Canuckflack

I’m always a sucker for the synthesis of Malcolm Gladwell. This week, he reviews Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” for The New Yorker. An excerpt:

“… But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people.

Today, it’s a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island’s forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. “I have often asked myself, ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?’” Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of “Collapse.”

Those trees were felled by rational actors—who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization.

The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

This doesn’t mean that acts of God don’t play a role. It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn’t get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites.”

Ian Carey’s written a funny list of alternatives to “opening a can o’ whupass” for McSweeney’s.

Shopping at the Polo Outlet the other day, I noticed one of the little design decisions that help distinguish a high-end, high value store from the local haberdashery (or the local Bay): each changeroom had a little wall-mounted bin to hold those irritating dozens of dressmaker’s pins that come with every man’s shirt.

While I’m on the topic of men’s clothing: take a look at this analysis of regional targeting in early catalogs from the T. Eaton Company, driven into bankruptcy during the 1990s because it was unable to, ironically, identify and focus in on its most profitable customers as its competitors specialized.

A sample:

“Winnipeg consistently showed garments on larger, full-figured women. The same styles often looked different because of the models used. For example, an apron shown in Toronto on a slim, fashionable model, was shown on an overweight, matronly-looking woman in Winnipeg. At the same time, Toronto tended to be more diplomatic, using the phrases “larger sizes” or “extra size,” whereas Winnipeg referred to “stout women.” In 1919, Winnipeg carried ten dresses recommended for stout figures, compared to only three in Toronto.” (from the
Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Before E-Commerce exhibition)

Well … as David St. Hubbins once sang:

“Big bottom
Big bottom
Talk about mudflaps
My gal’s got ‘em
Big bottom, drive me out of my mind
How can I leave this behind?”(sound file here)

Did you know it’s summer in Australia? I’m awfully aware of that fact, staring out my window at 8 inches of snow and a balmy -9 degrees celcius.

icon Communications is the AOR for Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa. As you probably know, Sharman is being chased through the Australian court system, and icon is being dragged along behind it.

The Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) has subpoenaed every document, note, scribbling and text message involved in their business relationship, and is using this material in its case against Sharman.

Interestingly, the ARIA is also arguing that icon is materially interested in the outcome of the court case, and is therefore violating the code of ethics for the Public Relations Institute of Australia by continuing to provide media relations advice and services to Sharman.

“I question their independence as a PR agency,” says ARIA media spokesman for the case, Michael Speck. “They need their client to win the copyright case to justify their involvement in a promotional campaign, which is now a central plank in our case. They should disclose that involvement to journalists.”

There are more details in The Australian.

Of course, in a just world icon communications would instead be scorned and mocked for their flash-dependent website.

Addendum: apparently, my last comment only applies to a company operating as icon communications in Australia - and not related to the company advising Sharman. Still, WAAAY too much flash on their site.

The actual icon can be found here.

Over the Christmas season, obviously, I will be blogging less. Please be patient, and I value your readership.

Happy Holidays!

Power. Money. Influence over the selection of Sun girls. A role in a Spice Girls movie. Do you want it all? Do you want to be … Max Clifford? (Guardian, r.r.)

Of course, being an effective public relations practitioner requires expertise in a number of areas, like direct marketing. Here’s some advice from Lester Wunderman.

How can you take a loved family member from soaring excitement to soul-crushing pain and agony - in the space of ten minutes - on Christmas morning?

Quite easily, actually. The first step is to give them an Ipod. The second step is to preload the Ipod with the worst playlist imaginable. Try using these tips from the SaltwaterPizza blog:

- Mix incompatible genres
- Variety, variety, variety
- Include “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus
- Be careful about groups with cult followings
- One word: Nickelback
- Use controversy to your advantage
- Don’t forget Disney!
- Corporate America Sellouts
- Add some Humperdinck
- Annoy the CD lovers

By carefully selecting the songs available to your loved one and limiting access to any alternative title, artist, genre or equipment, you can spend hours watching your brother/sister/father walk around sullen and hamstrung, working themselves through the stages of denial and loss:

Denial: “No, no. That’s fine. I’m sure the songs you picked out are great. After all, you DO know me so well.”

Bargaining: “Listen - I know it’s time for the turkey, but can I use your DSL line, just for fifteen minutes?” “The guy next door has 8 gig of songs? Well, maybe your neighbour DOES want to be disturbed on a day like this!”

Anger“But who the hell actually PAYS for MacArthur Park? Or Quando, Quando, Quando, for that matter!”

Despair: prolonged bouts of clicking and shuffling as your relative just stares at the Ipod, as if to will it to create a U2 playlist out of thin air.

Acceptance “You know, I never realized how much I really like Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy. In its eclecticism, this playlist reveals the depth of your musical sophistication.”

