Facebook Ups Ad Targeting

On September 1, Facebook began inviting advertisers to reach its users by targeting them through phone number or email address.

Facebook skirts privacy worries by emphasizing that advertisers already have that information (in fact, an advertiser has to send the info to Facebook, which looks for match-ups within its database).

Advertisers can blend phone number- or email address-targeting with other demographic markers (like age, gender, education and interests) to reach specific Facebook users.

 

So an advertiser with no more than a phone number could, for example, target ads to affluent women in their 40s with graduate degrees in physics and an interest in golf.

Another Early Retirement

You can't pick up an advertising textbook that doesn't mention Avis Car Rental's slogan, "We try harder."

The poster child for competitive positioning, the slogan was at the time of its roll-out half a century ago a powerful shot across the bow of the Number One car rental company, Hertz.

Alas, Avis has announced it will retire the slogan in favor of a new one, "It's your space."

Avis' chief marketing officer told Advertising Age the new slogan "presents the brand in terms of the customer experience and the advantages inherent in renting from Avis."

Nothing lasts forever in this wayward world. But I wonder why Avis chose such a humdrum slogan, when it had something so right.

I have a feeling the next early retirement at Avis will be the CMO.

Reality Doesn't Interest Me

Whoopee.

The quadrennial mudfest is upon us.

Is there any wonder why presidential campaigns have for decades been models of manipulation and deceit?

Elections are easy to sway when the majority of the electorate sleepwalks through life.

As journalist Walter Lippman observed his 1922 essay Public Opinion, elections are decided not only by "normal members of society"—by whom he meant people who are informed—but by "persons who are mentally children or barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion."

I am certain you'd welcome a substantive debate of political issues this election season as much as I.

But that's not likely to happen.

As propagandist Leni Riefenstahl once said, "Reality doesn't interest me."

Short Words Win

George Orwell advised, "Never use a long word where a short one will do."

The results of a 2005 experiment by psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer suggest Orwell was onto something.

Oppenheimer showed that writers who use big words needlessly are judged by readers as less intelligent than writers who use short ones.

To conduct his study, the Princeton psychologist borrowed students' writing samples and doctored them.

First, he created "highly complex" versions by replacing every noun, verb and adjective with its longest synonym.

Next, he created "moderately complex" versions by replacing every third noun, verb and adjective with its longest synonym.

Oppenheimer then asked subjects to read the various writing samples and rate the intelligence of their authors.

Across the board, the original samples won out over the moderately and highly complex versions.

Oppenheimer concluded, "Contrary to prevailing wisdom, increasing the complexity of a text does not cause an essay’s author to seem more intelligent. In fact, the opposite appears to be true."

Name Game

YouTube.

FireWire. 

Lean Cuisine.

Why do rhymes make such powerful product names?

Because they're self-contained.

"Rhymes create a sense of symmetry and completion," writes naming pro Steve Rivkin in Branding Strategy Insider.

Rhymes also lessen confusion and "Humans like anything that simplifies the buzzing confusion in the world," according to Harvard linguist Steven Pinker.