While there is no way you would ever find me quoting scripture (I’m wholly unqualified), I did grow up with some of the vernacular of the church-goer. So forgive me these post titles.

Came across an interesting note in the New Yorker on the style of reporting/storytelling used in chronicling the Great Migration: that massive movement of rural ‘folks’ from the rural world of the South to the urban world of big Northern cities like Chicago and New York. The piece, a book review by Jill Lepore, entitled “The Uprooted” appears in the September 6, 2010 issue. (I’m blogging from my phone or I’d provide the links). It’s worth a read; my familiarity with the topic comes mainly from my study of the history of jazz, while in college. The form of jazz morphed as it migrated, taking on local flavor via exposure to other musical forms, ethnicities, and tempos. I am left also with a memory of finding ‘Invisible Man’ nearly impenetrable as a 16 or 17 year old, but knowing that loss, separation, disenfranchisement were central (I often find the emotion of a story comes through even when I have no idea what a story is about).

So, definitely worth a read, if only to direct my attention to books that deal with the Great Migration in depth.

But a passage stood out:

Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports… about black life in the Urban North. “Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city,” Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity; uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn’t so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don’t crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive. More to the point, she doesn’t call them folk, and for all that her work shares with Wright’s, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson’s work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary…

It seems that as brands struggle with observation, understanding, listening, and insight mining, it is struggling less with market research trends and more with journalistic ones. Brands must chronicle the lives of consumers, one assumes, as a means by which they will understand those lives. But there is a constant tension of method. We must talk to many people and canvas their attitudes and perceptions because then we will know what it means to be this consumer segment. Then we must find the right representatives of this consumer segment to help us write the story of everyone within that segment. When those stories don’t mesh, when so-called outliers appear, or worse, speak up, it feels like the foundation of the narrative wobbles, or worse, teeters and collapses.

I have a solution. Accept the work of the strategic planner (in concert with market researchers) as being as rigorous as is possible when there is an unreliable narrator and an unreliable reader. Furthermore, accept that the work of the creative brief or the segment portrait is novelistic rather than documentary. And finally, accept that the role of most marketing is not to present the world as it is, but rather to present a profoundly (and this is not about size or scope but impact/depth) altered model of the world, predicated on idealizations, simplifications, archetypes and aspiration. Verifiable accounts of how “the consumer” spends her day are only useful in juxtaposition to how she believes she spends her day, how she wishes she spent her day, what she wishes her day would mean for the day after, and what she wants that day to mean.

Then there is that next step I will always promote: the part where some smart person, some creative imagineer, puts forward an idea about some other, new, more fulfilling day, presented in an undeniably true, deeply affecting way.

So, not just novelistic, but theatrical. That’s the sweet spot. Might be helpful to discard the veneer of science and focus on the performance and persuasion. Also. might be more fun.

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.)

When you’re an account planner, this is the inevitable follow-up question to the essential, “So, what do you do?”

As a tag for the role played, it’s remarkably inadequate. If planning modifies account, then it sounds like an account management role. It conjures up media planning for some who work in agencies but don’t have planning. Nothing about the tag suggests creativity. It only barely suggests strategy. And by placing ‘account’ at the heart of the tag, it suggests a role that is solely focused on the client.

Jennifer Morozowich posted this provocation on “The Future of Planning” on the Canadian Marketing Blog. She makes the argument that all the splintered and specialized sparks the industry casts off as it tries to weld together the old and the new, is counter-productive at worst and unnecessary at best. A good planner is a good planner, or as Faris Yakob remarked, there “ain’t no flavors.”

What she thinks a good planner is, I imagine, coincides with what she thinks planning is all about:

Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client’s brand and visa versa.

True, true.

“Do you know what the role of account planning is?”

I worked for a planner at Chiat who asked me that question once. I babbled on about establishing the strategic vision for a campaign, advocating for consumers, and so on. She smiled at me, somewhat condescendingly, and said, “It’s to ensure that the work we produce is effective.”

