I learned my Bible the old-fashioned way: by watching The West Wing.  It’s high piety and swelling democratic music was my Church of the Capra America. It was, I reckon, the best PR the Clinton Administration ever got, and it taught me a term to describe a trick I have long used.  ”Saying Shibboleth” is how I have entered rooms with CEOs and CIOs, housewives, soap opera writers, golfers, and NASCAR execs and curried their trust and favor.  It is often thought of as a kind of password, a signifier of your origin, a stamp of authenticity.  It is, at its most literal, a pronunciation used as what we would now refer to as a litmus test: pronounce it right, and gain entry to the kingdom; say it wrong, and be killed.

Like many people, I have instincts that tell me when I am among friends – body language, tone, facial expressions give me strong clues about whether I am welcome in a room or not.  Social cues – how my friends or family are behaving – also tell me whether I am in friendly waters.  These instincts and social cues are deeply rooted and closely held.

Even language plays a role – idioms are the hardest things for non-native speakers to absorb and employ, yet they are also significant indicators of origin.  I’ve worked with Brits for years, and have adopted some of their idioms – sometimes you’ll hear me say I’m at the end of my tether rather than rope, or that a project’s gone ‘tits up’, or I’ll confuse whether something is as dull as dishwater (US) or ditchwater (UK).  [As an aside, check these out, there are a lot of them that are also said in the US, at least in my part of the Northwest and among some of my friends here in NYC.]

There are also a lot I know and understand, but don’t say – you’ll never catch me describing a pregnant woman as “up the duff”, though lots of my friends do.  But I’ll say there are “loads” of something when most Americans will say “lots”, and sometimes, after several hours with my Brit pals, I’ll adopt the rhythm of British accents, all of them at once usually, and confuse the hell out of the next person I talk to.  Nevertheless, most people are quite well aware that I’m not English myself.  And while my American friends find my English accent hilarious after a few drinks, my friend Liam winces like I’m scratching at a chalkboard. I could not frame to pronounce it right, it turns out.

Saying Shibboleth at ROFLcon

I’ve been thinking a lot about saying Shibboleth since I ‘returned’ to Internet Culture (I hadn’t realized I left, of course, but some people regard me as a neophyte – I’ve already protested too much on this topic, so won’t flog my bona fides again).  I attended ROFLcon in Boston a few months ago and people were buzzing about someone’s mispronunciation of the word ‘meme.’  That word and I are the same age, though I can safely say I did not spring from the head of Richard Dawkins; while people much younger than me scoffed at the mispronunciation – the faux pas of an obvious n00b – I think we can forgive the transgressor for mistaking the pronunciation of so new a word, and one he had probably only seen in text.  Later, a panelist seemed perplexed when a questioner referred to IRL; the audience murmured their shock at his ignorance, and someone helpfully shouted the definition (“In Real Life”, a designation that is frankly, wildly out of date and out of step with how most of us live today).

What struck me at the time, and continues to simmer beneath the surface of so many conversations with and about the world of the Internet Nerds, is that these little hang-ups are cases of people failing to say Shibboleth.  They are not members of the tribe, and are held in some contempt for being outsiders.  People marveled at ROFLcon about how these people, who were clearly not ‘from the community’ (as people so delicately phrased it) were successful enough at their meme-making to be a panelist at a meme conference. The “insiders” were at turns impressed, confused, and put off by these outsiders and their success at making memes even when they couldn’t pronounce “meme.” They don’t speak the language, people seemed to be saying, and yet they’re succeeding anyway.

As a relative oldster in the crowd, I was at the time amazed at how ‘new’ everything was perceived to be.  Mainstream, commercial culture adopting internet memes was seen as a looming threat, as opposed to an ebbing and flowing one that has already washed over countless memetic sandcastles.  I was also surprised to discover that there was some sense of a homogenous “internet culture” – something that belonged to this group, and perhaps only this group. (In fairness, there were efforts at discussion of women and minorities within the culture, but these felt a bit forced to me.) The whole point, I always supposed (as the Internet Utopian I once was), was that the internet crossed cultures, combined cultures, even eluded traditional ideas of culture.

I can see that I was wrong. And not just at ROFLcon.

