I talked a couple of weeks ago about how so-called social media can help your company's branding effort, and what that means about conducting your business. It is pretty obvious that social media is a (relatively) new kind of marketing game, which would seem to imply a new set of rules as well. Given that, I'd like to spend this week to being feeling out the ethical terrain of designing and strategizing with social media.

The pretty clear place to start this (at least according to Google) is looking at the published ethics code for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Word of mouth marketing is the heart of most social media campaigns, and WOMMA has been advocating it since 2005. According to their mission, they employ an ethical code as part of their core strategy.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The heart of the WOMMA code is the so-called "Honesty ROI," a name which should strike at least a tangential chord with us DLB types, given our insistence on the critical role of keeping meaningful promises in all types of corporate design and marketing. The R.O.I. in question here cashes out to: Relationship, Opinion, Identity. This week, my plan is to look at each of these points in turn, and evaluate the stance of the WOMMA against the stance that we've been developing. I'll look for both similarities and disjunctions, either of which will hopefully be instructive in our ongoing investigation of design ethics.

Today, I'll just paraphrase the WOMMA's position, and on Wednesday and Friday, I'll take it up in earnest.

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Ethical advertising (and web and social media production) is totally transparent. That's it. That's its regulative ethical goal. If the product and company are ethical, a good design highlights that. If they aren't, a good design shows that as well. I'm not suggesting that a good design shines the harshest possible light on a client, but the Internet does, and a good design takes that into account in advance.

Now, you are probably thinking, if that's a good design, who's going to hire me? The obvious answer is: companies that behave ethically. Working for good companies is good for you, because (a) it brands you as trustworthy, (b) it makes your services scarce (and thus more desirable), and (c) you'll sleep great at night. It is also good for your clients, not only because your brand is a seal of approval on their clean ethical track record, but because meaningful and keepable promises are the most effective form of branding and advertising.

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A trend in DLB's emerging design ethics philosophy that the primary criterion for ethical design seems to be that it motivates ethical business practice. We have discussed here now many times our set of purely self-interested reasons why companies should be ethical (because people are going to find out if you're not, and because self-publishing and social media will then enable them to break your trust relationship with their entire social network). This leaves us open, I think, to the counter-argument that if this is the case, then designers don't really have anything to do — when products sell themselves, designers don't have to to design their way out of a paper bag!

In other words, couldn't design (used here in the sense of new media production and advertising) just as easily be understood as successful when it helps a client hide their ethical blemishes, and sell in spite of them? Yes, it could, and I would suggest that it very nearly always has been. But, our ongoing argument here at BlogLESS is that this strategy is becoming progressively more difficult because of (e.g.) search engines and self-publishing. Our further argument is that this fact implies that there are good, practical reasons for trying to reframe this problem into a different, easier to handle problem.

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I wrote on Monday about the role of social networking in new brands: about how much value it can add to your brand, and in particular about why some companies have trepidations about employing it. I argued that these trepidations are a consequence of a sort of means-end confusion. Specifically I argued that because of a long historical tradition, many people have conflated visual control with the trust relationships it has been used to engender.

Today, I'd like to add a corollary to that discussion about what this means for companies in terms of the kinds of policies that their brands underwrite.

There's a nice little article at Micropersuasion that touches on this with the slogan, "trusted search trumps untrusted search." What this means, to ape a bit from a good comment on the article, is that the only way for Google to ensure quality search results is "to assume that all URLs [are] spam, and require them to 'earn' their place" in the index. Call that machine filtering. The 'earning' algorithm can get smarter, but the core principle can't.

Now, enter some potential future of deeply searchable social networks: since the search is built on top of a network of trusted sources, the 'earning' algorithm for finding information is already better than the best possible machine algorithm, because it is reliant on a trusted set of human filters. Call this a social filter.

Coca Cola loses my trust.

What this means for brands is that their future success depends on being able to persuade not just a clever algorithm, but large network of individuals, including individual network influencers, of the value of their content. What this means is that they're going to have to develop trust. I spent two weeks in December arguing that the only way to do this was to make and keep meaningful promises.

Social networking is just another bit of writing on the wall that the various old-world advertising and promising models are dead, dead, dead.

For my money, we've learned a lot thinking about promising in advertising. We've learned that you while you can't promise something you can't deliver, a lot of companies try to circumvent reality by promising almost nothing, insinuating anything and everything, promising something deeply vague, or adopting an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general. From a viewer's perspective, that's a whole lot of of sneakiness, and it leads to an ongoing state of consumer anxiety.

