The Joke

I said last time I’d try to think of some jokes for the blog next time. This is next time, but I can only think of one joke and I always start laughing when I come to the punch line and ruin the delivery. And since it depends on the sound of a spoken word,       I can’t tell it here. It’s not off-color -- it’s perfectly acceptable in mixed company -- it just doesn’t lend itself to written presentation.  Come to think of it, it would be perfectly acceptable before an audience of children, and in fact might get its best reception there.

As we’re all aware. a lot of humor nowadays depends on sexual innuendo or the shock value of what used to be considered obscene and abusive language. Why mention of sex gets a snicker is a subject for people with more expertise in psychology than I have. Many other laugh lines delivered without their scatology or abusive reference to someone else’s mental capacity wouldn’t be funny at all. If you hang out on some online forums you find that (a) no language is too coarse to use, but (b) if you subtract or replace the obscenities and abuse, in many cases there’s not much message there at all. The invective is the message.

If you’re old enough to remember them, Red Skelton and Bob Hope represented different points on the spectrum. Although neither would have been allowed the language we hear today, Hope used innuendo and Skelton did “funny”; he turned himself into silly characters with odd speech patterns and twitches. Hope of course did much more than tell jokes and was greatly respected, especially among a generation of people who fought WWII. Skelton was a phenomenon whose show depended on a bunch of other people, but he was all of them. 

There also used to be a program on the radio (R-A-D-I-O) called “Can You Top This,” where listeners sent in jokes and a panel of “experts” tried to come up with funnier stories on the same theme. I suppose it might have been rehearsed, but if it was truly extemporaneous, those were some funny people, and all within strict bounds of language then permitted in public discourse. 

Vamping desperately, I still haven’t come up with a joke for this post, have I? Rather than feel deceived, though, look at the upside: if I'd started on some old shaggy dog story, in this medium you wouldn't have been able to stop me if you’d heard this one….

Local TV

We have cable TV where I live. In a classic denial of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the cable company fixed it: they “harmonized” the channel numbers across all their regions. Now people don’t know where their old programs have gone. The new channel numbers run up into the 1200s, but I don’t have access to most of them since I buy only the “basic” plan. The company nevertheless puts out the whole list in a nice glossy brochure,       I guess in the hope you’ll buy a more expensive package. 

That doesn’t work with me, though. I’m not an advocate of cheering for 5 or 9 or 11 millionaires on a playing field, so I can eliminate a large number of channels out of hand. I have never thought of cooking as a spectator sport either, so there goes another batch. Ditto for strangers in sunglasses playing poker.      I have never investigated my own genealogy; what makes programmers think I'd be interested in someone else’s?

Selling on screen could have been interesting, but it all seems to be clothing and jewelry, mostly women’s, and spray-on compounds that seal your windows against rain. I haven’t worn a necklace since the army, and we’re in a drought.

Sitcoms: there are only a few I watch, and I watch those because they have gentle humor and a collegiality among the characters; the people don’t continually try to score off each other. They rely on other techniques than sexual innuendo for their laughs; and they never forget the “com” part in the name stands for “comedy” and they don’t get heavy.

Local news is a farce. Someone pointed out a while back that many/most of the TV channels are owned by entertainment companies, so a regular feature of our “news” is what’s news to them:  the box office results for current movies. Do they really think the average listener cares if “Ghouls at the Gates” made more millions than “Dueling Chainsaws”?

And of course traffic and weather are standard news show items, traffic because we have a lot of it and weather in spite of our having hardly any here in Southern California. (Surprising how much anchor desk back-and-forth can be wrung out of a warming trend from 87 to 89 degrees.)

Those segments are the chance for well-coiffed aspiring actors and starlets to breathlessly give us “breaking” news “live” from the scene of the accident although no details are available yet, and to prance in front of electronically animated displays of weather fronts. There's information there, but it’s secondary to the "personalities" delivering it.

You’re not supposed to sound whiny or jaded in a blog; it puts people off.   I’ll try to think of some jokes, next time. 

When I Edited Engineers - 3

Another attempt, from my aerospace editing days, to call proposal-writing engineers back to their roots as purveyors of precise, measurable data.

On “World Class”

This is one of those phrases become meaningless through over- and inappropriate use.

