This is the first year I’ve attended SXSW.  I’m not altogether sure I’ve been missing much, but it does provide an opportunity to see a lot of people you know, and meet a few new people, all in one place, over the slightly absurd period of 5 days.

Veteran attendees seem to agree that it ain’t what it used to be; people used to come to learn, they say, and now they come to self-promote.  It’s easy to imagine that this is a convenient nostalgia for a fictional time gone by.  But the feeling is so widespread one begins to imagine that things have taken a turn; the first day’s panel topics seemed to yearn for simpler times, when ad people were in the minority, and didn’t appear on panels.

The first day of the interactive festival squared up firmly against “douchebags” – and we all know who the douchebags are, right?  It’s marketers and agency people.  The ones who used to come to learn, and now have learned how to parrot back the same ideas they heard at last year’s conference, but this time in the context of brands.  How do these rehashed topics wind up on the docket? I suppose it’s got something to do with the conference organizers knowing who pays the bills – those same brands that subsidize the event send their marketing people, and the conference wants to make nice.

But it’s also clearly got to do with the cliquish nature of this gathering.  Panels are organized by friends and colleagues – almost everyone on the panels I’ve witnessed are friends or colleagues.  The collegiality can make for good panel theater, but it can also lead to a general sense of pointlessness and fake exclusivity – if I wanted to listen to ad people talk tech, I’d just stop by Tom & Jerry’s for a drink.

The first talk I attended was titled, “Programming and Minimalism: Lessons from Orwell & The Clash” and was given by Jonathan Dahl from Zencoder.  I chose this topic for a couple of reasons – it was a topic I was less familiar with (though I am learning Ruby!), it promised to reason by analogy to things I love (writing and music), and it wasn’t about advertising in any way.  It was a really lovely talk, and I’ll come back to it in a later post, because it was much more useful and thought-provoking than the panel I attended next.

“Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies?”

This panel was packed, people lined the borders of the room, conference organizers admonished us not to block any aisles.  We were clearly in violation of the fire code.

The panel was moderated by Allison Mooney (Google, ex-Tribal DDB), and the participants were Ben Malbon (Google, ex-BBH), Matt Galligan (SimpleGeo), Rick Webb (The Barbarian Group), and Rob Rasmussen (Tribal DDB).  Yep, friends and colleagues.

The panel title was misleading, but scratch the surface of the SXSW Go app and the description was not:

How much do marketers (& their agencies) need to know about technology?  Advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world — one where code is on par with content.  ‘Consumers’ are now ‘users.’  So should ‘marketers’ be ‘developers’?  Enter the hybrid marketer.  More and more agencies are finding they need to educate and cultivate a new breed of people who understand tech from a marketing and brand perspective, and who have a consumer mindset.  At the same time, agencies are adopting practices — agile development, continuous deployment — learned from the tech world.  But should they really try this stuff at home?  Should ‘marketers’ be worrying about, say, the video capability of the latest iPhone, or pushing the envelope with HTML5?  Or should they just stick to their core competencies and work with established software companies / dev shops to realize their ideas?  How else is technology affecting the agency model and the creative process?

This meandering description closely resembles the actual discussion. Any time they were in danger of approaching a meaty subject, they quickly demurred.  This avoidance of substance was made easier by the lack of definitions.  No one defined an advertiser v. a brand marketer (one assumes they are functionally the same).  No one identified the agencies who are adopting agile development nor continuous deployment – certainly the agencies represented on the panel are not dedicated to these techniques and practices. And what would they say are marketers’ “core competencies”?

The panel knew its audience. By a show of hands, it looked like an 85 percent agency, 10 percent marketer, and 5 percent software/startup audience breakdown. If you’ve ever attended a panel at Advertising Week, the 4As, the ARF, or Social Media Week that tried to address the future of advertising agencies, you’ll know they tend to float vague concepts or forced metaphors but rarely advocate for any one path, beyond what have now become platitudes along the lines of ‘innovate or die.’

Ben Malbon was perhaps the most provocative, noting that agencies “fetishize what they don’t know” – preferring the new and the shiny over the useful and the relevant. He suggested that agencies be honest with themselves about the state of their tech savvy, and find good partners who can best implement technology.  He said agencies need random crazy people, freewheeling, tech savvy strategists and creatives, untethered to an account or department, to bring the world of culture and technology into the creative process. He said that liberating tech experts from the tethers of departments or billable hours would not only improve the agency’s ability to utilize technology, it would avoid wasting the time of these tech sherpas.  He said agencies should deploy fewer people to work faster and get to proof of concept rather than worrying executions into perceived perfection.  He advocated abandoning what he called “The Masterpiece Mentality”, instead showing clients messier work faster.

No one took the bait.

Rick Webb was the only one to respond directly to Ben’s ideas, and came at it pragmatically.  He noted that unless agencies are willing to fund a lab, brands are unlikely to pay for experimentation and iteration, and agency models aren’t typically set up to allow expensive experts to roam the halls unattached to paying clients.  He rightly observed that clients don’t know how to visualize their own brand making use of a particular technology – they need to see it in action.  He said that existing client and agency management models don’t really make agile development and scrums possible. He also wryly suggested that we were just updating the language with new metaphors rather than talking about anything substantively new, that the business is now saying ‘platform’ when they mean brand, and ‘campaign’ when they mean product, and joked that if what ad agencies are making is anything at all like software, then it’s the kind of software that gets shipped on CDs.

The crowd chuckled, knowingly.

The conversation inevitably turned to what agencies tend to think are the important practicalities of implementing new business practices:  Who will be responsible for staying up to date with technology?  What will this person’s title be?  Which department will hire and fund them?  Do we really need tech experts as interpreters, or don’t we need implementers?  When can we omit them from meetings and when do we need them? Who can we hire that will help us tick the box of ‘understands new technology’, so we can sell this understanding as a value-add to our clients, but who won’t truly disrupt the way we or our clients go about the process of making campaigns?

An excellent question from the audience on the topic of talent – when agency cultures (defined by their compensation models) aren’t really about agile development, rapid technology adoption, or thought leadership, how will agencies win the war for talent that understands and implements software-like brand solutions?  Malbon countered that the answer was in the question – culture is what brings in the best talent.  He then suggested that agencies think hard about why those talented, insightful, technology savvy people would want to come to work in an agency – what would they really DO there all day, anyway?

But this wasn’t a debate – everyone agreed that agility, leanness, and the use of technology would be virtuous in the agency of the future. Nobody wanted to suggest they had nailed the problem; and nobody wanted to admit they weren’t really reckoning with it in a meaningful way.  The audience walked away believing whatever they walked in believing.  And SXSW rolled on.

Ad Nerds Don’t Make Very Good Nerds

Ad agencies are not, generally speaking, staffed by nerds.  Let me offer my working definition of a nerd: a person who is passionate about a topic or set of topics, to the degree that they have developed expertise not only in its theory but its practice, and actively engage in bettering both their knowledge of the topic or topics, and their participation in it. They immerse themselves in a subject or practice, becoming experts, implementers and teachers.

