We spent March talking about stories. Stories are repeatable shorthands–ways to make it easy for your audience to understand your idea and share it.
In April, we’re going to shift gears a little bit. We start with this question:
Why are Republicans several times more likely than Democrats to drive Ford 150 pick up trucks? And why are Democrats dramatically more likely to drive Hondas?
The Times reports the story today in detail, but they don’t get at the useful construct.
What we do know is that politics should have nothing to do with what you drive. But it does. The reason it does is that politics affects your worldview. Your worldview is the set of assumptions and biases and instincts you bring whenever you examine something new. And if your worldview doesn’t match a story that a marketer is telling you, you ignore it.
March 20, 2005
People have a funny reaction to the placebo effect. It seems unfair, almost, that a medicine or treatment that “doesn’t really do anything” should work. Take the Respirate blood pressure trainer, pictured at left. All it does is help you become conscious of your breathing. It’s clinically proven to reduce blood pressure.
“You mean,” the skeptics say, “that all the device does is trick you into breathing differently?”
Actually, there’s more to it than that. It works because it helps you focus on your mechanics and takes your mind away from other things that are having the opposite impact on your blood pressure. It works because it allows you tell yourself a story about getting better, about living slower, about breathing.
The placebo effect works, and it’s proof that stories are at least as powerful as the real stuff.
March 19, 2005
My wifi post has certainly annoyed people far smarter than I.
[dead links, sorry]
So, here’s my deal:
1. if you run a bowling alley, my advice stands.
2. if you have data fears, my advice about asking a computer guru to protect your data still stands.
3. if you read the New York Times, my reaction to their fearmongering still stands
But, if you read my original post as saying that without any precautions, you ought to just make all your wifi hubs public, then I withdraw it, with prejudice, immediately.
This is brilliant. The whole site is worth a read.
Skeptico: Five apples.
Five apples
This is what my life is like. I have four apples. At least I’m pretty sure there are only four, I only bought four, I can only see four and there is no reason to suppose I have any more. There could be five I suppose, but I see no reason to think so. The trouble is, everyone else thinks there are five. I ask people for evidence that there are five apples. I ask them what reason they have to suppose there are five, or to show me how they counted five, and these are the replies I get:
1. What do you mean, “count the apples”?
2. Have you studied agriculture? If not, how do you know there aren’t five apples?
3. The majority of people in the world know there are five apples. Are you saying they are all wrong?
4. It’s closed-minded to think there aren’t five apples.
5. There is plenty of evidence to prove that there are five apples, go and look for it, I’m not counting them for you.
6. Apples can’t be “counted” by science, so there are five apples.
7. Can you prove there isn’t a fifth apple somewhere?
8. Scientists counted only three apples in the past and now they admit there are four, so there are five now.
9. The ancient Chinese knew there were five apples; modern science still has not yet caught up.
10. They laughed at Galileo when he said there were five bananas, and he was right, so there are five apples.
11. Science can’t yet see all the apples. You can’t see radio waves, but they existed before we developed ways to measure them, so why can’t there be a fifth invisible apple now that we just haven’t developed the technology to see?
12. Quantum mechanics proves there are five apples.
13. I just know the fifth apple is there.
14. It’s a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of the fifth apple.
15. You’re not keeping up with the latest research. It has now been proven that there are five apples (although I can’t actually remember where this research is written up).
Here’s the thing: I actually have four apples and an orange. These people are so busy making up stories about a fifth apple, they’ll never realize the orange even exists.
This one has been a long time gestating, but today’s New York Times completely pushed me over the edge (Link: The New York Times > Technology > Growth of Wireless Internet Opens New Path for Thieves.)
As I make my travels through the Northeast, I’m stunned by how many wifi networks my Mac encounters–and how many of them are password protected. Waiting in the doctor’s office, for example, I find five networks. And every one of them is closed.
Why on earth would someone go to the trouble to do this?
I mean, I’m sitting at an ad agency or a cosmetic firm and their network is closed. I’m standing outside of an office building and there are 18 networks and all of them are closed. All of them!
It’s like having a television on and intentionally putting up blinders so that certain people can’t watch it. Worse, it’s like making an apple pie and putting nose plugs on people who would like to smell it! (I like pie, not crazy about TV).
Having the wifi network in your lobby or your waiting room or in the street under your window open to guests will not compromise the security of your files. You need a different sort of security for that. And it won’t degrade your net performance much either (hey, if it does, you can always turn the password on again, cursing me out as you do). [NB I’m not a computer security expert, and I’m not making a statement about the risk to your data. What I am saying is that if you’re dealing in stuff that’s super confidential–like medical records or which Congressman is breaking which law–then you’ve got no business using a wifi network anyway.]