Back to the gender “shitstorm“

I’ve continued my background processing of the TechCrunch/WSJ/Change the Ratio spat from the weekend, and started to wonder whether an innate tribalism wasn’t the truer root of the gender divide in tech start-ups.

I noticed two ‘fact-based’ arguments being made as a reason (or an excuse) for the lack of women-led start-ups.  Statistics about women studying engineering or computer sciences were raised consistently – and legitimately – in the comments of all these discussions; so too were flimsy arguments about evolution, biology and neurochemistry.  But scratch these arguments and you find two ideas that may be much more about the tribalism of the start-up “scene” and much less about gender specifically.

ShibbolethFAIL #1: No CS or engineering degree

The first argument about women’s presence in schools and programs teaching the underpinnings of technology speaks to this idea of saying Shibboleth.  I used to describe my dad, a product manager for tech firms ranging from InFocus to Intel to Sun (and a great many pre-dot-com start-ups in between), as someone who spoke English and C++.  The truth is, my dad was a philosophy major who loved technology. When it came to the innards of servers and circuit boards, he was an autodidact who learned mainly by trial and error.  He passed for a native because he learned the language, adopted the accent and – perhaps most importantly – understood the concepts (logic, most especially) that underpinned the technology.  You don’t need to have a CS degree to understand what technology is capable of doing, or imagining what it could do in the future, or to have a passion for it.  But these arguments suggest that without these bona fides, you’re an Ephraimite who’s about to lose your head.

Look, so far women aren’t overwhelming the admissions offices of CalTech, but so what? I have a degree in PoliSci and Journalism, and another in Law. But nothing excites me as much as what technology can do. Tech has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and it is ultimately where I turn for connection, communication, information, and inspiration.  I can name-drop Ruby on Rails, mention spending the day teaching myself WordPress hooks, and lecture my exes on the difference between memory and storage (in other words, I can be a real drag). I know a lot of women who are far more knowledgeable than I am; I know a lot of women who know less about the tech but have a million great ideas for how to use it and develop it and evolve it.  If getting in to the club requires a CS or engineering diploma, then I reckon a purging is in order. Michael Arrington, for one, has a degree in economics and another in law, but no CS or engineering credentials. Perhaps we start with stripping him of his all-access pass until he completes the curriculum.

ShibbolethFAIL #2: Women are biologically and chemically different

Women in tech, it seems to me, are quite simply the Constitutive Other. They are not like the Same, so they are different, and need to be sorted into a category of some kind – safe/unsafe, certain/uncertain, integrated/segregated. While we are tribal creatures – this is why we build cities and cathedrals, why we go to war, get married, study in classrooms, pledge fraternities, live in neighborhoods, go to the movies, eat in restaurants, hang out in parks, go to meetups, follow each other on twitter – we build tribes of people who share something in common with us.  And we occupy many tribes – in fact, what some have regarded as a splintering of society may really just be a more fluid movement between multiple overlapping and/or disparate tribes.  The pluralism of our Internet Culture fosters these new ideas of tribal identity – interests, passions, beliefs, behaviors all can serve in place of nationalities or religions (or alongside them).

But to gain entry into these tribes, you must be the Same, not the Other. Women are, for a variety of reasons and as the result of many causes, not yet seen as the Same. An earlier, less educated time might have simply said that these matters were not a woman’s place, or that women were not smart enough or strong enough or whatever enough to do them; that these are important matters best left to the men, and not to worry our (ahem) pretty little heads about it.

Citing biology and neurochemistry and some pop-science understanding of evolutionary imperatives seems to me to be what smart, educated men (and some women, too) who know better rely upon to explain their perception of women’s Other-ness.

Perhaps, then, it’s not exactly men v. women.  Maybe it’s more Same v. Other.  The obvious solution would be to stop asking for passwords and start embracing ideas and action.  Focus on the merit of the idea as an initial matter more than the merit of the person.  Defining meritocracy that way might lead to more balanced outcomes.

L’envoi

The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same. (via The New York Times)

Ah! A mini Battle of the Sexes! Fun!

