It’s autumn in North America, and that means that homeowners and contractors are busy removing suburban leaves. It’s almost impossible to avoid the deafening roar of gas-powered leaf blowers.
Here’s what we know, without doubt:
Using a leaf blower is bad for the hearing and respiration of the user, often a low-paid worker with no real options.
They’re annoyingly loud, and can be heard from blocks away.
There are much quieter, safer and cleaner alternatives, easily available. In the long run, they’re also cheaper.
We also know that:
In one hour, a gas-powered leaf blower will emit as much carbon dioxide equivalent as driving a typical internal combustion engine car 3,000 miles. (That’s not a typo). The details are here.
The competitive nature of commodity garden care pushes gardeners to choose the fastest, cheapest option, regardless of the costs to the workers, the neighborhood or the climate.
The technology to replace gas leaf blowers is proven, inexpensive and readily available. And yet… They’re still here. And the reason is that they’re convenient, a sunk cost and a short-term profit hack.
The solution, if we’re serious, is to ban gas leaf blowers. The replacements will pay for themselves in a few weeks. Once the competitive playing field is re-set, gardeners will come out ahead. Employee well-being will increase, and the leaves will still get blown.
So what’s the problem?
We’re not serious enough about making change happen. If we cared enough to get two dozen friends and neighbors to show up at the village hall, the regulations could be changed in a few meetings.
_______ is [Always/Never] the solution to a problem.
In my experience, “always” and “never” are rarely useful ways to approach a problem. “Sometimes” requires nuance and insight and discovery. It might not be the lazy response, but if you’ve got a problem, it might be worth thinking about how to solve it.
Digital advertising has turned millions of people and organizations into not just the target of ads, but the advertisers as well.
But it doesn’t easily answer the obvious question: Did that ad work?
Long before digital ads were invented, my late friend Lester Wunderman coined the term “Direct Marketing.” This is measured, active advertising. Spend $10 on an ad and you’ll know by tomorrow if you made $20 or lost five.
Lester helped invent the American Express card and grew the Columbia Record Club, among other direct marketing heroics. The secret is simple: Measure an ad, and if it ‘works’, do it more.
And so, Google. Google makes billions of dollars selling direct marketing to organizations that aren’t being particularly brave, insightful or clever. They’re simply testing, measuring and repeating.
On the other hand, ads on podcasts or Twitter almost never measure well. They rarely seem to ‘work’ in the P&L sense, because they’re brand ads, not direct ads.
The purpose of a brand ad is to deliver a hard-to-measure but important feeling to the potential consumer. The brand ad tells a story, builds trust and most of all, helps a customer decide that this brand makes them feel good enough (hard to define) that they’ll pay extra for it.
If you try to measure brand ads, like quarks and other quantum phenomena, the benefits disappear. The very things you would do to make them measure better cause them to be pretty lousy brand ads.
Running brand ads in a medium that is counter to what the brand is trying to accomplish makes very little sense, regardless of how much it costs. On the other hand, sponsoring interactions that build trust and connection is hard to overpay for.
All a long way of saying that advertisers in the digital space are finally spending more time and energy thinking about the places they’re advertising and wondering about whether they’re simply making more noise or actually making a difference.
While it’s tempting to view our days as an amusement park with unlimited rides, that’s not really true. It might not maximize our impact or enjoyment either.
In fact, we each have a limited number of tickets to trade in. Limited time, limited opportunities, limited money and other resources.
Our standards aren’t set in stone. They change over time, often based on the situation we’re in.
This explains how cults or extreme views occur. Not all at once, but bit by bit.
Until one day, people wake up and are shocked to discover that they’re advocating for (or doing something) that is clearly wrong. It didn’t make them uncomfortable yesterday, but the reality of what’s being done is so different from the person we’d like to be that a break occurs.
The question is: If no one else was doing this, arguing for it, insisting on it–would we? Is it something you felt strongly about before the tribe and its leader took it on?
We can avoid this by staying away from institutions that profit from pushing participants further than they’d want to go on their own. If the heroes are extremists (in any sense of that word) don’t be surprised if participants are pushed to be so as well. And even more powerfully, we can remind ourselves of our first principles, about what matters more than winning or being popular.
Standing for something is a good way to avoid having someone stand on you.
Thirty years ago this month, I created 18 Pine Street, a series of young adult novels with bestselling author Walter Dean Myers. He was a brilliant creator and a delightful partner. The kids who bought those books are having kids of their own now, and perhaps some of the books’ ideas around identity, agency and inclusion made a difference along the way.
And twenty years ago, I produced and published Waiting for Godiva on SACD. It’s now on Spotify. It sounds even better than I remember. Beth and Michael made something magical on that single day we spent recording.
When we’re in the middle of a project, it’s easy to imagine that it’s not going to be around for decades. But every project opens doors, for you and for the people you build it for. It doesn’t matter if it works for everyone, if it’s a worldwide bestseller or on the front page.
Fair is often in the eye of the beholder. What you think is fair might depend on where you are in the transaction. Losers tend to think an outcome is more unfair than winners do.
But square?
The thing about square is that everyone can agree on that part.
If something is fair and square, then the losers can concur with the winners, because square isn’t relative.
The secret is simple: if the calculations look the same regardless of what you’re rooting for, then you’ve found the method. The outcome should be unrelated to the method.
November 3, 2022
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