Facing Facts

The greatest American superstition is a belief in facts.

— Hermann Keyserling

Facebook is countering fake news by downgrading all news.

Beginning next week, users will see mainly the posts of friends and family in their feeds; publishers' posts will virtually vanish.

In the short term, the decision is harmful. 

Facebook's move will lower users' time on the social network, and lower the "referral traffic" publishers count on. The latter will force all publishers to scramble to make up for the lost eyeballs, and put a lot of them out of business, according to The New York Times.

In the long term, however, the decision is beneficial—to Facebook.

Under scrutiny for abetting Kremlin-backed trolls during the 2016 election, the company confronts the real possibility of government regulation, as it lacks AI's equivalent of a Walter Cronkite or Ben Bradlee to decide what's legitimately newsworthy.

Critics complain the company's move amounts to a news blackout, since nearly half of Americans get at least some of their news from the social network. 

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is merely "protecting our community from abuse and hate."

The decision signals a return by Facebook to its "college scrapbook" origins ("Look how my new brussels sprouts recipe turned out!")

Takeaway? Ten years from now, we'll chuckle to recall we once believed Facebook was a media company.

The Empire Strikes Back

Ad blockers may appear the victors, but publishers are fighting back, "taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures," according to TechCrunch.

A new study by two universities finds nearly a third of the top 10,000 websites are using quiet techniques to fake out ad blockers.

The researchers repeatedly visited thousands of sites, with and without ad blockers added to their browsers.

By comparing the source code of pages visited with and without blockers, they could tell when page content changed based on the presence of a blocker.

The researchers found over 30% of the top 10,000 websites are retaliating against ad blockers; and 38% of the top 1,000 are.

Retaliation takes the form of source code that produces ad-like “bait” (for example, by including photos named "banner"). 

The bait triggers ad blockers, alerting the website to their presence; the site then deploys ads in ways blockers can't detect.

The researchers warn that a "rapidly escalating technological arms race" is on between publishers and ad blockers.

Time

Time isn't the main thing. Its the only thing.

— Miles Davis

My home sits across the street from the original campus of NIST, where a physicist invented the atomic clock in 1948. A bronze plaque marks the spot.

Physicists use the atomic clock to measure time and synchronize clocks worldwide. Without it, we wouldn't have mobile phones or GPS.

Physicists call the instants the atomic clock measures Atomic time. 

Naturally, there are many other forms of time, including:

Universal time. Universal time measures the duration of the Earth's rotation on its axis, which actually takes a bit more than 24 hours—and more time every day, because the earth's rotation is slowing.

Space time. Space time measures where instants take place. Einstein proved gravity causes space time to warp, particularly near black holes. Space time also warps at the DMV.

Quality time. Quality time measures the instants when spouses and parents enable silent mode on their mobile phones.

Eastern time. Eastern time measures the period when most of the work is performed each day in the United States (contrast this especially to Pacific time).

Miller time. Miller time measures the instants when beer and other alcoholic beverages are consumed. On college campuses, this form of time is frequently accompanied by Lost time.

Missing time. Not to be confused with Lost time, Missing time measures the instants abductees spend aboard UFOs, experiencing what physicist call "close encounters of the fourth kind."

Executive time measures the instants the President spends watching the Fox News Channel. Like Universal time, this from of time expands daily.

Did You Know Dashiell Hammett was Once a Copywriter?

Tuberculosis compelled Dashiell Hammett to quit his job as a Pinkerton detective in 1921.

Seeking less strenuous work, he enrolled in a journalism course at a business school in San Francisco, and began to write mystery stories for pulp magazines.

But by 1926 Hammett found mystery-writing couldn't earn him enough to live on, so he applied for a job as a copywriter with Samuels Jewelers. It paid a whopping $350 a month—nearly 10 times Hammett's earnings for pulp fiction.

He liked the new work; but he liked booze better. Before six months on the job Hammett was fired, after passing out in the office.

At the encouragement of a pulp magazine editor, Hammett began writing a "hard-boiled" mystery novel, Red Harvest. He mailed it—unsolicited—to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1929.

Knopf realized it had received something unprecedented: a thriller that was "real art."

With weeks of the novel's appearance, reviewers were comparing Hammett to Hemingway. 

Hammett followed Red Harvest the same year with a second novel, The Dain Curse; and in 1930 published his most famous detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.

