Web 2.0

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Misconceptions, Half-Truths, and Lies, Lies, Lies

June 3, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

The internet is a rich source of unverified speculation, baseless rumors and agenda-serving fabrication: no surprise there.  Ever since the widespread of adoption of Web 2.0, commentary, blogs and microblogs reconfigured the web into a vast wiki: user-sourced and generated, largely on the honor system.  That’s rarely a good thing (BP’s offshore safety standards anyone?), particularly to anyone accustomed to accepting information at face value–which is also rarely a good thing.

This is where snopes.com comes in.  If you haven’t already bookmarked this site, do it now.  It began about fifteen years ago as ‘The Urban Legend Reference Pages’–a site developed by Barbara and David Mikkelson dedicated to dispelling myths and providing real information on all sorts of topics.  As the web grew, so did the demand for their curious and obsessive fact-finding.  Today, readers submit all sorts of conjecture: about Nigerian inheritances, the war records of Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers, the new Pepsi can that eliminates ‘under God’ from our National Anthem…

The only real reason I mention snopes is that I got an email this morning about the many uses of WD-40.  This particular message closes by claiming that remarkable product’s main ingredient is fish oil.  All in all, it was rather mindblowing.

After a quick check on Snopes, I was it was also not entirely true.  What is true, is that this remarkable petroleum-based spray lubricant can serve a mind-blowing amount of uses.  Those that have been confirmed as fact are:

  1. Protects silver from tarnishing.Element 79, Chicago Advertising, Dennis Ryan
  2. Removes road tar and grime from cars.
  3. Loosens stubborn zippers..
  4. Untangles jewelry chains..
  5. Keeps ceramic/terra cotta garden pots from oxidizing.
  6. Keeps scissors working smoothly.
  7. Lubricates noisy door hinges on vehicles and doors in homes.
  8. Lubricates gear shift and mower deck lever for ease of handling on riding mowers.
  9. Rids kids rocking chairs and swings of squeaky noises.
  10. Lubricates tracks in sticking home windows and makes them easier to open.
  11. Spraying an umbrella stem makes it easier to open and close.
  12. Restores and cleans roof racks on vehicles.
  13. Lubricates and stops squeaks in electric fans.
  14. Lubricates wheel sprockets on tricycles, wagons, and bicycles for easy handling.
  15. Keeps rust from forming on saws, saw blades, and other tools.
  16. Lubricates prosthetic limbs.
  17. Keeps pigeons off the balcony (they hate the smell)
  18. Removes all traces of duct tape.
  19. If you spray WD-40 on the distributor cap, it displaces moisture allowing cars to start.
  20. It removes blackscuff marks from t he kitchen floor!  UseWD-40 for those nasty tar and scuff marks on flooring.  It doesn’t seem to harm the finish and you won’t have to scrub nearly as hard to get them off.  Just remember to open some windows if you have a lot of marks.
  21. Bug guts will eat away the finish on your car if not removed quickly! Use WD-40!

By the way, the email list was twice as long, but these are the only ones verified.  You’re welcome.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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The Esperanto of Bad Ideas

May 18, 2010 in Advertising | 3 comments

Great ideas travel far and fast.  Unfortunately, so do awful ones.  Today, with the onset of Negative Media–consumer driven backlash empowered by Web 2.0–advertising ideas that fall into that unfortunate latter category are no longer even limited by geography.

Witness these two screen grabs from recent-ish ads for Enterprise Car Rental.  I’ve been frustrated with this advertiser for years, for the reason you see in the vidcaps.  Inevitably, their ad opens on a helpless woman who stands in a car repair shop beneath a large white sign with two foot high black letters that spell out “Repair Shop.”

Now I’ve liked cars for a long time, and bought my first one long before I could buy anything decent, so I have spent a decent amount of time with mechanics.  And in over three decades of driving, I’ve never seen a sign like that hanging from the rafters of a garage.  It is there solely because the advertiser considers us to be mouth-breathing morons, incapable of recognizing the location, despite the steaming engines and hydraulic lifts.  I bet this inanity first started as a super placed over a badly-drawn animatic frame the client sent into testing.  Then, when the piece received an acceptable action score, an overzealous brand manager insisted that the commercial match the animatic exactly, right down to the pasted-in super.  Like so many other offensively idiotic ideas, this foolishness has a stubborn staying power, kind of like “American Idol.”

