False Problems

Has this ever happened to you?

So I'm sure many of you (of the nine who follow this blog) have seen the energy drink commercial that shows the "security camera"  video of the woman who walks out of the coffee shop into a closed door and spills her coffee all over herself. The announcer asks the rhetorical question, "Has this ever happened to you?" Then he proceeds to tout the solution to this universal problem of walking into closed doors with your coffee: Chug back your caffeine in one shot, using the 1.93 oz energy drink.

But I was thinking, my problem with drinking caffeine the conventional way has never been a tendency to walk into closed doors. Rather it's been burning my tongue (which is why I prefer iced coffee). The caffeine shot is a solution to a false problem. And besides, in the video, she was texting while walking. That was the problem. And slamming back caffeine shots wasn't the solution to that.

Marketers use the false problem all the time to hawk spurious features.  When I first met my then-future-ex-wife, she was a copywriter at another ad agency, working on an ad for some new Sony wireless speakers. The idea behind this transitory technology was that you didn't need old-fashioned wires to hook up your speakers to your entertainment system; they'd connect via radio signal. The client insisted that the true benefit of this new technology was not that you didn't have to crawl behind your furniture to hook up your entertainment system, it was that the  propagation of the signal from the amplifier to the speaker was imperceptibly faster via radio signals (the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second) than by electrons moving down a copper wire (oh, a little slower than the speed of light). So, following the creative brief, Cheryl offered the headline:

"Tired of waiting for your sound?"

This is how I fell in love with her (well, that and her Cajun meatloaf). The client loved this, too. It expressed the product benefit exactly. People were tired of waiting for their sound. "Where was that sound? I turned this thing on nanoseconds ago and my sound still isn't here!" And it followed the principle of advertising that you always solve the customer's problem. Even if it isn't a problem.

Politicians are masters of generating the false problem. Currently the false problem in this election is budget deficits. And everybody's trying to fiscally out-austere each other. Of course we've had budget deficits since the founding of this country. Every sovereign nation with its own currency has. That's how the economy grows. It's like buying your house with a mortgage. If everybody had to wait until they saved enough to pay cash for a house, nobody would.

But suddenly deficits are a problem. A false problem. And politicians are making everyone as agitated about them as if they had just downed six 5-Hour Energy shots. So we have to slash spending; fire millions of government workers; make people suffer. And other people's suffering will give investors confidence. Somehow. Don't worry about the details; they're technical. Just trust me. I'm a pundit.

Before that the false problem was voter fraud, even though the bona fide incidents of actual voter fraud in the entire history of record keeping have been countable on one hand. So state legislatures have been hysterically enacting voter-fraud prevention measures whose draconian solutions will be worse for millions of legitimate citizens than the false problem.

False problems are generated by lazy minds. In marketing (and all elections are marketing campaigns, too) the false problem is kicked into a brainstorming session by somebody who's tired and just wants to go home (see my post on Brainstorming). So they write it up on a white board and everybody, who haven't had their 5-Hour Energy blast in eight hours, looks wearily at it and says, "Yeah, that looks good. Let's go with that."

See how easy marketing is?

Now buy our book! The Unbreakable Rules of Marketing. It will cure that problem you've had with the urge to stick your tongue to a frozen pipe.

Our Book is Born!

After 18 months of gestation, Cathey Armillas and I have delivered forth a book. Weighing it at about 1 lb 2 oz, we've named this little bundle of joy The Unbreakable Rules of Marketing: 9 1/2 Ways to Get People to Love You.

It would be mere marketing hype to say that this slim, easy-to-read, no-big-words volume would change your life. So I'll say it. It will change your life. Not like The Secret was supposed to change your life. But it will make clients seek you out even if you're on page 17 of a Google search. It will make customers line up at your store before you open. It will make objects of your affection fall in love with you, registered voters vote for you, adversaries bow down to you, people you barely know invite you to parties, and your dog lick your shoes. (Your dog probably licks your shoes anyway, but no matter; he will like you all the more if you read this book.)

