On the Outcroppings of Reality

As the impact of social media on everyday life settles into a predictable routine, you naturally find more and more digital imagery uploaded by everyday people. So if our data is accurate and time spent at the major social media hubs is climbing exponentially, “reality” photos are now core components of our visual diet.

So the question is: What has that shift in visual intake done to the expectations of Web site visitors? Can a generation drenched in spur-of-the-moment imagery be expected to respond well to the poised, quaffed and artistically cropped stock art that dominates current Web design?

I’m not so sure. Strangely, the trend toward adding more “grit” to commercial photography is just about ready for its Archeology moment. Without even trying, I’ve been hearing about grainy black & white, documentary-style esthetics for at least two decades.

Today one encounters knock-offs of this more “real” photography at street level, every time a major city sponsors an open air market. In recent years, it’s not surprising that the trend toward a semblance of spontaneity in promotional imagery has taken a significant upturn.

But clearly, that’s not the same thing as making a real commitment to Reality. Like the retailer who brings out an “eco” line of products instead of simply taking the crap out of their mainstream products, the attempt to reach people through artificial honesty is disingenuous.

Phony + earnest = phony.
More to the point, for everyone focused on the fictive “bottom line,” is whether standard photographic techniques are now just too phony to be taken seriously. A few years back, Dove’s well-intentioned Campaign for Real Beauty used a cagily selective cross-section of striking non-models to make a point about one of our most pervasive cultural problems.

Posed the same way as the poutiest fashion models, with professional make-up and better lighting than most people will ever have in their entire lives, the “reality” status of these women was compromised. Where, I have to ask, was the real beauty, to be found in the tireless contributions women make to the world everyday—with or without the aid of dubiously named “anti-aging cream? “

Seeing in the vernacular.
Reality is defined always and only by context. Taken out of context, flattened out against studio backgrounds, even the Dove women became abstractions, as objectified as any runway gamin. Ultimately, it’s not clear whether Dove actually advanced the cause of social reform or merely jumped on the coattails of a critical debate that’s been part of our collective consciousness for over 40 years.

Dove’s motives aside, I question the continued use of over-produced photography, at least in digital space. Not that I advocate a camera-phone-only rule, but it seems to me brands need to abandon both the slick and the falsely non-slick— and opt for a style closer to the vernacular form of “image-ese” spoken by more and more digital natives.

Done quietly and without PR hype, we might actually have a chance to leech “beauty-ism”—that slow-acting cultural poison—out of American society. In doing so, we might also go a long way to building people’s trust for what they gather from a brand’s Web presence.

How Many Words?

On any project, once the initial fuss and bother is done, someone has to start writing copy. Often the main headlines and a swath of continuity copy have already been written. Then a Copy creative receives a loose set of instructions about what to save, what to modify and what to rewrite—from the vast body of existing copy.

Yet, having followed these instructions to the letter, a chilling indictment may still be handed down, often by someone out of touch with the premise of the assignment:

“Too much copy.”

Now, there’s always more than one way to say something in words. Introductory material can be stripped away. So can any concluding material, the summarizing statements that help consumers retain your key points. One can simply end with a terse call to action.

Reducing copy to bullet points is another tactic, as are extra-short sentences and simpler words. An across-the-board ban on adjectives can also be brought into play. That is, assuming the one and only goal of the project is to deliver it with as few words as possible.

If your goal, however, is to push a promotional offer, identify the brand with a cause or deliver value added entertainment, the issue isn’t how many words per square inch, but how complex a message you can reasonably expect your audience to absorb.

Playing the numbers.
For example, a bulleted list of 10 items is certainly succinct. What customers take away from them is not clear. Even assuming a snappy headline and catchy tag, people only understand data in terms of its emotional, cultural and intellectual context. They need a story line, a narrative to make the information meaningful.

The inconvenient truth about copy is that you can’t reduce it to a numbers game. When there’s “too much copy,” what might be at issue is the number of messages you’re trying to convey all at once. Want fewer words on the page? Try saying less. As with the ritual greeting, “How are you?” your audience’s expectation for how much you’ll ask them to retain is fairly limited.