I just looked up ‘nerd’ – two definitions are offered, and I clearly prefer the second: “An intelligent, single-minded expert in a particular discipline or profession.”  People in ad agencies tend to see someone like that and think of the first definition: “A foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious.”

I’ve encountered people in ad agencies who aren’t even nerdy about advertising.  They don’t really love advertising, they don’t know it well, they don’t study it.  They pay attention to who wins awards, especially when it’s them or their friends.  They pay attention to which accounts are in play.  They worry about selling out, object to every note or critique from the account team or the client, and resist the structure or guidance of a strategy.  Creative ideas spring from their heads like Athena, and are then chiseled in stone for all eternity.  Only the pollution of opinions mar their work.  They are precious about what they do, yet are passionless about it.  They are, in Paula Scherr’s parlance, solemn, not serious.

Don’t Blame the Cool Kids

It should be clear by now that I am contemptuous of this attitude; but it should also be clear that these attitudes are the results of institutional incentives and biases towards coolness, generalizations, and palatability.  It is also the product of compensation – clients pay for ideas they like, or ideas they think will sell products, or simple obedience.  The examples of clients who pay for great craft, or revolutionary ideas, creative leaps and challenging agencies are so few as to make them outliers from which there is little to learn except that you want to work on their business at their agencies, and bask in the glow of their exceptionalism.

Examples of great work that showed agility or iteration or software-ness, according to our panel, were the usual suspects, and most were stretching even these undefined terms: Nike+, American Express’ partnership at SXSW with Foursquare, the Arcade Fire/Chrome demonstration, Google Maps, and that tiredest of tired examples, the Subservient Chicken.  Apple and Nike can always be relied upon to be the two brands everyone thinks of as experimental, smart, digital [disclosure: I’ve worked on Apple at Chiat, and at Wieden, though not on Nike, and yes, I sometimes feel nostalgic].

There are too few available examples of software company practices in advertising, because quite simply, advertising agencies are not software companies.  They are service businesses, not product businesses.  They don’t ship.  They hire people who can write or design or produce or manage or strategize, but who don’t want to or can’t or are scared to make movies, or write books, or make art, or start businesses.  They hire people who believe they are too cool to be in boring old business, mere cogs in the wheels of corporate America, soulless hacks who work in cubicles.  So they join up with enormous agencies, held by even more enormous holding companies, servicing Fortune 1000 clients, and working, more often than not, in cubicles.

The old agency compensation model charged a commission on the purchase of time and space in media channels, and on the costs of production.  The muscle memory of the industry devalues creativity and the process of creation; it places value on hard costs and handling fees or brokerage commissions.  Madison Avenue is essentially a used car lot.

Often, agencies simply produce what they think they can sell to clients; and their view of clients tends to be abysmally low.

But why should it be high? Most (agencies and) clients are not interested in, nor see themselves as in the business of, contributing to culture. They are marketers of commodities; culture is there to provide context.  So they borrow from culture references and memes, wrapping themselves in a flag of relevance. They come on too late, adopting photobombing squirrels, Fuck Yeah Tumblrs, and YouTube sensations as their own, borrowing interest from anyone who has any to lend.

I was once told, and have no idea if this is true, that Dan Wieden regarded spec ads that co-opted national, political or religious symbols as the work of sociopaths.  It doesn’t need to be the Statue of Liberty talking about discounts on mattresses for a Fourth of July sale to be hackneyed and unseemly; it can just as easily be the use of badges and points, or the Facebook like button, or Ashton Kutcher, if used solely for ‘borrowed interest’.

This isn’t the work of nerds.  It’s not even the work of fans.  It’s the work of those people you laughed at in Robert Altman’s The Player – people who pitch ideas as “Ghost” meets “The Manchurian Candidate” or “Out of Africa” meets “Pretty Woman”.  Except it’s “David After the Dentist” meets Crest; it’s Keyboard Cat meets Whiskas; or in real life, it’s Jay-Z as a spokesperson for HP; it’s The Beatles on the Apple Store; it’s Ashton Kutcher flirting with not-Demi-Moore in Nikon ads.  These people have done some simple math – that internet kid has a lot of followers, this actor has a big Q-Score, lots of people have ‘a twitter’.  Let’s hang out with them.  If we’re nearby, people who don’t know better will just assume we have something in common.  It’ll be awesome.

So What’s the Answer?

The simplest thing is that agencies, particularly when it comes to digital and mobile culture, need more nerds.  They need people who use and understand these tools, who are passionate about technology, who study it, who can explain it and teach it and get people excited about it, and who can help shepherd others through the process of making it.

But I think what they really need to do is embrace depth, alter their understanding of the meaning of the word “nerd”.  They need to learn to love intelligence and passion and expertise.  They need to defect from the Church of Cool.  They need to start caring about what they actually make, and how it contributes not only to the client’s need to market its wares, but also how it contributes to culture.  What utility does this platform or campaign offer? How does it teach and reward new behavior? How does it enable or simplify old behavior? How does it bring people closer to the brand in a way that both sides benefit?

Only people who truly love something – technology, people, culture, brands – can answer these kinds of questions.  Nerds have that level of passion; cool kids are a study in detachment.  Agencies are full of the latter.

But the best answer is probably much simpler: ad agencies will eventually lose out to companies founded by, staffed by, and built for nerds.  These nerds will be those partners Ben Malbon encouraged agencies to find; these partners will eventually beat out their traditional agency partners because they will bring the vision, agility, and passion only nerds possess to clients desperate to be loved.

Yesterday, thinking I was about to go buy pencil skirts at J. Crew, I looked down 17th Street from 5th Avenue and was reminded of a shop I’d been in only once, and had bought nothing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like what was in the store, only that for some reason it seemed … presumptuous? premature? to buy something there.

The shop is called Journelle.

It’s a lingerie shop. It would kick Victoria’s Secret’s ass in a fight. Here’s why:

The shop is clean and pristine – tasteful shades of purple and cream rather than the explosion of promotions, the fog of perfume, and the garish nightmare of pink that threatens to burn out my eyes when I go to Vicky’s.

While VS’s stores often look nice in a photograph, or from the windows, you get inside and it feels like a teenage girl’s fantasy of Jenna Jameson’s boudoir.

By contrast, Journelle’s shop puts you at ease, makes you think the whole process will be forgiving, and hints that it might even be pleasurable.

It is well stocked with lots of styles and brands, but is not overwhelming or crowded. Bra and panty sets hang within open cabinets, and the drawers below with additional sizes are reasonably well organized and are clearly marked to encourage you to help yourself. The top drawer is labeled, “Open Sesame!” Nobody will slap your hand away from something you like.

The variance in style and color is impressive – and they’re not precious about keeping you within the prescribed set. I’m not a thong girl, myself, so a salesperson helped find bottoms to go with the tops – and she seemed genuinely to be having a good time coming up with a solution.

