handling, play finesse, aggressiveness, discipline, stamina. But they just couldn't score. Though the US team spent most of their time threatening the Japanese goal, the quirks of chaos theory just kept deflecting all of their shots from the net, never once being touched by the Japanese goalie, who might as well not have been there. It was like there was a force field around the goal. And it got to be very frustrating, almost ridiculous.

The dull thing about soccer is that, regardless of the skill of either team, goals are so rare that it is, as the saying goes, like watching grass grow. Literally. When goals are made, they seem to be entirely weird; not a solid crack of the bat signaling a home run, not a relentless and unmistakable drive to a touchdown, not that satisfying swish of the basketball net--just a strange happenstance of bounce in which the ball happens to ricochet off of someone's head and just happens to sneak into the corner--instead of an inch to the outside. It's as if the whole point of soccer were for each side to keep flipping a coin and a score happens when the coin lands on edge.

So rare are goals in soccer, and so unexpected, that it's no wonder announcers sound like squealing 12-year-old girls whenever somebody makes one. "GOAL!!!! GOALGOALGOALGOAL!!!" (be sure to roll your "l's" when you scream this.) It's soooo exciting.  But about as exciting as watching a piece of ground for a lightning strike. On a sunny day.

For this particular game (or match), even though the Americans, for whatever reasons, were technically outplaying the Japanese, each side made two of these quirky goals and after a tedious extra thirty minutes of overtime play were still tied. Can't have that. So, instead of playing forever until one side definitely wears the other one down (as they do in tennis, baseball, and war), the whole thing devolves upon a mindless ritual called a penalty kick shootout, or something. Each side gets a chance to take five shots at the net from about twenty feet.  The goalie has to decide, "What's she gonna do? Go right or go left?" This is the game theory equivalent of Rock Paper Scissors. It's really unsatisfying and you get the feeling you were gypped. The whole thing is about as thrilling as watching someone chuck a softball to dunk a clown in a church carnival. The commentators were saying that if the two teams were still tied after this little exercise, that they'd move on to an even more inane tie-breaker, the "sudden death" penalty kick, in which the first one to make a goal wins.

And if this didn't work, I'm sure that the clever minds at FIFA had an even more foolproof method of determining the winner; "I'm thinking of a number between one and two." Or possibly the dreaded staring contest.

But it worked. The Japanese got in more free kicks than the Americans, proving that they were the best soccer team in the world. Glad that was cleared up.

Much debate has gone on about why soccer has trouble catching on in the US. I don't know why. It has to be the dullest game ever thought up. The reason it's so popular around the rest of the world must be because you don't need much to play it. Any bunch of kids can wrap a wad of rags together into a soccer ball and start kicking it around the street, or minefield. You don't need special equipment. You don't need a net or a backstop or ice or helmets or skates or bats or mitts or even shoes. But cheapness doesn't make it good. Rock Paper Scissors is cheap, too.

Another reason soccer may have trouble catching on in the US is the nature of its play. There aren't time outs, downs, or innings. The clock keeps ticking even when the ball goes out of bounds. So, consequently, you better have gone to the bathroom before the game (or match) starts. And, even more consequently, there are no places for commercial breaks. What advertiser is going to want to buy a spot on either side of a game? Or in the middle? It's just not commercially viable. The brilliant design of American sports is that they are just made for commerce, with built-in advertising breaks. Soccer was designed by socialist regimes who see no need for advertising...or bathroom breaks (just go in your pants, like we do).

As I said, I don't know what I'm talking about. I come from a generation that only played soccer in gym in high school (when it had the same status as dodge ball). But watching last Sunday's World Cup, I kept thinking that this was a metaphor for something. I couldn't think of what. So I decided to go the easy route and whine about the game. Or match.

Panda-monium

SEO Priests, beware!
Google knows where you live.

For some nerdy reason (and I think it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who said--in French, of course--that nerds have reasons that reason knows not of), I've been following a lot of online discussion in the SEO (search engine optimization) community about the new Google search algorithm called Panda. They hate it. For one thing, it attempts to undermine all of their little search engine gaming tricks, like links to lots of other sites, repetitive keywords, meta-tag subterfuge, and some really arcane things that none of us lowly carbon-based lifeforms can fathom. Panda's a revolution. And if you you believe these Old World Chicken Littles, it is upsetting everything the orange-fingered clergy of SEO know about how to make a website turn up at the front of the line, regardless of whether it's what you were were actually looking for.

