I approve this message.

by Sam Van Eman

Transcript of this recording:

Dear Campaign Ad Writers,

You're probably still rejoicing, or mourning, depending on how last night's decision turned out. For months, you've invested time and your best talents to promote your candidate, taking information gathered by others to praise and smear, always in the hope of gaining an edge. Some of your top writing happened this year. You had 30 second spots to work with, billboard dimensions to hem you in, newspaper word counts, footage from archives to paint two pictures, perhaps cameras and lighting crews, a budget, an angle, and a mandate.

You were essential. Your work, done well, could change history, and you knew it.

Regardless of your mood this morning, there is, possibly, a reason for confession. While your project most likely rendered pride, there were times when beneath the celebration of dirt well-placed, even thick skin felt the hesitation of harsh words going public. You cringed. That was your text. Had you paused to feel for a moment, you know the same words could not have been said in person. You are kind at home, for example; a host or hostess who, though opinionated, enjoys good food, laughter, and respectable discussion with company. After pleasant evenings, guests always bid farewell wishing to return.

Public insult, though, from the norms of previous campaigns and from pop culture sources as far from you as American Idol, differentiated your work life. Insult was acceptable there. Harsh criticism thrived in a context where peer pressure affirmed it. In that arena, political aspiration, national attention, and the basic human desire to know that your work matters came together to create a second you. Success in the whirl of election excitement trampled civil discourse underfoot.

For the sake of winning, you sliced an opponent's career into talking points, five and ten words long. You edited, “Oh yeah?! Well you...” and kept everything after. 

As the election results wear off, you'll look back on your work. You'll remember that derision isn't you. It wasn't part of your childhood instruction. It wasn't endorsed by the professors who inspired you. It sits uneasily with you now, though you believe it was necessary for victory and for the aversion of perceived dangers that threaten American life.

Words have been your gift. People pay you to compose them just so. They come easily and you wish to use them well, though now you have the growing sense that you've betrayed them. 

The good news is that you can be forgiven.

Aligning with your candidate when he says, “I want to congratulate my opponent on a hard fight” does not cover months of slander. Assuming pardon when your candidate says of the loser, “I wish the best for you” does not erase distortion. It does not patch wounds caused by a year of playground antics and bullying.

As life resumes, I hope you find rest. I also hope you'll consider this citizen's request:

Please remember that nations around the world have observed your product and wondered what good exists in such ruthless strikes. Please remember that my children have observed your product and wondered, by way of message approvals, how your candidate's opponent could be such a bad person. Unable to discern adequately, my children assumed your messenger stood alone as the one source of good. (How many of us remain unaware just like them.)

For our sake, and for the sake of decency and respectability, please consider your actions and make amends. Do it this week. Enjoy the fruit of humility and a clear conscience. This is the high road for you and for us. I look forward to seeing your work again in the future. I will recognize it when it rings of competition fused with neighborly love.

Until then, peace be with you.

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Jesus and Harry: The Light and Dark of Light and Dark

Photo by FadderUri

I'm finishing book six of the Harry Potter series in Spanish. I wouldn't have been caught dead with this accursed thing in my Pentecostal church growing up. And the 2-1/2 movie versions I've seen so far leave me feeling a sort of heaviness which I don't like. But the books, in Spanish, are not only good practice reading for me, they feel, oddly enough, just fine.

The words that have always carried considerable meaning regarding evil don't carry the same weight in a foreign language. "Witch" and "sorcery" made my dark list in English, but in Spanish? They're "bruja" and "hechiceria" which fail to conjure images of the magic-hatted, green-skinned accomplice of the Devil, or something worse. Regardless of my theological position against all things hechiceria, the added cultural weight of these terms didn't make it through the translator.

In part, this has permitted me to ponder more objectively the brouhaha about Harry Potter and his symbolic relationship with Jesus, as well as the philosophical and theological divisions in the Church about what is light and what is dark. I've made a few illustrations below to show you what I mean.

