Bye, Bye, Millennials

Marketers now target Millennials by hobbies, not age, according to Hotwire's Communications Trends Report 2016.

No longer youth-obsessed, brands strive to engage customers through "age-agnostic content" that emphasizes the "hobbies we do for fun and the causes that pique our emotional interest."

Marketers should "forget about age," the report says. 

"Let’s focus our marketing on what really motivates our audience—their passions and the life they choose to live."

The PR firm's report is based on data from 400 communicators in 22 countries.

Face Facts

In a controlled experiment, the UK's Behavioural Insights Team studied the effect stock shots of faces had on the responses of 1 million visitors to the website of a charitable organization.

The researchers found the use of stock photos of people's faces significantly reduced conversions.

They concluded that, because marketers over-expose web users to these kind of photos, users simply tune them out—and ignore any content that accompanies them.

"The use of a stock photo discouraged individuals, who saw it as a marketing gimmick," the researchers said.

Swallow Your Pride

Why do we ask someone to eat "humble pie" when he overreaches?

The expression is a corruption of "umble pie," a tasty 13th century dish filled with spiced bits of animals' hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs. "Umble" derives from nomble, French for "deer innards."

The words "umble" and "humble" are in fact unrelated (the latter derives from the Latin word for "lowly"). But by the 19th century, "umble" had been dropped from the language and, because many Brits omit the spoken "h" at the beginning of words, the expression "umble pie" was mistakenly spelled "humble pie."  People assumed the mysterious dish had something to do with humility.

Chew on that.

I Tweet Dead People

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn't dead; in fact, it isn't even offline.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, devoted decades of his life to spiritualism, the art of communing with the dead.

He wrote 20 books on the subject; lectured about spiritualism throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and North America; and was an active member of the Society for Psychical Research for 37 years.

My medium for communing with the dead is Twitter.

Presently, I receive regular Tweets from Sir Arthur, Thomas Jefferson, the Ancient Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, and the Victorian lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong.

Tweets from the dead entertain and uplift me while I traverse the underworld (on Metro, not a raft) during my commute.

Indeed, communing with the dead is one of the very best uses of Twitter, which is otherwise largely wasteland. 

I recommend it wholeheartedly, and enjoy the fact the dead can Tweet and pay nothing for their mobile phones.

Woody Allen once wrote, “If man were immortal, do you realize what his meat bills would be?”

Fancy Pants

The term fancy pants first appeared in 1843 in an ad in The Bangor Daily Whig & Courier. 

In a time when most pants were coarse, the soft twill trousers advertised for sale by auction house Williams & Prince were, indeed, fancy.

Style manuals discourage writers from putting on fancy pants. Never use a fancy word, when a plain one will do.

But, as pscyho-linguist Steven Pinker says in The Sense of Style, the rule is overstated: 

"It's certainly true that a lot of turgid prose is stuffed with polysyllabic Latinisms and flabby adjectives. And showing off with fancy words you barely understand can make you look pompous and occasionally ridiculous. 

"But a skilled writer can enliven and sometimes electrify her prose with the judicious insertion of a surprising word. According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush."

In a 1739 letter, Voltaire offered similar advice to the 24-year old writer Helvétius:

"Beware, lest in attempting the grand, you overshoot the mark and fall into the grandiose: only employ true similes: and be sure always to use exactly the right word."