Let’s try to get the timeline from the weekend straight:

1. The Wall Street Journal posts an article about the lack of women as start-up founders, etc. and notes the emergence and growth of organizations dedicated to discovering and backing female talent in the tech and social media start-up scenes. (Do you know I spent about a minute trying to find ways to not say, “seeking out”, “nurturing” or “supporting” as they struck me as too feminine? Yipes.)
2. This Journal piece quotes Rachel Sklar saying it’d be nice if TechCrunch came from a worldview in which it could detect the gender imbalance at its conferences (also, “imbalance” is a very polite euphemism in most of these articles; we should be honest, the number of women being backed by VCs or invited to speak at conferences is absurdly small… and again I avoided words like “distressingly”, “appallingly” or “shockingly” because they sounded too emotional to me.)
3. Michael Arrington goes, as my dad would have said, apeshit. I would describe it a little differently – I’d say he threw a hissyfit.  He focused in on Rachel Sklar, who was clearly using TechCrunch as a ‘for-instance’, painted her with every ‘woman scorned’ brush he could conjure, and then used someone else’s statements to imply something about women’s innate inferiority because he was too much of a sissy to simply say it. (Oh, and yes, I am aware that I am doing the same. It’s called ‘parody.’)

I’ve followed the thread as far as I can – the comments are over 600 when last I looked – and yeah it’s mean and nasty and inaccurate and anecdotal and all that.  It is, after all, the comments.

But there are three things that stand out as – no, there isn’t another word for it – dismaying about the tone and tenor of the comments.  The first is the immediate leap to a discussion of biology and evolution – that female CEOs are not often on the cover of Fast Company because of neural pathways or biological imperatives.   The second is the assumption that there is something in the world of technology that makes it uniquely meritocratic, void of  -isms of any kind.  And the third is that people’s ‘personal experiences’ make them qualified to speak about gender bias, neuro-biology, social structures, or their own ability to perceive ‘imbalances’ in participation, recognition and reward between the sexes.

First, it’s not about brain function or hormones.  I have not done the research, but how many of the top CEOs of tech firms have some form of learning, attentive or cognitive disability?  Richard Branson, John Chambers, and Steve Jobs are dyslexic.  Ted Turner has bipolar disorder. David Neeleman spoke of ADHD as a major asset. Paul Orfalea has both dyslexia and ADHD. To use the easy retort from the comment thread, these are ‘outliers’ – but they’re just the ones I could find in a brief google search, and are nevertheless highly successful outliers.  Even if some have been ousted, as Neeleman, they were still highly successful men with learning or emotional disabilities who manage to find incredible success as entrepreneurs. Being a woman, last I checked, was not a condition listed in the DSM-IV, and yet the commenters treat having two X chromosomes as akin to a learning disability when it comes to math, science and engineering.  Let’s not use ‘science’ to camouflage prejudice; doing so has a very unhappy history.

Second, the notion that there is any industry, any business, any enterprise (words that all connote the exchange of goods and services for capital) that is entirely and purely meritocratic is, frankly, silly.  Where one is from, what schools one attended, how much support from family one has financially and otherwise, and how much skin one can put in the game are, at the very least, class indicators; they are also factors contributing to the success of a start-up.  Being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t make you the richest or best connected or most likely to get an angel; but being rich and well connected can compensate a great deal for not being that smart.

For one thing, VCs are interested in serial entrepreneurs – they want someone in the role of CEO who has both succeeded and failed.  Many years ago, Mike Jones was the CEO of a small web design company (disclosure: I worked for him as Creative Director, he fired me, we never reconciled).  That company was forced to liquidate as a consequence of a variety of (what I’ll simply call) bad decisions.  Today he is CEO of MySpace.  His failure was rewarded with greater successes.  He is not alone.  Most serial entrepreneurs have a failure under their belts.  This is not a bad thing – risk-taking requires that sometimes the risk will not pay off.  That’s what makes it a risk.