They’ve got all the basics, but nothing feels merely ‘basic.’ It’s easy for bras to be utilitarian – they do have a use, after all – but they should also be little treats, things only I (and a few lucky others) could possibly know about. They should also both improve the look of the clothes I put on over the bra, and improve the way I feel in them. I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard on Oprah. Anyway, each bra has a little touch to make it fun. Something about the playfulness of the place made me think of drinking champagne because it’s delicious, rather than because it’s an ‘occasion.’

Which, by the way, is something I do. Often.

These aren’t cheap bras. The least expensive one I purchased was $62. There is one I covet that is $250. Another time. But I spent about $500 in that store yesterday – hey, I needed a complete overhaul of this part of my wardrobe – and the reason for the investment/extravagance was simple. There was a pleasant, easy-going, decisive young woman helping me.

She did all the things you’re supposed to do if you work in a nice lingerie shop. She asked me what I was looking for, and when I basically said, I have no idea, please help, she took the whole thing over. She measured, explained the proper fit of a bra, brought me options, knew which brands ran large or small. She was exceedingly competent.

By the way – the dressing rooms in Journelle are like a suite at the W Hotel. There’s plenty of room, plenty of privacy. They offer a bathrobe in lieu of putting you clothes back on to look for more things to try on. There were bottles of water and chocolates, and disposable undies for trying on bottoms. They’d thought of everything.

But there were two moments that defined the quality of the help I was getting. I’d just put on the second bra when she came to check on me and she right away said, no, that’s not working for you. She whisked off to go find more options. A few bras later, I opened the door for the hand off of rejects to new possibilities and she actually said, “Wow, that’s great.” And she was right, I’d already fallen for that bra – but her spontaneous approval was genuine, and made me feel really good about myself.

And let’s face it, when you’re standing in front of a full length mirror with your top off, trying on bras – that’s exactly how you want to feel.

So, thanks ladies. Department stores and VS and sites like figleaves and barenecessities could learn something from you.

But what is that exactly?

What these other shops can learn is that I – and a lot of other women – do not have fantasies of being a porn star. I do not smack my gum and write about boys in my diary, either. My Facebook profile includes no sexy/provocative/bizarre photos, and I don’t engage in sexting.

My definition of sexual freedom or liberation or hell, just sexuality is not bound to images of DD-sized women making love to hot-rods during the Superbowl half-time show. There’s saying yes to sex, to having a good time, and then there’s dressing yourself up as a cartoonish fantasy and saying yes to sex because you’re afraid to say no. The images VS and other lingerie retailers put forward suggest that kind of desperation. And I guess that I – and lot of other educated, professional women who’ll spend $500 on bras and panties – aren’t that kind of desperate.

It’s troubling that these are the images of sexuality not merely because it’s “bad for women” but because I think it skews women’s expectations about what men find attractive. Men certainly look at these images and like what they see, but I’m not sure many of them are looking at the naked woman in the bed with them wishing she were more like that Playboy centerfold for one simple reason: the Playboy centerfold isn’t real, and she’s not there, in the bed with them, at this moment. What men see isn’t necessarily correlated to what men feel. And it is women buying into the imagery of pornography and pop culture fantasy that bothers me more.

There was an interesting study done about how men and women choose avatars in video games, and how each feels about the game after playing it. While it’s not that encouraging that both men and women assume powerful female avatars are secondary characters or villains, what is encouraging to me is that male gamers would rather choose a curvy but realistically proportioned female avatar over an extreme, hyper-sexualized one. That said, female gamers prefer playing the comic book ideal over the realistic one. So there’s that.

But I suppose the most important bit is this: I’ve shopped those other stores. The lingerie is cheap, and it looks cheap on. It doesn’t make my clothes look better. And shopping in the stores is an unmitigated nightmare. Online shopping is just as bad – no curatorial filters or meaningful help mean you can’t find what you need much less what you want.

Journelle was the first exception I’ve experienced. I’d love to find more. In the meantime, I’m already three panties towards a free pair, so I think I’ll stand by them.

[Journelle did not sponsor this post; I spent $500 in their store and want you to know how awesome I think they are. Your results may vary. Images via Journelle's Facebook page, Image of VS store via YouSayToo]

Just a quick thought on the subject of how cultures/groups can be defined by common language – and that this common language, especially in the fairly democratic language landscape of English (a bastard, by all accounts), is often demarcated by shared metaphors.

I am not a linguist. I am not a sociologist or anthropologist. I am a woman who works in male dominated industries, and who has been reasonably successful doing so.

Anil Dash’s blog post from a couple of weeks ago on the Mechanisms of Exclusion was perfect – noting the close, personal networks that funnel start-ups to VCs, and more tellingly, noting the sports metaphor used to explain the phenomena.

His observation was pitch perfect:

The best answer for how to get access to the man who’s arguably the most powerful angel investor in the tech industry is an example of an explicitly closed network that’s illustrated with an implicitly closed analogy to a sport that women are prohibited from playing. “Hey, I’ll fund anybody. I meet entrepreneurs in the ladies’ restroom outside of screenings of Eat, Pray, Love. All are welcome.”

Having worked with clients across a variety of market segments – sporting goods, entertainment, technology, logistics, fashion, and so on – it has always been clear that to gain trust quickly, you must show that you are smart and get their business and business problems, that you are a talented strategist or gifted creative, and that your organization has the infrastructure to solve their business problem.  But in many respects, this is the least of what you must demonstrate.  To gain their trust quickly, you must show that you speak the same language at the very least, but ideally, you must show that you are a member of their tribe.

I once flew to Boston to meet with a client with a major sporting goods brand.  They wanted to reposition the brand, and they were hiring the research firm I worked for to conduct a segmentation study to identify the best consumer opportunities, and to provide strategic guidance on how best to approach those opportunity segments (by the way, this sentence is rife with insidery lingo).  I flew to Boston, not to win the pitch (it was already won), but to convince the client that I knew his sport. He told my colleague that he wanted to look me in the eyes and see if I was a real golfer.

Lucky that I grew up with golf – my grandparents played it daily, my parents often. I went to camps to learn how to get through 9 holes without wanting to kill myself. I lived with a scratch golfer, across the street from a small public course.  I had my own clubs, and knew the major names on the Tour.  I had opinions about those players.  I occasionally picked up magazines dedicated to the sport, usually at the airport, but still.

Perhaps most importantly, I was humble about my prowess.  I looked that client in the eye and said, “Yes, I play. Not as often as I like, but I have my own clubs, and I try to get out when I can. And when I do play, I’m sad to report, I play it slowly, and not very well. But my short game is pretty good.”

My ruefulness – the signature emotion of every recreational golfer, committed to a life of frustration, never mastery – fit with the language: a “scratch” golfer, my “short game”, that I played old-fashioned steel clubs because the “flex” on a graphite shaft feels funny to me, and that I stole my ex’s “blade” putter because I feel I have more control (metaphorically and physically).

I spoke his language.  He was satisfied. Not only did we do the work, but he leaned on us heavily for strategic guidance – more heavily than the original brief entailed. And he sent me a pair of shoes that are awesome.