How Copywriters Leverage the "Endowment Effect"

A study by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman shows we overvalue the things we own—an emotional bias he calls the "endowment effect." Propelling the effect is our a fear of losing those things.

Copywriters put the endowment effect to work all the time, helping prospects vicariously experience owning a product or using a service:

• The writer for e-com platform provider Shopify helps prospects imagine owning an online store: "With instant access to hundreds of the best looking themes and complete control over the look and feel, you finally have a gorgeous store of your own that reflects the personality of your business."
  
  
• The writer for event producer Age Management Medicine Group helps prospects imagine participating in a conference: "After attending this in-depth, four-day conference, you’ll walk away with what you need to add this 21st century medical specialty to your existing practice."
  
  
• The writer for CRM provider Salesforce helps prospects imagine licensing a mobile sales platform: "Welcome to a new world, and a better way to sell. Where field sales sells only on mobile devices. It’s sales managers knowing which deals will close. And when. A world where lead and contact information is always fresh and complete. And everyone performs like an 'A' player."

Thanks to the endowment effect, ownership―even when vicarious―makes it hard for prospects to let go of your offer.

What Happened?

A bombshell not unlike Fire and Fury hit bookstores 40 years ago.

Elvis: What Happened?, based on interviews with three of the rock star's private bodyguards, painted a tabloid-style portrait of the King as a self-indulgent child bent on "slow suicide."

Fans were shocked, and reacted by calling the book a con-job. They cited the author's many factual errors; his failure to reveal his sources; his failure to verify the sources' accounts with third parties; and his frequent use of qualifiers like "as I recall."

Elvis was also enraged by the book and spoke in private about contract-killing the three bodyguards.

But when Elvis OD'd two weeks after its release, Elvis: What Happened? gained instant credibility, and a steady stream of confidants began to speak out, confirming the book's allegations.

With Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff, journalist and former editor of Adweek, has created the portrait of another self-indulgent child.

Trump's fans are reacting in the same way Elvis' did 40 years ago; and Trump's press secretary has dismissed Wolff's book as "trashy tabloid fiction." But unlike Elvis: What Happened?, Fire and Fury is based on interviews with 200 sources.

When the insiders―no matter their number―tell an essentially consistent story, only a fool cries, "Fake!"

Hedging

"Lead-gen leaders" are twice as likely to use a multi-channel approach as "mainstream companies," according to a survey of 1,000 B2B marketers by Digital Doughnut.

You could say lead-gen leaders understand hedging.

They know that "no single class of content asset stands out as particularly effective for driving good-quality leads," as Digital Doughnut reports; and yet, at the same time, that every class―if used well―can drive good-quality leads.

The channels they find most effective? The answers below might surprise you.

Source: The State of B2B Lead Generation, courtesy Digital Doughnut

Authority versus Authenticity

For sheer magnetism, nothing matches authority. B2B brands that show authority attract customers with ease, and always will: they're in a category by themselves. 

But lots of brands lay claim to authority without justification.

The word authority came into English around 1200 and stems from the Latin auctoritas, meaning "mastery." English speakers of the day believed an authority commanded trust, because he or she possessed demonstrable mastery.

Showing authority means showing mastery of certain theories, facts, skill-sets, and tool-sets. If your brand can show mastery, you're set―customers will flock to you; if it can't, it can at least show authenticity―another advantageous category.

Authenticity came into English around 1300 and stems from the Greek authentikos, meaning "original." English speakers of the day believed someone who showed authenticity was an "original," and therefore "real" and "trustworthy."

Showing authenticity means being an original: an original in your approaches to thinking, problem-solving, and adding value. That won't by itself attract customers, but it will make pursuing them a lot more effective.

Showing neither authority nor authenticity puts your brand in a third category―the category of meh―where only continuous hustling and discounting and perhaps sheer ubiquity attract customers.

An Association Fights "the Enemy at Home"

During World War I, the newly formed American Social Hygiene Association campaigned to arrest the spread of venereal disease, an incurable "enemy" afflicting over 100,000 Americans soldiers.

The association teamed with the War Department to teach American boys how to avoid the infections, and worked with local civilian and military police to break up the prostitution rings that plied near military bases.