Who's it written for? Everybody. Not just marketing professionals. In fact they are probably the least likely audience, because you'd think they'd already know all of these unbreakable rules. They are so fundamental that they've undoubtedly forgotten them. And, come to think of it, given the state of marketing lately, a lot of them have.

But it's also for businesses who need to become smarter about their own marketing. It's for parents who want to know how to not only get their kids to love them, but to clean up their rooms. It's for married couples who want to stay married, or singles who want to be half of a married couple. It's for people looking for a job, or just wanting to have a few more friends. It's for everybody.

Okay, okay, so what are the 9 Unbreakable Rules of Marketing?

1. Consistency Beats Ability
2. Perception is Reality
3. Be Creative or Die
4. The Medium is Not the Message
5. Work Hard to Keep it Simple
6. Give Love to Get Love
7. Emotions Rule the World
8. Go Big or Go Home
9. Everything is Marketing

What do these mean? Read the book.

You may purchase it either on Amazon's or Barnes & Noble's fine online establishments. Now.

Did I mention it's supposed to be funny?

Where is the Love?

Look into his eyes.
Does this guy love you?

Have you noticed how bad marketing has become in recent years? It's so desperate, so pathetic, so tiresome, so data-focused, so intrusive, so immediate-ROI driven, that it's hard to go through a day without having some slimy salesbot getting in your face while you are trying to read an article, enjoy a show, compose an e-mail, or watch an amusing video of an adorable cat playing with a laser pointer. Marketing now is like an annoying girlfriend who is constantly trying to shove food into your mouth.

What happened?

Like that annoying girlfriend, I think what happened is that there's no love any more. There's no love of the art of advertising, or of the products being advertised. There's no love of the customer; namely, you. You get the feeling that you're just a mark, a john, a datum waiting to be mined.

It used to be (and I'm dating myself sadly here) that marketing was entertaining and inventive. Marketing used to recognize that it was talking to squishy human beings, not datasets. Commercials tried to entertain you, as if apologizing for interrupting you. They begged your pardon with a joke. They didn't end with a Call-To-Action or an Ask-For-the-Sale. They charmed. They tried to get you to like their company, to want to do business with them. They demonstrated that they, in turn, liked you, as a person, not just a target market. They didn't have to ask for the sale. That was implicit in the fact that they were running an ad.

Marketers forgot to love. Now, like some boorish drunk in a bar, they dispense with the charm and just go directly for the sale, interrupting your deep conversation with a friend to belch into your face,"Tired of paying too much for car insurance?" No. Not particularly. Can you please leave us alone?

The norm in marketing in the 21st century is not to show love, not to entertain or be creative, but to go right for the data, the target market. That's what you are to them, a target. And they've got a gun aimed right between your eyes. Data-driven marketers act like they really know you because, in an unguarded moment of boredom, you happened to search for something silly and they captured that. So Amazon starts telling you that people who bought what you bought also bought this other dumb title, rubbing your face in an embarrassing purchase decision which you'd just as soon forget and lumping you in with every other adolescent who "likes" Transformers movies. Facebook has to tell everybody what song you're listening to, or alert the world every time you "like" something. Nothing is private. Even while composing this rant, Google keeps interrupting me to ask for feedback, or to advise me about exciting new features. Exciting to them. (Do you sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that these people have a very low bar for excitement?)

This is not love. It is the opposite. Marketers no longer love you, they love your debit card. You're just a datum to be mined.You're a predictable consumer, expected to do your part to fulfill their revenue expectations; like a cow who needs to be milked. Or harvested. Makes you feel warm all over, doesn't it?