That was a case of legitimate sportsmanlike camaraderie.  But it’s not the only time I’ve relied on the language of sports to do business with men, even when those sports are ones I’ve never played, or wouldn’t be allowed to. While I find the convention of the sports metaphor a little silly, and don’t exactly make a study of them in order to fit in, sports metaphors, like Biblical references, have a way of sneaking into pop culture, literature, media.  You probably know what it means to have the patience of Job, even if you can’t name all the tests of his faith. And a ‘Hail Mary pass’ combines both metaphorical worlds – a long pass of last resort, thrown with a little prayer.

But there are others – ‘being born on third and thinking you hit a home run’, for example, is truly a metaphor, and one that probably describes a lot of people getting VC money.  But I’ve been known to advise people to either ‘run out the clock’, or to make ‘an end run’; I’ve complained about bosses and clients ‘moving the goal posts’; and I’ve decided to just go ahead and ‘punt’ when there’s nothing left to do.  Some projects are an easy lay-up; others require a full-court press; and sometimes you just have to take your ball and go home.

The problem with these metaphors is that they are built to be inclusive – of people who know their meaning.  They are meant to help people bond, to create short-hands that engender excitement, drama, camaraderie.  And the assumption is often made that to be an “American” is to speak the language of sports; and since America is the land of diversity and freedom, everyone can/should speak this language.

But the trouble is, that language is learned early by a particular kind of American – a native-born male with a family deeply invested in the pursuit of sports, as players and observers. I grew up in a golfing, soccer playing, swimming and tumbling household.  We had a badminton set we’d take to the beach, and a croquet set my brother resurrected in the form of an Extreme Croquet League in high school. We didn’t pull up our TV trays to watch the big game. My mother refused to be a football widow; my dad thought baseball on TV was boring. Sports on TV were relegated to the Olympics, and the 1989-90 NBA playoffs, in which our Portland Trailblazers finally made it to the finals.

And yet, despite two strikes against me, I picked up this language, and (sigh) ran with it.

Amusing links:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1168143/index.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19774480/

http://www.hooversbiz.com/2010/01/07/enter-the-arena-of-sports-metaphors/

I learned my Bible the old-fashioned way: by watching The West Wing.  It’s high piety and swelling democratic music was my Church of the Capra America. It was, I reckon, the best PR the Clinton Administration ever got, and it taught me a term to describe a trick I have long used.  ”Saying Shibboleth” is how I have entered rooms with CEOs and CIOs, housewives, soap opera writers, golfers, and NASCAR execs and curried their trust and favor.  It is often thought of as a kind of password, a signifier of your origin, a stamp of authenticity.  It is, at its most literal, a pronunciation used as what we would now refer to as a litmus test: pronounce it right, and gain entry to the kingdom; say it wrong, and be killed.

Like many people, I have instincts that tell me when I am among friends – body language, tone, facial expressions give me strong clues about whether I am welcome in a room or not.  Social cues – how my friends or family are behaving – also tell me whether I am in friendly waters.  These instincts and social cues are deeply rooted and closely held.

Even language plays a role – idioms are the hardest things for non-native speakers to absorb and employ, yet they are also significant indicators of origin.  I’ve worked with Brits for years, and have adopted some of their idioms – sometimes you’ll hear me say I’m at the end of my tether rather than rope, or that a project’s gone ‘tits up’, or I’ll confuse whether something is as dull as dishwater (US) or ditchwater (UK).  [As an aside, check these out, there are a lot of them that are also said in the US, at least in my part of the Northwest and among some of my friends here in NYC.]

There are also a lot I know and understand, but don’t say – you’ll never catch me describing a pregnant woman as “up the duff”, though lots of my friends do.  But I’ll say there are “loads” of something when most Americans will say “lots”, and sometimes, after several hours with my Brit pals, I’ll adopt the rhythm of British accents, all of them at once usually, and confuse the hell out of the next person I talk to.  Nevertheless, most people are quite well aware that I’m not English myself.  And while my American friends find my English accent hilarious after a few drinks, my friend Liam winces like I’m scratching at a chalkboard. I could not frame to pronounce it right, it turns out.

Saying Shibboleth at ROFLcon

I’ve been thinking a lot about saying Shibboleth since I ‘returned’ to Internet Culture (I hadn’t realized I left, of course, but some people regard me as a neophyte – I’ve already protested too much on this topic, so won’t flog my bona fides again).  I attended ROFLcon in Boston a few months ago and people were buzzing about someone’s mispronunciation of the word ‘meme.’  That word and I are the same age, though I can safely say I did not spring from the head of Richard Dawkins; while people much younger than me scoffed at the mispronunciation – the faux pas of an obvious n00b – I think we can forgive the transgressor for mistaking the pronunciation of so new a word, and one he had probably only seen in text.  Later, a panelist seemed perplexed when a questioner referred to IRL; the audience murmured their shock at his ignorance, and someone helpfully shouted the definition (“In Real Life”, a designation that is frankly, wildly out of date and out of step with how most of us live today).

What struck me at the time, and continues to simmer beneath the surface of so many conversations with and about the world of the Internet Nerds, is that these little hang-ups are cases of people failing to say Shibboleth.  They are not members of the tribe, and are held in some contempt for being outsiders.  People marveled at ROFLcon about how these people, who were clearly not ‘from the community’ (as people so delicately phrased it) were successful enough at their meme-making to be a panelist at a meme conference. The “insiders” were at turns impressed, confused, and put off by these outsiders and their success at making memes even when they couldn’t pronounce “meme.” They don’t speak the language, people seemed to be saying, and yet they’re succeeding anyway.

As a relative oldster in the crowd, I was at the time amazed at how ‘new’ everything was perceived to be.  Mainstream, commercial culture adopting internet memes was seen as a looming threat, as opposed to an ebbing and flowing one that has already washed over countless memetic sandcastles.  I was also surprised to discover that there was some sense of a homogenous “internet culture” – something that belonged to this group, and perhaps only this group. (In fairness, there were efforts at discussion of women and minorities within the culture, but these felt a bit forced to me.) The whole point, I always supposed (as the Internet Utopian I once was), was that the internet crossed cultures, combined cultures, even eluded traditional ideas of culture.

I can see that I was wrong. And not just at ROFLcon.

Back to the gender “shitstorm“

I’ve continued my background processing of the TechCrunch/WSJ/Change the Ratio spat from the weekend, and started to wonder whether an innate tribalism wasn’t the truer root of the gender divide in tech start-ups.

I noticed two ‘fact-based’ arguments being made as a reason (or an excuse) for the lack of women-led start-ups.  Statistics about women studying engineering or computer sciences were raised consistently – and legitimately – in the comments of all these discussions; so too were flimsy arguments about evolution, biology and neurochemistry.  But scratch these arguments and you find two ideas that may be much more about the tribalism of the start-up “scene” and much less about gender specifically.