For another, Harvard and Stanford grads and drop-outs get more VC money than anyone else, and Harvard still edges out Stanford, according to a recent study.  Recipients of VC dollars are white, male, and affluent.  They are well-connected, mostly to others like them.  And there is also some evidence to suggest that men are more likely to become entrepreneurs or enter risky fields because they have the financial support of their families/parents.  Mike Jones’ father owned a URL called “investing.com” – this was a location of immense value to a lot of people; his business partner Jason Bernstein was closely connected with the Milkens and other wealthy families in LA and elsewhere who were interested in what could be done with investing.com (according to a whois search, it now belongs to an LA law firm).  While there, I helped to pitch and win a contract with Ron Herman, owner of the Melrose location of Fred Segal; our entree came through our new business lead who had once tutored Ron’s children.  Nepotism got us a long way.  There’s a reason the cliche, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is a cliche.

Finally, people are – and this is true of both genders – remarkably bad at identifying their own prejudices.  I know this from years working with and using market research; but I also know it from what scientists can tell us about socialized behavior and brain function.  Our ability to ‘reason’ is shot through with all sorts of heuristics, shortcuts, and biases that are not rational at all, and are often wildly inaccurate.  We make generalizations, we construct narratives, we make decisions we are entirely unaware of, and we engage in patterns of behavior we did not consciously construct.  Speaking as a woman recently diagnosed and now treated for ADD, who helped to get her father diagnosed with ADHD, who has lived with and grown up with people who have ADD or ADHD, I – who can correctly identify a person with ADD within about a day of knowing them – was completely unable or unwilling to see the traits in my own behavior.  We just aren’t wired to see ourselves accurately.  So while your personal anecdotes provide color and big wide targets other commenters can fire at, they don’t meaningfully add to the discourse on the role of gender in guiding the make-up of tech or social media start-ups.

There is much more to say on this matter – and more interestingly and usefully lots to do about it – but as an initial matter, I found myself wrapped up, and then disgusted, by the nature, tone, and substance of the ‘debate’ that is happening so far.  The one emotion I didn’t experience, however, was surprise.

(NOTE: I’ll be adding links in the morning. I’m tired. Sue me.)

Remember how I said in the last post that I had two responses (see how I give you credit for being a true and Constant Reader)? The thing that troubled me about Art & Copy was the thing that troubled my own career in advertising, and so profoundly affected (though I did not fully realize it as it was happening) my own aspirations: women were noticeably absent.

Phyllis Robinson and Mary Wells both went to work at Doyle Dane Bernbach back in the 1960s. Ms. Robinson was there from the start as Copy Chief, Mary Wells joined later, was successful, went elsewhere, was successful, etc. Wells made a wonderful and inspiring observation in the documentary – that advertising is theater, spectacle, meant to entertain and transform. Much of what she did went well beyond a headline and a nice photo – she transformed the businesses of her clients. They are both in the documentary.

But that is it – or almost. Liz Dolan, the former head of marketing at Nike, is interviewed, mainly to talk about how smart and intimidating Dan Weiden is. She’s right of course, he is both of those things. But where were the women who worked on the account? Where was Janet Champ? (To his credit, Dan Weiden did give her credit for the “If you let me play sports” work. Not that doing so was a hardship; after all, it was true.)

I wracked my brain trying to think of who they could have included from my gender. I failed. Even now, I am hard-pressed to think of a single top creative director at a top creative agency who is a woman. This is homework I’ll have to assign myself, but I want to put a small amount of perspective on this as well.

I haven’t been a copywriter, actively, for many years, so I might be forgiven for losing touch with women in the field. Still in the agency world’s orbit, I’ve been a planner and working closely with planners this whole time. And while I can name a few heads of planning who are women, there are few I count as superstars. Ben Malbon, Russell Davies, Gareth Kay, Robin Hafitz, Domenico Vitale, Paul Woolmington, Dan Cherry, Merry Baskin, are on that list. But consider that list for a moment – I listed 5 Brits, two women, and one African-American. It’s not that they aren’t out there, it’s that they struggle to be heard. And seen, for that matter.

There are two who get press and recognition from time to time: Natasha Jakubowski at Anomaly, and Katie Harrison at BBH. Both are Brits.  There is a special irony here, of course, given that as the story goes, planning came to the US from the UK when Jane Newman was hired by Chiat/Day. She later co-founded Merkley Newman Harty.  In her wake, a great many women have been hired and trained as planners, but fewer and fewer seem to rise to her stature.

