WORD SIMPLE

Recognize our headline? 

We (ahem!) borrowed it from a well-known tech company’s marketing campaign.

After all, the same sort of principles apply when talking simplification, whether in work or in words.  At least, we think so.  Route out the extraneous and the unnecessary (according to customers and users) and streamline, right?

Not.  So.  Fast.

Ownership of words within corporations tends to be (pick one) 1) mandated by the brand, 2) dominated by corporate functions like marketing and HR, 3) supervised by leaders, and/or 4) required by message stewards.  When interminably long documents and three-paragraph sentences dominate, it’s clear that someone isn’t paying attention to the eight-second rule.

Which is now the length of our attention span.

There are all sorts of reasons why business text is so hard to understand.  Like these:

“Defensive compliance” (consider annual reports and 10Ks)

“Bureaucratic tradition” (think government forms, even do-it-yourself instructions)

“Mindblindness” (the term psychologists use when folks are numb to their own knowledge).

What we know for sure is that someone (perhaps the author, maybe not) isn’t checking with his/her prospective readers, calibrating reactions, answering questions, and ensuring that at least a handful of audience members understand the points.  And when the average 10K in 2013 accounted for 42,000 words, someone, somewhere just didn’t want to be understood.

Mark Twain had us at this:  “I would have written that shorter, but I didn’t have the time.”  [Or was it Blaise Pascal?]

THE TYRANNY OF MESSAGING

At one point or another in our careers, we learn the importance of “messaging.”

“It’s the foundation of everything we do,” proclaim senior communicators.  “We need to ensure that we’re consistent and accurate in our statements,” insist agency brethren.  “And it’s the best way to spell out our uniqueness and differentiate us from the competition,” underscore marketers.

Sometimes the cry for re-messaging starts because of one specific event, say, an executive’s speech or a major presentation.  Other times, it’s the re-thinking of what to say about a company and its products/services, prompted by a merger, acquisition, reorg, new C-suite, and similar changes.  Or:  It’s simply time for a refresh.

Then … wordsmithing and architecting begins.  Reviewers, many of them, weigh in.  And go through many rounds until, voila!  Messaging is complete.

Not quite yet.  To us, the application of messaging often gets lost after the crafting’s done.  It’s all too easy to plonk down the messages in the middle of a blog or speech or Town Hall.   Recycle it, in other words.

But ask yourself first:  Does it ring true?  Is the leader’s quote plucked almost verbatim from the platform?   Could you imagine someone reading (or talking like) this?   Can you readily pick out key messages … simply from the exact words used and not the meaning?  How powerful, in short, is the conversation? 

One last question:  Does messaging control us – or do we control it?

THE TRIPLE-HEADER TROIKA TRILOGY

Triangles.

The Three Stooges.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

Red, yellow, and blue.

For years, we – as marketers, advertisers, designers, and communicators – have almost blindly followed the rule of three … in visuals, in messages, in benefits, and more.  It’s been one of the unproven facts that informs our universe; somehow, three and no more seemed to cement our case.

Now, more than gut says we’re right:  Two UCLA behavioral science/marketing professors investigated a handful of scenarios with hundreds of undergrads, testing recall and reactions to anywhere from one to six reasons for each.  They deliberately explored the theory known as “set size effect,” or, in other words, the more descriptors, the better.  [Guess the “set size” creator never met Mies van der Rohe.]  The results were to be expected:  Students embraced the list of three, with four or more receiving a raised eyebrow or words of disdain.

Don’t stop there, though:  Three means more than a simple count.  It points to one of the issues we face now:  Way too many choices and way too little time to make effective decisions.  Though every day we face that challenge (especially in grocery stores), it’s just recently, when shopping for healthcare insurance, that we wished for an easier process.  We not only had to review the in- and out-of-network providers, but also go through, grid by grid by grid, comparisons of benefits, making sure we were matching apples to apples.   Multiply that by five providers.  And hear our frustration.

So “three” is now our golden rule. 

For us, that involves skirting aisles with too many similar products (how many different kinds of oatmeal do we need?), glossing over ads with more than three descriptors, ignoring multi-multi-imaged signs.  It also includes our stricter adherence to tri-anything in our work. 

Like our headline.

YOU SAY POTATO ...

Color us curious … always.

In a variety of ad rags and online media, the words “native advertising” are getting big headlines, the paid media’s latest effort to get more attention and click-throughs from consumers.  Pew Research, in fact, estimates that going native has already accounted for some $1.56 billion in spend, with a super-impressive growth rate of 39 percent each year.

Definitions are a-plenty, ranging from “stories, posts, videos, and photos produced by a brand” to “less intrusive ads that provide interesting and useful information.”  In many instances, native is sponsored content – whimsical videos of dogs and cats brought to you by Purina, as one – that blends into the Web site, feed, or other digital formats.

Right now, yes, it’s hot; IPG says native ads are viewed 53 percent more frequently than banner ads.  [In our opinion, anything would be watched more often than those Web displays.]  There are a couple of buts in that prediction.

The first “but”?  That the native spot fit seamlessly into what we’re watching or reading or listening to.  It can’t interrupt our flow, or disrupt the search.

The second “but” is one that a number of advertisers have already flaunted – and paid for dearly.  And that is the demand for authenticity and transparency.  If it is indeed a sponsored post or image, say so.  And do it upfront.  A number of platforms (and their users) scrutinize all things advertising, and have no hesitation in calling out those who don’t comply.

The third “but”:  Make this message worth our time.  Ensure that it’s high quality and relevant to what we’re doing right now.  If it’s boring or doesn’t  add value, we’ll quickly skip to something else.  Trust us.

And, the final “but”:  In the spirit of nothing’s new under the sun, native advertising smacks of old-fashioned advertorials, those two-page print spreads (sometimes longer) often appearing in popular magazines and labeled as ads (though written as editorials).  John Deere did that with The Furrow magazine for farmers, starting in 1895.  And Michelin, with its guide that launched in 1900.  What we fear for this latest trend is that, in our ADHD world, native will soon become an alien experience. Instead, we’d urge marketers and branding gurus and communicators to think well ahead, and deliver messages that anticipate the medium, with truth and transparency and no little intellectual vigor for all.