A Farewell to Apps

It was a pleasant cat café, bright and clean and friendly, and I took my tablet out of my brown and saffron backpack and started to write. I was writing about the next all-hands meeting and the email was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor drink my mochaccino. Then the email was finished and I read it and saw that it was a good email but very long.

A girl came in the cat café and sat at the table next to mine. She was very pretty with a face as clear and clean as an iPhone box if they packaged iPhones in skin and painted the logo on with crimson lipstick freshened by a cool autumn rain. She smiled at me with her gently modeled face and her eyes looked inquisitive. "Using the app?" she said.

"To pay for my coffee?"

"No, The Hemingway app. It edits your writing."

"It's news to me."

"It cuts dead words from your writing and highlights passive constructions, so you write with the power and clarity of Papa, only faster and easier and without the beard. It costs only $9.99."

"I'll be sure to read the reviews."

She nodded and then I went back to my email and read it a second time and felt sad because it was very long. I clicked on Safari to download the app and launched the beach ball of death showing the wi-fi was broken and all the sadness of the big city filled me suddenly, with the streets turned to wet blackness by a cold winter rain and the storefronts all dark as if they were once Radio Shacks and Borders and Blockbusters and A&Ps and I thought my writing was slow and bloated and perhaps out of date like those stores.

I finished reading the last paragraph and looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she's not saddled with student debt like one of the mules we took up the mountainside at Caporetto, I thought. But I felt sad. I shut down my tablet and put it in my backpack and said psh psh psh to a black and white tuxedo kitty that came and restored my dignity.

How to Present Perfectly

Great speakers love triads.

Gaelic bards loved them—because they can be readily memorized.

Roman orators loved them—because they structure ideas.

Modern leaders love them—because they inspire.

In their new book, Communicate to Influence, speech coaches Ben and Kelly Decker urge execs to use triads whenever they prepare a presentation, calling triads the "perfect framework" for sales pitches, product launches, motivational talks and business briefings.

In three short strokes, triads create patterns and rhythms, which makes them inherently more intelligible than longer lists of things.

Triads are also more persuasive and memorable than long data dumps. Just think of the many you remember:

• Veni, vidi, vici
• Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
• Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité
• Government of the people, by the people, for the people
• The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
• Truth, justice and the American way
• Stop, drop and roll
• Wine, women and song
• Location, location, location

As writing instructor Roy Peter Clark says, "In the anti-math of writing, the number three is greater than four. The mojo of three offers a greater sense of completeness than four or more."

Roll Over, Richard Branson

Real brand spokespeople can't hold a candle to imaginary ones for tugging heartstrings.

Personification, hypnotizing us since Homer's day, attributes human qualities to animals, abstractions and inanimate objects.

Not only do educators and entertainers like Sesame Street, Disney and Pixar tap into personification, but marketers bank on it to spur customers' cravings for parity products.

Personification is a breed of metaphor, and the DNA of every marketer's imagination, says marketing professor Stephen Brown.

"Our very understanding of the world is reliant on figurative thinking," he writes. "Metaphors are both unavoidable and invaluable. They are the bits, the bytes, the binary code of the imagination and the crucible of today’s creative economy.

The most powerful metaphors symbolize human embodiment, sensations and emotions, Brown says.

"Hence, we sniff out market opportunities, listen to the voice of the customer, keep in touch with technological developments, spot yawning gaps in the market and lament the chronic myopia of top management. Our basic worldview is personified, in other words, and marketing’s root metaphors reflect this fact."

A sampling of famous personifications includes:

• Mr. Peanut
• Mr. Moneybags
• Mr. Clean
• Michelin Man
• Marlboro Man 
• Uncle Ben
• Aunt Jemima 
• Betty Crocker
• Peter Pan
• Californian Raisins
• Pillsbury Doughboy
• Jolly Green Giant
• Keebler Elves
• Snap, Crackle and Pop
• Google Android 
• Budweiser Clydesdales
• Tony the Tiger
• Dove Soap
• Red Lobster
• Angry Birds
• Playboy Bunny

NOTE: Thanks to photographer and video producer Ann Ramsey for suggesting this post; she personifies creativity.

Beware Influencers for Sale

The Federal Trade Commission isn't keen about marketers who truck with shady social media influencers, as two recent cases illustrate.

In November, it slammed ad agency Deutsch for misleading consumers after a rabid junior account exec persuaded fellow employees to use their personal Twitter accounts to broadcast ringing endorsements of Sony's PlayStation Vita game console.

The employees failed to disclose they worked for Deutsch or that Sony was a client, and the FTC ruled their tweets could reasonably be understood as the genuine opinions of consumers.

This month, the FTC charged online network Machinima with consumer deception because it paid two influencers $45,000 to post videos on YouTube that endorsed Microsoft’s Xbox One. Like Deutsch's employees, the two influencers failed to disclose that their seemingly authentic opinions were anything but.

Machinima had guaranteed Microsoft 19 million views of the videos.

Unfortunately, one originated within the FTC.

Robert Downey Words

After Robert Downey, Jr., walked out of a TV interview during which the reporter brought up the actor's former drug abuse, Downey's defenders agreed: he had reformed, and there is no call to bring up his dissolute past.

Words, too, can reform themselves, giving us no call to dredge up their once-dark lives.

Linguists call the mysterious process whereby a pejorative sheds its negative connotation over time amelioration.

Like guests at a Hollywood party, we're surrounded by words (and phrases) that have—over history—ameliorated:

• 30 years ago, bad meant crummy, sick meant unwell, wicked meant vicious, killer meant murderer, and shut up meant be quiet. 

• 70 years ago, collaborating meant aiding the Nazis, and a geek meant a freak in a circus.

• 200 years ago, lumber meant trash.

• 800 years ago, pretty meant cunning, shrewd meant evil, and nice meant stupid.