ShibbolethFAIL #1: No CS or engineering degree

The first argument about women’s presence in schools and programs teaching the underpinnings of technology speaks to this idea of saying Shibboleth.  I used to describe my dad, a product manager for tech firms ranging from InFocus to Intel to Sun (and a great many pre-dot-com start-ups in between), as someone who spoke English and C++.  The truth is, my dad was a philosophy major who loved technology. When it came to the innards of servers and circuit boards, he was an autodidact who learned mainly by trial and error.  He passed for a native because he learned the language, adopted the accent and – perhaps most importantly – understood the concepts (logic, most especially) that underpinned the technology.  You don’t need to have a CS degree to understand what technology is capable of doing, or imagining what it could do in the future, or to have a passion for it.  But these arguments suggest that without these bona fides, you’re an Ephraimite who’s about to lose your head.

Look, so far women aren’t overwhelming the admissions offices of CalTech, but so what? I have a degree in PoliSci and Journalism, and another in Law. But nothing excites me as much as what technology can do. Tech has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and it is ultimately where I turn for connection, communication, information, and inspiration.  I can name-drop Ruby on Rails, mention spending the day teaching myself WordPress hooks, and lecture my exes on the difference between memory and storage (in other words, I can be a real drag). I know a lot of women who are far more knowledgeable than I am; I know a lot of women who know less about the tech but have a million great ideas for how to use it and develop it and evolve it.  If getting in to the club requires a CS or engineering diploma, then I reckon a purging is in order. Michael Arrington, for one, has a degree in economics and another in law, but no CS or engineering credentials. Perhaps we start with stripping him of his all-access pass until he completes the curriculum.

ShibbolethFAIL #2: Women are biologically and chemically different

Women in tech, it seems to me, are quite simply the Constitutive Other. They are not like the Same, so they are different, and need to be sorted into a category of some kind – safe/unsafe, certain/uncertain, integrated/segregated. While we are tribal creatures – this is why we build cities and cathedrals, why we go to war, get married, study in classrooms, pledge fraternities, live in neighborhoods, go to the movies, eat in restaurants, hang out in parks, go to meetups, follow each other on twitter – we build tribes of people who share something in common with us.  And we occupy many tribes – in fact, what some have regarded as a splintering of society may really just be a more fluid movement between multiple overlapping and/or disparate tribes.  The pluralism of our Internet Culture fosters these new ideas of tribal identity – interests, passions, beliefs, behaviors all can serve in place of nationalities or religions (or alongside them).

But to gain entry into these tribes, you must be the Same, not the Other. Women are, for a variety of reasons and as the result of many causes, not yet seen as the Same. An earlier, less educated time might have simply said that these matters were not a woman’s place, or that women were not smart enough or strong enough or whatever enough to do them; that these are important matters best left to the men, and not to worry our (ahem) pretty little heads about it.

Citing biology and neurochemistry and some pop-science understanding of evolutionary imperatives seems to me to be what smart, educated men (and some women, too) who know better rely upon to explain their perception of women’s Other-ness.

Perhaps, then, it’s not exactly men v. women.  Maybe it’s more Same v. Other.  The obvious solution would be to stop asking for passwords and start embracing ideas and action.  Focus on the merit of the idea as an initial matter more than the merit of the person.  Defining meritocracy that way might lead to more balanced outcomes.

L’envoi

The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same. (via The New York Times)

Ah! A mini Battle of the Sexes! Fun!

Let’s try to get the timeline from the weekend straight:

1. The Wall Street Journal posts an article about the lack of women as start-up founders, etc. and notes the emergence and growth of organizations dedicated to discovering and backing female talent in the tech and social media start-up scenes. (Do you know I spent about a minute trying to find ways to not say, “seeking out”, “nurturing” or “supporting” as they struck me as too feminine? Yipes.)
2. This Journal piece quotes Rachel Sklar saying it’d be nice if TechCrunch came from a worldview in which it could detect the gender imbalance at its conferences (also, “imbalance” is a very polite euphemism in most of these articles; we should be honest, the number of women being backed by VCs or invited to speak at conferences is absurdly small… and again I avoided words like “distressingly”, “appallingly” or “shockingly” because they sounded too emotional to me.)
3. Michael Arrington goes, as my dad would have said, apeshit. I would describe it a little differently – I’d say he threw a hissyfit.  He focused in on Rachel Sklar, who was clearly using TechCrunch as a ‘for-instance’, painted her with every ‘woman scorned’ brush he could conjure, and then used someone else’s statements to imply something about women’s innate inferiority because he was too much of a sissy to simply say it. (Oh, and yes, I am aware that I am doing the same. It’s called ‘parody.’)

I’ve followed the thread as far as I can – the comments are over 600 when last I looked – and yeah it’s mean and nasty and inaccurate and anecdotal and all that.  It is, after all, the comments.

But there are three things that stand out as – no, there isn’t another word for it – dismaying about the tone and tenor of the comments.  The first is the immediate leap to a discussion of biology and evolution – that female CEOs are not often on the cover of Fast Company because of neural pathways or biological imperatives.   The second is the assumption that there is something in the world of technology that makes it uniquely meritocratic, void of  -isms of any kind.  And the third is that people’s ‘personal experiences’ make them qualified to speak about gender bias, neuro-biology, social structures, or their own ability to perceive ‘imbalances’ in participation, recognition and reward between the sexes.

First, it’s not about brain function or hormones.  I have not done the research, but how many of the top CEOs of tech firms have some form of learning, attentive or cognitive disability?  Richard Branson, John Chambers, and Steve Jobs are dyslexic.  Ted Turner has bipolar disorder. David Neeleman spoke of ADHD as a major asset. Paul Orfalea has both dyslexia and ADHD. To use the easy retort from the comment thread, these are ‘outliers’ – but they’re just the ones I could find in a brief google search, and are nevertheless highly successful outliers.  Even if some have been ousted, as Neeleman, they were still highly successful men with learning or emotional disabilities who manage to find incredible success as entrepreneurs. Being a woman, last I checked, was not a condition listed in the DSM-IV, and yet the commenters treat having two X chromosomes as akin to a learning disability when it comes to math, science and engineering.  Let’s not use ‘science’ to camouflage prejudice; doing so has a very unhappy history.

Second, the notion that there is any industry, any business, any enterprise (words that all connote the exchange of goods and services for capital) that is entirely and purely meritocratic is, frankly, silly.  Where one is from, what schools one attended, how much support from family one has financially and otherwise, and how much skin one can put in the game are, at the very least, class indicators; they are also factors contributing to the success of a start-up.  Being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t make you the richest or best connected or most likely to get an angel; but being rich and well connected can compensate a great deal for not being that smart.

For one thing, VCs are interested in serial entrepreneurs – they want someone in the role of CEO who has both succeeded and failed.  Many years ago, Mike Jones was the CEO of a small web design company (disclosure: I worked for him as Creative Director, he fired me, we never reconciled).  That company was forced to liquidate as a consequence of a variety of (what I’ll simply call) bad decisions.  Today he is CEO of MySpace.  His failure was rewarded with greater successes.  He is not alone.  Most serial entrepreneurs have a failure under their belts.  This is not a bad thing – risk-taking requires that sometimes the risk will not pay off.  That’s what makes it a risk.