First, when I read Harry Potter, I automatically place items, characters and actions into two general categories. Of course, I could split some characters into sub-categories since they aren't always good and aren't always bad (Voldemort excluded, unless you consider his desire to learn or his ability to cultivate as essentially good things regardless of his intentions). But to keep things simple, I do the following while reading:

(If Hermione and Voldemort turn out differently in the end, humor me for now.) I do the same with items, characters and actions I'd consider Christian. The Bible, with all of the bad stuff in it, is holy and perfectly good. The financial rating of our local Christian TV station, on the other hand, falls just shy of 60% which is a big fat F. Don't get me started on the way they do fund-raising, which I can't imagine Jesus would ever endorse. So I categorize here too:

Put the two together and I run into questions, which I think are the same ones other people run into. Consider the recent debate going on in the comments of an article about Steve Jobs at TheHighCalling.org: Were his acts eternally good or eternally bad or perhaps only temporarily good? Is it eternally good to do good to your neighbor only if you're a follower of Jesus, or does love count for the good-producing heathen as well?

Or consider the controversy around Christianity Today's reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I've avoided reading spoilers so far, but I'm aware of the rebuttals). Many of us are hesitant to condone or condemn when light and dark look so similar that they tie our moral hands together. So is it like the following, with gradations of good and bad?

Or this, which doesn't try to equate Hermione with the Bible, per se, but considers that good can't exist outside of God's goodness, even if that goodness falls within the traditional category of bad, which would mean that both the Bible and Hermione are good and both local Christian TV and Voldemort are bad?

Or is there another position altogether?

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The value of babies and stuff

I received a New Baby announcement in the mail this week. It came from good friends and I was happy to hear the news. In crude terms, the card was a simple advertisement. The family told us about their product: a beautiful child, a boy; and inferred the benefits of welcoming him into our lives: happiness, hope, reminder of new life...

Of course, I don't see their child as a product, and the card did not strike me as advertising in any of the disordered ways we may be influenced to consume. In fact, the following thoughts came to mind only after it sat on my desk for several days in a moment when I was reflecting on two general characteristics of advertising:

1) Declaration of value.
2) Invitation to enjoy this value.

I'm pretty sure all advertising performs these two basic functions. In a similar way, so does the baby card. What perplexed me was why advertising doesn't work more often like the card, or, more clearly said, why the card doesn't feel like an advertisement at all, even if it (generally) acts like one.

Here's a partial reason for the difference. Actually two. Advertising veers away from the beauty of my friends' announcement when it commits either or both of these offenses: 1) The declaration of value fails to match the delivery of value. 2) The values we are invited to enjoy fail at being valuable.

In the first, I'm mislead; in the second, mistreated.

Mislead
Years ago, I bought a camping tent that promised durability. I expected this value to come with the declaration. It didn't. I'm quite particular with my belongings and have made this tent work - without failure - for many years. However, sans meticulous care, it would have failed soon after we got it, and I think about this point every time I set it up and tear it down. I was mislead because of the conflict between declaration and delivery. The declaration of value failed to match the delivery of value.

Mistreated 
It's true that, in a sense, my poor tent value is a form of customer mistreatment. But I wasn't completely mistreated because I wasn't completely mislead. Do you follow? It has been a great tent and, though I've had to be extra gentle, it still does what a tent is supposed to do. I was only mislead on the one point about durability. So a more poignant example of mistreatment can be seen in this Nissan advertisement:

They're being partly facetious, but no copy editor would choose to write "Envy. Terrible to feel. Wonderful to provoke." if a significant percentage of car buyers wasn't actually motivated by insecurity. I've whined about bullying before and I'll do it again now. Companies have control over customer treatment, especially when it comes to the messages they use to declare and invite via advertising. Bullying always mistreats. It may, in a roundabout way, state a deliverable value, but the end doesn't justify the means.

In the case of this magazine ad, I'm mistreated as a customer because the value - making others jealous - is all chaff and no wheat. My insecurity may perceive this promise as worthwhile, but it really isn't. The value we're invited to enjoy fails at being valuable.

