Can, Could, Won't: Managing Risk

Additional risk: eye pokery

At one of the earlier stops in my career, I was fortunate enough to work with a top-notch legal compliance officer. Not only was this person quick and skilled, they were also exceptionally patient and understanding. That was all very necessary, since it was their poor task to proof all of my copy for not just the usual editing maladies, but also for anything that could put our employer in legal jeopardy.

What probably made the work (slightly) more tolerable for them was that I had some background in law in the first place. A political science degree, some secertarial work for law professors and lawyers at various temp jobs, and other roles prior to that gig made me think that I knew some stuff. And, well, I did; just enough to be dangerous. Because my skill set was nothing compared to what this employer wanted to instill, and even less than what many of our clients wanted to enforce. That's why the compliance role was there in the first place.

After a few years of high throughput copywriting and creative direction, I just didn't go down paths that led to issues. Can was just automatically changed to could, claims were softened with puffery or avoided, dates were omitted because the nature of our delivery channel (email) led to way too big of a chance of a bait and switch accusal. Sweepstakes were swapped out for less problematic premiums, and sensitive discussions were taken out of email, putting us light years ahead of, sadly, people who get major political party nominations to be the leader of the Free World. I've pretty much worked in a legally compliant way ever since, and have even served as the de facto legal expert for several employers afterward that just didn't have the budget or interest to have true counsel.

It wasn't as if anything I wanted to try before I got all of that training was irresponsible. None of my clients ever ran into legal issues due to creative before or since, and while some of my stops have run into fireworks for poor practices, none of that was related to practices in my part of the business. But once you get trained to go in a certain direction, that's where you go creatively. Especially since the other directions don't seem to gain you much more than added risk.

Which leads me to the risk that's on the other side of the ledger. While there are plenty of consumer categories that play in arenas where true and correct fear lives in the heart's of your clients, the real shame of it all is that those are the categories that are most ready for innovation. (That's the reason why so many job listings in restrictive fields come with a heavy requirement for relevant experience; it's a safeguard for things that can never, ever happen.) Class action suits are just the end for many a buisness, if not for the obvious legal damages, but also from the turnover they inspire. Doing anything new or novel in these categories takes unusual courage from your client, and presentation skill from the agency.

The trouble with being too aware of risk is that it breeds a degree of sameness and safety to all of your finished work, and in that sameness, you can't innovate, learn from outliers, push the envelope... or feel truly alive in the gig.

Because at the end of the day, there's legal risk in getting out of bed. It's just a little more pronounced and obvious than the risk you get from weak creative.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

3D Dragon Haircut Research

Sorry, Not 3D Enough

I'm going to confess to a prejudice here. When it comes to getting a haircut, I like the barber to have a few years on me. (Yes, I know, doesn't seem to go with the picture or the column's focus, which is marketing and advertising. We'll get there. Trust me.)

I'm sure that there are plenty of people who cut hair for a living who are masterful at the work at an early age. My needs aren't particularly esoteric, either. But once you've gotten used to the fine points of the job (a quality straight razor, a sense of how short I like it without needing to interrogate or break out measuring tape)... well, going with someone new to the field just seems like too much risk for not enough reward.

Besides, you also miss out on a chance to do market research. Which is kind of a big deal, given my profession, and how, if you really want to sell something in the U.S., you better be able to convince the people with money. That'd be (shh!) older people. Moving on.

This last week, I caught a skeptical column in my media feed that downplayed the coming impact of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The columnist pointed out how 3D in television, cable, and even movie theaters has been limited, with cable providers in the UK giving it away for free, rather than going for an upcharge. So with that as a precedent, why get excited about something new that's likely to run into the same resistant consumer inertia?

It's a reasonable point, honestly. Betting on failure is rarely sexy, but breakthroughs are relatively rare, which is why they are so memorable. Gartner calls this stage in the Hype Cycle the "Trough of Disillusionment", and for every tech that powers through to the "Slope of Enlightenment" and eventual "Plateau of Productivity", there are an untold number that fall by the wayside. I also work for a cutting-edge tech company, so I'm biased by nature.

Which led me to the barber's chair this last weekend, and small talk as Ray (good name for a barber, right? One syllable, can't mispronounce it) got to work on my desire to retain less sweat during the summer. He asked me what I do. I gave him my company's quick pitch, and my role in it. Given that I now work in the Bay Area and everyone dreams of knowing about the next great tech IPO, he asked about that aspect of the business. I pivoted, because honestly, it's just not that interesting to me; if the company does great over the next few years, I'm sure a rising tide will raise all boats, but that kind of long-term dreaming can just get really distracting.

