Josh Peters wrote a nice little post about an experience he recently had on Twitter. In the process of being spammed by Twitter user Liquid4Health, he noticed that the user's logo was a somewhat shoddy rip-off of the Mozy logo.
Comparison of Twitter Avatars for Mozy and Liquid4Health
Interestingly, Liquid4Health is a marketing account on Twitter for a company called GBG. GBG's logo is not the same as the Twitter icon in question. This seems to imply that the marketer who created, designed, and uses their Twitter account is making a series of unethical (or at least unpleasant) design and marketing decisions on behalf of the company. The lesson here? Keep a leash on your social marketers. This Twitter account is driving brand value down and attracting negative chatter on the internet. (Go ahead and Google Liquid4Health: the Josh's article is already on the front page.)
Funnily, one of the three taglines on GBG's homepage is "driven by ethics." One more lesson that design ethics is not a spectator sport. You've got to actively ensure that your brand is ethically represented, otherwise, as Josh says, it'll come back to haunt you.
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The Associated Press thinks that the way to save journalism is to use new technology (DRM) to preserve its old business model. Reddit user ClockworkSparrow took AP's diagram and rewrote the text to expose the folly of this idea.
To add insult to injury, after studying the initial press release, Ed Felten determined that the technology AP plans to use can't actually do any of the things they claim it can!
Lest we forget, Techdirt reminds us why any strategy that depends upon DRM is doomed to fail:
This has been said before (multiple times) but you don't rescue your business model by "protecting" against what people want to do. You don't rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.
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I started talking on Wednesday about so-called civil brands and advertising. I'm going to make one more point today about vague, value-based promises, about this especially dangerous kind of corporate bullshit. I'm going to get kind of preachy too. You've been warned.
The whitepaper on Civil Branding compares the role of brands in today's society with those of church and state in the past. Brands now "engage [in] wider conversations about how we should think about ourselves as a society." They play a primary role in informing what we find important, and help us tune our perspectives on it. God help me, I think this is right. But the conclusion - that it is the duty of marketers to help brands advertise with value-based messages, to promote good values - is dead wrong.
"I learned it by watching you, dad! I learned it by watching you."
When marketers suggest that companies undertake vague, value-based advertising campaigns that are contradicted by their unethical business practices, they are promoting a culture where values are handed down by institutions lacking the moral authority to do so. When companies use advertising to promote values that they don't instantiate, they drain the meaning out of those values.
Making value-based promises requires moral authority. If you're a marketer, and you help a company promote a value it doesn't instantiate, you're cheapening that value. You're making a world in which that value means less.
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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.