So I thought I’d air my little grievance with this brand on the blog.  Remarkably, despite these hyper-documented times, I couldn’t find a video copy of any of the Enterprise spots on the web.  That might indicate that even the advertiser realizes their ads amount to little more than blights on the culture, but probably not.  However, in searching, I stumbled across this Enterprise ad from the United Kingdom.

As you can see, idiocy speaks an international language, albeit with localized spelling.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Eleven Years Ago, This Was Insight. It Still Is.

May 17, 2010 in Advertising | 1 comment

Every weekday, I try to write something relevant to advertising, branding, or simply modern life.  But today, I’m going to highlight someone else’s writing. Which is a nice way to say “I’m copying.”

I’m copying off one of the web’s original bloggers, Jason Kottke, who has written online since 1998 and currently handles the endlessly fascinating kottke.org. Simultaneously, I’m copying off of Douglas Adams, the English author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and a totally fascinating creative artist who died nine years ago this past week.

Dennis Ryan Chicago Advertising Element 79This piece posted on kottke.org, quotes Adams from a 1999 interview entitled “How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love the Internet.”  That’s before widespread broadband or WiFi or even Web 2.0.  Read this and understand the difference between commentary and insight: nearly a decade later, Adam’s vision remains accurate despite the quantum leaps in communication and technology and social networking…

“So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”

Rational skepticism can be a beautiful thing, can’t it?
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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
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The New Marketing Landscape of O.P.E.N. Media

May 14, 2010 in Advertising | 1 comment

In a culture where opinion has a mass channel and information spreads at unprecedented speeds, we need to rethink our notion of media mixes.  Today, a more holistic view could be O.P.E.N. media: Owned, Paid, Earned and unfortunately, Negative.

Element 79 Chicago Advertising Dennis RyanFrom the very beginning, a few marketers and brands have realized the value of the media they Owned.  Wheaties drew attention by putting athletes on their box, Bazooka Joe used his comics, and Apple has long sold their brand through the style-setting impact of their clean, elegant industrial design and packaging.  More recently, Uniqlo has done it through their ever changing, always fascinating websites and Anthropologie through one of the oldest and simplest retail mediums: the store window.

Advertising agencies developed to create content and strategize placement for Paid Media.  We’d buy TV and radio time, take out space in magazines, newspapers and billboards, and invest in sponsorships and events.  It required making choices about where you should place your creative bets, but by and large, it worked.  And still does.

More recently, the world of Social Media introduced the notion of Earned Media.  Smart brands invest time in creating relationships with influential people in the online and offline world, and earn positive public relations as a result.  Or they create content and provide it to news shows and video outlets for others to share.  In the end, a brand must do something worthwhile or interesting to encourage people to share their story; they must earn it (On a side note, some like to parse out Shared Media: the pass alongs made possible through services like Reddit and Digg.  To me, this is hair splitting: Shared Media is simply a subset of Earned Media).

And yet, there is a fourth Media all marketers need to keep in mind today: Negative Media.  Brands have always had to deal with cranky customers, with complaints and disagreements over return policies or product efficacy.  But these days, consumers can turn to a mass channel of opinion to post their grievance and spread their displeasure.  In this modern world of Immedia, news, stories and cultural moments spread with unprecedented speed through online ecosystems.  And few things spread as quickly as bad news–United Breaks Guitars, anyone?  If a story is presented compellingly or if it captures the public imagination, brands can quickly find themselves in trouble due to a virulent outbreak of Negative Media.  Dominos had those yokels blowing their noses on their pizzas, Toyota had the Prius problem, and a long list of brands knows what happened when Tiger blew his cover.

Negative Media is a relatively new phenomenon.  With the individual empowerment of Web 2.0 and social networks, the ability to spread opinion far and wide has never been cheaper, faster or more effective.  That’s why keeping an ear on the online chatter about your brand means so much these days.  A good social media policy can mean the difference between being caught by a story or getting ahead of it.

Negative Media is just another argument for converging traditional marketing and public relations, particularly Social Media.  Coordinating these disciplines from the outset of brand marketing enhances the impact of the traditional efforts that get brands recognized even as it activates the advocates to drive brand recommendation.  And it can insure all of these investments by continually monitoring online dialogue for Negative Media.

