Digital Journalism & the Slogans of Doom (Part 1)

As anyone knows who has followed the debate about American healthcare reform, we live in an era dominated by ideology. Whether grounded in fact or paranoia, a single phrase uttered in commercial media space quickly becomes a battle cry of uncommon ferocity—sufficient to motivate oceans of people to protest a bill they haven’t yet read.

Although conducted at a much lower emotional pitch, the current spate of lamentations about the death of journalism bear the same stamp of hypnotic allegiance to one-dimensional slogans. As always, it’s a question of perspective. Surely, it would be more appropriate to say journalism is in the midst of a major transition. Not that there’s anything abstract or intangible about newspapers shutting down and people losing their jobs. That, regrettably, is quite real. Less real is the supposition that this alone signals the demise of an entire discipline.

Shift of inclination or simple decline?
Now, as I understand it, part of the reason some people are ready to measure journalism for a casket is the number of eager witnesses who regularly post cell-phone images to social space. There are, apparently, news editors who feel they’re being “scooped” into irrelevance by a generation they believe has stopped reading and stopped watching TV. Whether TV viewership is actually declining, however, is open to debate. But statistics aside, since when has journalism been defined as simply “reporting stuff?”

If mainstream news consumption is off, I doubt it has much to do with “millennial indifference” or the rise of social space as a permanent fixture. No, if people are tuning out, it’s more likely due to a decline in standards for objective evidence gathering and the gradual demotion of broadcast news to the status of an entertainment medium. Simply put, these two trends, for which the medium must take full responsibility, have eroded our trust.

A re-imagined medium…
As evidenced by the Web sites of many major news outlets, however, if the audience for traditional journalism is shrinking, there’s still one more reason: With only a few exceptions, these sites are a disaster. It’s as if, in their contempt for that new-fangled-Internet-what’s-it, competing news bureaus had all hired the same discount design vendor to get them up and running until the fad wore off.

Trouble is, it’s not 1999 anymore. If the major news outlets believe people have turned away from the tube and toward digital space, the only reasonable course is to set a new standard. In other words, to provide analysis and global vision no well-intentioned witness of the recent Moscow subway bombings could ever encapsulate by uploading camera phone clicks to social space—and do so in a new format re-imagined for digital space.

…or more poll-dancing?
But in a manner analogous to the behavior of our elected officials, professional journalism seems unwilling to take a stand against the societal forces aligned, we’re told, to seal its doom. With very few exceptions, instead of defining a new standard for the digital dissemination of news, many statistic- and poll-addicted news media executives, like many of their political counterparts, have become complicit in the Facebookization of their field.

In the next few posts, I’ll try to sort out the steps news services might take to regain credibility and reposition themselves—as more than just a click on the continuum between gossip and scandal.

Copywriting Captivating

Read a typical creative brief and, usually somewhere toward the end, you’ll find a slim, generalized description under a heading like “Voice and Tone.” Regardless of the branch of advertising you’re in, models for voice and tone conform to only a handful of prototypes, depending on business category. Often expressed as a chain of adjectives, a typical Voice and Tone summary goes something like this:

• Upbeat, conversational, youthful, affirmative, action-oriented.
• Serious, yet hopeful, empowering, empathetic.
• Confident, positive, authoritative, aspirational.

What concerns me here is the way these shallow descriptions of voice and tone are consistently mistaken for the real thing. Instead of empowering Creatives to craft a viable, branded voice for the project, these ritualized descriptions seek to turn an essential creative function into a mechanical process. That’s why, across the industry, voice and tone vary only by genre—despite detailed audience analysis and innumerable studies in generational identity.

Worse, each genre is endowed with a set repertoire of stock phrases. “Together, we can make a difference,” runs the concluding sentence of many a cause marketing blurb. “The kids will love it. Grown-ups, too,” drones the unctuous resort promotion. Shop-worn phrases like this pop up everywhere. Why? Because they bring with them the reassuring tick of the checkbox.

Presented with a string of commonplace observations (“Shopping for a new car can be confusing. With so many models to choose from…”) American consumers tune out. They’ve heard it before. In a 24/7 world drenched in media, message and marketing, that kind of talk couldn’t sell matches to an arsonist.

Stand for something real.
If you want to get a response, you’ve got to dig deeper, touch a nerve—and start a sympathetic vibration between the brand persona and the person you’re trying to reach. The first step is to actually establish that distinctive, brand persona. Only a fleshed-out personality can have a believable “voice,” can express empathy, motivate consumers to plan for their financial future, or captivate them long enough to sell them an overpriced vacation package.