Fortunately, this is not a universal thing. There is still a cadre of marketers who get that love is the essence. I went to a Starbucks this morning and ordered a vente iced coffee. They apologized when they realized they had run out of iced coffee and asked me if I'd wait five minutes while they brewed a fresh supply. I said, no, that's okay, I'd have iced tea instead. When I handed the barista my card, she pushed it away said that it was on her, and apologized again for disappointing me. This is love. This is marketing. This is brilliant. This is why, in spite of the disdain many coffee-puristas have for the mega-chain that is Starbucks, I remain loyal. They have my undying love because, again and again, Starbucks shows me (through their very human employees) that they love me, not because I'm just another customer, but because I'm another human being. Starbucks treats me like a person, not a datum.

That little gesture of generosity cost Starbucks $2.95. But it made them thousands in continued loyalty from me, wanting to return the love. But for all the thousands of other marketers who just need my credit card number, I have no love to give.

Here's a secret and an Unbreakable Rule of Marketing: If you get that marketing is all about love (and not sales or data), you'll subjugate all mankind.

A Sweet Boy, But Not Too Bright

Which one's the dumbest?

Just before another Easter, when I was seven, my dad decided it was time to level with me about the Easter Bunny. He was a psychologist and a responsible parent, after all, and thought I was old enough to know the truth, since I was evidently not figuring it out on my own. So he told me the truth, "Jeff, there is no Easter Bunny. I wish with all my heart that there was, but there isn't."

I was devastated. "But who colors and hides all those eggs?" I wailed.

My dad was a little worried about my density, "Well, obviously, it's your mom and me."

To make it up to me, for lying to me and shattering my childhood, he did suggest that he and I make it a tradition from then on to color and hide the eggs for my little sister (then 2). That assuaged me. And the prospect of being in on a conspiracy to pull a fast one on my sister (and set her up for a colossal trauma in a few years herself) was too much to resist.

I felt better after our man-to-man talk and said, "Well, at least there's still Santa Claus."

My dad thought (he later told me), "He's a sweet boy, but not too bright."

I wasn't. Or, at least, I was so self-deluding that I had the deft ability to wall off areas of illogic in my brain in order to hang on to beliefs that were vital to my sense of order in the world. It was, in fact, another two Christmasses before I could not escape the inevitable conclusion that if the Easter Bunny was my parents, so must Santa Claus be, too.

Me So Dumb

But think about it; giving up the Easter Bunny was easy. I mean just a bunch of colored, hard boiled eggs--and I didn't even like hard boiled eggs. But Santa meant loot. That was a much bigger delusional investment. Also, there was the forced realization that there wasn't really magic in the world, which is a shocking discovery for a seven year old. So I hung on to every last dumb belief, fighting to the last delusion.

And even after I finally admitted to myself that Santa was also my parents (to my dad's credit, he didn't feel it was necessary to have to have another man-to-man talk), I still hung on to the notion that  at least God was  real. God couldn't be my parents, right? That was just too dizzying a concept to cross that ontological chasm.

But that lasted only another thirty years or so--at least the notion of a God as described in religion, a kind of Santa in the Sky who causes football teams to win or lose bowl games, but has "His mysterious ways" when it comes to letting genocides happen. That God went the way of the Easter Bunny for me.

And then came my disillusion and eventual categorical rejection of my faith in the Republican Party. That just turned out to be my parents, too.

One by one, all of my childhood belief systems have fallen to the chain saw of logic--and facts.

Perception is Reality

This is an unbreakable rule of marketing (soon to be elaborated on in Cathey Armillas' and my forthcoming book, The Unbreakable Rules of Marketing: 9 1/2 Ways to Get People to Love You). Even when faced with incontrovertible facts, people--even people smarter than me--are bound by their preconceived beliefs. This extends right down to their commercial choices.

If they believe their Mac superior to any PC, even when it crashes a dozen times a day, that's a fact; it is superior to any PC. If they believe that tax holidays for the wealthy result in greater prosperity for all, that's a fact; even when the economy is in the toilet after ten years of tax holidays for the wealthy. And if they believe that taking their reusable shopping bags to the supermarket is saving the planet, that, too, is a fact. Planet saved.

