Archive for the ‘Advertising (& branding)’ Category
Good video: probably a good book
Wow, there is footage in here of wolverines doing somersaults. Who knew? I’ve never seen a wolverine. I would love to be involved in making this kind of promotional video! Looks like a solid book.
The Wolverine Way – by Douglas H. Chadwick from Wild Collective on Vimeo.
WD My Book® Studio™
Having purchased the one Terabyte external hard drive to back up my data, I made the mistake of letting it sit on my shelf for two weeks before actually trying to use it. It’s the WD My Book® Studio™. The first indicator that it’s wasting my time is the propriety software that it assumed I wanted to install on my computer in order to run the external hard drive. The software is slow, loaded with branding and attempts to get me to “shop“. And the software uses up a significant portion of the drive itself. So the drive is no longer even 1 TB! This kind of thing makes me angry. But then I wasted time trying to re-purpose it to use as a simple external hard drive. Apparently Western Digital doesn’t want me to use my own software. I even tried using my disk utility to wipe the drive and reformat it – but I was somehow prevented from doing this. I think the software additions might actually be firmware. Anyway, it’s going back to the store. This is a big hassle, but I refuse to buy their crap. I found this article by Jeremy Kessel1 singing it’s praises. But what is super funny is the 70 plus comments almost unanimously slamming the Western Digital product:
If you want to relinquish ALL control of your computer to Western Digital, then this is a good choice. If you get annoyed with software that auto-starts, can’t be shut off, and consumes virtually all computer capacity for extended periods of time “categorizing your files”, then stay away from Western Digital Smartware (I prefer to call it “Dumbware”). I bought the 1TB Essential and it will be my last Western Digital purchase. My second drive was a Seagate — and that’s where I’ll stay. Software developers and distributors who usurp control (apparently because they know what I want to do better than I do), should look forward to a purgatory of infinite loops! — Ron Williams – December 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm EST
- Seriously, Jeremy, what were you thinking. I hope they payed you well for this advertisement posing as an article. ↩
Advertisers make good advocates
The Age of Persuasion is a CBC radio show that I’ve always enjoyed.1 Terry O’Reilly is the host and has worked in advertising for thirty some years. He has recently published a book with Mike Tennant, who co-authored the book and who probably co-writes the radio show. They’re ad men. So ultimately they’re apologists for the advertising industry. But they’re also interesting and have some good insights and are, well, almost honest about the impact of the ad industry on our culture.
For ad men, that’s pretty good.
The book is called The Age of Persuasion, How Marketing Ate Our Culture. I’m totally enjoying it. But here’s what I’m talking about. In the preface, he reflects on the radio show he launched in 1995:
In the summer of 1995, I launched a twenty-five radio series, O’Reilly on Advertising, on CBC’s Radio One, eager to fill what I saw as a huge information void. Of the thousands of books, films, courses, and programs about advertising and marketing, few, if any, were created by people within the industry for people outside the industry.
Then turning to his more recent radio show, he adds:
This program has allowed me to fill another curious void: the thousands of works critical of the impact of advertising and marketing on modern life and culture are created, almost without exception, by people who have never worked within the advertising business.
Wow. If true, that is totally significant. it means that people who work in the advertising business don’t criticize themselves, the techniques of their trade or the affects they have on our communities. Ever. Wow. That is a huge criticism that O’Reilly almost, but not quite, made of advertisers. 2
The point I’m trying to angle towards is this. There is no one better suited to sell us on sales, than a salesperson. And advertising is sales. So there is no one better suited to sell us on advertising, than an advertiser. Well… maybe a salesperson. But do you get my point? Advertisers everywhere are advocates for their various clients now and then and once in a while. But advertisers everywhere are advocates for their jobs, their careers, and their industry, all of the time.
The question is, what are we buying?
- Here’s a link to a live stream of an episode on the branding and rebranding of sharks and other things. ↩
- So while O’Reilly is positioning himself here as a unique kind of advertiser (something I also could be accused of doing) he fails to grapple with the importance of his claim. He almost gets it in the next sentence by acknowledging that “few in the ad business ever seemed to reflect on the many ways their profession is shaping and changing the world.” But this is rather understated and the point is lost as he steam rolls on. ↩
The meanings of ‘animal’
Years ago I heard David Suzuki speak in Halifax. He was on book tour for his, then recent publication, The Sacred Balance. He told many stories that night and he spoke for several hours about the fundamental connectedness of life. Meeting and listening to Dr. Suzuki had a lasting impact on me. I recall feeling excited when he made note of the “no animals” signs posted in malls and restaurants.
