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

THE 80S RETURN: 140 WORDS ON TRON LEGACY.

A great artist or designer can add the subtlest detail to clothing, a room, a movie, prompting certain nostalgic associations and transforming how we perceive, respond to and feel about his creation. It can be a color, a smell or, of course, music.

Except for the olfactory, moviemakers can do this very well. Or badly.

Take TRON: Legacy. Though I never saw the original, I remember how the early 1980s looked and sounded in my mind's eye and ear. Evidently others do too. Because while I'm sitting in a theatre watching a film unmistakeably made in 2010, it still feels like 1982. Is it the Daft Punk soundtrack? Is it the makeup and costumes reminiscent of what we thought the future would look like back then? Is it just the trace of cheesy early 80s writing?

Whatever it was and however it was done, it was masterful.

 

THE NEW GOOGLE PROCRASTINATOR -- I MEAN, VIEWER.

If you're an information addict like me, you have a tendency to pull out your iPhone and google faster than someone can ask "when was the last time a lunar eclipse coincided with the winter solstice?" (1638.)

Now you have a new tool at your nerdy disposal. It's called the Google Ngram Viewer and it allows anyone to chart mentions of any term in any book in the last 500 years that Google has digitized -- that's 5.2 million books and 500 billion words.

So, say you want to see the rise of the terms Facebook and Twitter in recent years:

Or maybe you want to see the rise and fall of US presidents -- notice how Bush rises around 1992 (Bush 41) and then again eight years later (Bush 43, feh). And how Kennedy mentions tower them all.

The possibilities are endless. And now so is my ability to procrastinate. Sigh.

AND BONUSES FOR ALL.

I'm a meritocrat. I believe that if you work your ass off and the guy next to you doesn't, you ought to get paid more than he does and, when the time comes, you ought to be promoted or rewarded with a bigger raise. And, I believe, if you're more experienced than the next guy, you ought to make more money than he does too.

Most people, it seems to me -- unless you're a communist (not that there's anything wrong with that!) -- would find these two propositions fair.

Here's another proposition that most probably find fair: when a business is in dire straits, employees are laid off or asked to take a pay freeze so that the company remains viable for the majority who continue to work there.

A question arises, however, about what to do when a business as a whole does particularly well. When it does -- and it's a publicly traded company -- its success results in a higher stock price for shareholders and/or some generated profits being distributed to them as dividends. All of which also strikes me as fair. But there's another big chunk of change that hasn't been mentioned yet -- bonuses -- that in many companies doesn't end up being distributed in a fair or equitable fashion. With some exceptions, bonuses end up in the pockets of managers and executives for little other reason than that those decision makers have convinced themselves that they deserve that money more than the peons who work for them.

This has always struck me as outrageously unfair. As I mentioned above, if you work harder or longer, you deserve to make more money -- but that, I think, is recognized through higher salaries. A bonus pool of money exists because, in a given year, everyone in a company -- and I mean everyone from the president to managers to sales associates to receptionists to people who clean the company's toilets when the rest of us are asleep -- worked to make that business a success, and everyone deserves a piece of that pie.

I would even go so far as to say that if I'm a sales associate making $25,000 a year and you're a manager making $100,000, that your bonus ought to be four times mine. But to say that the chump making 25K gets nothing at all is simply a money grab by people with power taking advantage of those without it.

This basic inequity common in many if not most large organizations bothers me for another reason, and it ladders back to that third proposition I mentioned earlier: when a company is in dire straits, everyone is expected to do his part, to sacrifice for the greater good. If that's the case, then the opposite ought to be as well. In other words, if everyone from the president to the cleaning staff is asked to sacrifice when times are tough, shouldn't everyone share during prosperous times? It too rarely happens and it ought to.

So this holiday season, if your company finally pulled itself out of the recession and ended the year in the black -- thanks to the entire team -- it might be time to ask the president who signed your touching 12¢ thank you card whether he plans on sharing some of his 5-, 6- or 7-figure bonus check.

Granted that might take some mighty big Christmas ornaments but, hey, even Norma Rae had to start somewhere.

Just sayin'.

WHAT DOES YOUR WEB DESIGN SAY ABOUT YOU?

If you've ever wondered what the "right" font or color is to use on a website, here are some stats and graphics that should clear up some things -- or not.

Among the most interesting tidbits:

• Arial is unimaginative
• 60% of website use a sans-serif font for headlines -- mostly Arial, Verdana, Lucida Grande and Helvetica
• 13 is the most common point size for body copy
• Orange generates the strongest love/hate reaction of any color, which I know from recent experience -- I love it however one of my clients made a point of telling me how much she hates it and didn't want to see it in our designs
• Blue is the overwhelming favorite color.

TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE: PRIVATES AND PUBLICS.

I have a habit of using some phrases over and over again. If you've been paying attention to my posts, you'll notice a lot of "The truth is." If you know me in person, you may have noted I tend to start sentences with "it's funny but..." even when it may not be.

Lately, I've noticed I tend to try to lump folks into one of two categories -- "There are two kinds of people," I say, knowing full well there are infinitely more than that. What I usually mean is, on a particular topic or philosophy or way of thinking or living, people are usually an A-type or B-type. Granted -- I almost wrote "the truth is" -- that's probably an oversimplification but, at least for me, it helps frame issues and opinions and where I stand.

All of which is to say that I'm going to try a new little semi-regular feature here at the Levity blog, uber-creatively named: Two Kinds of People.

So without further ado...

There are two kinds of people: Privates and Publics.

Privates are, not surprisingly, not very public. They're guarded about information and its use. While they've gotten used to their name and phone number appearing in a phone book, the idea of their name or photo appearing on a genealogy site or Facebook makes them uneasy.  They don't like answering census forms and will usually shun a reporter on the street who asks them their opinion. They may be friendly or personable on the surface, but scratch a bit and you very quickly reveal a protective cover. Privates release information on a need-to-know basis because information is power and the more they can conserve, the more powerful and secure they feel.

Publics are people whose lives are open books. They're comfortable telling their friends how much they make for a living and how old they are. They have no qualms telling people they're gay or Star Trek nerds or that their child is autistic. They're on Facebook where they feel a rush from sharing their lives with people they know, including photos and videos of their kids. They may blog or tweet and secretly love answering questions from pollsters who call at dinner time. While they understand they have a right to privacy, they choose for the most part to believe the more you know about someone, the better -- that information isn't simply power, it's freedom.

We're all likely a little of these two kinds of people, but I'm curious: which do you most identify with -- and (come on Privates) why? Or, if you prefer, if Private is 0 and Public is 10, where do you fall on the scale?

A REFRESHING WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD.

Remember in the 1980s when every logo somehow looked like AT&T's? Or today, how everyone seems to believe the key to success is replicating Apple or Twitter or Starbucks. This sort of me-too-ism is rampant in marketing because it's (evidently) much less risky to plagiarize someone else's brilliant idea than to invest the time and resources to come up with one that's uniquely your own.

The truth however, as it often is, lies somewhere in the middle. As Seth Godin explains here, standing out with whatever you're selling (even if you're selling you) requires just the right balance of familiar and offbeat -- or what he calls the "refreshing whack on the side of the head that causes attention to be paid."

As I complete this post, I realize there's some irony in using a brilliant idea in someone else's blog post to write my own. My bad.

IS THE END OF FACEBOOK AND TWITTER NIGH?

In a recent post, I quoted Malcolm Gladwell on the perils of success and hubris:

"The reason why the history of capitalism [or politics or religion or technology] is the history of successes failing is because ... at a certain point, success leads to a set of responses that are pathological -- overconfidence being one of them."

This fascinating post over at socialmediatoday.com on creative destruction outlines why two of today's social media success stories, Facebook and Twitter, might -- like their predecessors MySpace and AOL -- be destined for failure.

"Over time they all fell short of user expectations in various ways, allowing alternative value propositions, service models, and providers to gain a foothold and eventually surpass them."

SETH REBLOG: MESSAGING CLUTTER.

Seth Godin, this morning, takes on a topic close to my marketing heart: clutter. Specifically, he attacks digital clutter -- more links, more banners, more offers, more messages -- but really this is a multimedia scourge, both on- and offline.

Usually, because marketers are too afraid to make a mistake or too clueless about who they're targeting, they make the decision to cover all conceivable bases and say as much as possible. It ends up looking like a dog's breakfast and sounding incomprehensible.

If you need proof of this sort of messaging clutter, simply take a look at the debate earlier this year for and against universal healthcare in the US. Republicans, to their credit, know how to get their message across: short, simple propositions that elicit an emotional response (usually fear) -- think absurd but effective "death panels." Democrats, bless their hearts, have still not figured this out, or they refuse to learn their lesson. They clutter the airwaves with detailed, logical messaging that makes a connection with rational and educated folks (maybe) but not with the bulk of those they need to convince. The result: people buy the GOP's tripe and the Dems' steak rots on the shelves.

Now to Seth:

Digital media expands. It's not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it's free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn't work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it's hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: INSPIRATION IS NONSENSE.

I guess I've been learning this more and more but it sure is nice to see someone as talented as Salman Rushdie speak it: Writing is rarely about inspiration, it's about hard work and concentration.

Now, ah, back to that novel I haven't been writing...