At the Olympic games, where competitors actually are from all over the world, “world class athlete” makes sense. Applied to everything else (as it has been, from harmonica playing to peanut butter cookies; today's reader, Google it if you think I’m exaggerating) it doesn’t carry the weight its authors intend. You know what they’re trying to convey, but you also know whatever it is they’re pushing hasn’t literally been tested against similar items around the world, and that the claim is pointless. If it had been tested in world competition, and certainly if it had been found  best or close to it, they wouldn’t be mealy-mouthing around with “world class” -- they’d say “best in the world,” or "one of the top ten (or hundred)," and they’d be prepared to show you the stats.

Interestingly though, that sort of claim has been judged legally permissible in advertising. Under the law, advertising has special status, in that it’s not held to the standard of absolute truthfulness. The Ohio State Bar’s web page notes that in advertising, “The law allows some  exaggeration, called ‘puffery,’”  further defined in other legal articles as “non-actionable” puffery.  To invite regulatory action a claim would have to be misleading enough to cause an average consumer to buy when he or she would not have bought in the absence of that claim. The assumption is that an average consumer won’t take as truth an exaggerated claim that can’t be proved by measurement. 

If the average consumer knows enough to ignore puffery, it sure ain’t gonna convince the Department of Defense -- a cut or two above your average consumer  -- to award us the  contract we’re bidding for. Let’s lose the phrase.

The New Marketing - 2

FOUND THE DOCUMENTS I REFERENCED IN LAST WEEK'S POST.

One is called “Inbound Marketing in a Nutshell,” the other is “The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing,” both put out by the same people. I had downloaded them out of curiosity a month or two back.  I’d forgotten I had them, but I’d remembered some of what they said. It’s where the quotes about traditional advertising being “crap” and “yelling at the customers” come from. (“Obnoxious” yelling at the customers, as I reread it.)

The Inbound technique is quite precisely formulated, as befits a fad trying to look like a scientific discipline. (You don’t believe it’s a discipline? Well, it has its own acronyms and a glossary...)

There’s a five-step process to it:   Get Attention; Give Value; Gain Trust; Grow Influence; Gather Insight. The 5 “G”s, apparently.

This is sometimes described as new-age touchy-feely marketing. There is another, older formula used by people who really want to sell things sometime in the foreseeable future: Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction, and Action.

Both marketing techniques must first define their audience of prospects and decide how to reach it. The next step, however, is where they part company.

Inbound presents “agnostic content” that it expects will be “relevant” to get the attention of and "engage" its prospects. 

Real marketing yells at the customer that he can make more money (or whatever the benefit is) using that specific product. Supposing that it's business owners we're talking to, attention-getters like making money, saving on costs, gaining market share, improving quality -- these are already pretty relevant, so you don’t have to invent “content.”

Can we assume you’ve snagged your prospect’s ATTENTION with one of those headlines? Maybe then you can catch his INTEREST  with some words explaining how the benefit comes about, to the point that he decides he’d like to have it - DESIRE - if it’s for real. You demonstrate that it is - CONVICTION - with case histories, testimonials, and the like; then you tell him how to buy. If it’s a complicated buying process as many b2b items are, you stick contact  information on at the end and encourage him to ask - ACTION - for some information or for a salesman to call. This all happens while your Inbound competitor is still gathering insights.    

 Oddly, not everything from traditional advertising is discarded. It’s simply renamed.  From the “Beginner’s Guide” glossary:

     Outbound Marketing: anything that goes “out” to put your business
     in front of the consumer, including TV or radio ads, 
     mail flyers, telemarketing calls, door-to-door salesmen,     
     computer popups, and so on [emphasis added].

(a) If there’s a negative connotation in that, I’m missing it.         (b) Putting your business in front of the consumer is more than just an ancillary exercise; it’s fundamental to selling things. You do it with ads and mail flyers. Call it "Outbound Marketing" if you like, but it sure walks and talks like traditional advertising... 

The New Marketing -1

I’m still annoyed at having read an article posted by one of the new-school marketing gurus who keep discovering what they think are new principles and trashing old ones.

In a lengthy sales pitch for his instructional course in “inbound marketing,” this one dismisses traditional advertising as “crap,” and “yelling at the customers.” Would that David Ogilvy were around to wash this puppy’s mouth out with soap! In other places I’ve seen advertising called other uncomplimentary things, including “dead.”  

The reason is that cool marketers today don’t advertise to prospective customers; they “engage” with them. This involves the popular  “content marketing” and (according to the writer cited above) its huskier cousin, “inbound marketing.”  Both may make use of “storytelling.”

