Chase what mattered

My dad died on Saturday. He made it to 59-3/4, the last "and 3/4" spent fighting sickness in the hospital.

I miss what could have been, but I don't think I miss him for what was. Our estrangement and relative superficiality, however, and the fact that no more solving can occur now, calls me to contemplate what matters as a father to my own two children.

This call makes a certain Chase commercial seem even more distant now than when I blogged about it last May: Chase what [really] matters

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Marketing Jesus

It's possible that everything I do, I do to experience pleasure, avoid pain, or assuage fear. Folks say I’m thoughtful and generous, but when it comes down to it, I still want the goods. And you do, too. What a challenge it is to find much altruism in any of us.

So it isn’t surprising that we tell people about Jesus in a similar fashion. We assume they’ll only be interested if perks exist. We take the basic invitation to faith, couch it in popular marketing terms, and offer it to potential customers: "[Y]ou (the consumer) 'invite him' (the product) 'into your heart' (brand adoption) and 'get saved' (consumer gratification)."

This little formula is from Tyler Wigg-Stevenson in his Christianity Today cover story, "Jesus is not a brand: Why it is dangerous to make evangelism another form of marketing" (January 2009). Tyler argues that our telling about Jesus is largely based on delivering goods, and his formula sounds like an advertisement, doesn't it?

To be clear, Tyler isn’t undermining the basic message of the New Testament. He’s saying that a generic If-Then evangelistic approach is inadequate. It resembles the frequent problem in which "brands promise to deliver goods - self-esteem, sex appeal, confidence, coolness - that they have no intrinsic capacity to give."

It’s dangerous to sell the Good News like HDTV. It puts the gospel on the same product shelf in consumers’ minds, and it means we’ll face the marketing challenges faced by all marketers. But here's where it gets tricky. We're human, so we’re needy. We need the perks. We shouldn't choose Jesus for what it's in it for us, but we can't help turning to Jesus for what's in it for us.

I can't turn my life over to Jesus just for Jesus' sake. Instead I do it because I've hit bottom and need to be rescued, or I feel insecure and need to be held, or I lack direction in life and need to be guided. Less commendably, I turn to Jesus because my friends are doing it. Regardless, I'm looking for deliverable goods, just like when I buy something from the store. Whether we consume Jesus or a new television, we still want what’s in it for us.

The difference between marketing Jesus and marketing HDTV, therefore, is in the quality of what can be delivered. If "Jesus is the power of God at work for a real salvation," as Tyler affirms, then gimmicks and special discounts are irrelevant. To hell then, so to speak, with fire insurance and promises that troubles will disappear once you have Jesus in your life. This Call-Now-And-You'll-Receive-This-Free-... approach “tend[s] to be met with all the success of a door-to-door salesman who's been working the same street every day for 2,000 years."

Yet because I get something out of it, I pass along the message in much the same way.

Am I to blame for this? Well, not completely. Tyler says that "consumerism is impotent to deliver on its promise." I disagree. We may not get all that we hoped for from a product, but we do get something, and that something is a foretaste (a this-isn’t-fully-cooked-yet foretaste) of what Jesus promises. For instance, a Steeler game on HD is far more pleasurable than squinting to read players' jerseys on my fuzzy analog station. HD won’t save me, and the increased viewing pleasure – as a singular benefit – doesn’t justify purchasing a new TV, but the Butterfly Effect of eventually watching games on a friend’s HDTV changed my social life and his family life and our communal life together. Consumerism may be handicapped, but it isn’t impotent.

Jesus and products provide benefits, but one certainly out-delivers the other. It behooves us to consider how, and then separate them accordingly.

Here is the practical challenge. People who share the gospel must understand that Jesus is not HDTV. This sounds ludicrous, but Tyler is right that our marketing methods are too similar. Second, people who sell products must be honest about what an item can actually deliver. There are marketing similarities between “selling” the gospel and selling products, but if the methods overlap too much, both the gospel and products will suffer a distortion of truth.

And when that happens, nobody will get what they want.


For more, read Tyler’s article, a critique of it, and an interview I hosted here with religious marketing critic, Mara Einstein.

