Happy Birthday BlogLESS
One year ago today, we launched BlogLESS.
Photo from Roger Butterfield’s Flickr collection.
Browse our posts and check out some of our favorites on the Archive page.
Thanks for reading!
Blogless
Browse our posts and check out some of our favorites on the Archive page.
Thanks for reading!
Nick recently wrote a post about the Civil Branding website and whitepaper. Here’s his distillation of the whitepaper’s argument:
Branding is a form of mass-communication. For better or worse, choosing brands is how we express which ideas we think are important. Therefore, marketers should encourage companies to adopt and promote progressive values in order to build a better society.
His argument against so-called civil branding is old hat for BlogLESS readers: Brands in fact shouldn’t make vague, value-based promises in their advertising because in the best case they can’t possibly keep them. He also noted that in many cases, these promises contradict a company’s actions.
Putting a finer point on the latter case, Nick brought up a ludicrous set of recent advertisements for Citibank, who now promote their company using the notion “that there is more to life than the pursuit of money.” Nick notes that Citibank hardly has the moral authority to make such claims: “That’s a great sentiment, but it’s hard to take seriously from a company that skims money from it’s customers’ accounts and takes unacceptable risks with their funds - all for the sake of making as much money as possible.” I made a similar point in November to a PR person from oil multinational BP whose recent branding upgrade situates them “beyond petroleum.”
The individual who wrote the Civil Branding whitepaper responded to Nick’s concerns in the comments, suggesting that by merely putting forth “progressive messages,” companies are taking on an ethically “constructive” role in society.
This idea is not only credulous, it’s dangerous.
Consider Civil Branding’s flagship exemplar of a “progressive message” from a multinational company: Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. This campaign is decidedly mild in ambition next to the Citibank and BP campaigns, but it’s worth considering. After all, it’s easy to put your finger on what’s wrong with Citibank or BP.
Dove’s message in this campaign is that the beauty industry is unhealthy for the self-esteem of little girls. Since this is undoubtedly true, if there’s anything wrong with this campaign, it isn’t that Dove is just lying to us. They’re not explicitly asking us to believe something that we know is false. Rather, they’re telling us the truth: Body image should be a deep concern for parents, given the state of the beauty industry’s advertising. So where’s the problem?
Since we all agree with its message, it is undoubtedly useful for the Dove brand to be strategically aligned with this value. The tacit message that underwrites this campaign, then, is that Unilever (Dove’s parent company) understands the problems of young girls in a body-obsessed culture, cares about them, and is committed to addressing them (in this case, by providing Dove-branded self-esteem materials addressed to girls).
At this point I should note that Civil Branding itself clearly indicates that this tacit message is false. While Unilever on the one hand promotes self-esteem to young girls, they simultaneously produce the Axe body spray commercials, some of the most blatantly exploitative and chauvinistic ads this side of Maxim magazine. Whatever this weird contradiction is, it isn’t organizational commitment to a value.
It strikes me as very strange that one could see this contradiction, indicate it in print, and still applaud the campaign. Ever since I read this, I’ve been asking myself how Civil Branding might be able to justify the idea that the explicit message is still admirable.
The best answer I could come up with was this: It’s better for our world when corporations use their power to promote these values than it is when they don’t. That doesn’t strike me as true, but at least it’s coherent. To understand why I don’t think it’s true that this is the case, let’s try to determine what the messages used in so-called civil branding are, exactly, if they’re not outright lies.
I had an intuition about this, and in following it up, I grabbed my copy of a newish little book by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit.
First, I thought, civil branding might be based on instances of what he calls humbug. Humbug “is not designed primarily to give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the topic…its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the speaker.” That seems to be a pretty likely candidate in the case of Dove. Since Unilever’s actions don’t substantiate its claims, it seems relatively likely that the Campaign for Real Beauty is a big steaming load of strategic humbug. And the messages of a humbug are meaningless. I’ll talk about this a little bit more on Friday.
However, it’s pretty hard, as that BP PR adviser suggested to me, to pin a corporation down on motivation. You can impugn, but hardly conclusively prove something like bad motivation on behalf of every individual relevant to a campaign. That said, even if some people at Unilever or Dove or the advertising agency that made the video do care about this value (and I’m sure some of them do) — even if it’s not humbug up and down the line — it’s still bullshit.
What is bullshit? As opposed to humbug, which has a directly adverse relationship to the truth, bullshit is just not concerned with truth in any way. That is, bullshit is simply not germane to the enterprise of describing reality; it is indifferent to the way things really are.
Note that this has to be the case for any attempt at “civil branding” by a company whose product doesn’t have an explicit civil dimension. A brand is just the image a company wants to present of itself to its consumers. It is a set of guidelines that determine which kinds of promises it can or should make in the messages that it uses to sell you its products. As soon as it makes a promise about something other than the characteristics of those products, you’re just bullshitting. Any statements that an advertisement makes about anything but what it’s trying to sell you are categorically bullshit. They are just not concerned with the reality at hand (the product).