It’s a 24/7 world.  Now we gotta be always O.P.E.N.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Technology-Enabled Anonymity…and Gutlessness

March 5, 2010 in Advertising | 2 comments

Technology makes this a halcyon time in human development.  Medicine advances mightily on nanotechnology, computing speed and power doubles at such a stunning rate as to confine hardware to a state of perpetual obsolescence.  My smartphone makes me feel stupid…

BetterMe.com Element 79 Chicago Advertising

Well, not 'say' so much as 'type'

But like most things in life, technology’s benefits can be a double-edged sword. Our unprecedented digital interconnectedness made possible through web 2.0 creates both amazing opportunities for human good (after two weeks, people texting “90999″ to benefit tbe Red Cross’ Haitian relief raised $8 million, $10 at a time) and ugly examples of our basest impulses (browse the comments below basically any agencyspy.com post).

Which is why I can’t help but view a new website called “BetterMe.com” with deep suspicion.  Its premise is depressingly unassailable: “open, honest communication is crucial, but not always easy.”  Think about that–their entire business plan relies on our fundamental gutlessness when it comes to telling hard truths.  BetterMe’s solution is anonymous opportunities to give, get and solicit feedback on any issue you’d like, from the professional (how would you rate my presentation style?) to the personal (how would you rate my hairstyle?).

Browsing through the site, the creators clearly intend this as a helpful tool.  Under a page titled “Why it Works” they cite the power of anonymity and privacy to encourage genuine honesty and honest, constructive feedback.

But are we really so spineless that it has to come to this?  Is honesty so difficult that we need this crutch to learn what people really think?  Good intentions notwithstanding, will something like this be used for good or perverted for evil?  It’s like the promise of time travel: would you use it to go back in time and stop Hitler or bet on Superbowl games since you know the outcome?

There’s a reason the expression is “Face it.”

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79


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Something We Realized in Dubuque Today. About Twitter. And Haiti. And Humanity.

January 15, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

I spoke to the Dubuque chapter of the AAF today, making a presentation titled “Engagement is the New Black.”  It opens with a quick review of how radically communications and communications platforms have changed in the past five years due to Web 2.0 and Social Media.  In a question and answer after the talk, we debated Twitter and it’s relative usefulness to clients and marketing professionals.

On the down side, Twitter is not scalable, it’s labor intensive, and it’s populated by a vocal minority with more than a healthy dollop of narcissism; it’s not really that valuable a sales platform.

On the upside, it isn’t really a sales platform anyway–it’s a communications tool.  A meaningful presence in this medium requires commitment but provides wonderful insurance should a company ever find itself on the wrong end of a public relations issue.  Companies that tweet have an audience and a platform that allows direct communication in a timely manner, which can fend off a lot of ugly situations.

We also discussed one more thing about Twitter, and that was the simple short code put out by the American Red Cross just two days ago.  People all over Twitter quickly spread the word that you merely had to text “haiti” to 90999 to make a $10 donation to the relief effort.

What’s truly beautiful is that hundreds of thousands did just that.  Thursday evening, the Red Cross confirmed that within forty-eight hours, this one tactic alone generated five million dollars.

Think about that: $5,000,000 worth of pocket change collected from strangers in less than two days.  That’s nothing short of amazing.

The Pennsylvania Dutch have a saying: “Many hands make light work.”  Twitter just expanded that concept into social media.

God bless Twitter.  And God bless Haiti.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

PS:  My sincere thanks to Ryan Brown and Marilyn Kupferschmidt of Kendall/Hunt Publishing for organizing such a well-run event, your generous hospitality, and sitting with me at lunch.  I appreciate it.


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On Web 2.0 And the Rise of Sociopathic Media

January 14, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

Social Media!  Social Media!  We’re building bridges through Social Media!

Except when we aren’t.  Except those times when it’s two-way dialogue becomes a brutal dog-fighting pit of character assaults by anonymous assailants in a digital lynch mob.  Don’t get me wrong–I love Web 2.0, even if I am still trying to find a way to make a fair margin on these new platforms.  But the ugly underbelly of Social Media is how it allows us to spread and share our basest ugliest selves.  Love may be the most powerful force on earth, but hate is a lot easier to summon.

The Mob's Digital Now, Atticus Finch

Decades ago, I met an AE at my first agency.  She was nice, funny, and ended up marrying another really fun AE and moving to Boston.  Occasionally I’d hear about them through old colleagues but as these things go, I didn’t really keep in touch.

Until the other day when her name leapt out at me off a gossipy ad business website.  She’s now a client and in a bit of regretably bad judgement, she did something pretty stupid.  And this blog called her out on it.  Within twenty-four hours, the post had been repeatedly forwarded through Twitter and nearly one hundred people had posted comments.  Their tone was uniformly vitriolic.  Under such charming aliases as “PhuhQ” and “Client Hater,” they piled on the invective, unshackled by civility or decency by the cloak of anonymity.