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WALL-E

For those who read my pre-Christmas rant about faux gifts, here's a somewhat insignificant and rather loosely connected follow-up. (You may be impressed by my Photo Studio skills, but don't get your hopes up if you're looking for something profound or even advertising-related.)

In that post, I unfairly accused the "Kingdom of the Sea" film creator, David Mulhern, of stealing his ideas from the "Finding Nemo" film creator, Andrew Stanton. A reader called me on it and I retracted my unsubstantiated claim. Still, I wanted to side with Stanton.

Then last week, I finally watched Stanton's latest movie, "WALL-E." Guess what: He stole it. Yep, right out of the Bible. Noah's Ark.

=> People become self-centered and ruin life on earth;
=> People live on floating vessel for extended time while earth is cleansed;
=> Small creature is sent to search earth for signs of life;
=> Small creature finds plant and returns to floating vessel where captain decides it's time to return to earth, but only after humans learn that self-centeredness is wrong way to live.

If this weren't enough proof, Stanton is, by his own account, a Christian and claims that his story is about love...just like in the Bible!

OK, so I'm pretty sure allegories don't count as plagiarism, which means Stanton is off the hook.

Stay tuned for something less tangential, and perhaps more serious, next time.

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Soaked to the skin

I found a book of poems in my dentist's lobby this morning. Thimbles of Thought was the name of it, by Lois A. Burr. Here's one that caught my attention:

"First Job"

Sodden,
soaked to the skin,
our paperboy protects
his precious parcels, neglecting
himself.

I liked this poem because it connects with what's true about a New Breed of Advertisers:

1. Work energizes them. There's a certain pride involved with a first job that often fades in subsequent jobs. We need that "first job" feeling to excite and energize us and to remember the thrill of being called.

2. Their work produces value. The newspaper isn't a trivial widget to the boy because he knows that it benefits his customers. He may not benefit from it like they do, but that doesn't stop the newspaper from being a meaning-filled, even "precious" item. So he protects it.

3. Work is their act of service. It's no fun to be soaked unless it was intended. So this job, on this day, cost the boy. At the heart of work - done in a Christ-like manner - is service and sacrifice for the sake of others.

Here's to a "First Job" kind of year for all of you!

Picture: WALL-E protecting Eve.

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Rollover Minutes

Objectification: "the act of representing an abstraction as a physical thing."

When referring to women in commercials and advertisements and banner ads, objectification is a bad word. Not so with Rollover Minutes. I love this series of AT&T commercials, including the latest one I caught over Christmas break. Even though I'm a Verizon customer, I not only understand Rollover Minutes (OK, so I didn't need to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to grasp the concept) but I also want them.

Verizon?

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Hug an advertiser

There are tough elements in everyone's job, which means we all need help along the way. Here are three examples of help given.

1. Inherent risk
I worked for a roofing company for four years. Roofing was, as they joked, "second from the bottom on the job list...one up from shark bait." It was hard work, especially the industrial roof "cold tar tear-offs" which took place at night. No skin could be exposed to the tar dust, or else the sun at daybreak would heat it and melt it into your pores, sending you to the ER with your skin burning and your eyes swelling shut.

Gross, I know, but I've seen it happen. It was a real risk. Yet there was a veteran employee who always remembered to bring extra rolls of duct tape for newbies to dust-proof their outfits.

2. Fatigue
In my early twenties, I taught in an inner-city high school. The previous teacher had a breakdown from the high stress and walked out in October, and then the classes suffered further strain with over a month of day-to-day subs. When I finally entered the scene in December, it was chaos. Every day I wanted to throw up because I wasn't sure about anything beyond survival - and there were times when even that was in question.

One morning an old man drove past me before I entered the school. Like an angel in my time of need, he hollered from the car window, "Keep going...We need you...Our kids need you...." His voice trailed off down the street, but his words did not.

3. Compromise
I was talking with a friend about graphic design. He's very talented and able to "coolify" just about anything, like dirt if he wanted to. But this presents a temptation for him. Coolifying a product, and finding the inherent cool in a product, are two different matters. The latter is genuinely cool, while the former adds pizazz which may have nothing to do with the product. It's the pizazz, unfortunately, that entices when deadlines pinch because it's such an easy solution.