Fluxblog has featured Jerry Nutter’s “The Twelve Days Of Christmas” - where Nutter substitutes vintage radio ads instead of the rote list of hens, maids …

Well worth a listen, especially for such Christmas favourites like “a three year supply of Libby’s frozen fruits and vegetables!”

Along the same thread as last week’s post on mobile habits, a fantastic idea from Draplindustries Design: The Society for Handheld Hushing, with dl’able custom hushing cards for loud mobile users.

Bit of a tempest in a teapot during the Tuesday sitting of Canada’s Senate. One enterprising Tory Senator noticed that some of his Liberal colleagues had read speeches in to the Senate support of legislation that were nearly identical to speeches previously read in the House of Commons - a transgression of Senate rules.

A short debate ensued about creativity and propriety ensued, but I found this excerpt from Senator Anne cools‘ argument on the issue interesting:

“There is now arising in many parliamentary quarters great concern about the number of speeches — especially canned speeches — that are being written by other people for members. It is a huge concern.

I expect, as a member of Parliament and a senator here, that if a senator rises and speaks, he owns that which he is saying — in other words, that speech is a product of his or her efforts. We must discern exactly what the parliamentary position is on these practices that have grown like Topsy, where it is immediately evident that those speeches were written in distant places because most often they do not even reflect the language of Parliament. Quite often, the grammatical structure is in the passive tense.

…This is a broad question. It has a larger consequence than we comprehend. What it means is that government, by having thousands of people churning out these speeches, can be making in each chamber many speeches in a day. This means, of course, that the natural proceedings in Parliament are not moving along at a very natural pace.

… I would submit to honourable senators that the government, with all its resources and all its speech writers grinding them out and holding them in cans, can load and weight the system in its favour.” (Senate Hansard)

Hey, all you government communicators! Isn’t it nice to be appreciated?

The NYTimes has spoken to several baseball and marketing experts about how Barry Bonds might deal with ‘roid ‘rage building around him.

Woody Allen’s penned a funny and surreal account of Mickey Mouse’s appearance as a surprise witness at the Eisner/Ovitz trial.

C: Did you ever tell Mr. Eisner of your apprehensions over his plan to hire Mr. Ovitz?

W: Minnie and I discussed it. We knew they’d clash.

C: Did you bring it up with anyone besides your wife?

W: Dumbo, Bambi—I really can’t remember. Oh, yes—Jiminy Cricket, one time at Barbra Streisand’s house. She threw a party for Jiminy when he bought his place in Trancas.

Propagating a campaign through word of mouth sometimes involves building volume by having many, many sources repeat basic and elementary facts - but comment spam?

“Help stop evil (url snip) word of mouth marketers like (url snip) BzzAgent.com by supporting the (url snip) Blog Publishers Association founded by legendary blogger (url snip) Jason Calacanis.”

Interesting little back and forth between Jason and the others over in a comment section at gapingvoid.

Addendum: AWW CRAP. I just figured this out! If I actually tell my Movable Type blacklist to ban this particular comment spam, it will block all those URLs as well. It must be a devious plot by those “No Logo” loving lefties!

Jackie Huba has a great idea: amplifying the volume on your unresolved customer service complaint through podcasting.

In January, an Ottawa man received an unsolicited marketing email from the Ottawa Renegades, the local CFL team. He asked how his addy had made it onto their list: turns out they scraped it from his work site. The man, Michael Geist, asked the team not to email again without permission. We all know where this is leading: Geist got another email from a different Renegades rep.

Problem is, Michael Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He sits on the federal government’s spam task force, and writes a weekly column for the Toronto Star on intellectual property issues.

We all dream our marketing lists are up-to-date, sparkling clean and full of potential bzzagents. We certainly hope our “unsolicited marketing messages” won’t irritate people or alienate key demographics. But I’m sure none of us wants to find a knowledgeable and politically-aware lawyer at the other end of the line.

Here’s what the Renegades have produced: the first official ruling under Canada’s new electronic privacy law (PIPEDA).Canada’s Privacy Commissioner ruled that the Renegades had violated this privacy law when they harvested Geist’s email from a business listing, and then did not accede to his request for contact to stop.

The ruling isn’t legally binding, but it calls into question an industry belief that business emails are exempt from this privacy legislation.

There’s more coverage in the Toronto Star.

Disclosure: I work at the Department of Industry, initially responsible for creating the PIPEDA legislation. I did not work on the act, and do not deal with electronic privacy issues. That said, nothing on this blog constitutes the opinion of the Government of Canada.

I don’t know what I find more disturbing: that some teenage students at the IMG Academies in Bradenton, Florida enrol in an on-campus media training and communication program, or that I didn’t think of it first.

IMG Academies specializes in providing intensive sports training to students and young athletes. Nick Bollettieri teaches there. Naturally, moving a kid into this sort of environment prompts a grab-bag of societal issues to be discussed over frappucinos - or around the Saturday soccer pitch, during the exurban 2:15-3:15pm semi-professional under-14 league game.