Instead, I pivoted back to what could be done with the tech, and what problems it solves. Which didn't interest him as much, because honestly, why should it? He's a barber. But then I drew it out further, and talked about the last mile aspects. How his phone could give him an AR path to the products he wants the next time he's in a warehouse store, rather than have to track down staff. How he could get offers and coupons without having to hunt for them. How the products and services that he wants to buy could be made cheaper, simply because the marketing and advertising expense would go down with increased efficiency. (Also, more darkly, the probable headcount at that location, because tech is frequently shorthand for Employment Winter Is Coming.) How some companies might choose to pass those savings on to the consumer, all while keeping their margins in check, in an attempt to grow their market share.

He got it then. He also got how, once anything like that was on his phone, how quick he'd be to use it all the time, and how soon it would just become table stakes for anyone that sells stuff.

Because that's the difference between 3D, VR and AR. There's no clear problem that 3D tech serves. Take a look at my screen shot image at the start of this column, and you'll see a character from "Game of Thrones" getting so up close and personal to an angry dragon that her hair is blown back.

No one who ever watched that show turned it off because the effects weren't 3D enough.

But plenty of people didn't buy something in a store because they couldn't find it, forgot their coupon, or thought it was too much money in the first place...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Persistence, Biology and Business

Sing It, Fellow Monkey

This week at my gig, I found myself going over presentation decks for a couple of absolutely critical pitch meetings, and obsessing over... how to make the fonts and spacing more consistent, and delving into the extremely fidgety points over exactly how large the bullets should be.

Widow and orphan copy protection, column widths, trying to avoid to start a line with symbols over text, checking back and forth to see what was the more consistent usage, and so on. It's the kind of work that always takes longer than you think it should because any interruption that you get in your life will take precedence over this. At its core, this level of document control is stuff that your brain is just *trying* to be distracted from, no matter how many times you've done it.

There are tricks around editing and QA, of course, which you learn from painful trial and error and experience. First, to remind yourself of just how important the meetings are; that has a way to sharpen the attention. A second is to edit backward, so your mind doesn't fill in blanks that aren't there. A third is read all of the copy out loud, which is an old broadcast journalism tactic that's great for self-editors. I also like to do my rounds at different speeds, so that my double and triple check doesn't feel like I'm just going through the motions.

Sometimes when I'm doing this, my mind wanders as to why the edit is necessary in the first place. Persistence and attention to detail seems like something anyone can do, after all. But keeping a sharp point during what others might consider drudgery is a talent, and I work at a start-up; people are incredibly busy and need to move to other projects with speed. Having the eye to find these points seems like it's in shorter and shorter supply, especially as we get more and more used to machine learning that lulls us into thinking everything is OK..

Which leads the skeptical reader to wonder just how much value is being added through this level of due diligence, and the answer is, well, no one knows. When a prospect doesn't convert to a client, they'll never tell you that they aren't going to sign because of tiny errors that made them lose confidence in your brand. But just because they don't recognize these things at a conscious level doesn't mean that it didn't happen. What we're trying to do at my current gig is hard; it requires our clients to disrupt their current way of doing things, and to challenge assumptions that they've been living with for, in some cases, many years. Having everything just so is almost like, well, insurance.

Believe it or not, such things even have a basis in biology.

I've been fortunate enough to run into a few interviews recently from a Stanford professor, Richard Sapolsky, who will gladly give you way too much to think about. After a lifetime of study, the professor believes that free will is simply the biology that we haven't learned yet, and so much of the stuff that we think is a conscious choice is, well, anything but. Sapolsky cites the mathematical woes faced by prisoners trying to gain parole with hearings just before lunch (dramatically lower than any other time, but never, of course, in front of judges that would admit that they were too cranky before feeding to feel much in the way of mercy). He also talks about the historical culture of blame that society would give to epileptics, people with scurvy, dyslexia, and so on. All of these classes were blamed for their afflictions until the world knew more about what caused them, and then they weren't.

Sapolsky also notes, with the evidence of people answering questions while hooked up to various scanning technology, that we make decisions almost instantaneously, and then spend much of our time and gray matter justifying those decisions. How people of different political persuasions, or those with better backgrounds with parents who had lower amounts of stress, react and manage complex conditions, or more darkly, racial relations and class differences. It's all simultaneously depressing and empowering, as it points to how little we should feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and how seemingly intractable problems might have solutions, if only we can get past the conditions that are causing near hard-wired dismissal.

Which is all very far away from a presentation deck, until we get back to decisions made by individuals in micro-seconds, on near unconscious levels. On criteria that will never be stated out loud.

Persistence is in my biology. It might also be in our audiences.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.