To convince soldiers of the wisdom of remaining disease-free, the association distributed pamphlets, posters, slide shows and films that relied on a mix of medical facts, appeals to patriotism, and moral suasion. 

One pamphlet depicted a patriotic mother fretting over the chance her soldier-son will catch VD. "She does not fear your death—your honorable death," the pamphlet said, "but the dread that you may become innocently contaminated pulls at her heart-strings.”

To break up prostitution rings, association members joined forces with local vice squads and the military police to round up and jail prostitutes and seal off red-light districts.

The Stars and Stripes proudly reported: “Mothers need have no fear that their sons are being dragged down to hell by vicious women.”

A Book for Every Man

When the US joined World War I, the American Library Association launched a fundraising campaign designed to provide troops leisure-time reading.

In only three months, A Book for Every Man raised $5 million, enabling the ALA to ship more than 385 thousand donated books overseas. Before the war's end, that number would reach 10 million. 

Books were delivered to camp libraries and hospitals; placed on transport ships and troop trains; and sent to German prisons housing American POWs. Many were how-to books that helped the soldiers master subjects like accounting, electrical engineering, plumbing, and carpentry; others helped them wage war against Germany; while still others helped them improve their scores in popular games like checkers, chess, poker, and dominoes.

Most of the books were escapist page-turners, meant to fill the idle hours. Among the most popular contemporary authors were writers we still read today, including L. Frank Baum, John Buchan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Willa Cather, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, H.P. Lovecraft and H.G.Wells.

How to Bust Public Enemy Number 1

Banner blindness is lead-gen's Public Enemy Number 1.

Ad blocking may be copping all the headlines; but if your ads don't arrest prospects' attention, they might as well be blocked.

Here are four things you can do to bust banner blindness:

Build better ads―follow tried-and-true ad-design principles and focus prospects' eyes on your call to action. HINT: Photos of smiling faces work wonders.

Help prospects―"contextually target" your ads to amplify the content on the pages where they appear. Help readers who may be searching for specific information or solutions.

Entertain―invest in high-end video. Testimonials are highly effective.

Go native―forget about banners and embed your ads in the editorial stream.

Fond Memories of a Forgotten Industry

If you want to know where the future goes to be seen, look here.

― Charles Pappas

Charles Pappas, reporter for Exhibitor, has compiled a lighthearted treasury of trade show tales titled Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World's Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World. 

It's a whimsical wayback machine that whirls you through a century and a half of gadgets and the shows that made them famous.

Pappas' goal isn't to spotlight the stars, but the stage. 

Although worth about $100 billion today, trade shows are a forgotten industry, he says, "as invisible as the oxygen in the air around us."

And that's ironic because shows are much more than "product platforms," Pappas says: they help launch social movements.

You'll find tons of delightful trivia inside his 250 pages.

Among my favorite:

• We owe our obsession with dinosaurs to an 1851 London show
  
  
• We eat bananas because an 1876 Philadelphia show popularized them
  
  
• The seed money for the Statue of Liberty came from shows in Paris and Philadelphia
  
  
• Aunt Jemima owes her fame to an 1893 Chicago show
  
  
• The electric vibrator premiered at a 1900 Paris show (where else?)
  
  
• The Patriotic Food Show promoted eating roadkill to help ration food in 1918
  
  
• Space travel launched at a 1927 show in Moscow (30 years before Sputnik)
  
  
• Picasso's "Guernica" began life as a trade show mural
  
  
• The run on Nylon stockings began at the 1939 New York show
  
  
• The term "Con" (as in Comic-Con) was coined by the same promoter who coined "Sci-Fi"

Pappas' book suffers from the author's overuse of puns, but they're easily overlooked amid the fascinating stories he tells. 

Don't miss Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords. It's a lot of fun.

Free College for Everyone

Anyone can go in, but it is not everyone who can go out.

― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Bernie Sanders only says free college should be everyone's right; Donald Trump is guaranteeing it is.

Inmates of London's Marshalsea―enshrined in the novels of Charles Dickens―liked to call the brutal debtors' prison "the college."

Trump is busy reinstituting Marshalsea-style "colleges" nationwide.

Although federal debtors' prisons were outlawed in the 1830s, the states remain free to operate them.

Since the 1980s, one-third―including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas―have found them immensely profitable ventures, both for state and local governments and for the shareholders of private-prison companies like Geo and CCA.

