Beanz Meanz Blogz

April 26, 2017

The Asbury & Asbury store cupboard has just got more interesting with the addition of this limited edition tin of beans, signed by Maurice Drake, who penned the best slogan of all time 50 years ago.

I wrote about the slogan for the Creative Review 'Top 20 slogans' issue in 2011. What I said then was:

Beanz Meanz Heinz. The classic brief – associate our name with the generic product. The prosaic answer would be ‘Think beans. Think Heinz.’ This is the poetic answer – a brilliant piece of wordplay rooted in the brand name.

I feel like I could write another 50,000 words about what a good line it is. Not sure there's a better result for a copywriter than having the client put on an exhibition in your honour 50 years later.

Incidentally, I also like the way they handled the apostrophe after Beanz in the copy.

Thanks to Russell Davies for the unexpected gift – even more welcome as it comes from someone who knows his beans.

The Language of Design

April 26, 2017

A brief post to point you to an interview I did with Communication Arts, touching on writing, design, tennis (?), Disappointments Diary, A6 Notebook, Pentone, tone of voice, social media, Smile in the Mind, ideas, New York Times, poetry, Corpoetics, chatbots and 'about us' pages.

Here is the interview.

Make America Grumpy Again

March 27, 2017

A brief post to mark a milestone / millstone in our lives.

Last week the US edition of Perpetual Disappointments Diary officially came out with Chronicle. (This follows the UK edition being published by Pan Macmillan last year, which in turn followed us publishing it ourselves for several years independently.)

As expected, Chronicle have done a beautiful production job on the diary, with an especially nice cover stock, smart embossing, and a cool sheet of blue Monday stickers.

The diary includes some changes for the US market, including some more US-centric Notable Deaths (sorry Hovis Presley), some tweaked cultural references (Kestrel Super makes way for Sierra Nevada Hoptimum IPA), and some new proverbs, complete with US spellings.

March is an unconventional time to bring out a diary, but hopefully it’ll give it time to get into US stores before Christmas, by which time 50% of the current administration may be using it to write their prison memoirs.

On that note, we discovered this post by a Disappointments Diarist on Instagram:

If you're in the US, you can order the diary here.

And the UK edition continues to be available here.

Technology explained, sideways

March 14, 2017

Today is the launch of Sideways Dictionary, a project I’ve been working on with Jigsaw, the technology incubator at Alphabet.

Sideways Dictionary is a collaborative online tool that explains technological issues using everyday analogies. I worked with Jigsaw to develop the concept and name for the dictionary and populate it with entries for the launch – covering about 300 analogies for 75 terms ranging from ‘API’ to ‘zero-day’. Some adapt analogies already in popular use, while most have been developed for this project.

Part of the mission at Jigsaw is to increase public understanding of the technologies that shape our lives. When I got involved, there was the seed of a thought about using analogies to explain technology in an accessible way. One of the examples was email being like sending a postcard, whereas sending an encrypted message is like sending a sealed envelope. People instinctively use analogies like that when explaining new concepts, but there was no central bank where they could be stored, searched and shared.

So that’s what the site aims to do. It’s now open to public contributions, with a voting facility to rate the best analogies – resulting in a shared resource for everyone to use.

The project has been developed in partnership with the Washington Post – the best analogies will be used on their site whenever a technical term comes up. And there’s a Chrome extension you can use to have Sideways Dictionary explain things across the web.

At this point, you should probably go off and play with the site. But for those interested, I’m now going to get geeky about analogies.

Analogies are fascinating things. When they’re good, they feel like magic – like discovering an underlying connectedness in all things. But they can also be frustrating – as a reader, you experience something close to physical pain when an analogy goes wrong, like it’s hurting the synapses in your brain.

The thing we kept coming back to throughout the project was that all analogies are inherently imperfect. The more perfect an analogy is, the less useful it is. The best analogies shed light on one aspect of an issue, but can never capture its totality. One of the advantages of Sideways Dictionary is that it gives you multiple analogies per term – each one may be imperfect, but together they have a cumulative effect. Even the process of working out where an analogy falls down leads you closer to an understanding of the issue.