From that point of view, it’s clear that the way to manage copy is not at ground level, when the clock’s ticking and you’ve already run into five rounds of revision. Your thinking should begin at a higher level, as you map out your messaging strategy for the year. Roll your message out rationally and you’ll easily see how to serve it in portions your audience can actually digest.

Asking the wrong question.
OK, I know I’m dreaming. In the real world the discussion of message quickly ends in an agreement to get some version of a general statement across. The discussion then switches rapidly to budget and media buys and, inevitably, an ooo-and-ahh session about the latest developments in database mining.

Yet what we intend to say to consumers is the whole reason the rest of the apparatus exists. Until we recognize that, and give messaging the attention it deserves, we’ll persist in the folly of improvising strategy on the fly. We’ll continue to hire teams of nail biting copywriters to write, rewrite, cut, paste, edit, replace and otherwise violate the tenets of their craft.

And all because, at this late stage, our model for communication is still a tidy array of words dancing tastefully across the page: words as decoration, words as a design element, generic words leaving plenty of room for generic stock art. How many words? Until you have a clear underlying message, I suggest you’re asking the wrong question.

Return on Illusion

In good times and bad, if you skulk the halls of Advertising, you’re liable to hear the acronym “R.O.I.” It’s trotted out at many different occasions and frequently embroidered into an agency’s mission statement. It’s the mantra of every COO who believes great creative can be stamped out on cookie sheets like gingerbread men.

But like a lot of other business concepts, R.O.I. is relative. Sure, project managers can use the favored calculus of the moment to keep cost-obsessed clients happy. Using feature-rich software, it’s easier than ever to promise the impossible. Before long, you, too, believe in phantom “efficiencies,” time-savings that can only occur if your client reads between the lines and follows every step of the agreed-upon schedule to the letter.

Expand your budget for staying on schedule…
Should you live to be 1000, however, you’ll never see a day when budgets and schedules, planned out to the last gnat’s whisker, bear more than a loose relationship to reality. In fact, the problems that derail many a project, sending costs up, often occur in the first three days.

Say for example, a major “efficiency” has been found, specifically, in the retrofitting and recycling of existing Web copy. What the schedule fails to reflect, time and again, is that the existing copy not only does not meet professional standards, but is utterly incompatible with the stated aims of the project.

A skilled Copy creative, however, can work wonders.

With eight to sixteen extra hours—working off hours, nights, weekends—even the steamiest pile of copy detritus can be whipped into something that’s at least readable. Whether this makes for a healthy workplace or a model of staff-development, is of course, another issue. Meanwhile, the scheduling software purrs contentedly past another illusory milestone. Doubly so, if the client compounds the travesty by instituting a rate card system with cost valuations that haven’t been adjusted for inflation since the 70s.

…and schedule some quality time with Quality.
At the end of this process—the inevitably mediocre result is launched into digital space. Why “inevitably?” Because the foundations of success were eroded from the start. Like a delicious filet mignon, motivating copy can’t be pasted together from scraps you wouldn’t feed to your pet ferret. And when the results are disappointing, the cry of “R.O.I.” rises over the top of every cubicle from here to Albuquerque.

The client is unhappy with the “R,” and misses the point entirely. Contrary to received wisdom, the most important letter in the R.O.I. equation is “I.” Clients who refuse to invest the time and money to earn extraordinary results will never attain them. COOs and project managers who enable a client’s addiction to unrealistic expectations are responsible for the outcome.

Yet the damage to the client is only part of the issue. What really smarts is the damage these false accommodations do to the agency business. If the decades since the “Mad Men” era have seen a steady erosion of our reputation, it hasn’t really been due to reported excesses or the occasional outburst of eye-popping bad taste.

It’s because the integrity of our product has been whittled away from the inside. Painful as the alternative may be, every time we participate in the fiction that quality work can be achieved without quality input, we erode our reputation even further. So if boosting R.O.I. is the signature tenet of your agency’s business model, it’s time you realized you have a vested interest in demanding a meaningful investment—of time, money and vision—from your client.