And yet, here comes the influential Times with an urgent warning that all sorts of pedophiles, car bombers–hey, even people who do graffiti or spit on the street–are using this major hole in our security networks to do bad deeds. Since the article focuses on the dreaded "data thieves" it’s easy to assume that they’re stealing data from the networks. They’re not. They’re just hiding from the FBI. But if everyone jumps up and down and starts closing their networks, these data thieves will just take one of their stolen credit cards and go to Starbucks!
There were no razor blades in apples on Halloween when we were growing up. Did you know that? Really. They made it up. Someone should tell the Times and its readers that if you want to be anonymous on the Net, you can go to Kinko’s or go to Bryant Park or the library. It’s certainly not necessary to scare the nation into closing their wifi hot spots.
Have you ever eaten ostrich?
I missed my chance when I gave up poultry as the last land animal on my eating list.
My guess is that you haven’t had a lot either.
It turns out that there was a huge bubble in ostrich farming (yes, they have bubbles off the internet, too). Once a few clever promoters (Ostriches On Line – Chad.) realized that the world would go crazy about ostrich meat (and don’t forget the eggs) there was money to be made selling breeding ostriches.
So, you bought two ostriches and a bunch of land, and soon you have some baby ostriches. You sold those ostriches for $20,000 or more each–to other people who wanted to breed ostriches. Do this for a few generations and pretty soon there would be plenty of ostrich meat available (and the breeders at the top of the pyramid would be rich indeed).
You can guess the punchline. The breeders sold their ostriches to other breeders, and soon there were plenty of ostriches but in the end, restaurants didn’t want to sell the stuff because people didn’t really want to eat it.
The blogads survey (see below) says that more than 20% of blog readers are also blog writers. Imagine a world where 20% of the people who read novels, wrote novels. Hope we’re not breeding ostriches. We’re so busy writing that maybe, just maybe, nobody who shows up is going to actually spend the time to read! As a parting shot, here’s a quick blurb from the ostrich site:
The ostrich industry is the fastest growing agricultural business in the world. With the vast array and almost unlimited supply of products and services that we have available, your opportunities to resell these products has never been better.
Joi Ito points me to the newest Blogads reader survey. The upshot?
Blog readers have a one in five chance of having their own blog (ostrich farming alert!). They read a ton of high end magazines and are well educated. They have very very high household incomes. They don’t hesitate to sign petitions, write letters or otherwise share their opinions. They read about five blogs a day. They buy almost nothing online. A bunch are students, but even more have influential jobs. And they don’t use an RSS reader
Blogads: reader survey for blog advertising..
Ten or twelve years ago, I used to buy stuff from Paper Direct. They sell preprinted sheets that you run through your laser printer to make brochures and business cards and such.
In those days, when laser printers were still a little rare (and only printed in black toner) this was a neat way to make a sole proprietorship seem a little more professional.
I got their catalog in the mail today and browsed through it. I was stunned. The stuff they sell is exactly the same. The same pastel colors, boring designs, slightly cheesy look and very cheesy fonts in the examples. The market has changed radically but the products haven’t changed a bit.
Today you can print astonishing color on a $200 printer. You can do professional short run printing on an Indigo machine. But Paper Direct is still selling design from the 1980s. It sort of screams, "home office!"
My bet? I think that every time they try to introduce something more hip or effective than "PC1606 Tropical Fish Postcards", their audience doesn’t buy any. As a result, they slavishly serve their existing audience. Which is no doubt profitable, but how can they grow?
The organizations that have the most impact and grow the quickest are those that frequently alienate their existing customer base.
Hundreds of designed printable border papers, brochures, certificates at PaperDirect..
March 18, 2005
Let’s say you run an airline with a horrible cost structure and you’re facing bankruptcy on an almost daily basis.
Why on earth would you waste money on marketing like this?
Do the folks at American believe that some harried New Yorker is going to choose to fly to Tokyo on the spur of the moment for sushi and because American is the brand that prompted them, fly there on American?
Where’s the ROI?
I just got back from the New York International Auto Show. They’ve scaled way back on the buxom blondes, but there’s still plenty of lying going on.
A car, after all, is an extremely expensive device with a fair amount of utility. But that’s not what they sell at the show. The going price for utility is $15,000 or maybe $20,000. Figure $25,000 if you want a Prius. What they sell at the show are cars that cost many times that, or cars (like the one being hawked at left) that are totally cool but not particularly useful.
Unless you define “useful” to mean, “useful at making me feel sexy and young and filled with energy.” Because that’s what they’re selling and that’s what we’re buying. The fact that it can also get us somewhere is slightly irrelevant.