For another, Harvard and Stanford grads and drop-outs get more VC money than anyone else, and Harvard still edges out Stanford, according to a recent study.  Recipients of VC dollars are white, male, and affluent.  They are well-connected, mostly to others like them.  And there is also some evidence to suggest that men are more likely to become entrepreneurs or enter risky fields because they have the financial support of their families/parents.  Mike Jones’ father owned a URL called “investing.com” – this was a location of immense value to a lot of people; his business partner Jason Bernstein was closely connected with the Milkens and other wealthy families in LA and elsewhere who were interested in what could be done with investing.com (according to a whois search, it now belongs to an LA law firm).  While there, I helped to pitch and win a contract with Ron Herman, owner of the Melrose location of Fred Segal; our entree came through our new business lead who had once tutored Ron’s children.  Nepotism got us a long way.  There’s a reason the cliche, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is a cliche.

Finally, people are – and this is true of both genders – remarkably bad at identifying their own prejudices.  I know this from years working with and using market research; but I also know it from what scientists can tell us about socialized behavior and brain function.  Our ability to ‘reason’ is shot through with all sorts of heuristics, shortcuts, and biases that are not rational at all, and are often wildly inaccurate.  We make generalizations, we construct narratives, we make decisions we are entirely unaware of, and we engage in patterns of behavior we did not consciously construct.  Speaking as a woman recently diagnosed and now treated for ADD, who helped to get her father diagnosed with ADHD, who has lived with and grown up with people who have ADD or ADHD, I – who can correctly identify a person with ADD within about a day of knowing them – was completely unable or unwilling to see the traits in my own behavior.  We just aren’t wired to see ourselves accurately.  So while your personal anecdotes provide color and big wide targets other commenters can fire at, they don’t meaningfully add to the discourse on the role of gender in guiding the make-up of tech or social media start-ups.

There is much more to say on this matter – and more interestingly and usefully lots to do about it – but as an initial matter, I found myself wrapped up, and then disgusted, by the nature, tone, and substance of the ‘debate’ that is happening so far.  The one emotion I didn’t experience, however, was surprise.

(NOTE: I’ll be adding links in the morning. I’m tired. Sue me.)

Remember how I said in the last post that I had two responses (see how I give you credit for being a true and Constant Reader)? The thing that troubled me about Art & Copy was the thing that troubled my own career in advertising, and so profoundly affected (though I did not fully realize it as it was happening) my own aspirations: women were noticeably absent.

Phyllis Robinson and Mary Wells both went to work at Doyle Dane Bernbach back in the 1960s. Ms. Robinson was there from the start as Copy Chief, Mary Wells joined later, was successful, went elsewhere, was successful, etc. Wells made a wonderful and inspiring observation in the documentary – that advertising is theater, spectacle, meant to entertain and transform. Much of what she did went well beyond a headline and a nice photo – she transformed the businesses of her clients. They are both in the documentary.

But that is it – or almost. Liz Dolan, the former head of marketing at Nike, is interviewed, mainly to talk about how smart and intimidating Dan Weiden is. She’s right of course, he is both of those things. But where were the women who worked on the account? Where was Janet Champ? (To his credit, Dan Weiden did give her credit for the “If you let me play sports” work. Not that doing so was a hardship; after all, it was true.)

I wracked my brain trying to think of who they could have included from my gender. I failed. Even now, I am hard-pressed to think of a single top creative director at a top creative agency who is a woman. This is homework I’ll have to assign myself, but I want to put a small amount of perspective on this as well.

I haven’t been a copywriter, actively, for many years, so I might be forgiven for losing touch with women in the field. Still in the agency world’s orbit, I’ve been a planner and working closely with planners this whole time. And while I can name a few heads of planning who are women, there are few I count as superstars. Ben Malbon, Russell Davies, Gareth Kay, Robin Hafitz, Domenico Vitale, Paul Woolmington, Dan Cherry, Merry Baskin, are on that list. But consider that list for a moment – I listed 5 Brits, two women, and one African-American. It’s not that they aren’t out there, it’s that they struggle to be heard. And seen, for that matter.

There are two who get press and recognition from time to time: Natasha Jakubowski at Anomaly, and Katie Harrison at BBH. Both are Brits.  There is a special irony here, of course, given that as the story goes, planning came to the US from the UK when Jane Newman was hired by Chiat/Day. She later co-founded Merkley Newman Harty.  In her wake, a great many women have been hired and trained as planners, but fewer and fewer seem to rise to her stature.

[If you're wondering why I note the national origin of Brits, it's that things are a bit different, culturally, in the ad business in the UK versus the US. Of course Americans tend to think an English accent bestows 10 extra IQ points on the speaker, but it's more that account planning is more entrenched, more strategic, and more creative in the UK, generally, than it has been here. When a planner comes from the UK, they come to be senior.]

The other thing I’d note here is that, I am (ahem) 33 years old, and have been in this business more than 10 years. Russell and Robin and Merry and Paul have been names in this business for as long as I can remember. So who are the smart strategists from my age cohort? They don’t come from ‘traditional’ planning – but then neither do I. To the list, I would have to add Noah Brier and Faris Yakob, who are, I am happy to say, friends and colleagues. But they’re also dudes, and Faris is British. Actually, ask Faris about it sometime – Faris is everything, he’s the most fantastic mutt I’ve met in some time.

But, again, I ask, where all the ladies at?

It’s not just advertising

In fairness, this is not limited to the ad game. Watch the documentary Helvetica; the only woman designer interviewed is Paula Scher, who famously hates that typeface, and equates it with war and corruption and corporatism. She’s inspiring and talented and wonderful, but she’s a boomer and the only woman to be interviewed in the whole 90 minutes. (Doug Pray outdid this flick three-fold, so good on ‘im.)  There are no young women designers on the rise?  There are no contemporaries to Scher? There are no generational equivalents to Wells and Robinson?  I just find that so hard to believe.

Or watch The September Issue. Oh sure, you think, Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington run that show and they’re women! True, but watch for the scene where Wintour meets with her advertisers – most of the non-Vogue players at that table were men. Watch for the designers and photographers – still mostly men. And my favorite, watch for the meeting in which she presents the issue to the Conde Nast board – I’d need to go back and freeze-frame to be sure, but I’m almost certain that they’re all men. So even Anna Wintour, famous as the boss/dragon lady or ice queen, has bosses – and they don’t worry about scuffing their Jimmy Choos or how to wear fur for spring.

My point would be…?

Look, there are lots of women in advertising. Something like 60% of agency staff is female. It’s just that the female staff is more junior, and in more administrative or project management oriented departments. They are critical to the running of an agency, but they do not craft the art & copy, or guide the strategy of the business. Even lists of advertising ‘women to watch‘ are very often clients, not creatives or planners or agency heads (and female CMOs ≠ female ECDs). With so many women in the business, why aren’t there more in the sexy, powerful, famous roles?