Have you ever seen that episode of the Flinstone’s where the aliens take Fred and then there’s a duplicate-alien Fred running around, and then when the real Fred comes back, no one believes or understands him? That is my worst nightmare. There is nothing so lonely to me – so utterly alone making – than being misunderstood or disbelieved. In my next life maybe I’ll keep a psychiatrist on staff to help me with this. In this life, I surround myself with friends that share my values. And when I heard David Suzuki taking the time, in a public and well attended lecture, to point to a common artifact of our culture and draw out the significance of the apparent contradiction, I felt totally sane.
In conversational language, we use the word “animal” in a way that excludes humans. Rationally and scientifically, everyone admits that humans are animals. But few people care that the sign says something so wrong. 1
The fact that so few people find these signs to be notable, is partly because so many people, deep down, deep deep down, beneath their scientific and rational brain, actually think we’re not animals. People act as though we’re special. Well, okay, we are kind of special. But it’s more than this. They also act as though we’re outside of, or separate from, or above, or better than, or not fundamentally connected with. And this might explain some of our less than intelligent modes of being in the world. This might be what’s wrong with the sign.
Now let me make this clear: the sign is not the problem. Sure, the sign is part of the problem. It’s at the very least a symptom or a reflection of the problem. But it’s also a state endorsed problem entrencher. It’s a kind of low level, under-the-radar, reinforcement of the idea that humans aren’t animals. The sign is, after all, quite common.
And this is the rub. If you actually talk to the people that act as though humans aren’t animals, they will tell you that humans are animals! Well there’s a fun (apparent) contradiction. The people who behave as if humans aren’t animals, still, intellectually, believe that humans are animals. 2 It’s sufficient here to say, simply, that the gap between what we believe intellectually, and how we actually behave in the world, is a gap that is of the utmost interest to advertising, the art of persuasion and social engineering.
We all have a gap between what we think, and how we act. So those of us who read the sign and don’t really notice what’s wrong with it, can at least be excused for being busy. But what is troubling about this sign, is that it was written by someone. Someone was paid to make this sign. Someone was paid to think about the meaning of the words.
Back in Halifax that night, Suzuki argued that this kind of sign is evidence of the human pretension that there is an invisible divide between humans and the nonhuman natural world. He also argued that this idea is at the root of our current incapacity to live in balance with our Earth. He also speculated that this idea, this human pretension, was a result of our Christian heritage. And still to this day, I find this interesting and compelling. Could it be that the mainstream Christian notions of a soul, a heaven, and a human-centric God lies at the heart of our imbalance with the Earth? It’s possible. 3
It really boils down to this. That all life is inter-related. we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny so that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. – Martin Luther King, 1967
- One could argue perhaps that the sign also excludes insects, and other animals, and so it’s not uniquely misleading in regard to humans. I don’t find this argument compelling, however, since we may have no power over the presence of insects and other small animals: we do have total power over whether humans are permitted on the premise or not. As we say in ethical studies, “ought implies can.” ↩
- Most contemporary, accepted theories about the human brain/mind, muddled as they are, acknowledge a gap between the conscious, thinking person, and the unconscious, subconscious, less-than-fully-conscious acting person. ↩
- I should add that there is a movement of educated Christians that are championing environmental issues, and using scripture to do so. I should also add that there have always been those more complicated, more thoughtful Christians that are as troubled by the other layers of common meaning of “animal.” ↩
Wilderness and the imagination
Jenny Kingsley is a good friend of mine. And she has just fulfilled an important requirement in her Masters of Fine Arts: she just defended her thesis. It’s not a thesis like the sort we often think of when we think of Master’s degrees. It’s a fine arts program in the department of creative writing.
So Jenny wrote a manuscript. Her genre, very broadly, is creative nonfiction. Yup, that’s right. It’s nonfiction, written artfully. Think documentary but executed with enough thoughtfulness, attention to audience and writing talent, that you might be interested in it even if it’s not about your personal weekend hobby.