The Content Strategist’s Axe

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of talk about content strategy, even to the extent that in might now be “the next big thing.” Now, this topic has been around for some time and I’m a little surprised to see it’s getting so much attention, as if it were the latest Apple app or Justin Bieber download.

But when was content strategy not on our minds? Am I to assume that, up until recently, Web site development has been a process in which content blocks were simply thrown together willy-nilly?

Having analyzed a large number of Web sites over the last few years, I guess that’s quite possible. And considering that one piece of advice consistently given by content strategy consultants is to “know all the content on your site,” I see the issue is woven more deeply into the fabric of digital space than I realized. The situation is so bad that people are actually hiring consultants to snake out their Web sites, Roto-Rooter style, and find out what bubbles back up through the drain

So perhaps the sad fact is that the digital revolution has so far been carried out in a singularly haphazard way. As I see it, the root of the problem is a generalized obsession with all-inclusiveness: We expect each Web site to do too much.

Original. Fresh. Relevant.
By now, if we are to believe the statistics, it’s clear people are popping on and off Web pages in mere seconds. Given that, should we really strive to pump every consumer-facing site full of “the best of the Web,” including newsfeeds linking to other sites offering “the best of the Web?”

Surely, if we are to believe that the average American has the attention span of a gnat and the education of a Fifth Grader, our only hope is to provide more narrowly focused and more frequently updated content. Just as important, that content should be original. In fact, if a site can’t deliver original content on a regular basis about a particular range of topics aimed at a specific target, I doubt there’s any reason for it to exist at all.

Even within merchandizing space there’s room for frequent updates on shopping trends, consumer advice and advocacy. How much more useful the average e-tail site would be, if it came out for or against product lines or market trends.

Sharpening the blade.
Seen from this perspective, maybe the way around the content strategy dilemma is not to hire more consultants, but limit what’s posted to information immediately relevant to visitors. And by “immediately,” I mean to strike out 99% of what, through a never ending chain of word associations, often ends up on a Web page.

Given that, perhaps the only content strategy tool you’ll ever need is a scalpel—or in some cases, a pick axe. If you don’t believe me, take a good hard look at the featured content on a dozen or more sites—even those from major brands. Can you honestly say that more than 1% is worth saving? Look long enough and you’ll even discover that a large amount of it is even copied verbatim from some other source.

Chances are, once you carry out this exercise, you’ll realize that the best thing you can do for your Web site is start over from scratch. This time, build your content strategy around only those topics that directly support your brand message. If it’s true that “brands are becoming media,” then what you show on your channel is more than a window display: it’s the store itself.

Culture of Perfectionism

In developing creative concepts for any advertising medium, conflicts often arise between a client’s specific demands and the task of motivating consumers to take a desired action. This conflict is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the frequently protracted process of finalizing the copy.

Like most conflicts, this one is multilayered, affecting different aspects of the process at different times. It can be summarized under the general heading of perfectionism. Perfectionism itself, the compulsive pursuit of an unattainable idea, is plenty destructive on its own. Doubly so, since the criteria for achieving “perfection” are deeply irrational.

In the sphere of advertising copy, however, this compulsive drive to write, rewrite, or revert to “safe,” existing copy also has a disastrous impact on brand-building and ROI. Sadly, this particular type of perfectionism, this Anxiety of the Word, grows out of a fundamental misunderstanding about the way language works. No matter which marketing ideology you subscribe to, you must realize that what motivates people to action isn’t individual words.

What motivates is a clear, fresh message, based on a deep understanding of audience desires. That message is a promise, of reward, fulfillment, enhancement, of health or of wealth—but never a promise that only certain phrases will appear on the page. Why, then, devote so many hours to incessant word-picking, while relegating the real message, the promise to consumers, to a few trite phrases of marketing speak buried in the back pages of a creative brief?

Deluded by a deluge of diddly details.
Let’s go back to first causes and realize that language is a complex phenomenon encompassing far more than words on a page. Words are only a conduit for ideas pouring out from a specific point of view, in this case, a sales proposition. Layered on top of that is what should be a very carefully conceived brand persona—emerging from the total impact of the communication.