The Art of Looking Sideways – image via It's Nice That

Throughout the project, and particularly when it came to the title, I kept thinking of Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways – the classic book about design and lateral thinking. This is more like the Art of Writing Sideways.

It’s a head-hurting form of writing. Analogies usually happen by serendipity – they occur naturally in conversations or in the course of thinking deeply about a subject. So to sit down and generate analogies mechanically is a weird process. But I found it’s like a concentrated version of what happens in creative thinking generally.

You take an issue like ‘secure socket layer’ or ‘wiki’ and that becomes your anchor point, like the end of the compass that stays in the centre of the page. Then you move the other end of the compass in a slow circle, passing through lots of areas – household objects, films, fairy tales, sports, games, cities, the natural world, pop culture, human interactions. All the while your mental compass is scanning through these worlds and trying to find matches back to the term at the centre.

When a match occurs, you try to capture the analogy in a single sentence and then expand as needed. Some colour and humour adds to its memorability and jaggedness. A good analogy can serve a twofold role – it’s partly about explaining the issue, and also about making it linger in the mind.

Fairytales are a rich source of analogies:

Others are rooted in shared human experiences:

The natural world provides some poetic analogies:

While the human world is harder-edged:

Some analogies involve real-world research:

Others find parallels in earlier forms of digital:

Some analogies enter surreal territory:

Others are more to the point:

The seed of the analogy is often in the name itself:

Analogies can reveal ancient parallels, between sheep farmers and programmers:

Some analogies are already in popular use:

Others took some imagination:

Like chess, analogies can feel like a beautiful game, or mental torture:

You can explore more analogies, and contribute your own, at sidewaysdictionary.com

Site design: Hello Monday
Films & animations: Google Creative Lab, London
Thanks to Alfred Malmros and Justin Kosslyn at Jigsaw for their patient support throughout the project.

Advertising versus Trump

February 28, 2017

I hesitated to publish this post, because it’s criticising someone else’s work and, even more ungraciously, trying to rewrite it.

But my defence is that it’s a public interest project (supporting a free press against Trumpian bullshit), so there’s more at stake than with most projects. It’s also by a great agency who I have said nice things about (Droga5, who did brilliant work for Hillary Clinton, even if you can criticise the appeal-to-the-core-vote strategy on which it was based).

So here goes.

The New York Times has produced an ad campaign in response to the continued attacks from Trump, and it has received murmurs of approval on social media – mainly, I suspect, because people sympathise with the cause, and also copywriters in particular like anything that only involves copy.

But I don’t think it works. And it’s frustrating, because it was a chance for advertising (and writing in particular) to step up and show the world the difference we can make. We’re supposed to be the experts at persuasion. Maybe we can be the ones who cut through the bluster and bullshit of Trump. For once, instead of making Dove look good or making people cry at John Lewis, we can take on Trump and do something useful.

But then the big, high-profile brief comes along, and this ad misfires. Not on an aesthetic level, but on the basic functional level – it fails as persuasion, and possibly has a net-negative effect as it could turn off some supporters.

The billboard (above) is the most obvious distillation of why the whole campaign is off-track. To say ‘Truth. It’s more important now than ever’ and sign off with your logo is to equate the NYT with the truth, which is an absurdly overblown thing to do. But it’s happened because they’ve allowed themselves to be painted into a corner. They’ve accepted the terms of Trump’s playground ‘FAKE NEWS!’ argument and gone to the other extreme – we are the guardians of the real truth! And by doing that, they confirm the worst preconceptions people have about the press – that it’s an elitist, out-of-touch, self-appointed authority.

The TV spot spells out the argument more, but it’s the same problem. The NYT is casting itself as the arbiter between competing versions of the truth, but does nothing to justify that position. It sounds elitist and dogmatic – all the things you don’t want.

That comes out even more clearly in the press ad, which is a series of manifesto-like statements that don’t stand up to much scrutiny. Again, the effect is po-faced and patronising. The truth is hard. It’s complicated. It’s probably too hard for you to figure out. Leave it to us. This is important.