I’ve had anonymous posters call me out by name and take cheapshots and it stings.  But having hundreds, even thousands of people in your business alerted to your big mistake and then pile on with assessments of everything from your intellect to your sexual activity is a harrowing experience.  Are these people in your office?  On your bus?  And how did they get your email and home phone number?  It well may blow over in a week, but when it strikes, it’s a short trip from the center of this maelstrom to outright paranoia.

Look, I’ve laughed at other’s misfortune, repeatedly.  I mocked the contestant from South Carolina’s ridiculous answer in the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant.  I listened to Alec Baldwin rail at his daughter and Christian Bale rant at his DP.  And I followed every salacious detail in the implosion of the Tiger Woods machine.

More to the point, I’ve done plenty of boneheaded things in my life and career; I’ve made indefensible mistakes and watched as well-intended actions turned horribly, desperately wrong.  Happily, those events happened in relative privacy.  I could find someone and apologize or try to explain myself to a small group and move on.  But now the web connects offended parties far and wide, most of whom are uninterested in hearing another side because it clutters up the story we like, the version that allowed us to justify some indignance.  Between the proliferation of cell phone cameras, voicemail, email hacking and even widely disseminated 911 calls, we must all accept that we now live very public lives: perhaps not at the level of Nancy Pelosi or Conan O’Brien, but far more than we typically assume.

So today, I’m giving thanks for every opportunity I’ve ever been given to err anonymously.  Whoa…

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79


a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

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Three Advantages to Emphasizing Story over Strategy

January 4, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

To a cynic—and yes, everyone in the advertising business does get cynical from time to time—the difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘story’ may seem a matter of semantics.  As a writer who earns a living on words, that makes a good argument right there.  But adopting a story-centric mindset opens up marketing in many powerful ways.  Because ‘many’ is a bit nebulous, here are three reasons to start thinking story.

1.  Strategies Centralize, Stories Travel. Any media expert will tell you that the biggest upset of our advertising applecart has been Web 2.0 and the emergence of social media.  This game-changing development changed the way consumers gather and share information.  Moreover, it is frequently mistaken for ‘free media,’ which intrigues resource-strapped clients.

People use social media to share stories, about their lives, their interest, their opinions.  A traditional strategy-driven ad only goes as far as the media plan, and then it disappears.  A story starts with that same media plan but when defined correctly, extends far beyond those finite GRP’s, riding the waves of social media and word of mouth as people spread their own versions of your brand’s story.  We don’t need consumers to create the story, but simply build on them and pass them along.  In an increasingly advertising-resistant society, using story to further recommendation is good business.

We should work brand stories to spread virally, but viral is not a tactic: it’s an outcome.

Clearly, There's a Story Here...

2.  Stories Serve Integration Better than Strategy. Because strategies are centralized, one agency inevitably takes responsibility for it.  They ‘own’ the strategy.  But in a social media-powered world, no marketer really owns how people consider their brands, we can only influence it.  Because consumers have such a hand in defining and sharing brand stories, no one marketing entity can claim dominion: everyone has a hand in defining the story.

A story is not owned, it’s shared.  And that simplifies everything.  For years, each discipline brought separate planning resources to interpret the strategy for their particular specialty, a divisive exercise which more often than not, really amounts to defining tactics.  When everyone knows a brand’s story, the integration process simplifies tremendously.  A promotion either reflects the story or it doesn’t.  A user experience either fits or not.  Instead of an intellectual exercise, integration becomes simpler, more human, more obvious.

3.  Stories Reflect Brands Better than Strategies. Both strategies and stories define their audience.  Both use conflict to build drama.  And both communicate a POV.  But stories go further to embrace tone.  In a parity marketplace, an emotional perspective, a tone, can be a big differentiator and make the story far more compelling.

Strategies largely avoid tone or consign it to a bullet-point at the base.  But the right tone is fundamental to a story’s success: Poe didn’t crack jokes and Hemingway never asked for a hug.  Powerful feelings can drive sales just as much as rational reasons to believe.  In fact, I would argue they are more compelling.  Logic and reason do not trump passion and emotion: we don’t get married or go to war for logic.  This may not hold up to quantitative analysis, but if the ultimate goal is predicting in-market success, consumer research is a rather suspect science at best.