That’s because language communicates through a composite of word, rhythm, gesture, accent and honest emotion. In advertising, the core of this phenomenon is a promise of affirmation. We’ve all had the experience of being “sold” and, thinking back, the process involved a lot more than just reading a formulaic call to action. It consisted of a gradual matching of our personal attributes and goals to key attributes and goals of the brand and the specific product.

Now, as I see it, the key word here is “gradual,” and this is another reason why we need to stop fussing over individual words. For all this wrangling grows out of another delusion, deeply embedded in current practice: The idea that each communication with consumers must convey all and every detail of the product’s benefits and features.

Little words. Big picture.
Why does this matter? Because you can’t drive a message home just by repeating it verbatim. You must weave it into the very substance of your relationship with consumers. Take, for example, the message “I love you.” As most people would agree, that message takes time to express itself meaningfully. In a similar way every marketing message, to be credible, lasting and believable needs to be rolled out over a period of months.

So instead of trying to “fix” the words in a specific consumer engagement, you’d do better to put that pent-up energy into mapping out your brand promise in more depth, and deciding how to stage its communication over the course of a year, five years, ten years or more.

Once you start “thinking big” about language you’ll see just how futile, trivial and misguided a perfectionist obsession with individual words actually is. You’ll let Copy Creatives stop editing and go back to their real work: The intricate weaving of targeted idioms, brand messaging and deep structure that creates memorable, meaningful and motivating communication.

Digital Journalism & the Slogans of Doom (Conclusion)

Recalling the digital faces of major news outlets I’ve explored so far, I see they are, in essence, mere adjuncts to whatever’s happening on the main stage. “That’s the news. For more information, visit us online…” goes the refrain on many a news broadcast. Yet, often enough, what’s online is really an information dumping ground, a “newsfill” for everything squeezed out by commercials.

Such sites show no appreciation for digital space as a medium with unique capabilities and a global reach. For example, ever since “google” became a verb it has become the very exemplar of information gathering. In that sense, one indication that journalism might be faltering lies in its failure to address how people seek news in 2010. Should audiences discover they have a better chance of keeping up via Stumble Upon, the vultures will indeed begin their spiral.

A voice you can hear.
Still, as I see it, some news outlets do present news more idiomatically online. Reuters, for example, succeeds just by putting the emphasis on news itself. That’s “news,” by the way, as opposed to “news items,” “news stories,” let alone “what’s hot.” What stands out here is not the layout itself as a design statement, rather this layout’s power to delimit, edit and focus attention.

Like a trusted advisor, reuters.com greets users with an actual point of view. And in the end, that’s the difference between, “Communication Arts” and communication: Someone real to talk to. Brand personality here emerges as a consistent criterion for selection, an actionable model for what “news” means.

In a very different way, Time also establishes a distinctive voice, by creating a consistent frame of reference for what is and is not news. Contrary to expectation, the layout creates a sense or order and conscious selection by retaining much of the visual organization of a print magazine. Aside from a horrific Technology section, there’s a sense of proportion here, of higher level design and intelligence, effectively mimicking an encounter with a real person. The impact is palpable: The site has Presence.

Likewise, The New York Times uses the full repertoire of text, still photography, slide show, animation and video, to craft an editorial persona all its own. The true strength of its design, however, lies in how well it’s conceived to be read. After all, words matter in journalism. In terms of proportion, spacing, and font selection, nytimes.com has been thoroughly imagined as a digital space for absorbing news as text.

A stance you can take.
That it also incorporates many of the signature features of social networking—without walking one centimeter away from its heritage—surely suggests that journalism need not “die.” In fact, the examples I’ve chosen show that if anything is killing journalism, it’s not an emerging generation hopelessly addicted to social media. As with every other major dilemma a fictive, slanderously conceived “They” are not the source of the problem.

For if the Slogans of Doom are correct, this will not be a case of Murder by Media Revolution but—as evidenced by its digital face—a case of Suicide by Indifference. As the more successful news sites show, everything is in place to ensure journalism will survive. All that may be missing is the willingness of editors—or the media conglomerates that fill their water dishes—to keep journalism alive as a vital, dynamic and essential component of American culture.

