Jesus Lied

If you believe Seth Godin, all marketers are storytellers and all storytellers, liars.

History's most famous storyteller, perhaps, is Jesus Christ, which would also make him history's most famous liar. Jesus told parables, allegorical stories that aim to teach.

Among his best-known is "The Good Samaritan." The parable teaches neighborliness and goes like this:

A man was traveling when he fell among robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and left him half dead. A priest who was also traveling the road saw the man and passed by him. So did a Levite. But when a Samaritan came upon the man, he took pity and stopped; he bound his wounds after pouring oil and wine on them, and set the man on his own beast and brought him to an inn. The next day, the Samaritan gave two denarii to the innkeeper and said, "Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back." Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?

Well-told, the parable can be a powerful way to put across a lesson, as contemporary storytellers like Malcolm Gladwell know. Perhaps every salesperson's favorite parable is "The Stingy Customer." It warns against false economy and goes like this:

A rep received a call from a prospect. He told her he wasn't going to hire her company, but instead pay three college students to build his company's shopping cart. He also told her he was nobody's fool: her fees were too extravagant. Four months later, the man called again and asked the rep to look over the students' code, which worried him. The rep saw the students had taken shortcuts, making the application sluggish and easy to hack. With little experience a hacker could steal all the customers' names, passwords, credit card numbers and CCIDs. The rep wished she'd told him four months earlier, "If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur."

TED organizer Chris Anderson says the parable "can entertain, inform and inspire all in one." But he cautions parable-tellers to avoid preaching. "You don’t want to insult the intelligence of the audience by force-feeding exactly the conclusion they must draw from the tale you’ve told," Anderson says. "It’s important to test your material on someone who knows the audience to see if it lands with clarity, but without clumsiness."

A Buck is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Twenty percent of every digital ad dollar is wasted, according to a new study by The & Partnership.

Last year, $12.48 billion of the $66 billion marketers shelled out for digital ads flowed into the hands of crooks committing botnet and adware fraud.

Botnet fraud occurs when an ad is presented, but never viewed by a human; adware fraud, when it's never even presented.

The money wasted exceeds the cumulative digital advertising revenue of all 80 members of Digital Content Next, a trade association whose members include AP, NBC, NPR, PBS, Turner and other publishers.

Fraud will worsen this year. The report predicts $16.40 billion will be lost to it in 2017 (20% of the $82 billion marketers will pay for digital ads).

Who Should Vote?

Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

— Plato

Most philosophers agree "one person, one vote" is the right policy in a democracy.

But who counts as a person?

You could say any individual affected by the government should count. But it's hard to say who is and who's not affected by the government. And would you let children vote? Probably not.

That answer's clearly wrong.

You could also say any adult citizen should count. But would you let POWs, felons, tourists, aliens, and the mentally incompetent vote? Probably not.

That answer's also wrong.

I'd go out on a limb and say any democratically competent adult should count. And I'd determine whether any adult were "democratically competent" by requiring her to answer, in writing, two questions:

Why did Americans fight the Civil War?

Why did Americans fight in the Second World War?

Philosophers call my preferred political system an epistocracy (episteme is the Ancient Greek word for knowledge.) An epistocracy restricts suffrage to the democratically competent, assuming good political outcomes depend on votes cast from knowledge, not ignorance. Philosopher Jason Brennan calls it "rule by knowers."

You might say, "Wait, the Founding Fathers rejected epistocracy!"

That's true; and they also rejected the Ancient Greeks' democracy, in favor of the Ancient Romans' republicanism.

Under the Founding Fathers' preferred system, citizens can vote to elect politicians, who act as a firewall against mob-rule. They defined a citizen as any wealthy white man.

But 230 years later, we have a democracy, the political system Plato called the "agreeable form of anarchy." We let nearly any yahoo vote.

Plato also warned: Democracies inevitably give rise to tyrannies when a populist autocrat can play to the mob's passions.

It's time for an overhaul—before we're led over the cliff.

Expanding Your Boundaries?

According to Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen, a company can grow profitably in two ways: by diversifying or by expanding the boundaries of its core business, or what they call entering adjacencies.

Their study of thousands of companies has led them to say there are six ways to enter an adjacency:

• Expand along the value chain (De Beers moved from wholesaling into retailing diamonds, for example).
  
  
• Use new distribution channels (supplement maker EAS moved from selling to nutrition stores to selling to Wal-Mart).
  
  
• Enter new countries (Vodafone expanded from the UK to Europe, the US, Germany, and Japan).
  
  
• Address new customer segments (discount broker Charles Schwab became an advisor to the super wealthy).
  
  
• Offer new products and services (IBM pioneered "global IT" and doubled its earnings).
  
  
• Build a new business based on an in-house capability (American Airlines created Sabre, which in turn created Travelocity).

From their study, Zook and Allen also conclude that companies which learn to enter an adjacency, then repeat their recipe again and again, grow at twice the speed of rivals—at a minimum.

How about you? Are you expanding your boundaries?

My new business partner and I, while our direct marketing agency is still in its infancy, have already added six new products and services to the four core offerings we opened shop with in January, including PR, video production and marketing research.

We're following advice you can find in Competing Against Luck, whose authors say customers never "buy" products and services, but "hire" them "to get a job done."

We're designing a menu based on jobs our customers need to get done. We might not grow at the pace of Charles Schwab or IBM, but we're trying—and learning a lot in the process.

I'll keep you posted, in any event.

B2B Events Get Hip

Expect more annual B2B events to market themselves like music festivals, according to Cramer.

Meetings once held in convention center halls and hotel ballrooms will migrate outdoors and to hip, alternative venues, offering inspired music and entertainment.

"Festivalizing" your B2B event means adding not only rad surroundings and music, but the other hallmarks of a big festival: frictionless registration, entry and wayfinding; a "choose-your-own-adventure" schedule; post-modern structures; exotic food and beverage; cause-related happy hours; playrooms and coffee houses; co-created artworks; social media extravaganzas; and event themes that celebrate coolness, community and creativity,

Festivalization's dual goals are "reinvigorating attendee bases and attracting millennial prospects, who prefer experiences, touchpoints and connections at events," Cramer says.

B2B event planners are riding a wave. According to Billboard, 32 million Americans attended a large music festival last year.