Now I'm not going to even pretend to understand this debate. I'm a writer, a branding guy, not a programmer. All I know is that for the past several years I've been having to suppress everything I know about good writing and persuasion in the interests of making sure my "content" has enough buzzwords to make a search engine salivate--mostly at the cost of fun--or interest. But from what I can understand, what Google has done is to finally make an algorithm that comes closer to how actual human beings would prefer to browse for something, instead of how a robot would. The implications are, for me, wonderful. It means that the search engine is looking for interesting, original, cool content. It gives greater weight to well-known brands and trusted sites. It ignores sites with lots of ads and stupid links to nowhere. It requires that the content be relevant and well-written.Yippee! Or maybe, Yahoo!

One SEO blogger lamented that Panda is unfair because it means that big, well-known brands will have an advantage over small, start-up companies. So? An old colleague of mine, Amanda Mailey, used  to say, "The best keyword is a strong brand name." That's the way it should be. And Panda, by its quirky mathematics, looks to make that true again. It means that there are no wise-guy, programming shortcuts to racing to the top of a search list; you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way, by building a strong, well-known brand. And do it creatively.

What Panda promises is that we are getting closer to a time when the web is more human. A website will be more visible because a lot of people find it interesting or entertaining, not because it's been "gamed" to make it pop up at the front of a search query. And for those of us who long for the days when creativity and entertainment ruled branding, Panda is our friend. Anything that overthrows the Lords of SEO is our friend.

At least that's what this Luddite thinks. I probably don't understand it at all.

Bad Science

1.2% Prefer Death by Eels

I've been following all of these marketing blogs and news feeds because, well, I don't know, I guess I think I'm supposed to because I'm in advertising? I really don't know. But one yesterday caught my eye because of its provocative headline: "Study Reveals Why Consumers Fan Facebook Pages," followed by the confusing subhead, "Nearly 40% of Consumers 'Like' Companies on Facebook to Publicly Display Their Brand Affiliation to Friends." After I tried to decipher the ambiguous sentence construction of the latter (which is always fun in headlines), I read the article in hopes of finding out the Why that was promised in the banner heading. I was disappointed. There was no why, it merely stated that, of all the ways consumers are hit by branding messages, 40% said in a survey that they prefer it when there are promotions attached and that 39% of those say they would be inclined to "fan" that promotion to friends on their network. There was no Why. And it didn't say they did actually fan their friends when there was a promotion, they just answered that they would be inclined to do so. They were probably thinking, "Yeah, sure, why not?"

You've participated in these mindless surveys. When you are sucker enough to start, you'd like to think that there is a mechanism in there to complain about something, but the questions are always so patently skewed to support the biased hypothesis that there is no real study; it's just trying to push a conclusion so they can push whatever it is they're trying to sell. It's bad science. Here's an example:

Q: Of the following forms of dying, which method would you prefer?

1. Decapitation by a dull, rusty saw
2. Sliding down a fifty foot razor blade into a pool of alcohol
3. Being slowly lowered into a cauldron of bubbling lava
4. Eaten alive by ravenous eels
5. Peacefully in your sleep

The results? 96% choose #5
Therefore, this study shows that most people would like to die in their sleep. 

"That's why 96% of your friends recommend Go-Ezy, the sleep aid that takes you to paradise." 

But, as you take the test, you search in vain for #6 "Wait minute, nobody said anything about dying!"

It's the same with these loaded surveys that ask which method of social media advertising you'd prefer to see, or whether you'd fan somebody about a promotion. There is never the choice: "I'd prefer not to be bothered by advertising on Facebook, thank you."  But be honest, given a choice about being hectored by constant e-mails alerting you to a new promotion based on your "likes," or not having to empty your inbox 60 times a day, how pathetically lonely are you to pick the former? You need to get some sunshine.

I do worry about the 1.2% who selected death by eels. Are we sure they were taking the survey seriously?