And where there are profits to be made, you'll find Trump.

So, parents, celebrate!

College lies in every child's future.

These are the 10 Most Bizarre Crimes Ever Committed by an Association Executive

NOTE: The confessions below are transcribed from official police files.

"We spent our marketing money on digital ads."

"Yeah, we sent email, but didn't know it was all flagged as spam."

"We quit phoning members twenty years ago."

"We quit sending direct mail twenty years ago."

"Games? Don't believe in them! Our members are serious."

"Humor? Don't believe in it!"

"Fun. Don't believe in it!"

"We never thought about authenticity. What is it, anyway?"

"We didn't change with the times. It costs too much."

"We ignored everyone under 40."

TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME. 

Download Growing Your Event: 10 Magic Bullets for 2018. 

It's yours free, courtesy Bob & David James.

And have a Happy New Year!

Why Being a Bore Will Wreck Your Career

It is vain to do more with what can be done with less.

― William of Occam

"Don't be a bore," says 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián.

Talking overmuch is a sign of vanity.

"Brevity flatters and does better business," Gracián says. "It gains by courtesy what it loses by curtness. Good things, when short, are twice as good."

Worse, talking overmuch is a sign of ineptness.

"It is a well-known truth that talkative folk rarely have much sense," Gracián continues. Talkative folk are "stumbling stones" and "useless lumber in everyone's way."

Useful folks get right to the point. "The wise avoid being bores, especially to the great, who are fully occupied: it is worse to disturb one of them than all the rest. Well said is soon said."

Art Depreciation

The art-show blabbermouth peeves me.

He knows why every artist chose his subjects, what he intended by painting them, and where he ultimately disappoints viewers—and wants everyone in the gallery to know he knows.

Were he right—like a stopped watch—just twice a day, the blabbermouth would deserve a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

We should be so lucky.

One of these wearisome windbags trailed me during my visit to Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting this week.

At one point she complained for all to hear that the exhibit was a "huge disappointment:" it simply didn't include enough Vermeers.

She doesn't know Vermeer produced only 40 works; that the dozen on display represent a full third of his extant work; or that the show's curators have received universal praise.

"Know how to appreciate," urged the 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián:

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled. To know how to make use of every one is useful knowledge. Wise men appreciate all men, for they see the good in each and know how hard it is to make anything good. Fools depreciate all men, not recognizing the good and selecting the bad.

Darkest Hour

England's policy of "appeasement"―letting Hitler grab neighboring lands with impunity―provides the backstory of Darkest Hour, the new biopic about Churchill and Chamberlain.

As we watch the media under attack by right-wing Republicans, Churchill's warnings about the dangers to freedom of the press are as relevant today as they were in his time.

And so are his actions to sidestep thought control.

During the 1930s, Chamberlain favored appeasement, for an extremely practical reason: his party's rule hinged on the votes of working-class Britons, who opposed foreign entanglements and distrusted war profiteers (after all, they'd paid the price for militarism in the previous war against Germany).

In 1938, Chamberlain signed an accord with Hitler labeled the Munich Agreement, which let the Führer annex part of Czechoslovakia if he agreed to stop seizing more territory. Most Britons praised Chamberlain's coup; but of course it didn't stop Hitler, who provoked war with England a year later, when he invaded Poland. The pacifist Chamberlain proved within eight months an inept wartime leader, opening the door for Churchill's appointment by the king as his successor (the first scene of Darkest Hour).

Chamberlain's most fiery critic, Churchill had spent years protesting appeasement, using his favorite soapbox: the newspaper op-ed. When Chamberlain―in keeping with the Munich Agreement―moved to stifle all opposition to Hitler, he ruled out critical speeches in Parliament and threatened the newspapers with shutdown, citing national secrecy laws. Churchill, in response, promised to take his message to the streets.

In a November 1938 speech before the national press club, Churchill wondered aloud whether Chamberlain wouldn't rather live in a totalitarian state. "In those states they conduct foreign policy on the basis that the press say nothing but what it is told, and immediately say what it is told. It might be very convenient, no doubt, if we could suppress public opinion here, and everything was allowed to go on quietly without our knowing what was going on outside."

Churchill suggested England was in fact already experiencing a press blackout. With appeasement's critics in Parliament muzzled and the press censored, Chamberlain enjoyed carte blanch to bamboozle Britons. 