Most of all, only a carefully crafted brand persona can speak directly to the heart, imagination and worldview of your audience, by embodying something identifiable, tangible and real. That can’t be done with a tagline or a logo alone. It can’t be done with a color wheel or a flash animation. A brand persona is a composite of language and image, something (or rather, someone) that emerges from the total environment we create for consumers.

And it all begins with a true, textured, layered and culturally relevant tone of voice. It’s the kind of thing your Copy Creatives are just itching to create for you, if only you’ll leave the tried and true behind and stand for something real. It’s not how much you say, but whether you make it memorable, meaningful and mesmerizing. Benefits? Schmenifits. No matter how many asterisked USPs you bullet out, your efforts are wasted without copy that creates a vivid, captivating experience for your audience.

Copywriting Selling

In the last few years, a new copywriting sensibility has started to emerge. Despite the twists, turns and inconsistencies of this trend, it does have a common thread: An attempt to emulate the spontaneity, vitality and apparent honesty of user-generated content.

So far, this call for “authentic selling” has had few echoes outside the conference room. Cosmetic changes notwithstanding, the average Web presence still addresses its audience in a tone not too far removed from the used car lot. Whether this has more to do with strictures from the client side, or an addiction to bad habits, is still open to debate.

Meanwhile, the only real change in digital space is the inclusion of content from supposedly authentic sources—including bloggers making paid endorsements or consumers posting showy, flamboyant comments no more reflective of reality than the goings on at Survivor, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives or, for that matter, the WWE. Yes, there are important exceptions, but we can’t be so naïve as to ignore the recent “fakening” of reality in American culture—and assert that amateur writers are necessarily more authentic than professional ones.

So, OK, let your Web presence become a conduit for the voice of the public, whoever they are. Done right, you’ll earn repeat visits and acceptance as a brand open to consumer input.

You will, however, still have to sell your product.

Real, specific, local.
What should selling look like in the Web 2.0 century? Any attempt to sum it up neatly in a new paradigm would only repeat the mistakes of the past. There are, after all, 1001 product categories being pitched every day to 1001 audience segments. Very few “rules” apply equally well to selling toasters as to selling, say, healthcare reform.

For that very reason, we might be on safe ground if we agreed to define authentic selling in terms of how well it captures the specific, real concerns of a specific, real audience. While a broad-stroke national campaign might still be an effective way to map out the terms of the discussion, talking to consumers online would need to have a more local flavor.

One nation, obsolete.
If this sounds impractical, it might be essential nevertheless. As members of America’s major political parties have recently discovered, people in Texas, Maine and California (North or South?) are now as different in their attitudes as those in Alaska, Ohio and Florida (North or South?). More and more, the idea of the U.S. as “one nation,” from a cultural or ideological standpoint, is becoming obsolete.

So perhaps digital copy should vary by cultural geography, with key sections of each Web site, for example, swapped out by region. At a bare minimum, copywriting for this era needs to be global in a less generic way—evoking shared human experience in more depth and detail.

In that sense, sharing itself, the very thing we ask consumers to do, might be the most apt foundation for a re-imagined process of branded communication. Instead of pushing buttons, establish an appealing persona for the brand, share an honest appraisal of the product, provide an access number and say goodbye. Could it work? Ask yourself that the next time someone enticing scribbles their IM address on the back of your business card and walks away.

Copywriting Observing

One of the most amazing things about being a copywriter is the absolute blizzard of free and unsolicited advice available, online, offline, by e-mail, over the phone, one-on-one or at a full conference table. It’s one topic everybody has an opinion about.

You might even think it was important.

For the most part, that advice revolves around the statement and perpetuation of rules of thumb, tricks of the trade, and usually involves at least one reference to standing a pyramid on its head. The latter is derived from the sort of writing seminar exercises given out at continuing education centers. Nothing wrong with that, except to the extent that its evocation of geometry is the very emblem of formulaic thinking.

And that’s the problem. As useful as this kind of training might be to help beginning writers find their voices, as principles of professional copywriting they are absolutely useless. Formulas don’t communicate and, in fact, don’t even function that well as conduits for communication.

Psst. They’re on to you.
That’s doubly true today, when the advertising formulas celebrated by Mad Men are the subject of parody and fodder for pop-culture sampling. As far back as
I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners people were already wary of the snake-oil cadences of American marketing speak. Today, as always, connecting to consumers means crafting a specific message for a specific context and then finding an idiomatic way to get it across. Idiomatic, that is, in the subculture of your audience, an audience made up of real people.