[If you're wondering why I note the national origin of Brits, it's that things are a bit different, culturally, in the ad business in the UK versus the US. Of course Americans tend to think an English accent bestows 10 extra IQ points on the speaker, but it's more that account planning is more entrenched, more strategic, and more creative in the UK, generally, than it has been here. When a planner comes from the UK, they come to be senior.]

The other thing I’d note here is that, I am (ahem) 33 years old, and have been in this business more than 10 years. Russell and Robin and Merry and Paul have been names in this business for as long as I can remember. So who are the smart strategists from my age cohort? They don’t come from ‘traditional’ planning – but then neither do I. To the list, I would have to add Noah Brier and Faris Yakob, who are, I am happy to say, friends and colleagues. But they’re also dudes, and Faris is British. Actually, ask Faris about it sometime – Faris is everything, he’s the most fantastic mutt I’ve met in some time.

But, again, I ask, where all the ladies at?

It’s not just advertising

In fairness, this is not limited to the ad game. Watch the documentary Helvetica; the only woman designer interviewed is Paula Scher, who famously hates that typeface, and equates it with war and corruption and corporatism. She’s inspiring and talented and wonderful, but she’s a boomer and the only woman to be interviewed in the whole 90 minutes. (Doug Pray outdid this flick three-fold, so good on ‘im.)  There are no young women designers on the rise?  There are no contemporaries to Scher? There are no generational equivalents to Wells and Robinson?  I just find that so hard to believe.

Or watch The September Issue. Oh sure, you think, Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington run that show and they’re women! True, but watch for the scene where Wintour meets with her advertisers – most of the non-Vogue players at that table were men. Watch for the designers and photographers – still mostly men. And my favorite, watch for the meeting in which she presents the issue to the Conde Nast board – I’d need to go back and freeze-frame to be sure, but I’m almost certain that they’re all men. So even Anna Wintour, famous as the boss/dragon lady or ice queen, has bosses – and they don’t worry about scuffing their Jimmy Choos or how to wear fur for spring.

My point would be…?

Look, there are lots of women in advertising. Something like 60% of agency staff is female. It’s just that the female staff is more junior, and in more administrative or project management oriented departments. They are critical to the running of an agency, but they do not craft the art & copy, or guide the strategy of the business. Even lists of advertising ‘women to watch‘ are very often clients, not creatives or planners or agency heads (and female CMOs ≠ female ECDs). With so many women in the business, why aren’t there more in the sexy, powerful, famous roles?

I have a few hypotheses I’m going to throw out here, and I’ll try to stay on track to think more about them and do more research on them…

Oh, kidding. I think those are mostly crap!

So I clearly  have some homework to do on these causes… But I guess my biggest question is less to society at large, or men as a group, but to each woman who writes little doo-dads, or draws on the back of everything, or takes amazing photos, or makes little videos, or teaches herself PHP… Where are you? We need you to show up. Being seen is the necessary precursor to being heard.

I finally got around to watching Art & Copy the other night, and had two responses.

OMG, I <3 THIS!!!

I was flooded with remembrances of what I once loved about advertising, why I wanted to be a writer, why I admired the agencies and creative people I did.

I think I was only vaguely aware of the existence of ad agencies before my father introduced me to the idea of working in one. He was sneaky about it; he came home one day and told me, “You should work in advertising. You’d love it. I was in the head of the agency’s office today, and a woman, I think she’s a writer there, came in, flopped over the back of his couch, and yelled, “Fuuuuuck!” How cool is that?”

My father knew me so very well. So yes, I was intrigued. He kept bringing things home – little posters people made and posted around the shop, examples of ads they were making or had made, stories about the brilliant or hilarious thing that the creative directors said, or about the guys playing HORSE in the half-basketball court, or how work broke down on Fridays as everyone ran for the roof with water-tight vessels of any kind in hand, ready for delicious beer. Dad was installing their servers and network and he loved that place.

The place? Weiden + Kennedy, the agency behind “Just do it” and more recently, the Old Spice videos.

So studying advertising seemed like a sure-fire way to find my way to a career of flopping onto couches yelling, “Fuuuuck!” And for the price of in-state tuition, no less.