The maddening thing is that this is a smart publication and a smart agency falling into a trap set by Trump – not because he’s some genius of persuasion, but because he communicates in such childishly big crayon scribbles that people miss how simple they are. In calmer times, the New York Times would never claim to be about ‘truth’. It’s about facts, which aren’t the same thing. As the old line goes, it’s about ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ – i.e. that meets certain standards of editorial rigour. That’s a much more meaningful, grounded thing to say than ‘The truth is more important than ever’.

They’ve been bounced into that position by the cartoonish rhetoric of Trump. It’s difficult to keep a cool head in such heated times, but I think the job of the ad agency should have been to get them to take a breath, avoid the obvious reaction, and reframe the whole argument in their favour.

I won’t presume to provide the whole answer, but I know where I’d start.

I’d list those negative preconceptions about the media and then go the other way. Instead of elitist, go popular and empowering. Instead of out-of-touch, go down-to-earth. Instead of self-appointed authority, go modest and democratic.

It’s not about the NYT being fake or true. It’s not about Trump being fake or true. It’s about the people. Truth is up to the people to decide. The NYT is a supporter of the people. It provides people with the tools to make up their own minds. It asks the questions and reports the answers. But always in service of the people. Make them the hero of the argument – they also happen to be the target market.

That could lead to something like:

Don’t count on the New York Times to tell you the truth

Don’t count on the President either. Or CNN. Or Fox. Or everyone on Twitter (sorry everyone on Twitter).

We know you’ll make up your own mind about the truth.

Our job is to help you put some of the pieces together.

We’ll provide verifiable facts, investigative reporting, and diverse opinions.

We’ll ask questions to people in power. And the madder they get, the more we’ll keep asking.

We’ll be a voice for the silent majority and the silenced minorities.

We’ll keep publishing all the news that’s fit to publish, online and in print.

And we’ll work with you to do it.

Send us your stories.

Tell us your truth.

We’re counting on you.

Even if you don’t like the ad, it’s a better strategy. It changes the conversation, instead of just continuing it.

But you could still say it’s too defensive. Another option would be to go on the attack. Make it about Trump, not you. The comically obvious thing about his ‘fake news’ attacks is that he’s trying to undermine the credibility of the people who are most likely to bring him down. It’s a hysterical pre-emptive tantrum because he’s scared. So point that out. Something like:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in 166 years of holding power to account, it’s this. The angrier they get, the louder they get, the more hostile they get – the more interested we get. And the more questions we ask.

That’s not the whole thing, but it’s something. It’s a counter-narrative. It means the next time he shouts 'Fake news', you’ve already framed it as a distraction technique. You could print a variation of that paragraph in small type on a giant poster site and promise to make the type bigger every time Trump says ‘Fake news’.

But probably the biggest ‘take the high ground’ move would be to ignore Trump altogether and use the moment as a platform to connect with the people. Even before Trump, the NYT had a problem with appearing elitist and old-fashioned – but the sheer extremism of the Trump attack is the perfect opportunity to reposition. Use the ads as an invitation to get people to send in their stories, or to launch a new journalism prize for rigorously researched articles by young people on issues that matter. Don’t try to make the ad the answer – do something new and grassrootsy, then talk about it.

Or don’t do any of the above, because someone somewhere will have a better idea – probably someone at the NYT or Droga5, because they're smart people. I don’t think this one nailed it, but it’s useful to talk about why, before the giant political whirlwind moves on somewhere else.

As a footnote, I saw the Washington Post went with 'Democracy Dies in Darkness'. It’s not the most cheerful line (people have commented on its goth vibe), but it’s decent and meaningful. And the simple masthead change probably got as much publicity as the more expensive NYT campaign.

Maybe 'Democracy Lives in Light' would go down better with your morning coffee. But I can’t really talk as the writer of the most depressing diary in the world, which comes out in the US on March 14th. (Yes, this whole thing has been an ad and therefore = fake news.)

One last note – Stephen Colbert's The Late Show has parodied the NYT ad and made it into something much better. This at least is a sign it has made a cultural impact in pretty quick time. Maybe it's great.