Effectiveness, now that’s sexy. She’s not wrong; she was probably writing case studies and EFFIE submissions. The job of the planner, as she saw it, is to provide some conduit between what the client’s business objectives are, what the consumer’s desires are, and the creative idea that will guide those two forces toward each other, in a way that we can measure.

She saw this as a highly strategic role; some firms in fact call planners ‘brand strategists.’ This gets closer to the actual job, especially as it has been imagined and shaped over the past 50 years. Many firms root planning in ‘information’ as Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King did (as quoted in Morozowich’s post):

“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.” – Stanley Pollitt

Having worked in market research, I understand why agencies require ‘proof’ of a good idea. Instincts, which are honed through experience and expertise and attitudes can be a tough sell when millions of widgets and hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. So planners often must carry credentials that relate to their familiarity with different research methodologies, and their comfort levels with reading data tabs and comprehending statistical regression analysis – those hallmarks of intellectual rigor.

In the research role, I often felt duty-bound to reflect only that which we ‘heard’ in the research, and as a qualitative specialist, to hedge: of course what we believe we learned and what we believe that means is still conjecture, the sample size is not projectable. We’ll need a survey to get real numbers. As a planner, a good hunch could be killed quickly by a standard research design. Research does a good job of illuminating how things are; the person using the results of that research must be trusted to imagine how things will be. And that needs expertise and experience and attitudes, yes; but that’s not all it needs.

I knew I’d get to Mad Men eventually.

In the 4th episode of this season of Mad Men (season 4), titled “The Rejected“, Faye does a focus group with the young, single secretaries about beauty. Faye’s got all the tricks for moderating – dress well, but neutrally; be innocuous; be self-deprecating; offer them food; tell them something that seems personal; and so on. These are tricks for setting the tone and fostering comfort and (we all hope) candor.

But Faye glides right past important bits as though they weren’t there, or sees them through very conventional lenses. The first woman to reply speaks of her national/ethnic origins, her mother’s perfect skin, the routine she uses: simple – just warm enough water, and patting her skin with her fingterips. She mildly protests that despite not using soap, her mother isn’t dirty. And she implies that this is her routine, though she never describes the routine as belonging to her. For her, beauty routines are the domain of this perfect creature, her mother, and are closely tied in with culture and class. But that routine is where her mother is entirely tuned in with herself, looking at her reflection, touching her face, caring for herself in a moment that belongs to her (even if there was a small girl who once watched from the doorway). This routine, as used by the secretary, is described in a quiet voice, with a slow tempo; she blushes a little, and bows her head slightly, and smiles broadly. This is something sacred – her mother’s beauty, this private moment, were and are still awe-inspiring to her. Here we have one archetype to begin to draw.

Then the next secretary, Dotty, speaks about using a night creme at her vanity. There is a ritual here, too, that is for her something like play-acting. She describes ‘playing house’ with her boyfriend and him laughing at her for it. Faye lets this moment elide as the embittered girl next to her takes the conversation down an inevitable route: “You shouldn’t do things for them. They don’t appreciate it.”

Dotty describes their subsequent break-up, “I don’t know what he noticed… but, it wasn’t me… I guess.” The play-acting evaporated into reality. Dressing up like your beautiful mother, or a glamorous actress, or mimicking daytime soap opera starlets is fun; but it doesn’t define who you are, or what makes you special. Faye could have grappled with the physical experience of caring for your skin (e.g., your beauty) and how you feel about yourself, versus how others see you and what your beauty means to them. Dotty wanted to be loved, sure – but she wanted to be seen by a man who liked what he saw. Then Don’s secretary, Allison, takes it from there, noting that “It’s worse when they notice, sometimes.”

And down we go into the tears and commiserating that all single women in New York are said to be familiar with.

Faye predictably concludes that these girls just want to be married; link Pond’s with matrimony, she advises. She also decides to kill Peggy’s hypothesis, that the routine itself is physically satisfying (oh Peggy, that great hedonist!). Don, rightly, sneers at her, “Hello, 1925.”