When I took my first course in the ad sequence at University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications, in my junior year of college (oh my, you have to take all these classes and a Language Skills Diagnostic Test before they let you in! You have to write an essay! Mine said I wanted to be either James Carville or Dan Weiden – note the total absence of female heroes), I thought I would be an account person. I have no idea what voice told me that was the right choice, or that I couldn’t be on the creative side, the side my dad celebrated so regularly. I was running a student magazine, and writing and reporting every two weeks – why didn’t I think I was a writer, yet?

But I did take Introduction to Copywriting – it was required. Halfway through that 10 week class, I was sure I was drowning. I couldn’t figure out why some of my ideas worked and others didn’t; I simply could not come up with anything for Right Guard deodorant. The instructor, Ann Maxwell (that link is shamefully sparse, it doesn’t even begin to describe her), had mid-term check-ins with all the students. I came into her office for the first time, sat down, and scanned the room. She had cool stuff. She had a nice window. She had Clios.

She told me she thought I was very talented and that she knew I said I wanted to go into account management, but that she thought I should do this instead. I was shocked. But, as I have been incredibly lucky to do a few times, I chose to just say, “okay.” And at that moment, I became a copywriter.

I devoured anything I could find – The Copy Workshop Workbook, Ogilvy on Advertising, The Book of Gossage, How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising, Truth, Lies and Advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor, Communication Arts, Ad Age, Creativity, agency reels, stuff I saw in magazines and on television, anything. I worshipped at the feet of the two great Creative Revolutions in American advertising – those giants: Bernbach, Gossage, Riney, Wieden, Goodby, Chiat, Clow. I leaned on Mary Wells Lawrence‘s agency’s approach for organizing my thoughts. I venerated Janet Champ‘s work on Nike’s PLAY campaign: “If you let me play sports.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

(click to play)

When it came time to apply for jobs, I aimed high: Goodby Silverstein & Partners, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Ground Zero, Fallon, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, WongDoody, Butler, Shine & Stern, Cliff Freeman & Partners (not all of them survived the agency consolidation movement or the Great Recession). I had a positive response, people liked my portfolio, they loved my cover letter (oh my kingdom for that Word file!), they invited me in for interviews, they almost hired me several times. But times were tough in the ad business, and junior creatives are always scraping for any job that gets them in the door.

I got this feedback once, from a young man in a creative department in a creative agency in Los Angeles: “Well, it’s obviously a woman’s book. There are no women in our creative department.” I’m pretty sure I ended the interview right there.

When I came back, two years later, after having worked as a copywriter (in the spirit of the times, I was actually the Creative Director) in a web shop, that same agency had finally got around to hiring a woman. She told me that my portfolio showed that I could write, but not that I could think. She recommended moving very far away and working for free. She recommended, in other words, posing no further threat to her. She was now The Woman in the Creative Department.

I think that’s when I started wondering again whether I really was a writer, whether that was acceptable, or possible, or worth the rejection. I was watching the level of creativity decline again, and it was depressing. After some wonderful detours, I landed at Chiat, embraced by the account director on Apple, who told me that I belonged there, that he wouldn’t get in the way of my dream, and that I was hired. But – oh, irony! – I was hired into the account team. Somehow, with the help or seduction or something of a very charismatic planner (and a woman!) I morphed into an account planner – a field that is, at most levels, dominated by women in the US. Theoretically, the planner is the creative’s muse and the voice of the consumer. Sometimes, that’s true. A lot of times, it’s just another kind of account management.

It was not lost on me that only about 3% of creative directors in US agencies are female; neither was it lost on me that only about 18% of management jobs are held by women. It also was not lost on me that my new employer’s planning department was run by a man who’d never been a planner; that an account director once exclaimed in his English accent, “There are too many bloody women on this account!” or that he referred to me as a part-time woman of no importance. To my face. I told him, quoting one of my heroes, Gail Zappa, “I’m going to remember you said that.” And I have.

Anyway – very long digression, right? – I became a strategist and an innovations expert. I’d become entirely disenchanted with advertising. What good had it done for culture, for society, for its clients, lately, anyway?