I encouraged him to keep bringing out the inherent cool. This is much harder than coolifying, but it's the honest approach that will not only pay off for him in the long run, but also do a great service to his projects now.


This week: Help somebody in their work.

Like the tape-carrying veteran roofer, the school angel, and the anti-coolifyer, we can help somebody in the their work. If you need a place to start, find someone in the advertising world this week. (All employees can benefit, but I'm mostly concerned with these folks.) Perhaps you work with or for a copywriter, photographer, graphic designer, media planner, or creative director. Or you know somebody who does. Or you know a student preparing to enter this field.

Give that somebody a hug. Take him out to lunch. Encourage her to continue serving God and loving neighbors as she faces constant temptations and pressures.

Like the man who hollered from his window, you never know what a blessing you might be.

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How NOT to be seen

There's a funny thing about this vignette from Monty Python's Flying Circus: When it comes to being seen by marketers, we're willing to stand up, too.

The question is whether it will turn out as badly. We know that marketing is increasingly pervasive and invasive, finding its way into everything from Nokias to noses. We're also aware that marketing is increasingly adept at targeting. For instance, marketing technology reads my Gmail note to a friend about summer camp and immediately provides a list of sponsored links, including "Summer Whale Camp," "Wakeboard Summer Camp," "Girl's 2-Week Summer Camp," and "Camp Caribou for Boys."

How does it know what I wrote? And do I mind that it's targeting my interests with related advertisements? At first I was weirded out but not anymore, regardless of the personal nature of my e-mails. Technology is learning how to find us and follow us, and I'm not sure that we mind.

In a recent interview with Kerry Langstaff, VP of marketing at Quova, she says the following about their specialty, "dynamic geo-location":

Basically we go and map the infrastructure of Web servers set up all over the world and map where IP Addresses have been allocated.... We identify where a user is connecting from through their IP address.... So, as an example, say a customer is searching for shoes. By using IP geo-location data to situate exactly where they are, a shoe retailer can localize its landing page for each incoming visitor. Another customer example is a newspaper which uses reader location to customize their news and ad content. If you log in from Massachusetts, you'll get the Red Sox score first -- not the Yankees score. And news, weather, and the store locations of advertisers can be localized based on where a particular person is logged in from.

(Read the rest of the article here: "Knowing Where The Consumer Is")

These are child's play examples and I like the idea of finding my favorite team listed before others. I like the idea of going to a news page and finding the top stories to be my kind of stories. I'll be seen for that. But what kind of targeting could eventually get me shot? I don't really mean shot, of course, but harmed, or controlled. At what point could privacy leave my control? From a Forbes article called "Scary Stuff":

Michael G. Michael, a theologian and technology historian at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, Aus­tralia, says that he originated the term uberveillance to describe the new environment. The stem "uber" means "over" or "super" in German. He thinks the pervasive monitoring will lead to increased cases of insanity and mental distress. "Mental illness will become an increasingly confronting factor as these issues develop," he frowned.

This is just one of myriad problems you could imagine in a world of uberveillance if you let your mind go there. Being the independent people that we are, I hope we'll only give away so much, but who knows? Maybe the Monty Python skit isn't too big of a stretch after all.

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Personal Brand Insecurity

I have a branding dilemma and I'm not sure if it's something minor or a symptom of something major. Ready for this?

Should I use caps or lower-case?

You can roll your eyes all you want, but it's a question that's starting to bother me. Stay with me for a minute. The internet has plenty of presentation norms and I know what most of them are. At the very least I know that web pages for business executives have significantly different norms than chat messages between teens.

case for lower
but i don't want to use capital letters. lower-case is more relaxed; more personal. it's how i want you to feel when you come over for dinner. you might think it's the finest table and tastiest food, but i want you to wander around the house if you'd like, get something from the fridge, or laugh out loud. lower-case is more my style.

lower-case is also easier, which means it's what i'd rather do. same point, less time.

Case for Upper
But I don't want to use lower-case either - at least not for writing. When I read through a dozen comments on a blog and one is written in lower-case, I skip that one or else put a lower value on it. I can't help thinking the writer is less educated. How arrogant, you say. Well I'll add hypocritical, too, since I e-mail almost exclusively in lower-case!