Digital Journalism & the Slogans of Doom (Part 4)

Aside from the issues I’ve already discussed, my exploration of the digital face of journalism has also driven home to me the signature attributes of digital space as an emerging medium. I say “emerging,” because we don’t yet know what form it will ultimately take. Despite the squealing hysteria surrounding the iPad, even that sleek new device is only capable of displaying digital space as it exists today.

With that caveat, however, a few things seem clear. Digital space is, at a fundamental level, a multidimensional experience unfolding in real time. That means an effective, motivating Web site must be more than a tidy assemblage of image, text and motion graphics. It needs, through over-arching architecture and design, to simultaneously grow out of and inhabit its own unique world.

And on that score, the vast majority of sites devoted to delivering on the promise of American journalism fail miserably. That this is intimately bound up with the perceived demise of the field can be seen in every way the home pages of Fox News, C-Span, UPI and The Huffington Post are decidedly different from the iPad.

In a promotional environment where the iPad could sell out Yankee Stadium if it chose to give a concert, it’s hard to imagine these sites are reaching more than a fraction of their intended audiences. That is, assuming the goal of journalism is not to appeal only to a narrow band of obsessive-compulsives, market researchers or ideologues on holiday.

Stacked like hotcakes...
The problem, again, is partly one of organization. While all four of these sites do create some sense of hierarchy at the top of their templates, each quickly loses definition. The category labels at foxnews.com, do no more to guide or motivate users than a conventional coffee shop menu.

At c-span.org, the labels “What We’re Covering” and “Featured Links” are too generic. In the first instance, the heading reduces the site to the status of a help menu for c-span broadcasts. Equally important, these neutral demarkers, like their “just the facts” cousins in digital and direct marketing, are not motivating. “Great,” says the user, “I’ll check out the Featured Links after I find the news stories I’m looking for.”

By the same token, given UPI’s heritage of excellence, I can’t understand why it would take so little care of its digital footprint. With an information flow far below the standard set even by Flickr, upi.com can only be navigated by ESP. Finally, huffingtonpost.com consists solely of a welter of topical articles, blog posts and images stacked like hotcakes in a rural truck stop. The disarray is further compounded by a cluttered navigation.

…and served up with indifference.
In each case, the effect is analogous to that of a landscape architect dumping hundreds of pounds of sod, seed and fertilizer on a vacant lot and calling it a “garden.” Like a well designed park, a Web presence needs to exist to serve its regular visitors, by offering different paths through it, providing areas of rest and recreation and creating a welcoming environment.

Because when someone arrives at a news source—whether via the latest technological heart-throb or a battered CPU running Windows 98—the one and only reason they’ve come is to be enlightened, informed and, yes, reasonably entertained. In my next post I’ll discuss sites I believe achieve those needs more successfully.

Digital Journalism & the Slogans of Doom (Part 3)

As I continued to search the digital face of American journalism, for signs of its impending demise, I discovered more evidence that—in an effort to be more “relevant” to a badly drawn portrait of the digital audience—digital news editors had walked even farther away from their heritage than their on-air counterparts.

At least on a traditional national news program, we feel the weight of an achoring personality. This is someone who lends the proceedings some sense of perspective and authority. No doubt today’s audience has no stomach for the somewhat paternalistic tone struck by Walther Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Peter Jennings. The only thing about “the old days” less likely to recur is the use of music by Beethoven as a theme song for a nightly newscast.

Yet even in the aftermath of the broadcast Reformation that followed the now-mythic 1960s, personalities like Katie Curic, Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams still offer viewers a point of orientation. Online, anything like a unifying perspective at sites serving the major broadcast news outlets is conspicuously absent. Accordingly, my visit to ABC News and MSNBC turned up only slight variations on the themes I discussed in relation to cbsnews.com in my previous post.

Trivial pursuits.
As it appeared on April 5, 2010, the abcnews.com homepage presented users seeking the big picture with a dizzying array of disassociated design elements. At the top of the list was a thumbnail crawler offering a random sampling of the day’s most titillating gossip. Is Tiger back in the swing? Did Whoopi have an affair? Will Erykah Badu apologize?