Why I Unlike facebook

The f -bomb

Have you ever noticed that it's not possible to be negative about anything on Facebook? The only structural choice you have is to "like" something. You can "unlike" it (an unword if there ever was one), i.e. change your mind and take the little thumbs-up icon off. But you don't have the option of sticking a thumbs-down icon on anything. I think this is insidious. It reminds me of the part of Orwell's 1984 where the Ministry of Information is in the process of devolving English so that it is impossible to have certain ideas, like freedom or justice, for instance, because there are no longer words for them.

Ironically, this sunny lack of negative editorial options on Facebook doesn't prevent vicious little adolescent snots from tormenting one of their peers to suicide. They figured out how to do that without an icon. This is the second reason I'm not so ready to stick my thumb up for Facebook. It can be lethal. Instead of promoting human interaction, as was Mark Zuckerberg's noble, original goal, it has been perverted by some as a convenient power tool of sadism. There may not be a convenient "hate" button to click, but bullies find a way to slip the shiv into their victims anyway. I guess it's the social network equivalent of nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But mostly evil.

An Online Insane Asylum
The third thing that fails to plus me about the Big Little f (aside from the fact that you're supposed to render it in self-consciously pretentious lower case) is that it seems to encourage banality. People, especially people born after 1985, tend to share every eruption of a bodily function with everybody. The net result, even if you don't have that many people on your "wall," is a large, digital dumpster full of inane comments, pictures, and "likes."  Like who cares? I know it feels good to announce to the world that you like Lady Gaga, and that it feels like you're famous for a microsecond because your post goes up there on that ever scrolling ticker-tape of important announcements, but it's just an illusion. Nobody cares. Everybody's talking at once and nobody's listening. That's not human connection. It's the Social Room at the Sunny Valley Mental Hospital.

That's not exactly true that nobody cares. Prospective employers care, of course, looking for embarrassing pictures of you with your top off at a party, so they can send you a "thank you for your interest in our company" letter. And you don't even have to post those pictures onto your FB page; your friends (so-called) will do that on their pages and tag your name, so it shows up on your page anyway.

Meanwhile, for those people who would actually use their wall to inform family members and friends about important events in their life--say a wedding or death or a sex change--those messages get buried in with all the other junk about who's now friends with whom.

Where's the Love Button?
A more famous curmudgeon than me, Jonathan Franzen, in a piece in the NYT, says that Facebook is insidious for another reason; that it commoditizes human love, reducing it to a commercial relationship on the same order as your "like" of a brand soft drink. To love someone, he says, is a dangerous, lifelong undertaking. To merely "like" something lets you off the hook. You can "like" something or "unlike" something with the click of a mouse. There's no commitment. At least not like there is when love is involved. You can love someone, he reminds us, without necessarily having to like them all the time. That's real life; sticky, risky, painful, but also euphoric, transcendent, fulfilling, and fun. Of course, Facebook doesn't pretend to be a substitute for the sticky, risky, painful, euphoric, transcendent, fulfilling, and fun. But it does tend to keep you on the couch instead of going outside to play. Sort of like writing blogs.

The daughter of a friend of mine was--momentarily--my hero because she went off grid. She called her mother and said she was getting off Facebook because it was a waste of time. I was inspired to follow her lead. But another trusted friend talked me off that ledge by saying, "Yeah, do it if you want to commit professional suicide." (Of course, I think it's far too late for that; I committed professional suicide when I started a career in advertising.) And then my friend's daughter got back on Facebook after all. You really can't live without Facebook, anymore than you could live without GPS. Or clip-on mosquito repellent.

So I stay on Facebook. I check it every once in a while (as well as my Linked-In account, Twitter, my four e-mail accounts, my voice messages, a dozen blogs, my post office box, and my jeans pockets). Besides, if I didn't, I wouldn't get all this material to make trite observations about the banality of humanity, so I can feel superior--for a microsecond.

Talk Is Cheap

Smart as a Cloud

Rule: Just because you use the word "just" in front of a request, doesn't make the request any easier. Or cheaper.

Example 1: I just want a new website.

Example 2: Just eat this car.

Example 3: Just bring the troops home.