He’s found the problem – Faye was looking for what was expected, she was able to identify and identify with the notion that “single girls want to be married women”… and then let the conversation end there.

But maybe there was something else, something about letting mascara and lipstick be for him, but letting Pond’s be for me; or about taking the time to care for yourself; or about confidence and youthfulness; or about stolen moments of beauty. Don rightly pushed back and decided to lead rather than follow… but then there’s the matter of what the report will say…

Maybe instead of what it is, we should ask what it could be

The core ‘product’ of the planning department was traditionally the creative brief. This is a document that should give the creative team all the information they need to develop a campaign. But pat data is not enough, the document needs to inspire.

I used to write ads, and would shake my head (rattle my brains, more like) when I saw a brief that outlined the target as “25-34, single, college educated women with $55k+HHI, living in A & B counties”. I might be able to buy media space for this target, but I can’t single out one woman and write to her based on this. I need to conjure up a woman, the woman, what her life is like, what she loves and hates, what her hopes and dreams are, how she sees herself, how she wants to be seen (of course, this should be tailored to the category or brand). And then I need to know what you want me to do. What they currently think and what we want them to think, that’s a start. Wieden’s planners used to use “The Exciting Possibility” as the springboard from strategy to creative – the face that would launch 1000 ships, to carry on all this beauty crap.

So we have a slightly different role here, one that the word ‘account’ so often seems to contradict. This is the role of the creative muse. The planner serves as the Patti Boyd or Pamela Des Barres to the creative teams’ various interpretations of rock gods. Let accounts advocate for the client – we all know who pays the bills – while we, over here, create a communal space between consumer desires, client objectives and something else… ideas.

I sometimes imagine that the best planners would be Method. They would live as the target does, speak like the target, spend time with the target, befriend the target, sleep with the target (cue, “Common People” by Pulp). They would be the target incarnate, guiding the creative team along a meditation on what would inspire them, seduce them, convince them, lure them.

Of course, it can’t always be that – the planner must pivot in this role, playing muse to both client and creatives, inspiring them to think about their business issues, the world in which we live, the trends impacting our audience and business, and the lives and aspirations of our audience in fresh ways. Done artfully, the ideal planner sets up the creative team to develop insightful, creative, break-through work, and equally sets up the client to expect and embrace it.

But as agencies scramble to solidify client relationships, move ‘upstream’ as ‘partners’ in the business, and to be quite simply taken seriously as the experts on consumers and brands that they are, I find planners are cleaving ever closer to the client, aspiring to be ‘problem-solvers’ and business partners and consultants… But while they court clients and read data tabs and steep themselves in consumer and media and technology trends, they risk neglecting the importance – sometimes even the transcendence – of great ideas artfully executed.

So yeah, digital planner, brand planner, communications planner, whatever. There ain’t no flavors. But sometimes, I feel like there ain’t much ‘flavor’ at all.

On December 28, 2009, I posted this on my name site. It was not a manifesto, to be sure, but it was a promise I made to myself.

The Goal: Quit my job and be working as an independent by June 30, 2010.

Goal achieved. In fact, I was out of my job on June 15, and sitting at this desk, looking out onto a tree-lined brownstone street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Then, in January I posted this on getting my financial and physical house in order. I had grand plans of having six months income socked away before I started my new life. That was before I remembered that I’d blown my savings on some family obligations. I don’t begrudge those expenses (much) but it has definitely made things a little more, um, pressing. Yesterday I had $50 in my checking account; today, a client’s payment arrived and I am back in good shape. By the end of September, I’ll have enough to get me through the end of the year, even if I didn’t do another job. That’s a liberating feeling, even if it was a nail-biter for a few days.

A little later that month, I ruminated on my procrastination, my disaffection for the job I had (or really, the industry I was in), and also noted that I wasn’t that into a guy I was certain I wouldn’t go out with again, but instead dated unproductively for 3 months. Oh my, how I can wallow in something unpleasant for awhile because coping and dealing and figuring out can provide enough cognitive load that I don’t worry about anything else (though that’s because I become a big ball of worry).

