Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

ZEITOUN.

"How could this happen in America?" reads the inside front jacket of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.

It's probably a question a lot of Americans ask themselves after reading the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American home renovation contractor whose life -- and the life of his family -- will be forever scarred by the events following Hurricane Katrina, when this kind-hearted man was arrested, humiliated, brutalized and accused of being a terrorist.

"How could this happen in America?" may be a question a lot of Americans ask, but it's the wrong question or maybe it depends on what the definition of "this" is. Because the truth is this has happened before in America -- to the Japanese and blacks and Native Americans. It's happened to the Tutsis in Rwanda, to the Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, to the Hmong in Laos, to the Jews in Germany and Poland and to the Armenians in Turkey. It's happened everywhere one group of people, gripped by fear and hatred and ignorance, too easily whipped into a rabid frenzy by reckless political and religious leaders, commits crimes against innocent human beings.

Americans like to believe their country is exceptional. In many wonderful ways it is. But the trouble with believing you're exceptional is that sometimes you forget you're fallible. And that's too often when people get hurt.

Zeitoun should be read in that light -- as a cautionary tale of what happens when people forget to be human. But it's also a reminder that, even when dragged to hell and back, some amazing people like Abdulrahman Zeitoun fiercely refuse to allow their humanity to be stolen from them.

IT AIN'T SWEET: 140 WORDS ON SALT.

It's hard dating just anyone after you've been with "the one." I'm having that kind of problem after Inception and it's unlikely any movie will impress me much until some time has passed.

Salt did not help.

Angelina Jolie has proven in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Wanted that she can do a bang-up job in the action adventure genre. But no one is good enough to save a movie from plot holes you can drive a truck through -- literally.

It's one thing to suspend disbelief. It's another to ignore a twist whose only excuse is to launch a 15-minute chase scene. Or one, near the end, I saw coming before my bar-mitzvah. (I kid.)

I mean, you don't cast the guy from Manchurian Candidate and not expect the audience to go there, do you?

ALRIGHT VS ALL RIGHT OR YOU LEARN A NEW THING (OR TWO) EVERY DAY.

Recently, after watching the movie The Kids Are All Right, my friend Moe and I both wondered out loud why "all right" in the title wasn't spelled "alright" since we both assumed the latter was the way to go. (I've always thought "all right" was synonymous with "all correct" and "alright" was another word for "safe" or "unharmed.")

Despite being a voracious reader, I was in my teens before I realized "alot" was spelled "a lot." I guess it's taken me 40 years to realize "alright" is not all right either.

At least, according to this blog and this one or even here. (Personally, I think if "alright" has become as widespread as it is, it's now alright to use and I'll, perhaps a little guiltily, continue doing so.)

That second blog also suggests that the prevalence of "alright" may have something to do with The Who's 1965 song "The Kids Are Alright," which I assume now is where the name of the movie came from.

Who knew?

MAD MEN VS GEEKS.

 

No one dreams about working in direct marketing. Which is why Mad Men is based on a 1960s Madison Avenue mass marketing agency like Ogilvy, not on Wunderman.

Not that there's anything wrong with that... Like the jocks in high school, the flashy mass guys have always gotten the star treatment, while the number-crunching, often more strategic direct guys have always been mocked as geeks. But just as one discovers at the 25-year high school reunion that the jock is now bald and overweight and that the prom queen married the geek who started his own computer company, direct marketing may yet have the last laugh.

Seth Godin explains the differences between these two dominant forms of advertising brilliantly on his blog:

"A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and tv ads and more more more and then... bam... critical mass is reached and success occurs...

The direct marketer, on the other hand, must get it right in the small. That pitch letter can be tested on 100 houses and if it gets a 2% response rate, then it can be mailed to 100,000 houses with confidence...

Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. It's far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it's the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work."

"A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and tv ads and more more more and then... bam... critical mass is reached and success occurs...

The direct marketer, on the other hand, must get it right in the small. That pitch letter can be tested on 100 houses and if it gets a 2% response rate, then it can be mailed to 100,000 houses with confidence...

Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. It's far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it's the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work."

THE HALF-GOVERNOR'S ENGLISH.

One of the English language's greatest strengths is its ability to evolve -- fast. Consider newly minted words or new definitions for old words that, like the Borg, we have so completely assimilated into our everyday vocabulary: ringtone and blog and tweet and google and crackberry and gaydar and, maybe, refudiate.

When I read Sarah Palin's tweet last week about building a mosque near Ground Zero, I missed her misuse of the word "refudiate." Or rather, I paused, read it again, thought something was a bit off -- the way people in horror movies miss those wall portraits with moving eyes -- and kept reading.

It was only later, when I read some tweets poking fun at her, that I realized what I had missed.

We use and spell words the way we do because, as English speakers, we generally have an unspoken agreement to do so. I still think "color" looks strange without a "u" even though I've chosen to use US spelling in this blog and I'm sure Americans think "colour" is vaguely un-American, which it is. Neither is really wrong, just simply the result of mostly random convention.

Context plays a role too. It irks me to see people misspell "you're" (contraction of "you are") as "your" in print or in an email but I've come to accept it in text messages and tweets, where character counts often matter.

Which brings me to "refudiate." As much as I dislike Palin and her politics, it's kind of a cool word. It certainly beats George Bush's "misunderestimate" and Dan Quayle's "potatoe."

Roy Peter Clark, founding director of the National Writer's Workshop, defends the newly minted Palinism:

"I'm for more fun and more color in political speech, including the occasional swing and miss that turns into a home run. The alternative is all script and spin, all euphemism and disclaimer, all flap and doodle, signifying nothing."