People seem to have a lot of unfounded faith in the magic of words, as if they are incantations to insure success (more on this later). Saying that you just want to be rich doesn't make you rich, any more than saying you just want to go to the moon will get you to the moon, much as the word "just" seems to shrink the scale of the task.

There are a lot of useless, magic words like this. Putting the adjective "creative" in front of something, doesn't make it creative. It just comes across as wishful thinking. In fact to use the word "creative" at all betrays the opposite, especially if you're using it to describe your own creation. If it's creative, it will be obvious--at least to people who know what creativity is. Garnishing it with the adjective doesn't do it.

Nor does the word "strategic" in front of a noun make it strategic. People in marketing love this word "strategic." It sounds so grown up and important and has that militarized, metaphorical feel to it (like "target" or "campaign"). But I've found that hardly anybody in marketing would know a strategy if it were chewing on their finger. If you define your role in a company as having responsibility for "strategy" it might mean you have no idea why they hired you and are wondering when they're going to catch on.

Another Talk-Is-Cheap example is the overuse of the word "success." Merely using the word "success" in speeches and on your website won't make you successful. In fact, without saying what you mean by the word "success" you only look like a fool to say it. How often, when poring over the brochures or sites of schools, do you come across the promise, "Our mission: to help your child achieve success." Notice how they never guarantee it--they only "help"--a defensible hedge. And notice they don't specify what they mean by "success." It's an old marketing gimmick to keep the promises vague. Success is when your tuition checks don't bounce.

Then there's that other overused word in marketing: "Smart."  Smart seems to apply as the amorphous quality of anything that essentially has no qualities. It's the Styrofoam of virtues. There's a very expensive, effects-heavy spot for IBM running now with good looking people saying that your computers are now "smart" because they can use Cloud Computing. They don't say why this is smart. They just use the word over and over and you're supposed to buy it. To tell you the truth, the whole idea of Cloud Computing in this environment of crummy WiFi, bad cellular networks, crashing servers, and cyber-hacking doesn't sound particularly smart at all. It sounds pretty reckless. And dumb.

That's all I wanted to say. I'll probably say it again, mostly because I like to rant, it's my blog, and talk is cheap.

We're All in Heaven Now

Is it just me, or is it kind of boring here?

Just wanted to inform you all that I was taken up directly into Heaven yesterday at precisely 6:00 PDT. If you are reading this, that means that you, too, were taken into Heaven. Congratulations! Big hugs all around! We made it! I always knew we would.

Heaven seems a lot like earth, though, doesn't it? And the WiFi's sucky.We'll see.

Defense of Job Killing

Job Killing cluster bombs
over the Capitol

Here's some political advice from a professional ad guy: If you want fanatical support for any repeal legislation you want to ram through Congress, just stick the phrase "Job Killing" on the front of the name of your bill and you'll have your frothy lipped constituents plastering their bumpers with stickers and heckling their representatives mercilessly with e-petitions. For example, "Repealing  the Job Killing Health Care Act."  This phrase is gold and works on anything: "Repeal of the Job Killing Medicare Act," "Repeal of the Job Killing Geneva Convention," "Repeal of the Job Killing 19th Amendment," "Repeal of Job Killing Graduated Tax Laws for Rich People Act," "Repeal of the Job Killing Sherman Anti-Trust Act," "Repeal of the Job Killing Emancipation Proclamation." This would be good because people like jobs. And they don't like so-called Acts that kill them. And are probably unconstitutional, to boot.

Likewise, if you have some radical, oppressive legislation you want to pass, stick the phrase "Defense of" in front of it and it's bound to get a tidal wave of support from The American People (I mean the Real American People, not the people you know). "Defense of Our Nation's Borders Act," "Defense of Head of the Family Rights Act," "Defense of Rich People's Rights to a Tax Free Gated Community Act," "Defense against Job Killing Cute Furry Puppies Act," This would also be good because people feel bad when defenseless things need defending. So we should have lots of Defense Acts. Defense Acts are never bad. There are never any unintended consequences from a Defense of Anything Act. And anybody who wants to think them through before they are voted on is just a Job Killer.

Just some political advice.  I'm accepting calls from Congressional offices.