Anyway, it’s now the last full week of August. A lot has happened. And as I look back on those early posts – those little prayers tied to the fence posts, I have realized something very interesting: I don’t have a process for this. I can map out a strategic plan for a client, sketch a campaign, develop a methodology. But for me…

I do leaps. I do tricks. I get from here to there on what feels like and sometimes looks like wild instinct. I react. I make moves out of the pure sense of growing panic, that if I do not do this thing, I never will, that if I never do, I will go crazy, or worse.

Then I second guess, I question my own credibility, I wonder if maybe the headhunters are hinting at something, that maybe I need to build a brand at some hot agency before I can do this on my own. But I also know that I will lose a part of me if I do, that I won’t be any closer to doing what I want to do, and that I will be doing it under someone else’s aegis. Fuck that.

So anyway. This past week I dwindled down to my last $50. I put Drano on a credit card to fix my clogged tub. I tucked into my cupboards and freezer. I permitted friends to buy me a drink or two. And this morning, with my housekeeper coming, and a doctor’s appointment later in the day, I poured the change in those two Ball jars into a hot pink nylon shopping bag, tucked it into my purse, and carried it like a baby on my hip to one of those banks with the ‘penny arcade’. There were $106 in those jars. Enough to pay the housekeeper and the co-pay, and buy a sandwich later on. I would make it through today, even if the check didn’t come. I’ve been this close to the wire and on the other side of the zero balance before, but it never gets easier.

I thought of my dad, talking about days when he had half a tank of gas in the car, and the knowledge that today he had to make a sale, because the baby needed shoes, or the baby needed diapers, or they needed to pay the electric bill. He’d hope the car wouldn’t break down and the half a tank of gas would be enough. And to remind him what he was doing this for, he’d come into the baby’s room and look down, and there I was, smiling back up at him, so happy to see him. That image would motivate him to get his ass out the door and on the road and in those offices, selling, selling; that image would break his heart.

I have nothing like that at stake. But I relate to the sense of urgency, the sense of responsibility. Just as he wanted me to be happy and cared for, to love and respect him, I want to feel that way about myself, provide that to myself.

So at about 2:30, I went downstairs, sure that the check would be there, half-believing it would never come, unlocked the mailbox and took an envelope from the stack containing the payment for consultancy on a project. I took it to the bank, and deposited it, and am breathing easier. It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to be awesome, actually. But at this particular moment, I feel like I got pulled back from falling onto the subway tracks, just as the train came barreling into the station. The adrenaline rush is quite something. Here’s to no more of that.

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.

(click to play)

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.

(click to play)

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?

There is a sensation that I sometimes experience, maybe it’s familiar to you?  The sides of my tongue pressed against the inside of my molars, my jaw hovering and semi-clenched, my neck straining to keep me out of a hunch.  These are the physical symptoms of keeping my mouth firmly shut.

Now, I can talk while I’m cinching up my mandible.  I haven’t fallen into Carthusian silence, because these symptoms are symbolic of the cage in which I keep all the words I’m not uttering.

And why don’t I utter them?  There are a lot of reasons, but a key censor in my world is that easy archetype, the bully.

McFly!!

This is the guy who comes to mind when I think of a bully (but it doesn’t have to be a guy).  Biff Tannen: a loud mouth power by a dim bulb, a seemingly privileged kid from an actually unloving home, a constant tormentor, a cheater, a ringleader, a thug.

What is it, really, that Biff is doing?  He is demanding things that don’t belong to him, and when they won’t be given, he takes them with force.  He escalates violence as he meets resistance.  He takes a joyless pleasure in seeing other people’s fear or misery.

But some bullies I’ve known exert their power quietly, in code, behind-the-scenes, through a proxy, or through patience.  They sit quietly enough, but as if they are presiding over the proceedings; people turn to them for their approval, even when they aren’t sure why.

