tdog.blog

Back in February of 2006, Verizon Wireless CMO John Stratton showed up to the Hollywood & Vine Conference put on by Ad Age and basically roasted the entire industry for being the out-of-touch, exorbitant-amounts-of-money-spending, clueless little creatives that they are. It makes for quite a read, and is happily summarized at manhattan marketing maven.

It starts off like this:

1. Your clients are absolutely in trouble and they are looking for you to save them.
2. What you’ve been selling for the last fifty years no longer works.
3. Major marketing money is going to be in motion in the next decade and no one really yet understands exactly where it will land, if it even will land, or if it will just disappear altogether.

And just goes downhill from there, with lots of scenic stops along the way.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

PS. I don’t understand how these agencies have won the trust of corporate america. Why they’re still in the conversation is just so bizarre to me. They don’t know how to sell, they only have a vague notion of figuring out what a customer is or how to fashion a product, nor do they have any sense of accountability. They essentially get paid to spin a good line of bullshit and package it up as ideas. Well, whooppeeee, I have about 350 ideas an hour on my good days. Maybe I too could go sell my dreams to corporations.

No thanks, I’d rather just stick with things that are doable and actually bring in revenue to my clients’ coffers. And I don’t have to dress like Dieter from Sprockets, either.

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Too often, I see companies put together lead generation efforts that concentrate on the product or service, and not on the offer. What am I talking about?

Well, let’s say the company in question is selling a $10,000 piece of software. They put together a great plan to interest people in the product by first getting them to sign up for a webinar or white paper. Instead of concentrating on the offer (which would be a free webinar or a free white paper) they talk all about the benefits of their product. Or worse, they concentrate on the features of their product.

Remember my dating metaphor. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You just want a phone number, maybe an exchange of pleasantries at first, not a marriage proposal (ie., a sale). If you concentrate on the offer, you’ll get them interested in that first step. And yes, you can talk about the benefits of your product while you drive interest in the offer–but only if you keep it all in context.

For example, let’s say that you’re particular piece of software helps companies identify stale content on their web site, thereby saving them 50-200 hours a month in manually going through and updating the site. You can talk about this significant cost savings while talking about the free webinar:

Join us for a free Webinar on Thursday November blah and learn how to save $2000-$5000 a month and 50-200 man-hours per month when you update your corporate web site!

If you attract a prospect that’s interested in doing just that, you’re not only putting a lead in your pipeline, but you’re learning some crucial about each and every one of those leads: that they have this problem and are interested in solving it! Instant segmentation!

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If any of you want any inspiration on how to create really great marketing assets, go over to trendwatching.com and sign up for their newsletter. You’ll get really attractive emails on a great topic (upcoming trends that entrepreneurs have taken advantage of). If you’re like me, you’ll be inspired by the great work they do.

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And no, as much as I like Worf on Star Trek, I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about building frames of reference, and in particular, I’m reaching back to some old-school linguistics (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and to Lakoff (who was here in Austin just a few years ago to talk about how Democrats can reframe the political discussion in contemporary America).

Basically, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis goes like this.

1) There is a systematic relationship between the structure/grammar of a language and the way a speaker of that language perceives (and behaves in) the world.
2) In other words, speaking/listening/thinking in a language actually affects the habitual patterns of thoughts within a language community.
3) That in fact, and to put a finer point on it, the mechanisms of any language really puts a top-spin on how the speakers of that language interact with their world.
4) Wanna change your frame of reference? Learn a new language.

(Now, those of you who are baby boomers may sneer at this thought, but that’s okay, it’s not your fault. You’ve been mostly under the tyrannical thumb of Noam Chomsky, who argued for a more universalist approach to natural language instead of the relativistic chaos espoused by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But I digress.)

For example, many of us Americans have a particular frame of reference when it comes to time. We see time in a purely economical sense. We believe that (as my father said time and again), “time is money.” We feel that someone is “wasting our time” if they don’t get to the point as quickly as we like. We also “spend time” with friends, and “invest time” in activities that please, educate, or empower us. In other words, we view the concept “time” through an economic framework…an economic metaphor, if you will. (And if you were Spanish, you would say, “Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week.” Oh by the way.)

Now, here’s the kicker. Learning a new language is beneficial not only for its practical applications (i.e., going to a foreign country and being able to converse with the locals) but also because the process of learning a new language opens up new pathways–new patterns of perception and frames of reference.

Let’s take another little detour. I grew up in a bicultural bilingual household. I spoke nothing but Spanish until 3rd grade, then learned English as I entered an American school system. Spanish is now my second language. I understand it 100%, and can speak at about an 80% rate. My wife Hope is learning Spanish now as an adult, and I’m relearning a lot as I watch her grow in language skill.