In theory, the “content” thus provided is of such value to the prospect that  he or she becomes a fan of the organization and, it’s hoped, eventually buys from it and even proselytizes for it. .It’s all laid out in a neat schedule, with acronyms for the stages: “Top Of Funnel” to “Call To Action.” Ideally, the process will be so customer-oriented that if your competitor has “content” that supplements your own, you'll refer readers to that competitor’s site. The precedent cited is the instance in “Miracle On 34^th Street” where, in the original version, Macy’s does tell Gimbel’s.   It’s a children’s movie.

All of it implies a long-range campaign, and one capable of posting information readers will continue to find valuable over that long range. You’ve probably noticed (clears throat discreetly) that with the exception of this blog, not a lot of the stuff on the Internet meets that standard.

There’s a scenario that plays out in my mind and intrigues the hell out of me: Some old-school marketer advertising the benefits of using his product (“yelling at the customers” -- remember? ) instead of “engaging” with them, swoops in, asks for the order like we used to do before advertising died -- and makes the sale, while the Thought Leaders are still cozening their readers. Wouldn’t that be fun? I like to think David Ogilvy would have approved.

[Awful lot of quote marks for a short piece, but I can't help myself; it's hard to be serious about some of this stuff.]

When I Edited Engineers - 2

From my aerospace editing days: another hint (seldom taken) to the engineers on how to make their proposals sound less like they were written by engineers. (I use “engineer” generically, because that’s who I worked with, but it could be any technical subject matter expert.)

  

On Using Nouns As Verbs

…and don’t try to make that “verbizing nouns.”

There are enough words in the language already that can confuse you when reading something because they can be either noun or verb: think “approach,” “balance,” “control,” “design,” “estimate,” “function,” “gauge,” “heat”…

Yet proposal authors keep inventing more. Some popular corruptions include “architect,” “status,” and the seemingly all-purpose “baseline.”

You have to wonder why. Does “architecting” a system have some advantage over designing it? Were we missing something all that time we just reported on things rather than “statusing” them? Is “baseline” really so versatile that it’s up to establishing the requirements for the engineering design AND naming the management team?

It’s a rich language, with plenty of nuance to go around. The Eskimos’ language is often remarked on for having dozens (or is it hundreds?) of words to describe snow. But when you think about it, English has something akin to that for rain. We differentiate “misting,” “a few drops,” “a drizzle,” “ sprinkles,” “ showers,” “driving” or “torrential” rain, “a downpour,” “a cloudburst,” “a deluge,” “cats and dogs,” “buckets,” “gullywashers,” and rightly or wrongly, “precipitation.”

The point is, whatever you have to say, there’s probably a perfectly adequate word or phrase already in the langue to say it with. Granted, language is a living, evolving thing; but unnaturally rearranging the parts of a living thing -- take a lesson from Dr. Frankenstein.

Quiet

It can be startlingly quiet where I live. As I write this, sitting on what I call my "writing bench," I hear nothing. The 3 o’clock freighter from Atlanta went over a while ago headed for the airport, and even the gardeners are giving their leafblowers a rest.

It’s uncanny; I’m just a few miles from part of Los Angeles and eight miles from an airport, and there’s not a sound. Occasionally a stray airplane flies over high up going somewhere, but otherwise it’s the kind of silence you could call “deafening.” You think your ears have gone plugged and you start looking around for something that should give off a sound. Eventually I tap my pen against the bench and it’s OK -- I can enjoy the quiet again.

 I can remember when I lived in Los Angeles standing on the corner of Alvarado and Sixth, talking to a friend, and we had to shout at each other over the ambient noise. It’s the traffic that does it. The traffic almost never stops in LA. The early morning hours see more traffic, I’d bet, than some towns see at high noon.

My first apartment in LA was literally across the street from the Hollywood Freeway. The street dead-ended at the fence; they’d chopped the street off to build the freeway. After a while, the sound of the traffic worked like the sound of surf in a more exotic place, providing a background hum that encouraged sleep. If it stopped, a  rare gap in traffic, late at night, I’d wake up.

I guess I’ve always had an affinity for silence; probably why I became a writer rather than an orator (or a precinct cept’n, if you remember the Shelley Berman routine). In fact, I wrote a sort of ode to it in highschool, and finding it all these years later I liked it well enough to post it here, even resisting the urge to edit out the highschool-level awkwardness. It’s in the December 28 slot.