Or they select the topics and guide the discussion by force – no one getting a word in edgewise – so that they are center stage, and everyone else has to keep up with or join them in forced frivolity… a kind of unspoken, “dance, monkey!”  Often as they select these topics, their criteria rests on exclusion and inclusion: drawing clear boundaries between who is in and who is out.  And occasionally they will condescend to offer a small nugget of praise on one of the outsiders trying so desperately to get in, though no one is quite sure whether the praise is sincere, or merely condescending.

This dividing – us and them, in and out, cool and uncool – this is what bullies do best.  They make the rules, they enforce the rules – hell, they live the rules.

Obviously we could talk at length about the hurt souls inside these bullies – the damaged and flawed people who need our compassion, if not our company. Mostly though, I wonder why people are attracted to charismatic dominant personalities who turn out to be bullies.  And by people, I mean me.

Anyway, someone I’ve known a long time and always thought of as the warm, gooey center has decided to turn himself into a bit of a bully.  I know he wants control, to feel important. But he winds up forcing everyone to orbit him at the distance and velocity of his choosing.  He leads people on aimless death marches to see who will stick it out.  Frankly, he seemed to be working at depriving me of meaningful interaction with our mutual friends, when this was something he once so loved about our group. And while I understand – that is to say that I know – why he is behaving like this, I am simply too disappointed to be compassionate.

via scienceblogs.com

In the spirit and style of any self-respecting talks-to-herself-looney, I thought I’d go ahead and try to answer my own question.  How do you tell a Big Truth?  A truth that requires you to stop believing a whole lot of other things in order to believe this new replacement thing…

A few possible tactics spring to mind:

Tell a Lot of Little Truths

This is the backbone of any marketing campaign that relies on ‘pillars’ or thinks of itself as ‘educational’ – we’ll tell you about these things that we think are really important about our brand and product, and in the end you will be willing to drop everything in favor of us.

Sometimes, I suppose, that works.  When marketers attempt to educate you about the product, they are trusting in the notion that an ‘educated’ consumer is, first, something people want to be, and second, a quality that runs in their favor.  In my cervical cancer vaccine example from a couple of days ago, maybe this means backing up and spreading a few different messages:

• Eureka! We discovered something amazing! A virus causes a kind of cancer! It’s not about heredity or diet, it’s about a virus!
• You know, this virus is really common, and there are lots of kinds of it.  That wart you had frozen off your finger last year?  Same kind of virus as what we’re talking about here, only this version causes cancer… weird/kinda scary, right?
• Having a strong immune system helps some people suppress this virus on their own; but you take vitamins to keep up your immune system, right?  You get your vaccinations as a kid to help your immune system fight off chicken pox and things like that, right? Same idea.
• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Get your kids inoculated now, then breathe easy.
• Sex is intensely personal, private, and it’s a big deal.  It shouldn’t be entered into lightly – but it shouldn’t be inherently dangerous, either.  Let’s make it a little safer, so when our kids finally do become sexually active adults, they aren’t at unnecessary risk.
• More people are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year than you think – and while regular screenings will catch early signs of the disease, they don’t prevent cancer.  This vaccine prevents cancer.
• Caught early, this kind of cancer is treatable – but a lot of the time it isn’t caught early enough.  Complications of treatment for cervical cancer run from fertility/pregnancy complications to hysterectomy to death. It’s serious.
• And so on…

The problem with an ‘educated’ consumer is that there is so much information available, and so much of it is conflicting, that a consumer who tries to educate herself about a particular product may find herself even  more confused.  Confusion, I would argue, is the worst experience a person can have cognitively.  Confusion leads to frustration, skepticism, mistrust.  Confused people don’t understand why they are confused – we tend to believe that everything should be understandable, clear, simple.  When something is complicated, contradictory, or controversial, people keep it at arm’s length.  Educated consumers take one of two paths – endless ‘research’ in which they take in all the he-said/she-said without a way of judging which side is right, or sitting out the debate until an authority can weigh in.

Don’t Explain

This is related to two things I spend a lot of time thinking about: prototyping and iterating.  People do better with a prototype than with a concept.  Put the thing in their hands, implement the program, install the device, require the vaccine, launch the site/campaign/app/etc.  The implementation doesn’t have to be 100% perfect, but the product has to work.