Jenny has written about the arctic and her journeys there. She is, among other things, an expert paddler. As it stands, it is an unfinished manuscript, although I have no doubt that she will find a publisher. I know this because I had the pleasure of attending her defense and while I haven’t actually read the manuscript, I have listened, carefully, to those that have.
I was delighted to discover that much of the challenge of writing such a book is in telling stories about the wilderness with integrity.1 This has been on my mind lately. Many conservation organizations choose to focus on the charismatic megafauna like the baby seals, grizzly bears and bald eagles, in their public communications. From a public relations stand point I totally get this. Humans that lack biological training, after all, have more compassion, emotional connection and willingness to act on behalf of elk than they do for invisibly small fungus and such.
But at least one concern is that while these public relations strategies make sense on an individual basis, there may be an aggregate affect of these campaigns on the public’s imagination. Over the course of forty years of saving whales, could it be that we’ve constructed a lopsided, incomplete, and too simplistic image of the wilderness we’re trying to protect?2
Now this was not exactly the centre of Jenny’s defense. Well, maybe it was. It was certainly on the minds of the committee members. These academics were, in moments, shall we say, disappointed, by the portrayals of wilderness by some authors and organizations. And it seemed to me that they spent the majority of their time during her defense pressing on Jenny to justify her literary decisions in this regard.
And while Jenny has been very cognizant of these, well, literary obligations, she was broaching them a slightly different angle. It seemed to me that the challenge occurred to Jenny as a challenge to shake readers out of our common and cliche conceptions of arctic wilderness and human experience there in. Maybe my reading of this is clouded by my experiences doing communications work. But as an author (or a brand manager) nothing is scarier than the preconceived ideas that folks have about your topic (or industry or company). People jump to conclusions, they pigeon hole, they try to know you. And then they fit you, and your topic, into a tiny little box. And then they pat your head and say good girl. All of this is tolerable if it’s an acceptable little box. But it’s an absolute nightmare if it’s a box that you really hate.
Of course there is a certain amount of this that is about ego, and about rejecting a mainstream view, and about distrusting the public, and about underestimating your reader, and about dismissing others as ignorant, and about repositioning yourself in the marketplace of ideas, and about dismissing your competition or those that have gone before you. But this is also about trying to see the world as new; about making the world new.
See, in academic jargon, the wilderness is, arguably, a human construction.3 Wilderness is a human concept. Sounds crazy to some. Many would just prefer to say that human stories about the wilderness are human stories, and that human experience of the wilderness is human experience and that human thoughts about the wilderness are human thoughts. Most folks would also prefer to say that the wilderness is still real even if we can only ever think of it, while we’re thinking of it. No big deal. We don’t need a Ph. D. to acknowledge this. And we don’t need a bunch of “quotation marks” everywhere. We don’t need to refer to other people’s ideas of wilderness as “wilderness” and we don’t need to arbitrarily dream up strained cognates of this word (wyld?), and start using them instead. I do, however, like the use of the word “wild.” And, like any philosopher, I love a good distinction.
And, admittedly, it’s easy to forget that our understanding of wilderness, is just an understanding. I’ll conspicuously switch to the first person here, so I don’t offend my reader’s intelligence. Sometimes I forget that the things I think I know are just things I think I know. And sometimes I forget that the thoughts I have about the arctic wilderness are just thoughts. This is a pretty common trap for me. 4
Jenny, luckily, has escaped relatively unscathed by these academic madnesses.5 Her genre actually depends on the concept of truth. And so, nonfiction, even creative nonfiction, actually has to work and give meaning and shape to the slippery concepts of truth, integrity, and representation.6
Plus, she’s a solid story teller, a disciplined writer, a great humourist, and someone willing to earn her moments of emotionally heightened story telling. And she’s willing to talk politics, gender and privilege. Like, she’s willing to actually talk about it. Good work, Jenny.