It takes a Magnitude 9 Logic Quake to shake the foundations of those beliefs. Our walls are thick and high. So bring on the facts; make your best shot.

I don't think I'm as dumb today as I was at seven (though there are many who would weigh in on this), but I think even someone as astute and cynical as me is vulnerable to something as blatantly maudlin as a Pixar movie. I love those movies because they bring back for me the comforting feeling that magic is real, that the Easter Bunny comes in the night to hide colored eggs,  and that Santa magically comes on Christmas Eve to bring presents, and that God is up there listening to me and caring about me.

But I'm not too bright.

No, It Doesn't Help.

Come on!  It's just a little cockroach!

I was listening to a very painful episode of This American Life the other day in which they were re-interviewing someone they had done a show on earlier in the year, someone who had lied to them. The someone was Mike Daisy, a performance artist who has been doing a one-man show in New York about his experiences "investigating" the appalling working conditions at Apple's manufacturing plants in China. I remember that previous episode and remembered how outraged I felt that I was listening to it streaming from my iPhone, which had itself been assembled at the very factory where underaged slave laborers were worked to death, where suicides were rampant, where workers were suffering from all sorts of work and environmental-related illnesses. I felt betrayed by Apple and my rage knew no bounds.

But it was a lie. Maybe not all a lie, but enough of a lie to cause you to distrust any further stories you heard from Mike Daisy, and possibly any further stories about working conditions in offshore factories. Ira Glass, TAL's host, was holding Daisy's feet to the fire and asking him point-blank why he betrayed him, why he lied. Long seconds of excruciating silence followed each question (usually death for a radio program) as Daisy tried to screw up the courage to admit he had lied, or to say why he had done it. You felt for the guy. Sort of.

But after those long silences, what followed was not a contrite, considered confession, but a rationalization. He was a performance artist, he whined, not a journalist, and he had done it for the art, "to get to the greater truth."  He claimed that it was "some of the best work I'd ever done." He said that in dramatizing a "truth" he believed in, it was necessary to make stuff up. Stuff he couldn't prove. And he believed that in order to get people to be aware of the problem, it was acceptable to invent the details. That's what art is. And I thought, what a sanctimonious dunderhead!

A week previous, we had all been regaled with another example of someone, Jason Russell, making stuff up to get to the greater "truth" about the fugitive war-criminal, Joseph Kony, in his beautifully produced "documentary" Kony 2012. His video went viral in a huge way. It was moving. Even my own daughter called me from college to urge me to see it and sign whatever petition was attached to it. But, as a little time went by, it was also revealed that the facts in Kony 2012 were kind of fast and loose.

Okay, Kony is  a bad man. And should be tracked down and stopped. Got it. But what Russell did was use "art" to dramatize something that didn't need dramatizing, and ended up doing more damage than help by sullying the veracity of the story.

But wait! There's Moore!

And then there's Michael Moore, a documentarian with whom I happen to agree on most things, but who can't leave well enough alone by simply presenting the bald facts about gun violence (Bowling For Columbine), the Bush administration's manipulation of terrorism (Fahrenheit 911), and health care in the U.S. (Sicko). No, he has to exaggerate and go just a little too far to make a point, making you question the whole premise.

And may I bring up another social crusader/entertainer, Morgan Spurlock, who, in Super Size Me, his 2004 expose of the fast food industry (the shocking revelation that it was not health food), conducted an experiment in which he left several samples of french fries from a variety of establishments and watched all but the McDonald's fries go bad and moldy over time. Hm, he suggested, there must be something sinister about the ingredients in the McDonald's fries. Yes, Morgan, that sinister ingredient is salt, a preservative known for thousands of years. But the way he presented it was to make it seem as if this evil corporation was up to no good. Okay, so he had to cheat a little to get to the bigger truth.