My point is this. As Americans, we take direct and active responsibility for being late. If we are running late and miss the bus or train, we say “I missed the train” or “I got there too late!” But my fellow Latin Americans say, “El bus me dejo!” — The bus left me!

[I shall now pause to let that sink in. Go ahead and think about it. And by no means am I making some kind of racist comment (remember my bloodline!). Just let it sink in.]

Okay, back to our regular programming. If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can rear its head in such throw-away phrases, imagine what would happen if we consciously learned a new language just to see the world differently. You start seeing all kinds of relativistic jewels float up to the top of the bubbling cauldron of the time-space continuum. Instead of saying ‘good bye’ (or ‘God be with you’ to keep you safe) we would say as the Romans did, ‘Vale!’ (or be strong, be healthy). It just seems so much more fitting to me–considering that we are the new Roman Empire.

What about other parts of your life? What if you had to express your business in terms of Klingon (hey, don’t knock it, I’ve got a great Klingon dictionary–and look, we are back to Worf!) or Chinese? Would you see your business and how it relates to the marketplace (heck, the world) if you put it to that test? Of course you would!

So here’s an even more specific bit of advice. Take a look at your home page. Really look at it. What does it say to you as an American. Now bring in somebody from a totally different culture. And I don’t mean, “Hey I’m from Boston so I’ll bring in Ted who’s from Texas!” We’re not that weird here in Texas. I’m talking about that French exchange student your kid knows, or the programmer you have who was born in Bangladesh. They’re going to have a completely different set of Sapir-Whorf spectacles on, and they’re going to tell you a lot of surprising things about your home page that you never could have dreamed about.

Now, I’m not going to say that everything they say will be 100% reliable, accurate, true, or even useful, but its good to take what they have to say and consider it. Maybe something will come up that will be relevant or at least make you pause.

THEN, take the next step, and do the same with your customers–that’s right, the people who fund your kids’ college fund and put bread on the table. Even though you and they may share a same town, language, and even Christian denomination (or even church pew!) I’ll be willing to bet that you may as well be speaking Klingon to them. The good news is, though, that they will tell you if you’ve broken any of the rules of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

That’s enough for the day.

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David Ogilvy once remarked:

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

I think he would agree that the same thing goes for a web site. If you look at a web site and say, “Wow, what a great web site!” you have a completely different experience than looking at a web site and saying, “Wow, what a great product [or service]!”

Unfortunately, the world of web site design and development is ruled by those who want to create beautiful sites to further their own careers, and not to further the economic fortunes of the products and services featured on those web sites. If you don’t think that’s true, just take a casual stroll down any set of industry-related web sites, and you’ll see a great deal of similar afflictions (and affectations):

* Web sites whose copy is completely devoid of sense or validity–rather than copy that addresses the reader’s problems
* Web sites full of tilt-a-whirl goo-gahs and PT Barnum freak show effects–rather than design that leads the reader to clarity
* Web sites with total innovation as its goal–rather than the comfort of the known and useful

Of course, get six of us “experts” in the room and you’ll get three or four different takes on all this, but really, web site development has taken a wrong road. Instead of being the medium through which a message is conveyed, it has become the point we all talk about. It’s as though the only reason to go to art galleries is to discuss the kinds of paint used by the masters; or, the only reason to purchase books is not for the reading, but for the pleasure of collecting typefaces or paper grades. And oh, by the way, isn’t it cool how this particular publisher puts the spine on the left instead of the right, so you have to read in the opposite direction? And look, the pages are randomly numbered! How cool.

Not.

Things have gotten better, I suppose, or at least they did until the Web 2.0 thing started happening. I’m not against the democratization of content, per se, but I do find some of the design patterns a bit troubling. One of the neato features of Web 2.0 is the lightbox effect (or modal dialog), in which the picture or item you’re looking at floats above the page. You see this a lot with Flickr and other services.

Why is this so bad? Well, it isn’t bad, so much as annoying. Here I am working with the most open-ended content delivery and linking system in the universe as we know it (ze Web) and now you’re forcing me to look at just one thing at a time (but reminding me that the other stuff is out of reach by placing it in the blacked-out background). Irks me to no end that I have to consciously finish what I’m doing to go back to all the other things I also must do. It’s a throwback to the pre-Windows era when machines only had enough memory to allow one task at a time.

Seriously, if I wanted that, I’d dig through my storage boxes, find my ancient (but very reliable) Atari 130XE (the one with 2! disk drives and 128 honkin’ KB of RAM) and load up AtariWriter to pen this blog. I could then write without having the old Mail.app ping me with incoming mail….hmmmm…maybe this would be better!

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