So there you go—three thought starters for the first workweek of the new year.  I will be working with this thought and how it applies to the advertising business over the next few weeks.  If you have any additional points—or counterpoints—I’d welcome them.  Because I have a feeling we share a similar story: advertising professionals seeking answers in a changing industry to help our brands thrive.

Oh, and our careers too.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Happy New Decade! Here’s One Prediction for Advertising in The Teens…

January 1, 2010 in Advertising | 5 comments

Not a list or a look back of any kind; just one prediction regarding all this industry convergence and confusion about how the advertising business we knew will evolve in the decade ahead…

#1.  The Days of Strategy Are Over.

The Age of Stories Is Upon Us.

Again.

That’s not a quote from The Lord of the Rings; that’s a truth that’s become increasingly obvious as we’ve dealt with seismic changes within both our industry and the culture as a whole.  We live in times when great masses of people can organize without organizations (good point Clay Shirky).  We live in times when recommendation drives sales more than any other factor (good business plan Zocalo Group).  We live in times when the way people can experience a brand–has never been more diverse (good luck with integration there, Bub).

Today’s reality renders the notion of a centralized advertising ‘strategy’ quaint.  The conceit that any advertiser controls their message is both dated and dangerous.  Strategies assume centralized authority which no longer exists in an empowered-public forum.  Strategies come from people with a vested interest, but these days, those people are only a part of the in-market dialogue.  Today, consumers have loud voices: socially-networked, extraordinarily powerful and digitally-amplified via Web 2.0 voices.  And their voices will be heard

All of which means that if we want to learn, we will have to unlearn–it’s not about just what we advocate, it’s about what consumers accept.  To lead we will also have to listen–not just to clients but to consumers whose voices are stronger than ever.

We will have to put aside the older ways and accept that to move forward, we will have to embrace one of the most primal and fundamental assets of our humanity: storytelling.  We will not only need to tell stories on our brands’ behalf in the future, we also must shape those stories, enhance those stories, make them more pertinent, more relevant, and more impactful to the people we want to buy our brands.  Sparking stories, guiding stories, monitoring and brightening stories–that will define the advertising business in the coming decade.

And so that will become our daily work.  Identifying the story.  Shaping the story.  Refining the story.  And most of all, spreading the story in a way that others pick up our narrative and spread it themselves.

We are no longer in the advertising business.  We are now in the oldest profession known to man: no, not that–the storytelling business. And it just may be the most antediluvian business at work today–telling stories for the entertainment and edification of others.  But at least it’s honest work.

Come to think of it, the years ahead should be a really good time.  A Happy Decade Ahead to All!

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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On Anonymity and Civil Discourse in the Digital Age

November 20, 2009 in Advertising | No comments

The latest issue of  Wired magazine features an article by Evan Ratliff chronicling his efforts to vanish from society and avoid detection for a month while the magazine readers vie for a $5000 prize for locating him.  The story teaches all sorts of useful things like how cell phone batteries are trackable and how Greyhound is a last bastion of transportation that doesn’t require a photo ID.

mark-manginoI read the article with particular interest because of a note my friend Paul Meyer sent me yesterday on this very subject.  Paul’s a diehard Jayhawks fan, and their administration looks ready to step in and fire their football coach, Mark Mangino. Paul didn’t really say where he came down on the issue of the coach’s tenure, but he did point out something disturbing he noticed on a story on ESPN.com.  By the time he quit skimming it yesterday, the comments count had topped 1330, and almost every one of them made some sort of fat joke.  While Coach Mangino is a plus-sized individual who dwarfs even Notre Dame’s Charlie Weis, the fact remains his job is in jeopardy not for his physical appearance but rather his won-loss record.  What no doubt started as a bit of snarky smack talk online quickly devolved into ugly personal attacks that can only be classified as vicious and mean.

In this kind of environment, when anonymity can spur otherwise decent people down to something as ugly as character assassination, how can we maintain any semblance of civility?  How can we expect those with an agenda to follow some sort of higher-minded Marquess of Queensberry rules and avoid the partisan mud-slinging inanity that has so polluted the aisles of Congress?  How can we protect brands from competitors with less ethical standards?

In the end, the answer will probably rely on even more technological advancement as a means to out those who abuse the best aspects of Web 2.0.  Anonymity has a legitimate role online, but so does accountability.  In a Wiki-ed world, let’s hope for a bit more wisdom from crowds.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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