What these noble social motivators don't get is that when you do that, when you stretch the point, when you fudge the data, you knock the legs out of your whole argument. One little lie is too much. It's like just a little cockroach discovered in your salad. It ruins the whole salad. The size of the cockroach is not the issue.

But, they say (and Mike Daisy said), isn't it better to tell a little lie to get people to move? NO! Because if the people you're trying to move discover you've lied to them, they don't trust anything you say. Ever. Moreover, they tend not to trust anything that's said about that subject coming from anyone, even legitimate, truthful journalists. So the whole truth gets trampled on by your little cockroach of a lie. When you lie, you betray the entire cause.

So, the next time somebody like Mike Daisy, or Jason Russell, or Michael Moore, or Morgan Spurlock feels like helping The Cause, my advice to them is: Shut up. That would be a big help.

Brainstorming Doesn't Work

Love it! Can we go to lunch now?

I was delighted the other day to read a piece in the New York Times by Susan Cain, entitled The Rise of the New Groupthink, in which she slams the myth of creative brainstorming. This notion, that great ideas come out of groups, is something that's been around in advertising agencies for decades. And I thought I was alone in my prejudice against them, but apparently I haven't been. Apparently there is ample scientific evidence to back up this prejudice.

Really, after I sent this article around to a bunch of my friends in advertising, I found that the disdain for brainstorming sessions, rather than being the mark of an antisocial crank, is almost universally held. There are, at least among professional creative people, legions of us anti-brainstormers.

We all recognize the mandatory, post-lunch (or worse, trans-lunch) all-department meeting whose mandate is to come up with The Big Idea for some new campaign, or new pitch. Nothing ever comes out of these meetings except a high from sniffing the dry-erase markers. The meetings are usually called by the least creative person in the organization, some dip who is full of enthusiasm and loves to be "part of the creative process". And this moderator--let's call him Nancy--always starts by laying down the ground rules (as he sees them) for the brainstorming session, "There are no bad ideas. Everything is on the table."  Evidently, Nancy believes that this is the way we, the ones who are actually paid to come up with the ideas, do it; that when we hole up in our cubicles with our muse, we just write down every bland idea that comes into our heads and give each one serious weight. At the end of the afternoon, with the whiteboard filled with banalities and all of us drowsy from the hydrocarbon fumes, Nancy always says, "I think we've accomplished a lot today!" He always has his assistant take a picture of the whiteboard, too--you know, in case the rest of us want to refer to it later.

But as a fellow antisocial crank of mine says of these sessions, "All you think is, 'Shit! I've just lost three hours and will have to work late tonight to come up with the real idea!'"

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing (who? me?), I can categorically state, without exception, that not one big concept that I've ever had a part in has ever come as a result of a brainstorming session. Ever. That's a categorical statement because it's categorically true. Brainstorming sessions are there for people who can't come up with ideas alone, and who have no clue how they come in the first place. They either saw it done that way in a TV sitcom, or took a Creative Management course as part of their MBA curriculum. But however they came by their belief in the "creative process", they seem to exist to throw sand in the machine of real creativity.

And the results are displayed in advertising every day. Try to sit through an entire TV show, in which more than fifty percent of the broadcast is taken up with deadly dull advertising, and you can see the influence of creative brainstorming. Every ad that begins "Tired of paying too much for...," you know came right out of a brainstorm. But whenever you do happen to notice a clever or entertaining spot, you can be sure that just one or two people thought of it, wrote it, designed it--usually late at night after the brainstormtroopers went home to congratulate themselves on what a good day's work they put in. That's how it really works. A few people do the thinking. Everyone else is taking pictures of whiteboards.

Your Defenses Are Useless!

"We're safe as long as no Ewok
throws a rock at us."