- This is a challenge of writing a book on wilderness but also of defending it in an academic context. ↩
- Actually, I don’t think so. I think environmentalists have pushed our business culture to deeper and broader understandings of the natural world – but it’s a fun polemic! ↩
- This is not the case for all academics. This is also not the case for Jenny Kingsley. But in the humanities, and in the postmodern milieu that we find ourselves in, this is mostly the case. ↩
- Of course, I also wrote a thesis centred around these debates about knowledge. Nonetheless I’m thankful to the academics, in particular, the post-modern folks that press on me to really grapple with just how much stuff I make up about the world all of the time and just how my modernist sensibilities result in such things as holocausts, colonialism and environmental destruction. Thank you. ↩
- I am constantly surprised by my own academic training to find fault and to make criticism: in keeping with this training, I had one notable impulse of this kind during Jenny’s defense. At one point during her defense, Jenny said that folks that get to work and play in the wilderness are privileged. This is a partial truth, and I’m sure that she was referring to wilderness guides and folks that have the privilege to choose to work in the wild. But as I looked around the room at her defense, I saw a bunch of mostly white, middle class folks who made little outward acknowledgement of those working class folks for whom the wild is actually a place of risk, dreary monotony, and disconnect from community and family. That said, they did speak to the notion of entitlement, and Jenny has included the word “middleclass” into her preface. And since Jenny had to draw lines somewhere, I’m sympathetic with her choices. Nonetheless, the lack of attention to this issue, at her defense, left me wanting more. This is no longer a footnote! And this is probably worth another post, and it’s something I want to return to. I see this as a recurring challenge for environmentalists who want to actually connect with the outdoor-working working class. ↩
- So too, does the genre of fiction, give meaning to the notions of truth and representaion, although, I believe, in less direct ways. ↩
On Peace and Non-Violence
Questions surrounding ends and means, principles and expediencies, strategies and tactics, have been swirling around my mind of late. In my meditations, I remembered that on Christmas Eve I posted the audio of a sermon by Martin Luther King. I took some time over the weekend to listen to it again and transcribe some of the relevant sections. 1 From Fair Trade coffee and a global economy, to the communications strategies of conservationist groups, I find these words relevant and provocative. I’ve included here roughly the first half of his lecture.
On Peace and Non-violence, excerpt
Massey lecture for CBC – part five, Christmas Eve 1967
Peace on Earth. This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We neither have peace within or peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears cower people by day and haunt them by night. our world is sick with war. Everywhere we turn we see it’s ominous possibility. And yet my friends, a Christmas hope for peace and goodwill towards all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian hoper. If we don’t have goodwill towards men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power – wisdom born of experience that tell us that war is obsolete.
There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. But the very destructive power of modern weapons of warfare eliminates even the possibility that war may any longer serve as a negative good – so if we assume that life is worth living, if we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.
So let us this morning explore the conditions for peace. And as we explore these conditions I would like to suggest that modern man really go all out to study the meaning of non-violence, it’s philosophy and it’s strategy.
We have experimented with the meaning of nonviolence in our struggle for racial justice in the United States. But now the time has come for man to experiment with nonviolence in all areas of human conflict. And that means nonviolence on an international scale.
Now let me suggest first, that if we are going to have peace on earth our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and as long as we try the more we’re going to have war in this world. The judgement of God is upon us. And we must either learn to live together as brother or we’re going to perish together as fools. As nations and individuals we are interdependent.
I have mentioned to you before of our visit to india some years ago. it was a marvelous experience. But I say to you this morning that there were those depressing moments. But how can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. more than a million sleep on the sidewalks of Bombay India every night, more than a half a million sleep on the sidewalks of Calcutta every night – they have no houses to go in, they have no beds to sleep in.
As I beheld these conditions something within me cried out, can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned? And an answer came, “oh no!” And I started thinking about the fact that right here in our country we spend millions of dollars everyday to store surplus food and I said to myself, “I know where we can store that food free of charge” – in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia and Africa, latin America and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night.
It really boils down to this. That all life is inter-related. we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny so that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the inter-related structure of reality.
Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning with out being dependency on most of the world. You get up in the morning and go the bathroom and you reach for for the sponge and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. Then you go in the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning. That’s poured in your cup by a South American. Or maybe you want tea – that’s poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having coco for breakfast and that’s poured in your cup by a West African. And then reach over for your toast and that’s given to you at the hands of an english speaking farmer, not to mention the bacon.
Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning you are dependent on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured. It is it’s inter-related quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the inter-related structure of all reality.