The situation left opponents like Churchill one choice: to resist the government's policy through the "public platform." And resist Churchill did. 

Between September 1938―when the Munich Agreement was signed―and September 1939―when Germany invaded Poland―Churchill spoke against appeasement relentlessly on the radio. He also repackaged 80 of his op-eds into a book―which became an immediate best-seller―and, with financial help from silent backers, erected billboards calling for his appointment to Chamberlain's cabinet. 

Churchill's cabinet appointment did come, three days after Hitler entered Poland and simultaneously with England's declaration of war with Germany.

Welcome to Perfection

There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.

― Shannon L. Alder

B2B marketers who rent prospect names have a funny idea about accuracy.

They expect perfection.

A team of direct marketing experts sampled the offerings of five large suppliers of prospect names and verified the samples' accuracy by phoning the prospects.

They found the data offered imperfect. Suppliers' data-accuracy ranged from a low of 93% to a high of 98%, as the chart below shows:

Why anyone who routinely accepts less-than-perfection from a spouse, a quarterback, a physician or a priest expects perfection from a data supplier is beyond me.

If you do, my advice is twofold: get real; and get a list broker. Brokers know which suppliers offer decently accurate prospect data―and which don't.

And don't expect perfection.

Spreading the Light

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

— Edith Wharton

In the early 1920s, Professor Edith Stein was assistant-teaching at the University of Freiburg alongside her mentor, the renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl.

Their aim was considered subversive at the time: to train a generation of scholars to dissect "lived" human experiences—everything from falling in love to walking the dog, encountering a Rembrandt to eating a sandwich. Professional philosophers rarely thought about such things. 

Stein's own interest lay in dissecting empathy—our lived experience of others—which to her mind was the key to self-knowledge. Her interest stemmed, in part, from her work as a nurse in a field hospital during World War I, after which she told a friend, "I realize now that my life is no longer my own.”

A once-devout Jew turned atheist, Stein believed through philosophy she could shed light on the existence of souls—an effort her mentor encouraged ("The life of men is nothing else than a way towards God," Husserl later told her). But while visiting a friend's home, Stein read a borrowed copy of the autobiography of a nun, Saint Teresa of Ávila. It convinced her to convert to Catholicism. Stein then quit her university job and began to lecture throughout Germany, not on Catholicism, but feminism—talks that made her famous. Twelve years later, Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne, planning to live a secluded life writing philosophy books.

But politics intervened. Hitler's persecution of Jews prompted the nuns to transfer Stein in 1938 to a convent in Holland, where they thought she'd be safe. And she was until 1942, when Holland's bishops condemned Nazi anti-Semitism from the pulpit and Hitler, in retaliation, ordered the arrest all Jewish converts in the country. Stein was taken in a boxcar to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. Her body was cremated, like 1,018,350 others.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II—another of Husserl's followers—beatified Edith Stein. That same year, a two-year-old girl in Boston mistook Tylenol for candy and swallowed the equivalent of 16 lethal doses. The girl's parents begged everyone they knew to pray to Stein to intercede on their dying daughter's behalf. They did, and the girl recovered within days.

''I'm not saying it was a miracle,'' her doctor told The New York Times. ''I'm saying it was miraculous. I'm Jewish. I don't believe per se in miracles, but I can say I didn't expect her to recover.''

Two years later, the pope canonized Edith Stein as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. He remarked in English that day, ""Edith Stein stands out as a beacon which casts its light amid the terrible darkness which has marred this century. To her prayers before God I entrust all who suffer for the sake of justice and human dignity."

The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled

Democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

— Isaac Asimov

I've had it with the truthies, trash and trivia that's vying for my overtaxed attention.

Once intriguing, the big news sites and social media networks have become cyber cesspools.

My New Year's resolution: to boycott them.

The last straw was a click-bait headline that dogged me yesterday: "The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled."

I don't need—or care—to know why ABC executives scrapped a TV sit-com 46 years ago.

Worse, I resent being told the "real" reason was adultery, when in fact it was low audience share.

It's time for all good people to call a halt to America's romance with anti-intellectualism—the willful "dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility," as executive coach Ray Williams puts it.

We should take no pride in the fact Americans choose to be gullible and uninformed.

We should only take comfort in the fact that millions of the most gullible and uninformed are killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and guns.