Obviously tents and sedans can't be compared with children, but a truth remains. We admire companies that exceed our value expectations and treat us with human dignity, which is exactly what my friends' New Baby card did. It pointed to value I can't possibly estimate and made me enjoy being human.

What if all advertising did this?

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Dying Sailors and a Valuable Lesson for Employees

The Stormy Sea by Gustave Courbet

The first Outward Bound school opened in 1941 for a reason that I think has as much validity now as it did then. Listen to what was happening to WWII sailors:

"Lawrence Holt, President of the steamship company Blue Funnel Line...was greatly disturbed about the number of young sailors who were losing their lives in the service of his company. Battles at sea with Nazi submarines often resulted in sailors having to abandon ship."

"Time and time again Holt noticed that older sailors made up the greatest proportion of survivors." 

"Young men, though often more physically able, seemed to be lost because they lacked the sheer will to withstand the ordeals of ocean travel by lifeboat or raft." (From The Role of the Instructor, by Ken Kalisch)

This fascinates me. One would think physical prowess and youthful drive lead to success, but it turns out they don't. And I'm not sure these characteristics succeed in the pursuit of challenging careers either.

I spent last weekend with thousands of students who sat in session after session learning how the Christian faith, in particular, can inform work. These young attendees weren't learning how to proselytize or hang religious calendars in their cubicles. Instead, they were learning how to study various trades and career paths and the systems that shape and run them; how to orient their vocational vision toward addressing and correcting what's broken in those careers and using the careers to address and correct what is broken on the client end; and how to surrender to a divine call that honors God in the way the work gets done.

In practical speech, it works like this: As Jesus healed lepers, today's engineers protect travelers. As Jesus gave to the poor, today's shoe salesmen promote generosity. As Jesus spread his message with humility and truth, today's advertisers market honestly and with compassion.  

Or that's the way it's supposed to be. Perhaps I should have said, "Sometimes advertisers..." or "Advertisers try to market...." Advertising is one of those careers where the young are often, as we might say, lost because they lack the sheer will to withstand the ordeals of the industry.

I say this as an outsider, and to be fair, I'm pretty sure I would get lost if advertising were my career. Challenges face new employees in every field but advertisers especially seem unusually susceptible to compromising situations. The intersection of mass media, consumer wants and relative anonymity (Can you name anyone who has made a Super Bowl commercial?) creates enormous pressure to do whatever the boss/client demands, even if it makes no sense restoratively. And yet. And yet, it is no less a worthy vocation.

In tougher fields - like advertising - what employees need is a way to build character and resilience and wisdom to buck the broken systems and sustain new, neighbor-loving approaches. I don't know whether that looks like a program or mentorship or simply a community of stalwart encouragers, but if it works anything like wilderness experiences do, then a combination of duress and success is needed. Conscience-squeezing situations, risk, biblical formation, courageous stands, creative alternatives, and at least occasional victories are important elements that increase the survival rate of novitiates.

I've been both the young sailor and the old sailor and and I've drowned a few times. Mostly because in my youth I lacked the sheer will to withstand the ordeals of [fill in the blank].

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The devil is sometimes green

"Does anyone ever question what green actually means? And why is it so important to just be green. What about how these companies treat their employees, give to their communities or provide more to the world than just another product or service?"

I always appreciate neighborly questions related to marketing. They're the Can I borrow your watering can? and Do you need a hand with your gutter? questions of the ad industry.

Matthew Ammirati asked the green questions today at MediaPost - the "largest and most influential media, marketing and advertising site on the net, providing news, blogs, directories to help our community of more than 100,000 members better plan and buy both traditional and online advertising."

I add MediaPost's bio because that's quite an audience for Ammirati's questions about multi-level moral questions.