Now let me say secondly that if we are to have peace in the world, men and nation must embrace the non-violent affirmation that ends and means must cohere.
One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means – that the means really aren’t important, the important thing is to get to the end you seek. So if you are seeking to develop a just society, the important thing is to get there and the means are really not important – any means that will get your there, they may be violent means, they may be untruthful means, they may be unjust means, to get to a just end. There have been those who have argued this through out history.
But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means because the means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. And ultimately you cannot reach good end through evil means. Because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
It’s one of the strangest things that all of the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old came killing in pursuit of peace. Alexander, Julius Ceaser, Charlemagne and Napolean, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. Did you know that if you read Mein Kampf close enough, Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany, was for peace. The leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, president Johnson is talking eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek.
But one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that in the final analysis, ends and means must cohere because the need is pre-existent in the means. And ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are going to get peace on earth and goodwill towards men, must be the affirmation of the sacredness of all human life…
- Wow, transcription is not straightforward. It would probably be a little easier with a foot pedal controller. All of the decisions around punctuation, paragraph breaks, and emphasis, are my own. ↩
The Olympics versus Tiger Woods
Ages ago I wrote about how the brand of the Olympics is a safer investment than investing in a single athlete or even an entire team. Since I wrote that, a particularly high profile athlete has had a massive brand crash. So it seems like a good time to underline the relative brand security of an entire team of teams.
In order to draw out this comparison, first consider that as of December 10th, reporters and opinion makers were still largely guessing that Tiger Woods wouldn’t lose any sponsors. Well he did. Many of them, I think. Companies became afraid of being associated with Tiger Woods. Wow. Now some didn’t drop him, they just suspended him, I believe. Probably, and I’m totally making this up, some of his sponsors just pretended to drop him and made him sign carefully crafted legal agreements and then forced him to adopt a 9-step process to rebuild his public image.
It is notable that sponsors dropped or suspended Woods in such a short period of time. If you do a site search for “Tiger Woods” on the Calgary Herald website you get a list of 165 articles. Now these articles are listed chronologically. And 12 of those articles occur before they reported on the infamous car crash on November 27th with this article: Woods’ wife rescues golfer from smashed up car. By December 3rd, the Herald published: Sponsors willing to give troubled woods a mulligan. By the 1oth of December the Herald had written: Sponsors begin to shun woods. By February 22nd there had been roughly 150 articles including: Dalai Lama weighs in on Tiger Woods. 1
Some might argue that this is evidence that the Calgary Herald wastes time and resources writing about socially insignificant issues. Some would argue that the energy that the Herald puts towards this issue is evidence that they lack journalistic integrity. But these issues are not mine today. Perhaps I will quickly note, however, that since these articles are about Tiger Woods, they are actually affecting, even constructing, the public opinion about Tiger Woods. They report the news and they make the news all at once. But this is a digression.
The point, and the point of comparison, is that an individual’s billion dollar brand was tarnished so much that in the span of a couple of weeks, his sponsors had to either drop him, suspend him, pretend to drop him, or at the very least, hold tense stakeholder meetings and press conferences. Wow. Now try to imagine what could possibly happen to the Olympics in order for that to happen. It’s almost impossible to imagine. The brand is too diversified. It’s too secure. And partly, I would argue, the public opinion shapers, like the Calgary Herald, have too much invested in the Olympics and the Olympic machine. When the Woods scandal came out, the companies involved with Woods pulled their ads featuring him. But if there was Olympic scandal involving individuals or teams, they would just switch individuals and teams. There is nothing that could happen that could cause the Olympic brand, in toto, to crash that hard, that fast. Even if some athletes became embroiled in some kind of publicity disaster, there would still be thousands of others. And even if some entire teams, or a few countries of teams became publicly toxic, there would still be entire other countries of teams to cushion the brand.
Of course, knowing this, it’s no wonder that the IOC carefully developed, and then enclosed, and then protected that brand within a vast legal framework in order to sell it to the highest bidders. How better to support the cause of amateur sport and international peace & cooperation?
- The number is approximate because some, not many, of the listings in the search were of comments, not complete articles. Actually, the number of articles might be more than that, since I did a search for “tiger woods” not “t. woods” or simply “tiger” or “woods”, etc. ↩