I'd like to talk briefly today about how we as designers, advertisers, and corporations, can address this problem, and why we should want to.

We consumers are jaded. That is part and parcel of living now, in the culture we live in. We've been lied to enough that we aren't willing to accept that. If that's the case, we should note, there's no reason to think that the practices of promising something minimal, irrelevant, vague, or indefinitely deferred can go on forever with our blessing either. On the contrary, the ironic stance we're adopting toward these promises (and their counterpart wild insinuations) seems to evidence that this paradigm is falling apart even more quickly than the last.

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Last week I ended by noting that it seems counter-intuitive that you can promise almost nothing, insinuate anything, or promise something deeply vague with an advertisement more easily than you can promise something you can't deliver. Today I'd like to ask why this is counter-intuitive. My argument below is that it does because, as a culture, we've started to develop an ironic stance toward the role of promise making in advertising altogether. I'll also argue that this doesn't put us on very firm footing as consumers.

As I noted last week, promises are a firmly entrenched aspect of our morality. They are, in the form of contracts, oaths, vows, and treaties, the guarantor of social cooperation. It is no suprise, then, when faced with a media climate of insidious strategies (vagueness, minimal promises, insinuation) to undermine the value of the promise model, consumers "buck."

For me, one of the deepest and scariest parts of coping as a human being living in our modern media climate is becoming jaded. Because we're being lied to, and because when that stops working, we get even worse treatment. It is easy to become detached, to just simply stop taking promising seriously. This trend, I think, is terrible news for us as consumers, who after all dictate what works and doesn't in branding and advertising.

Why? Well, what happens when consumers stop expecting advertising and brands to make meaningful promises? By definition, advertising becomes unintelligible. And this is happening right now, or else it has already happened. I think about it a lot, and I don't know why or how some advertising works on me exactly, at least not at a deep level. What I do know, though, is that the advertisers know that I'm trapped in this ambigious relationship to advertising, and that they've started advertising to that. I'll give my favorite example.

No doubt you have seen this Pizza Hut commercial. The plot goes something like this: Many people sit down to dinner in a fine italian restaurant. They are brought out heaping plates of pasta and (literally, macaroni and bacon - the mind reels) and glasses of presumably fine wine. They eat, they enjoy life. At the end of dinner, it is revealed to them that they have been eating... Pizza Hut! They are shocked. Awed. Their lives have changed, for the better. Finally, gourmet cuisine at a price they can afford and from a brand they can find in any city in the United States.

Accompanying audio: "Pizza Hut delivered the pasta!" Look how shocked this "real" person is. She totally thought that was pasta from this fancy restaurant.

This advertisment campaign makes wild, crazy promises. These are promises that everybody knows Pizza Hut can't keep. But, the media-aware citizen explains, these promises are self-aware: they're not lies, they're ironic. No one with any sense would believe that Pizza Hut pastas are indistinguishable from fine restaurant cuisine. And of course no one does. But it's too late: the advertising already happened. We accept the story ironically, but we still accept it.

Promises entail promissory obligations. That is to say, what it means to promise to do something is to create — apparently out of thin air — the obligation to do it.

On Wednesday, I talked about the advertising strategy of committing a company to a minimal obligation, or one that's already in place. Today I'm going to look briefly at two related types of canonical advertising promises: namely, vague promises and insinuations.

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In the first ever episode of the television show Mad Men, the creative team at the fictional advertising firm of Sterling Cooper, headed by Creative Director Donald Draper, is faced with the end of an era: medical science has proved that smoking cigarettes is bad for the health, so no longer can cigarette advertisements feature "doctors" propounding the health and lifestyle benefits of, say, Lucky Strikes.

Of course, the reason they can't just keep doing what they are doing is that to do so would be to make a promise that consumers would understand as unkeepable, which would presumably be more than the brand can withstand. Again, advertising is based on trust, or, to put that another way, at least the illusion of coherence with reality.

The end of an era at Sterling Cooper.

Draper's brilliant bit of advertising is to promise less from Lucky Strikes. (I bet you thought I'd never get back around to this, didn't you?) Draper's plan: Since his client can't promise that their customers will have a healthier life, promise anything else that's true.

The moral of the story? Any keepable promise is better than any unkeepable one. If your company can't promise, e.g. that you're no longer a gas company, promise that you have clean floors in your bathrooms. Hence, "It's toasted."

The Lucky Strike executive protests: "But everybody else's tobacco is toasted."

Draper: "No. Everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strikes' is toasted."