Do I agree? You betcha.

TELLING IT VS. SELLING IT OR WHY CANADIAN NEWS ISN'T SEXY.

My friend Rob and I were chatting today about TV news and I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that I hardly watch Canadian news anymore. I usually wake up to CFRB radio in the morning (the CBC puts me back to sleep) to keep up with what's going on in Toronto and across the country but for the rest of the day and evening, when I'm watching news, I'm usually tuned into CNN and MSNBC. (Fox News isn't, for the most part, news.)

In part, it's because I've always been fascinated with politics south of the border (and, since Pierre Trudeau, mostly bored with Canadian politics). Even in elementary school, I could recite the names of all the US states, capitals and presidents before I could do the same for our Canadian counterparts. Don't get me wrong. I love Canada and, in many ways -- from multiculturalism to publicly funded elections to universal healthcare -- I think we've done a better job of giving our citizens a better, more equitable quality of life than our cousins to the south. But American 'stuff' has just always seemed cooler, shinier, sexier. Including how they do the news.

There are lots of things US TV news does poorly -- milking stories long after they should be put to rest and not doing a very good job of educating and explaining news from far-off places, to name but two. (Canadian journalists seem to understand international stories better than their US counterparts, which may be one reason so many Canadians are hired by American news organizations.) But mostly Americans do a better job of making what they report more compelling.

Many in Canadian media circles might disdainfully call what I'm describing the Hollywoodization of news. And taken to the extreme, it might very well be.

But Obi Wolf Kenobi aside, I think news organizations here could learn a thing or two about how they do it state-side. Canadian media types still think you can simply tell the news. Americans have learned -- masterfully in many cases -- how to sell it.

What do you think?

SETH GODIN AND THE ART OF SEDUCTION.

In light of my post from yesterday, words of wisdom from Seth Godin that all marketers -- and politicians -- ought to consider.

"It's a lot easier to seduce someone who's worldview and attitude makes them open to it. If you want to be successful at whatever form of seduction you have in mind, seek out the right people... And yet as marketers we seem to want to treat everyone the same, want to please everyone, want to come up with the magic words that open every heart."

More here.

KAWASAKI ON WHY TOO MUCH MONEY IS WORSE THAN TOO LITTLE.

Great insights from Guy Kawasaki on American Express OPEN Forum about entrepreneurship and the way big business works -- or doesn't. Some of my favorites:

"Companies create projections that use the money that they have. The availability of money makes them think of ways to spend it, so there’s less emphasis on doing the right things the right way."

"Companies divide the amount of money that they have by their monthly expenses. This figure is a company’s “runway” or the number of months that it can survive. There are three problems with this calculation: first, expenses always rise, so the number of months decreases. Second, products are always late, so that any revenue that company counted on to extend the runway don’t materialize. Third, just because a company has the money doesn’t mean that investors won’t ask for it back."

"Proven people are over-rated. Oh, their resumes are great, and they look great on your website, but they didn’t cause the success of their former companies. They just happened to be there when these organizations succeeded."

SHIRLEY SHERROD AND THE RIGHT-WING CONNING OF AMERICA.

Oh oh, it's another political moment...

The mainstream American media (in other words, not Fox News) is in a tizzy this week about the Shirley Sherrod story.

Sherrod is a black US Department of Agriculture employee who was accused by a right-wing blog site, by way of a grossly edited videotape, of giving a racist speech earlier this year to the NAACP. Fox News -- purveyor of such propaganda hits as "ACORN is corrupt," "Tea Partiers speak for mainstream Americans," "Barack Obama was born in some icky African country" and "Barack Obama is a Nazi/Communist/socialist/Anti-Christ" -- picked up the story without checking its accuracy and, as they say, the "news" quickly went viral.

Yesterday CNN ably exposed the made-up story, interviewing, among others, white southern farmers who were personally helped by this vicious honky-hating Black Panther-loving hussy.

Today the mainstream media is wringing its hands with pundits everywhere asking one another how the right wing managed to hoodwink them. Their conclusion: they really should have checked the facts a little more carefully (i.e., at all) before jumping on the story like a fat kid on an M&M -- just to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.

To which I have two words for them all: Iraq War.

This has happened before, folks. Most notably back in 2003, when George Bush, Darth Vader, Condoleeza Rice and friends were all busy scaring Americans with Iraqi WMD bogey men, some like former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter were questioning the right's cooked up stories. But so-called left-wing (reality-based) news organizations were so frightened of being called un-American traitors -- as they are now -- that they refused to listen.

This sort of thing will only end when reputable media like CNN and The New York Times stop worrying about what the radical right is calling them and simply continue doing the job we count on them to do: reporting the news in a manner that's (really) fair and balanced.

THE END OF M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: 140 WORDS ON PREDATORS

As I was saying in my last post about Inception, sometimes Hollywood gets it right -- and sometimes it doesn't.

And while Predators certainly confirmed my belief that lazy studios love to regurgitate the same garbage over and over again if it'll make them some money (though Robert Rodriguez's version did have redeeming qualities), the most telling moment in the theatre was not while the movie was running but just before, during the trailers -- specifically this one:

The embedded Youtube title makes it impossible to hide the filmmaker but the fact that when M. Night Shyamalan's name appeared at 2:08, theatergoers let out a collective groan, should tell the purveyors of schlock that many of us have been sucked into stupidity one too many times.

Then again, I paid $12 to see Predator XXVII, so maybe it's hopeless.