I have a few hypotheses I’m going to throw out here, and I’ll try to stay on track to think more about them and do more research on them…

Oh, kidding. I think those are mostly crap!

So I clearly  have some homework to do on these causes… But I guess my biggest question is less to society at large, or men as a group, but to each woman who writes little doo-dads, or draws on the back of everything, or takes amazing photos, or makes little videos, or teaches herself PHP… Where are you? We need you to show up. Being seen is the necessary precursor to being heard.

I finally got around to watching Art & Copy the other night, and had two responses.

OMG, I <3 THIS!!!

I was flooded with remembrances of what I once loved about advertising, why I wanted to be a writer, why I admired the agencies and creative people I did.

I think I was only vaguely aware of the existence of ad agencies before my father introduced me to the idea of working in one. He was sneaky about it; he came home one day and told me, “You should work in advertising. You’d love it. I was in the head of the agency’s office today, and a woman, I think she’s a writer there, came in, flopped over the back of his couch, and yelled, “Fuuuuuck!” How cool is that?”

My father knew me so very well. So yes, I was intrigued. He kept bringing things home – little posters people made and posted around the shop, examples of ads they were making or had made, stories about the brilliant or hilarious thing that the creative directors said, or about the guys playing HORSE in the half-basketball court, or how work broke down on Fridays as everyone ran for the roof with water-tight vessels of any kind in hand, ready for delicious beer. Dad was installing their servers and network and he loved that place.

The place? Weiden + Kennedy, the agency behind “Just do it” and more recently, the Old Spice videos.

So studying advertising seemed like a sure-fire way to find my way to a career of flopping onto couches yelling, “Fuuuuck!” And for the price of in-state tuition, no less.

When I took my first course in the ad sequence at University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications, in my junior year of college (oh my, you have to take all these classes and a Language Skills Diagnostic Test before they let you in! You have to write an essay! Mine said I wanted to be either James Carville or Dan Weiden – note the total absence of female heroes), I thought I would be an account person. I have no idea what voice told me that was the right choice, or that I couldn’t be on the creative side, the side my dad celebrated so regularly. I was running a student magazine, and writing and reporting every two weeks – why didn’t I think I was a writer, yet?

But I did take Introduction to Copywriting – it was required. Halfway through that 10 week class, I was sure I was drowning. I couldn’t figure out why some of my ideas worked and others didn’t; I simply could not come up with anything for Right Guard deodorant. The instructor, Ann Maxwell (that link is shamefully sparse, it doesn’t even begin to describe her), had mid-term check-ins with all the students. I came into her office for the first time, sat down, and scanned the room. She had cool stuff. She had a nice window. She had Clios.

She told me she thought I was very talented and that she knew I said I wanted to go into account management, but that she thought I should do this instead. I was shocked. But, as I have been incredibly lucky to do a few times, I chose to just say, “okay.” And at that moment, I became a copywriter.

I devoured anything I could find – The Copy Workshop Workbook, Ogilvy on Advertising, The Book of Gossage, How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising, Truth, Lies and Advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor, Communication Arts, Ad Age, Creativity, agency reels, stuff I saw in magazines and on television, anything. I worshipped at the feet of the two great Creative Revolutions in American advertising – those giants: Bernbach, Gossage, Riney, Wieden, Goodby, Chiat, Clow. I leaned on Mary Wells Lawrence‘s agency’s approach for organizing my thoughts. I venerated Janet Champ‘s work on Nike’s PLAY campaign: “If you let me play sports.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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When it came time to apply for jobs, I aimed high: Goodby Silverstein & Partners, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Ground Zero, Fallon, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, WongDoody, Butler, Shine & Stern, Cliff Freeman & Partners (not all of them survived the agency consolidation movement or the Great Recession). I had a positive response, people liked my portfolio, they loved my cover letter (oh my kingdom for that Word file!), they invited me in for interviews, they almost hired me several times. But times were tough in the ad business, and junior creatives are always scraping for any job that gets them in the door.

I got this feedback once, from a young man in a creative department in a creative agency in Los Angeles: “Well, it’s obviously a woman’s book. There are no women in our creative department.” I’m pretty sure I ended the interview right there.

When I came back, two years later, after having worked as a copywriter (in the spirit of the times, I was actually the Creative Director) in a web shop, that same agency had finally got around to hiring a woman. She told me that my portfolio showed that I could write, but not that I could think. She recommended moving very far away and working for free. She recommended, in other words, posing no further threat to her. She was now The Woman in the Creative Department.

I think that’s when I started wondering again whether I really was a writer, whether that was acceptable, or possible, or worth the rejection. I was watching the level of creativity decline again, and it was depressing. After some wonderful detours, I landed at Chiat, embraced by the account director on Apple, who told me that I belonged there, that he wouldn’t get in the way of my dream, and that I was hired. But – oh, irony! – I was hired into the account team. Somehow, with the help or seduction or something of a very charismatic planner (and a woman!) I morphed into an account planner – a field that is, at most levels, dominated by women in the US. Theoretically, the planner is the creative’s muse and the voice of the consumer. Sometimes, that’s true. A lot of times, it’s just another kind of account management.

It was not lost on me that only about 3% of creative directors in US agencies are female; neither was it lost on me that only about 18% of management jobs are held by women. It also was not lost on me that my new employer’s planning department was run by a man who’d never been a planner; that an account director once exclaimed in his English accent, “There are too many bloody women on this account!” or that he referred to me as a part-time woman of no importance. To my face. I told him, quoting one of my heroes, Gail Zappa, “I’m going to remember you said that.” And I have.

Anyway – very long digression, right? – I became a strategist and an innovations expert. I’d become entirely disenchanted with advertising. What good had it done for culture, for society, for its clients, lately, anyway?

But sitting there for 90 minutes watching Art & Copy, I was reminded that sometimes a well crafted bit of copy and an amazing image can change your life (“I will be… naked more” from a Norwegian Cruise Line ad was the piece that made me want that job as a ‘creative’). It can motivate you to do something you’ve always wanted to (a friend at W+K met a couple camping across America who had quit their jobs and packed their tents because of an ad for Nike he’d written). It can inspire you to care (“If you let me play sports…”). Or it can reflect back all that you admire in humanity (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Sometimes advertising can aim a bit higher than doing no harm or being merely ‘effective.’ Lots of things that are effective aren’t any good at all. But the work and thinkers and makers featured in this documentary are good. They’re better than that, they’re the enemies of good. They’re great.

Saw this today at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press website.  (Yes, sometimes I love to look at bar charts. I find them mysterious – they mean, after all, nothing, and yet signify so much.)

Surely this is not breaking news?

Over on Things That Remind Me of Robots I posted something about coming back to watch the X-Files, 10 year later.  I won’t rehash it here, but it has got me to thinking a lot about the notion of Big Truths.