Furnaces and everything else
As a consumer, I confess that our recent decision to replace a dysfunctional furnace was only as green as the tax credit we'd get in 2011. I actually do care quite a bit about earth care, partly because so much of my professional life has been based in the outdoors, but also because it is a biblical concern based on one of the earliest commandments and supported throughout the Old and New Testaments. Yet I'm still motivated by what so many green-in-name-only companies know all too well:

I'll buy what complements my wallet.

Ammirati, on a marketing-centric website of all places, calls me and green card carrying companies alike to a more mature treatment of the issue. "[H]ow can we as marketers not succumb to the pressures of green-washing and lend our support to companies that are truly doing good in the world?" he asks. "It comes down to evaluating how a company treats its employees, its impact on the community, and whether the company is a good steward of the environment."

Employee care? Community concern? These are general good will questions and more than typical green questions, but they're also Jesus questions. They have Good Samaritan and foot-washing written all over them. Furthermore, Ammirati isn't a local environmental club spokesperson. He and his company serve "over 350 companies across 55 industries representing over $1.2 billion in revenues." As he puts it, "This is not some hippie, crunchy granola group of activist companies getting together to talk to themselves."

Explicit and implicit faith
I don't know Ammirati's faith background, or whether his Trustee meetings open in a word of prayer. I wouldn't be surprised though if they did. What I do know is that his questions are questions I need to ask more often. And when those questions threaten my wallet, I need to find adequate solutions.

The task of living Christianly as a consumer is near paralyzing, but Jesus knew I'd feel paralyzed in the myriad of decisions to make, didn't he?

Read the rest of Ammirati's article, Is It Enough to Be Green? What about Being Good?

Note on the painting: Wikipedia's caption reads: "In the 15th century 'Saint Wolfgang and the Devil' by Michael Pacher, the Devil is green. Poets such as Chaucer also drew connections between the color green and the devil." The painting jumped out at me with its use of color, especially considering the reactions some in the Church have had to earth care as well as separations others have made from green's biblical roots. Plus it's a particularly bizarre depiction of the devil, isn't it?

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Take It On Tuesdays: "Little Debbie, anyone?"

Take It On Tuesdays is a weekly encouragement for you to either Take It or Take It On. You'll use both depending on the work situation. You may need to turn the other cheek or confront, surrender or stand your ground, step back or step up. Here's to knowing which and when, and having the courage to follow through.

-----

When I was eleven, I remember spending one long summer day riding bikes with Eric and his brother. We rode for miles up and down the western Pennsylvania hills on BMX bikes (read: no granny gears). At that young age, we had plenty of energy but little common sense, so while we covered a great distance, we hadn't considered the return trip. In fact, by the time we stopped traveling, we had almost zero energy to return.

Coincidentally (perhaps), we crashed in the parking lot of a small convenient store. We were starving and weak. And we had no money. In a very memorable and (I thought) desperate act, I went inside and painstakingly took a Little Debbie snack from the shelf without the owner's notice. 

I had never committed such a crime, but we were hungry and I was excited to provide a remedy. I felt brave, like a mini hero. The brothers, however, were shocked. 

"You have to take it back! It doesn't matter if we're hungry - you can't do that!" 

Here I was the church-goer of the three and yet they were serving as our communal conscience. So I took it back. The store owner may have given the .25 cent cake to us had we told him our story but that hadn't crossed my mind. We were genuinely in need of food and I justified a way to get it.

Similar deeds take place every day in the workplace: a Little Debbie in accounting, a Little Debbie of plagiarism.... When you're tempted, you can either take it, or Take It. Go the hard route. You might let a boss or client down, but go hungry anyway.

My friends made me do the right thing and I hope yours do, too.

Related post: Art Worth Doing
    

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Is he REALLY that happy?

I'm interested to see how ads will reflect this volatile economic time. Will essential products step into the foreground? Probably. Will non-essential products beg? They already are with 0% financing and the like. Will companies smilingly promote non-essentials to suggest that all's well? Unfortunately.

Ad-makers, et al, I pray for you to keep your morals high and your consciences clean. You don't want to get through this and wish you'd lived it differently.

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