The NYT magazine ran a story on the facility last week.

You can pretty much identify a person’s PR specialty by their mobile phone habits:

Investor Relations: very short, abrupt conversations, finished off with “I’ll call you on a land line.”
Trade Communications: very long conversations about concrete plant specs and the next client meeting in Waukesha.
Marketing Communications: call starts with a discussion about a new boss (”she’s a witch!”), then moves into discussions about retail campaigns
Media Relations: “did you get my email? No, the other one. The one about the tree planting Sunday morning!”
Corporate Communications: “Hi. Mom? What’s for dinner?”
Publicist: “What time is it? Two? Why don’t you and Lindsay meet me at Megu at eleven.”

But all PR folk know to limit their conversations at certain crucial moments. When? As the old saw goes: it’s all about location, location, location!

For instance, you probably shouldn’t spin your new business pitch while on a crowded train:

But last week the Paddington-to-Swansea … train gained notoriety as the blabbermouth express when staffers at one agency decided not only to discuss the pitch they were on their way to - but to prepare for it with a plethora of loud calls to the press, sounding out views on their potential client.

‘It was embarrassing - it was very Ab Fab,’ PRWeek’s spy on the train tells us.

The agency boss … defended her loudmouths … ‘It was nothing confidential, we would never discuss something confidential in public.’ It is not the first time pitches have been overheard on the Paddington train - PROs be warned. (PR Week UK - behind a sub wall)

The folks at Playboy are considering hi-tech consumer vehicles for cross-promoting their brand.

My question: What exactly would a Playboy ringtone sound like? This?

Well, it ought to be an interesting quarterly earnings call for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce next Thursday. First, a scrap dealer reveals that CIBC branches across Canada have been faxing reams of sensitive RSP and loan documents to his office in West Virginia, then this happens this past Monday:

A CIBC cash machine started dispensing Canadian Tire money at a mall outside of Moncton, N.B.

This latest slip-up comes as the CIBC reels from the repurcussions of the fax crisis: the bank appears to be assuming a defensive posture as lawsuits have been filed against the West Virginia scrap dealer for violating Canada’s privacy laws - a clear sign that the lawyers are in charge of the company’s strategy.

As I said, that quarterly call ought to be entertaining.

A joint study on the growing role of chief marketing officers, conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Association of National Advertisers, doesn’t exactly break new ground. It is, however, a good summary piece, and has a really catchy title:”Making the Perfect Marketer.”

I was intrigued by their use of the term “surrogate metrics” to examine how marketers (and by extension, communicators) try to wedge their (relatively) thin performance measurements onto shelves full of quant measurements produced by operational divisions.

“Although these forms of measurement may be valid to the tasks at hand, we surmise they have not been adequately explained and “sold in” to other senior executives, who typically come from backgrounds with different rigors. Among marketers themselves, there is a lingering, if fading, fear that too much “science” might dampen the “art” of marketing.

Some marketing chiefs value unbridled creativity and innovation over multivariate regression models that isolate the incremental consumption delivered by a new program or ad execution. Although this communication gap involving metrics is understandable, given the novelty of the CMO position relative to other officer positions, it appears to be contributing to the diminished status of CMOs in many companies.”

Apparently, Kodak has stopped making the Carousel slide projector. (WPost via Alyson Hurt)

Strangely enough, this now lends a certain social cachet to the formerly ostracized members of the high school Audio Visual Club: “Oh yeah, the Kodak Carousel 4200! You may not remember this, but that slide tray had to be positioned JUUUST right, or the whole geography class was screwed for the day!”

Of course, the pseuds have long jumped on your uncle’s old vacation slides as a cultural artifact and Saturday evening amuse-bouche:

“… the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design … presents another annual installment of its immensely popular Anonymous Photography exhibition. Begun in 1999 as a response to the growing interest of the public, art galleries and institutions in vernacular photographic images, the first show was practically an instant sellout, with buyers vying for a favorite snapshot or old news photograph.”

Vernacular photographic images? Sheesh!

Have you read the LA Times reporting on the coordination between psychological operations and public affairs on the ground in Iraq? You should. It dances around a very important question: at what point should a fighting force stop being transparent and attempt to deceive its enemy through obfuscation, implication or outright fabrication?

I’ll leave the moral handwringing and ethical debate to other fora. Maybe that freshfaced lieutenant shouldn’t have lied right to CNN. But if you remember your military history, armies from many nations and cultures have a long history of deception and disinformation. The difference? The window of gullibility used to be very wide - weeks or even months - before opposing forces, reporters and the public caught on.

Today, it’s minutes.

If you want a bit more information about the implications of information warfare, the CIA’s unclassified journal has a dry, but informative, article.