What follows on the home page is a patchwork of links and associated thumbnails raining down on our consciousness at random. In mild contrast to CBS, ABC puts slightly less emphasis on its broadcast news menu, but that hardly matters. Far from being about “the news,” abcnews.com is a free-for-all of information overload delivered in no discernable order.

Like the Facebook page it emulates, it’s a list of lists, offering no center of gravity, no focal point and no interpretation of the day’s events. Even within the category headings further down the page, the rationale for grouping these stories is not at all clear. Ironically, this confusing visual experience is not only discouraging to anyone seeking perspective on the news, I also have a hard time believing it serves the needs of the gossip-addicts it panders to.

Demotivating clutter.
MSNBC’s more sober approach has many payoffs, if for no other reason than that the layout gives the users’ eye somewhere to rest. Beyond that, the categorization of news items begins much higher up in the layout and, within each subsection, there’s a clear hierarchy of attention. By whatever criteria the stories are grouped, it’s easy to see what the editors intend me to focus on.

While I may not agree with their choices, the resulting frame of reference makes the site much more readable. That small accomplishment alone lends this site at least the aura of authority, a sense that one might reasonably expect something that YouTube or your BFF can’t offer. Even given that aura, however, the site’s cluttered appearance is still deeply demotivating.

In my next post, I’ll look at a few more familiar players then visit sites orbiting outside the gravitational pull of network broadcast news.

Digital Journalism & the Slogans of Doom (Part 2)

In an attempt to understand what impact the digital face of major news outlets might be having on the declining state of American journalism, I started by taking a close look at CBS News. As I mentioned in my previous post, this site shares with many of its competitors a rather lifeless, by-the-numbers approach to design and architecture.

That is, it’s merely functional. Yes, users can conveniently access news stories. There’s a lot more to a motivating Web presence, however, than access. Users also need a point of orientation. At cbsnews.com, however, the editors have completely leveled the landscape. There’s no hint of expert opinion signifying which stories might logically claim our attention, as adults concerned about the state of the world. Instead of meaningful orientation, the site offers only an incoherent wall of noise.

Hence, on the home page for April 1, 2010, a story about Apple’s iPad jostled for attention with a profile of celebrity sex addiction, with recipes for Easter, with a story about P. Diddy and with a disturbing announcement of a potential beheading in the middle east.

Can’t spell “press” without “PR.”
More unrelated items followed, grouped by the program they air on. To me, this signals a serious confusion of intent. Does the site exist to promote journalistic values—the press freedoms at the core of the American experience—or does it exist to create PR for TV shows? A look at the top navigation, a catalogue of CBS news programs, confirms that PR is a deep-rooted value here.

Granted, there’s nothing wrong with CBS promoting its news products on its digital news hub. Sure, broadcast media needs a revenue stream. But giving these links pride of place begs the question: If we’re meant to lament the imminent Death of Journalism, isn’t it reasonable to expect that Journalism might actually exist outside the realm of entertainment?

In fact, only a small portion of the content at cbsnews.com confirms the existence of a proud journalistic tradition. Steamy slide shows don’t count as news—unless it’s actually news to you that America has a burgeoning sexual subculture. Is there news analysis in the traditional sense? Keep scrolling and you’ll find an array of Facebook-like jpeg-and-caption modules indexed by category, like a lack-luster offering to appease discredited gods.

Welcome to the salad bar.
Clearly, if people are unwilling to swim in this ocean of information, it’s due to the fact that, in yet another triumph of Marketing Anxiety, the site tries to be all things to all people. Ironically, CBS News shows little understanding of who these people are and what they want.

People don’t come to a supposed news authority for an all-you-can-eat buffet of information. They’re looking for expertise. After all, “salad bar” news service is available everywhere. You can find it on Oprah, YouTube, Facebook, in blog space or in the 1,000,000+ opt-in “newsletters” used as promotional tools by cause-marketers and cheese merchants alike.

By refusing to stand for something more substantial, CBS News has equated itself with the lowest common denominator. Seen from this perspective, the issue is hardly the Death of Journalism, rather the Voluntary Abandonment of Journalism.

In my next post, I’ll take a similar look at a few more mainstream news outlets to see just how pervasive these issues have become.