But sitting there for 90 minutes watching Art & Copy, I was reminded that sometimes a well crafted bit of copy and an amazing image can change your life (“I will be… naked more” from a Norwegian Cruise Line ad was the piece that made me want that job as a ‘creative’). It can motivate you to do something you’ve always wanted to (a friend at W+K met a couple camping across America who had quit their jobs and packed their tents because of an ad for Nike he’d written). It can inspire you to care (“If you let me play sports…”). Or it can reflect back all that you admire in humanity (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”).

Click here to view the embedded video.

(click to play)

Sometimes advertising can aim a bit higher than doing no harm or being merely ‘effective.’ Lots of things that are effective aren’t any good at all. But the work and thinkers and makers featured in this documentary are good. They’re better than that, they’re the enemies of good. They’re great.

Saw this today at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press website.  (Yes, sometimes I love to look at bar charts. I find them mysterious – they mean, after all, nothing, and yet signify so much.)

Surely this is not breaking news?

Over on Things That Remind Me of Robots I posted something about coming back to watch the X-Files, 10 year later.  I won’t rehash it here, but it has got me to thinking a lot about the notion of Big Truths.

Let me offer a definition:  A Big Truth is something that you have to sacrifice previously held beliefs in order to believe in for the first time.  You have to stop believing one or more things that you have taken for granted: as articles of faith, obvious facts, commonly accepted truths.  Then, you have to start believing something else, something that contradicts, or at the very least replaces, those previously held beliefs.  Regardless, you can’t believe the Old Truth and the New Truth at the same time.

I’ve generally encountered this sort of problem – how to tell the Big Truth so people will believe it – only in pharmaceuticals.  Specifically, I encountered it working with the cervical cancer vaccine.  How could we convince young women and the mothers of girls to get a vaccination against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cancer and genital warts?  There was a lot to unpack in that brand and product proposition.

We did a lot of focus groups talking to young women and moms about cervical cancer, vaccinations, HPV (human papillomavirus, the type of virus that causes cervical cancer), and sexual and reproductive health.  We’d talk about the vaccine, show them descriptions of the ways the vaccine is administered, the strains of virus it inoculates women against, the causal relationship between the virus and different diseases, efficacy results, safety indications, and so on.  For two hours, everyone would nod their heads and say things like, “the virus that causes cancer” and yet, I often felt that somehow we were not getting through.  So I drew this diagram on an easel:

When we showed people this diagram, suddenly the participants would stop in their tracks.  Despite the fact that this idea was at the heart of a two-hour discussion, and that this is what people told us they understood, it was not until we drew this diagram that they really understood what the idea really meant.

More than that, they were shocked.  Not only had they not really not understood what we were talking about, they found what we were talking about very difficult to believe.  All the way through the conversation they were intrigued by a vaccine for cancer, concerned about the implications, questioning efficacy, and musing about the importance of safeguarding their own or their daughters’ health.  But suddenly their seeming engagement with the topic was subsumed by confusion, dissonance.

And this is where it became clear:  they understood the concept; they just didn’t believe it.

Why not?  Because it required them to overcome a series of competing beliefs that they already had – ideas about what causes cancer, fears about vaccines, social norms about sex and sexuality, moral judgments about prevention and treatment.  We were asking them to believe that (A) cervical cancer and genital warts are caused by the same family of viruses, (B) these viruses are passed through sexual, skin-to-skin contact, (C) the vaccine inoculates young women against the strains of the virus that cause 90% of cervical cancer and 70% of genital warts, (D) the vaccine is safe, so that (E) it is a good idea to use the vaccine on young women.