Let me offer a definition:  A Big Truth is something that you have to sacrifice previously held beliefs in order to believe in for the first time.  You have to stop believing one or more things that you have taken for granted: as articles of faith, obvious facts, commonly accepted truths.  Then, you have to start believing something else, something that contradicts, or at the very least replaces, those previously held beliefs.  Regardless, you can’t believe the Old Truth and the New Truth at the same time.

I’ve generally encountered this sort of problem – how to tell the Big Truth so people will believe it – only in pharmaceuticals.  Specifically, I encountered it working with the cervical cancer vaccine.  How could we convince young women and the mothers of girls to get a vaccination against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cancer and genital warts?  There was a lot to unpack in that brand and product proposition.

We did a lot of focus groups talking to young women and moms about cervical cancer, vaccinations, HPV (human papillomavirus, the type of virus that causes cervical cancer), and sexual and reproductive health.  We’d talk about the vaccine, show them descriptions of the ways the vaccine is administered, the strains of virus it inoculates women against, the causal relationship between the virus and different diseases, efficacy results, safety indications, and so on.  For two hours, everyone would nod their heads and say things like, “the virus that causes cancer” and yet, I often felt that somehow we were not getting through.  So I drew this diagram on an easel:

When we showed people this diagram, suddenly the participants would stop in their tracks.  Despite the fact that this idea was at the heart of a two-hour discussion, and that this is what people told us they understood, it was not until we drew this diagram that they really understood what the idea really meant.

More than that, they were shocked.  Not only had they not really not understood what we were talking about, they found what we were talking about very difficult to believe.  All the way through the conversation they were intrigued by a vaccine for cancer, concerned about the implications, questioning efficacy, and musing about the importance of safeguarding their own or their daughters’ health.  But suddenly their seeming engagement with the topic was subsumed by confusion, dissonance.

And this is where it became clear:  they understood the concept; they just didn’t believe it.

Why not?  Because it required them to overcome a series of competing beliefs that they already had – ideas about what causes cancer, fears about vaccines, social norms about sex and sexuality, moral judgments about prevention and treatment.  We were asking them to believe that (A) cervical cancer and genital warts are caused by the same family of viruses, (B) these viruses are passed through sexual, skin-to-skin contact, (C) the vaccine inoculates young women against the strains of the virus that cause 90% of cervical cancer and 70% of genital warts, (D) the vaccine is safe, so that (E) it is a good idea to use the vaccine on young women.

What they already believed was some cocktail of the following:

• Cancer is hereditary – if no women in your family have had it, you won’t get it.
• Cancer is caused by environmental or lifestyle factors – if you live a healthy life, you probably won’t get it.
• Sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted by fluids – to get a sexually transmitted disease, you have to have vaginal, anal or oral sex.
• Young girls – in particular, pre-pubescent girls – do not engage in sexual contact.
• Condoms prevent all sexually transmitted diseases.
• Abstinence definitely prevents all sexually transmitted diseases.
• Vaccines are not safe – they cause autism, longer term illnesses, the illnesses they seek to prevent, flulike symptoms, or simply don’t work.
• You shouldn’t sexualize young girls by subjecting them to treatment or prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, much less discussing these treatments with them.
• Only promiscuous girls get sexually transmitted diseases.
• People who get sexually transmitted diseases deserve it.
• Sexually transmitted diseases, like genital warts, are treatable.
• Cervical cancer is treatable if you get regular cervical screenings.
• The risks of the vaccine outweigh the likelihood that a woman will get cervical cancer.

Most of what people already believed was either inaccurate, incomplete, or flat-out untrue. People’s ideas and attitudes towards sex and sexuality colored the rest of their beliefs about both the disease and its prevention.  We were asking them to abandon all of these previously held beliefs, forget the misinformation, delete their incorrect inferences, and believe something new.  We had science on our side, we had common sense on our side, but the one thing that worked the most effectively surprised us: fear.

The people most prone to abandon their previously held beliefs were people with intimate experience with, or a deep-seated fear of, cancer.  If you are terrified of cancer – and if you’ve ever known someone who has been treated for cancer, you understand this terror – then you are willing to abandon these beliefs because the new, Big Truth, transforms your understanding of cancer: from a terrifying, mysterious, deadly or disfiguring disease into something preventable, something you can spare yourself or your loved ones.  In other words, our Big Truth inspired a hope and sense of possibility, even relief, that abated their fear.  It was as if, for those who were scared, we’d turned on the light and shown them that the monster under the bed was just an errant stuffed animal.

But if you weren’t afraid of cancer – if you considered it a remote possibility – then the Big Truth was at least confusing, and worse, confounding, contradicting too many things you already believed.

It’s not often that we encounter brands and categories that trade in the Big Truth, or feel they have to, or have an opportunity to do so.  And who would blame them, when they can simply tap into what people already believe in and leverage these beliefs, even if they are based on falsehoods, to sell products or brands?

But I recently encountered this idea again in the context of electric vehicles.  People ‘get’ EVs.  But they do not have personal experience with them, generally, so their understanding is necessarily abstract.  As a result, the people I spoke to were shocked again – to discover that there would be upwards of a dozen different makes and models of EVs by 2013, that tens of thousands of EV charging stations will be installed throughout the country by the end of this summer, that plug-in hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles are coming, and so is the infrastructure for them.  In their minds, the abstract notion of widespread adoption of electric vehicles was 5 or more years away. Embedded in their abstractions were prejudices about EVs:  that they are small, lack power, don’t drive at highway speeds, aren’t safe, aren’t reliable, can’t go far enough, are expensive to maintain, aren’t fully proven as a technology.  Some have gone to another extreme – that all sources of electricity are suspect, produce emissions, cost resources, and so on.  These previously held beliefs hindered the depth of our discussions – too many hypotheticals were required to have a robust conversation.

Yet – an interesting belief was also embedded in our conversation about cars and energy.  Most of the people I spoke to believe that what kinds of cars get made, what kinds of energy sources we use, what energy costs, and what brands are available in this market are elements that are simply not up to them. The fact of this technology is fascinating, inspiring, concerning, but not within their power to control.  What brand of charging station will I plug my EV into?  Whichever one is installed on the street, in the parking structure, at my workplace, sold with my car.  What kind of EV will I drive?  Whichever kind I can afford, or like the looks of, or that my wife likes.  People were confused, surprised, but not stressed out in the slightest.  Electric cars are coming, resistance is futile, let it wash over you, and do what you will.

The cancer vaccine, on the other hand, was entirely up to them.  It wasn’t mandatory yet, it was the responsibility of a parent, or of an adult.  So when you combine believing in a Big Truth with placing the enactment of that belief solely within the responsibility of an individual – when believing in a Big Truth requires you to be responsible for the results of that belief, then people resist.  They resist hard.

I’m not sure what the answer is, and suspect that advertising or marketing are ill-equipped to take people very far in the process of overcoming previously held beliefs and adopting a new Big Truth.  But it is an interesting problem and one I suspect we will continue to face as scientific discoveries become products in a world where brands and communications are everything.