And the idea that we should somehow be happy about this corporate bullshit strikes me as silly. As far as I’m concerned, there are no two ways about it: we should demand better.
Optical illusions aren’t just tricks. They’re tricks that people’s brains like, so they tend to make an impression on viewers.
((They’re also hard to make, so I appreciate seeing a decent one.))
Via.
After harping all week on tough problems in business ethics, I thought I’d wrap up today talking a rather neat design idea from Google.
Screening out automated computer systems (from, e.g. signing up for e-mail accounts or posting spam comments) is an ongoing problem on the Internet. Many of us already know about the popular CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) technique, which traditionally uses noisy text readable to humans but not to bots.
Recognizing that there are a variety of good reasons to think about a new style of Captcha, Google has designed a novel Captcha strategy that employs images that are easy for people to orient correctly, but hard for computers.
From the paper, What’s Up CAPTCHA?:
This task requires analysis of the often complex contents of an image, a task which humans usually perform well and machines generally do not.
Given a large repository of images, such as those from a web search result, we use a suite of automated orientation detectors to prune those images that can be automatically set upright easily. We then apply a social feedback mechanism to verify that the remaining images have a human-recognizable upright orientation.
The main advantages of our Captcha technique over the traditional text recognition techniques are that it is language-independent, does not require text-entry (e.g. for a mobile device), and employs another domain for Captcha generation beyond character obfuscation. This Captcha lends itself to rapid implementation and has an almost limitless supply of images.
We conducted extensive experiments to measure the viability of this technique…Our Captcha technique achieves high success rates for humans and low success rates for bots, does not require text entry, and is more enjoyable for the user than text-based Captcha.
Nice.
By now everyone has heard the advice that it’s bad practice to finish a presentation with a blank screen. Conventional wisdom says it looks poor and breaks the flow of the talk. I’m going to go one step further today and say it’s also a missed opportunity — one that many presenters don’t take advantage of.
To avoid having a blank screen, presenters often have another slide that says something like “Questions?”. This is better, but not by much.
The projector rarely gets turned off after a presentation, which means the audience is probably going to be staring at that slide for the next 30 minutes or so. Your last slide will be seen longer than any other slide in the deck. Moreover, people tend to remember more about the beginning and the end of things. Now, are you sure the final impression you want to leave the audience with is “Questions?”.
It might be a good idea to put some more design into that last slide.
One tactic we used recently was to create a “big picture” diagram for the last slide. In our experience it’s helpful to have something that people can point to when they’re asking questions, rather than asking for a particular slide or speaking in abstract terms. So, for example, you could make a storyboard that recalls the main points of your talk or show them an overview of the system you’re pitching. Make it a conversation piece. Ending with a visual summary not only jogs people’s memories during the discussion phase, it will help them remember the talk later.
Another useful technique is to leave the audience with something actionable. This is an old marketing trick. When writing copy, they say the last sentence should tell the audience to do something, such as: “If you’re concerned about water safety, write to your congressperson”. You can do the same thing with your final slide. Leave your audience with a task that will supplement their understanding of your presentation or put them on the road to joining your cause.
In any case, consider what your goals are for your presentation and put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Your final slide is not just a placeholder, it’s an important tool in delivering your message. Take advantage of it.
You’ve no doubt heard about this by now, as it’s been one of the most popular stories in the media for the past week.
If you haven’t, here are the bullet points, excerpted from the New York Times article.
Two Domino’s employees made a video in the restaurant’s kitchen. In the video, one provides narration while the other performs gross violations of health-code standards. Within days:
In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged. “We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” said Domino’s spokesman Tim McIntyre. “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.”
This is an interesting practical situation. Unlike in the case of Virgin Airlines, this incident does not seem to be as clearly attributable to the brand itself. Indeed, the analysis of the Domino’s incident (and the recent similar one at Amazon, although that one may be slightly less apropos to my point here) has almost exclusively addressed damage control strategies for incidents of this type, treating them as rather more like a hurricane than as a symptom of endemic organizational problems.
I wonder, though, if there isn’t something even more interesting to be found by treating them as the latter. If we can justly do this, and we do, then perhaps we can comport ourselves to the disease, rather than the symptom. I’m thinking about this now, and I’ll try to write about it next week.
Designed by Denis Guidone, the Ora ilLegale Clock has a numberless face that, when tilted on its side, adds or subtracts an hour from the time. An ingeniously simple means of addressing the problem of resetting one’s clock when the time changes.
It’s not yet available, but is due to be manufactured soon by NAVA and for sale at the MoMA store in a year or two. Bravo!
Via.