What they already believed was some cocktail of the following:

• Cancer is hereditary – if no women in your family have had it, you won’t get it.
• Cancer is caused by environmental or lifestyle factors – if you live a healthy life, you probably won’t get it.
• Sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted by fluids – to get a sexually transmitted disease, you have to have vaginal, anal or oral sex.
• Young girls – in particular, pre-pubescent girls – do not engage in sexual contact.
• Condoms prevent all sexually transmitted diseases.
• Abstinence definitely prevents all sexually transmitted diseases.
• Vaccines are not safe – they cause autism, longer term illnesses, the illnesses they seek to prevent, flulike symptoms, or simply don’t work.
• You shouldn’t sexualize young girls by subjecting them to treatment or prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, much less discussing these treatments with them.
• Only promiscuous girls get sexually transmitted diseases.
• People who get sexually transmitted diseases deserve it.
• Sexually transmitted diseases, like genital warts, are treatable.
• Cervical cancer is treatable if you get regular cervical screenings.
• The risks of the vaccine outweigh the likelihood that a woman will get cervical cancer.

Most of what people already believed was either inaccurate, incomplete, or flat-out untrue. People’s ideas and attitudes towards sex and sexuality colored the rest of their beliefs about both the disease and its prevention.  We were asking them to abandon all of these previously held beliefs, forget the misinformation, delete their incorrect inferences, and believe something new.  We had science on our side, we had common sense on our side, but the one thing that worked the most effectively surprised us: fear.

The people most prone to abandon their previously held beliefs were people with intimate experience with, or a deep-seated fear of, cancer.  If you are terrified of cancer – and if you’ve ever known someone who has been treated for cancer, you understand this terror – then you are willing to abandon these beliefs because the new, Big Truth, transforms your understanding of cancer: from a terrifying, mysterious, deadly or disfiguring disease into something preventable, something you can spare yourself or your loved ones.  In other words, our Big Truth inspired a hope and sense of possibility, even relief, that abated their fear.  It was as if, for those who were scared, we’d turned on the light and shown them that the monster under the bed was just an errant stuffed animal.

But if you weren’t afraid of cancer – if you considered it a remote possibility – then the Big Truth was at least confusing, and worse, confounding, contradicting too many things you already believed.

It’s not often that we encounter brands and categories that trade in the Big Truth, or feel they have to, or have an opportunity to do so.  And who would blame them, when they can simply tap into what people already believe in and leverage these beliefs, even if they are based on falsehoods, to sell products or brands?

But I recently encountered this idea again in the context of electric vehicles.  People ‘get’ EVs.  But they do not have personal experience with them, generally, so their understanding is necessarily abstract.  As a result, the people I spoke to were shocked again – to discover that there would be upwards of a dozen different makes and models of EVs by 2013, that tens of thousands of EV charging stations will be installed throughout the country by the end of this summer, that plug-in hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles are coming, and so is the infrastructure for them.  In their minds, the abstract notion of widespread adoption of electric vehicles was 5 or more years away. Embedded in their abstractions were prejudices about EVs:  that they are small, lack power, don’t drive at highway speeds, aren’t safe, aren’t reliable, can’t go far enough, are expensive to maintain, aren’t fully proven as a technology.  Some have gone to another extreme – that all sources of electricity are suspect, produce emissions, cost resources, and so on.  These previously held beliefs hindered the depth of our discussions – too many hypotheticals were required to have a robust conversation.

Yet – an interesting belief was also embedded in our conversation about cars and energy.  Most of the people I spoke to believe that what kinds of cars get made, what kinds of energy sources we use, what energy costs, and what brands are available in this market are elements that are simply not up to them. The fact of this technology is fascinating, inspiring, concerning, but not within their power to control.  What brand of charging station will I plug my EV into?  Whichever one is installed on the street, in the parking structure, at my workplace, sold with my car.  What kind of EV will I drive?  Whichever kind I can afford, or like the looks of, or that my wife likes.  People were confused, surprised, but not stressed out in the slightest.  Electric cars are coming, resistance is futile, let it wash over you, and do what you will.

The cancer vaccine, on the other hand, was entirely up to them.  It wasn’t mandatory yet, it was the responsibility of a parent, or of an adult.  So when you combine believing in a Big Truth with placing the enactment of that belief solely within the responsibility of an individual – when believing in a Big Truth requires you to be responsible for the results of that belief, then people resist.  They resist hard.

I’m not sure what the answer is, and suspect that advertising or marketing are ill-equipped to take people very far in the process of overcoming previously held beliefs and adopting a new Big Truth.  But it is an interesting problem and one I suspect we will continue to face as scientific discoveries become products in a world where brands and communications are everything.