Write according to a sure-fire formula and you might as well pitch your wares to mannequins—not that this hasn’t been tried. Sure, Americans share cultural values, up to a point. But travel around just a bit and you’ll soon get an inkling of the simmering stew of attitudinal nuance bubbling just beneath the surface. No formula fits that, whether it’s a headline tip, a sentence tip or tips to make your copy more punchy.

An ear for compelling rhythms…
All of this is a complete waste of time. The craft side of copywriting comes from daily, hourly practice, coupled with a lifetime of voracious reading. You don’t learn copywriting in school and you certainly don’t learn it by downloading software promising “explosive headlines.”

The technical side of copywriting is something people with talent learn on their own. Talent is, in large measure, the ability to acquire technique and then adapt it to one’s own purposes. But copywriting talent is also something much more.

It’s a talent for observation, for empathy, combined with the ability to capture and reproduce the rhythms of everyday life. It’s the ability to compel, to motivate, to move people to tears or make them laugh—not because you’re clever, but because you’re true.

...and an eye for telling details.
So if I were to offer one little tip to copywriters I’d boil it down to this: Observe. Forget about market research, conversation studies, audience segments, Google analytics, household incomes, education levels—and just listen. What are people saying with their eyes? What can you hear them seeing in their speech? Who do they listen to and what do they listen for? What do they love, hate, cherish, lust after, yearn for and pray to?

This you can learn on your own: Down at the bus station, on line at the bank, in the frozen food aisle at the convenience store. Observe. It’s the only school of copywriting that can teach you anything about connecting with your audience. Because there is, after all, nothing punchier than the truth.

Coloring Outside the Lines

Talk about building a branded Web presence and the conversation inevitably turns to drivers and distribution strategy. Typically, the talk goes to syndicating content out to the sites consumers frequent, curating the “best of the Web,” or continuing the quest for the Holy Grail—a banner someone will actually click.

Standing back from the process, I can’t help wondering if the effort to drag people to Web sites, or invade their social space with apps and ads is actually misplaced. If it’s really that difficult to engage our targets, the issues may run deeper than any slate of tactics can solve.

Maybe the problem isn’t with how people behave in digital space, but with the siloed, competitive way our media and advertising outlets coexist. If so, it’s time for a new type of media integration, something more coherent than posting up episode clips from a TV show and calling it digital marketing.

Rather, we must break down the barriers between all media and re-imagine them, in keeping with the current reality: Consumer time and attention is now "totally owned” by digital attractions.

One intent for one audience.
Ironically, it's precisely here that offline media have an opportunity for renewed influence. That's because, for all its hypnotic power, digital space is still a miserly master—which makes accessing its most valuable content a real challenge. Search engines are a highly inefficient tool for information retrieval. While the volume of results is often staggeringly high, their relevance and usefulness is often distressingly low.

To provide better access, imagine an offline magazine reconfigured to act as a filter. Each article would point readers to appropriate, branded online resources. At the moment, this only happens in a scattershot way, whenever a columnist just happens to mention a URL.

The difference here is that the articles would now be written from the outset as introductions to a wider, digital discussion. Instead of competing, print and digital content could act with one intent for one audience. An offline magazine could curate digital space as a whole, through the filter of its readers’ interests.

Adding more dimension than “3D” alone.
Along the same lines, a film, for example, would no longer be a theatrical experience that also sports a temporary Web site, featuring pseudo-documentary material or a (wishful-thinking) viral campaign. It would exist as a series of interlocking experiences: Some theatrical, some print, some digital.

Instead of thinking in terms of “licensing intellectual property for multiple media,” the entire project would be conceived as one seamless entity. To see the whole picture, viewers would engage the film on several levels. To access the digital experience, ticket holders might input a single-use access code they’d receive at point of purchase. Meanwhile, brand sponsorship of such sites by consumer brands would have a huge role to play.

Selling experiences to market satisfaction.
Regarding traditional advertising, the path to a truly integrated approach is still waiting for a machete sharp enough to carve it out. Many major brands simply “have a Web site,” often an e-commerce shell decorated with themes from their General Advertising campaign.

Driven online from re-imagined offline sources, fans of the Mazda Miata could be tempted to spend quality time interacting with the brand—not just collect another Facebook fan badge for its own sake.

Of course, brands would still have to reward users by continuing the momentum. They’d have to build on the exhilarating “Zoom-Zoom-Zoom” they’d created offline, by delivering intriguing details in an engaging package so consumers keep coming back for more. It’s every brand manager’s dream—and the kind of effect you can only achieve when you jettison traditional categories and color outside the lines.

Climbing Out of Oppositeland

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.

Correct me if I’m wrong…

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.