Caps are also more professional and readable. I can imagine my second-grader trying to read a chapter book with no capital letters. Talk about run-ons.

A diagnosis
For you non-analyzing types, you can't believe this is anything but a joke. But for me, a writer and speaker who mixes with a variety of audiences, this is only partly funny. I don't toss and turn or seek counseling over it, but it crosses my mind subtly every time I log on and start to type.

This constant e-wareness of whether to use caps or lower-case is why I think it is a symptom of something more serious. See, I'm the guy who reads Henri Nouwen's books, like Reaching Out or The Genesee Diary, and says, "Henri knows me." I'm the guy who reads Brennan Manning's Abba's Child and passes it on to all my friends. (Notice the link? I'm passing it along. Check out the others while you're at it.) I think I'm suffering from a case of Personal Brand Insecurity and I'm sure it's affecting my work.

PBI isn't just about what letter forms I should use. It is about searching for who I am, trying to find my voice, and wanting to care less about people's impressions and more about what matters. In C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, the demon uncle gives the following advice to his apprenticing demon nephew:

"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."

As I think about branding, advertising and all aspects of marketing, I wonder how someone like me could do it consistently and honestly while suffering from PBI. I applaud all of you who can.

Any advice? (About caps or lower-case, I mean, although PBI counsel is welcomed, too.)

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Art, haloes not included

Got this from the good folks over at *culture is not optional:

"What is Christian in art does not lie in the theme, but in the spirit of it, in its wisdom and the understanding of reality it reflects. Just as being a Christian does not mean going round singing hallelujah all day, but showing the renewal of one's life by Christ through true creativity, so a Christian painting is not one in which all the figures have haloes and (if we put our ears to the canvas) can be heard singing hallelujahs."

H.R. Rookmaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture

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But, MAAAaaaAAAHM!

Parents have it rough, and this year perhaps more than most. Toy companies are marketing directly at kids, and the kids are responding, "Yes!" while parents' wallets are saying, "No!"

But who's to blame? The parents, for not setting good boundaries for their kids? The kids, for having low discernment skills? Or the advertisers, for putting on an irresistible show? Perhaps a little of all three.

Parents
I read an article yesterday about parents complaining to toy companies this Christmas. The organization leading the push-back is Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and they want ads to stop being aimed at kids. Let parents make the decisions, they say.

I like this idea, but even I want half of the toys on TV, and I'm 35. Maybe it's because I only had one Star Wars action figure as a kid: no spaceships, no detailed model of a far away planet, no accompanying action-figure troops, and certainly no special effects, like these kids had:



I'm still jealous, and this ad is from the 80's. Commercials have come a long, tempting, way since then, and kids are even more seduced now. Only the strongest could resist such an onslaught of allure. I want to say to the marketing minds behind this brilliance, "Stop sucking us in. Enough is enough. Help us to lead simple lives. Quit enticing me...er, my children!"

Kids
But my first responsibility is not to change the market. It's to curb my own desires and to teach discernment to my kids. My girls have to learn the difference between wants and needs, quality and junk, genuine interests and peer pressure. I can't protect them forever.

Advertisers
Now what about the advertisers? They certainly carry guilt, but how much? Well, just imagine how toy advertising would change if they cared more about our kids than about profit. We might be able to say, "Susie, if the advertiser says it's a good toy, then it's a good toy because he loves us and wants the best for you." Sort of a What Would Jesus Market? approach.

I must admit, Ad folks, I change the channel on most of your toy commercials. They're just too much and too often and too flashy. Yet, I try to give you the benefit of the doubt because what if you aren't thinking about the 1000s of other toys on the shelf, but only the one you're pushing because you swear it's good for my child's development and because you hope it will replace the more meaningless toys my kids already have?

I know if I were you, these are the toys I'd want to market. And I'd want to tell the kids AND the parents about them.

Readers, check out the article to hear what parents and advertisers are saying about toy ads this year. Or visit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and send a ready-made letter to the toy companies. Or, tell me what - if any - toy commercials should NOT be taken off the air.

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