In the case of the vaccine, the governor of Texas skipped the parental hand-wringing by mandating it for school-age girls.  It was highly controversial, parents were outraged, doctors rushed to get adequate supplies, and so on.  But it temporarily took the decision out of their hands and placed it into the government’s.  The state already mandates other childhood vaccinations, and the governor felt strongly that the high incidence of HPV infection and cervical cancer diagnoses in Texas constituted a public health interest in mandating the vaccine.  However, in the end, the state legislature overrode this executive order, stalling mandatory vaccination until 2011. Most states managed to kill or stall implementation of a mandatary vaccination scheme; even those states with opt-out provisions still find their bills lost in committee.

In the case of electric vehicles, the fact that federal dollars are available for pilot programs in providing charging stations and other incentives for driving electric vehicles, that many of the major manufacturers are going ahead with development of EVs and plug-in hybrids, and that all of this is happening nowish, all combined to leave people feeling, frankly, resigned to the new reality.  It felt like it was out of their hands, and therefore was all perfectly acceptable; maybe there would be some inconveniences, maybe they’d be annoyed, maybe things wouldn’t be perfect – but since it’s not up to them, they might as well just go along.

People do a pretty good job of adapting to change once it’s here, no matter how much time and effort they spend resisting the change.

Manage Expectations

I have an idea for a mobile app.  I like the idea, a lot of people I’ve spoken to like the idea, and now I just need to figure out how to implement it.  But – there are some people who don’t love this idea. Every once in awhile I encounter someone who doesn’t think it’s fantastic, and while this bruises my fragile little ego, the bigger lesson I take from it is that I’m not doing a good job of helping them picture what the app will be like.  I tell them what it does and what it’s for, but they can’t picture it – they can’t see it in their minds, imagine themselves or their friends using it, create an imaginary world in their minds in which this thing exists.

In my previous roles using a lot of qualitative research to help clients, I’ve seen this phenomenon frequently.  Some people are really good at taking the kernel of an idea and running with it – imagining the universe in which this idea is fully implemented, in which they use it and like it, or in which other people use it and like it.  And some people struggle with this exercise – they simply can’t imagine what it would be like.  They aren’t on board with filling the gaps for you, the inventor or the creative director or marketer.  They need someone to draw them a picture.

I wasn’t convinced about the iPad, the notion of a tablet computer, an oversized iPhone, until I saw this image:

That posture, sitting in a partial reclining position, feet just a bit up, reading the paper, and doing everything through gestures – that was enough.  I didn’t need the technology – I needed that posture.  I needed to sit like that and do that stuff.  I could already do that stuff, I just couldn’t do that stuff while sitting like that.  Am I making myself clear?  It wasn’t about the object, it was about me.  I could imagine myself sitting on a couch with that object, doing that stuff, in a comfortable position – and this was, for me, revolutionary.

It’s similar to why I bought my Kindle – check out this image:

Reading books on a digital device? Yeah, okay, big deal. But reading books on a digital device without any glare?  Sitting on the beach reading books on a digital device?  Now you’re talking.  In fact, this is my biggest peeve when it comes to the iPad – the glare on that screen when I’m in the park can be almost painful.  But this image once again was less about the device and more about me – I could imagine myself doing exactly what she’s doing, and the benefit (no glare) was compelling.

Helping people imagine what their life will look like, how they will move through the world, which chair they’ll sit on and whether they can wear sunglasses in this new world are incredibly important aspects of helping people get comfortable with any new Truth.  I suspect it’s just as important for helping people prepare themselves for a Big Truth.

And this, I suppose, is why product demonstrations and testimonials will never really go out of style – they are effective means of helping us imagine ourselves in the universe of that brand or product, in a world where this new Truth is accepted.  Marketers can help here in establishing and managing expectations, in making the abstract concrete, accessible.

…

What else?  What other modes can we employ in helping people put aside old ideas in order to adopt new ones?