One of the things that always gets me, whenever I watch either a historical or fantasy movie involving fights among people (or orcs) in armor, is how useless the armor seems to be. The hero charges around, usually without armor himself (and with unlimited reserves of stamina),  the bad guys shooting at him with unbelievably bad aim, and the whole while he's blithely dispatching them in droves, despite the fact that they are all wearing armor. Arrows, swords, and spears are shown penetrating thick breast plates like styrofoam, or ray guns burn right through them. So many people in these movies seem to be killed while wearing armor that it begs the question: why are they bothering to do it at all? Armor's expensive, heavy, hot, and restrictive. If it's not even going to stop an arrow, why would you wear it? In historical reality (for those movies set in ancient or quasi-medieval times) armor used to be so restrictive, in fact, that it would have severely limited the ability of the person wearing it to move around, much less fight (or see). So they wouldn't have worn it just because it made them look cool. And it was so expensive that only the richest elite could afford it at all; most soldiers used to wear no armor or, at most, carry only leather shields...the better to fight (or run away).

And, in a science fiction or fantasy setting, what must be the budget for armor for the Galactic Empire? Does the Armor Manufacturer's Lobby in the Imperial Senate have disproportionate sway? I demand a bipartisan commission to investigate plutocratic corruption!

So why don't the makers of movies think about this "armor problem"? Of course, the teenage boys, who love this kind of mayhem in their historical/fantasy/sci-fi movies and games, don't care about reality. Obviously: They're teenagers. Their favorite kind of armor is the armored bra protecting the thong-clad warrior princess's nipples--but not her vulnerable abdomen or cranium. She depends on the incredibly bad marksmanship of the enemy soldiers (unable to see out of their heavy helmets) to protect those.

But I do worry about it. I feel sorry for the poor sonofabitch orc who was forced to march a hundred miles in stifling weather with a hundred pounds of armor on his back, only to find it completely useless when shot by a Clairol-coifed Orlando Bloom, not even bothering to aim his bow as he snowboards down a staircase (something you couldn't do in armor). As the orc lay dying with an arrow in his armor-clad chest, he probably thought, "What the f*** was I lugging all this around for?" You know that the Imperial Storm Trooper was thinking the same thing as he lay dying from an unbelievable pistol shot made by a rope-swinging Luke Skywalker, "If I hadn't been wearing all this armor, I might have been able to duck in time." Why do they wear that armor, by the way? Because the art director thinks it looks wicked? Or because Chancellor Palpatine has an equity position in body-armor futures?

Why Do Cars Always Explode?
And it's not just useless armor that irritates me in movies. It's also explosions. Why, in action movies and TV shows, when cars roll down a hill, do they often explode with the force of a Mk-85 500 lb bomb? Or even when they just hit another car? How often have you seen that in real life? Why do we even drive cars at all if that's the risk? Cars don't just explode. And when a helicopter crashes in real life, it usually doesn't blow up like it does in movies--unless it has a live napalm bomb on-board ("I told you to leave that behind! But nooooo, you had to take it with us!"). This is lazy screen-writing.

Here's another beef I have with sloppy film-making: withheld information. So often in movies and TV shows, a character who has in his possession some vital information that could clear all this up, just doesn't bother to share it with the key-decision makers so they might not push that button that would end in the destruction of civilization (or a costly divorce). There's usually no reason this character decides to withhold that little bit of knowledge; he just does--you know--to move the plot forward. This is also sloppy writing. And it makes you flush your sympathy for the characters. I hate that. Mostly because I don't have a real life.

I know, I know, it's just a movie. But while I'm immersed in a movie, I want to stay in the universe that is the movie for that hour-and-half; I don't want to be reminded that it's just a movie. When a character gets killed and then miraculously comes back to life, I tend to think, well, I don't have to worry about his being in danger; he can be just "scripted" back alive again. And when he's wearing armor, I want to believe that it will do a half-assed job of protecting him from a stray arrow...unless he's an orc or Imperial Storm Trooper, of course.

And when a character actually does have some important information, I like to see he be given a chance to bring it up--even if it doesn't keep us out of an unnecessary 10-year war in Iraq.