Love in the Time of Cholera

Increasingly I believe that coming to terms with death
is the beginning of wisdom.

— Mary Catherine Bateson

The incivility rampant today in our politics, public spaces, schools and workplaces stems from the remoteness of death. 

We have postponed, sanitized and hidden death sufficiently to ignore it completely; as a result, we behave toward one another like petulant gods on Olympus.

People in earlier centuries behaved with a grace and humility unknown to us, because they were rooted by constant loss.

A case in point. 

The land where my home sits in Washington, DC, was owned in the early 19th century by a then-famous winemaker named John Adlum. 

Despite his mastery of farming and business, Adlum couldn't prevent disease from thinning his household every few years.

Just around the corner from me is his daughter's Georgian country manor house, where five of Adlum's grandchildren died from cholera.

Widespread cholera epidemics in fact broke out five times in 19th century America: in 1817, 1826, 1832, 1849 and 1866.

The symptoms would onset suddenly: nausea and vomiting, followed by a high fever and explosive diarrhea. Within only hours, the victim's face, hands and feet would turn cold and blue, and she'd die suddenly from dehydration. Medical records of the time frequently reported victims' dead bodies "twitching" for hours, so families usually forbade burial sooner than a day. In cities like Washington, daily wagons were dispatched during epidemics to collect the corpses. The drivers would pass by homes shouting, “Bring out your dead," and haul them to mass grave sites.

The 1832 cholera epidemic alone killed 459 Washingtonians.

And cholera wasn't the only deadly household guest at the time; there was also typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, yellow fever, smallpox, malaria, influenza, diphtheria, dysentery and measles to remind you the Grim Reaper never slept.

In contrast, death in our day is a secret hospital procedure concluded by the quiet cessation of care.

And we behave without dignity and timor mortis. We act with civility only when there's a a videotaped incident like 9/11—and then only for a handful of days.

Tough All Over

A campus tour of the University of Arizona in Tucson this week convinced me middle-class Americans' quality of life and ambitions are unprecedented in history. I felt like I'd sailed to New Atlantis.

So as I read No Recovery, Gallup's bleak analysis of America's future, I wonder whether economic statistics distort a rosy reality.

But I doubt they do.

According to the report, America is heading into a long night of deprivation, at least for the majority.

Gallup points the finger at two causes:

• Lack of innovation (breakthrough inventions—like the movie projector, airplane and computer—that spawn entire new industries and high-wage jobs); and

• Protectionist policies (barriers—imposed by special interest groups—that raise the cost and lower the quality of products produced by old industries like construction, medicine and education).

Protectionism is especially harmful, Gallup says, because prosperity dips when costs rise faster than quality. And protectionism is in full swing—with no sign of abating.

POSTSCRIPT: Americans' income-growth per capita today is half what it was in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, according to No Recovery. That's better than no growth, but not much, when you consider the inflationary costs of housing, healthcare and education. My takeaway from the analysis: downsize; don't get sick; and save for college.

This Will Shock You

According to research by two Norwegian business professors, "self-referencing" headlines—those with you in them—drive more clicks.

Specifically, the professors discovered the highest-performing of these four headlines was the last:

• For sale: iPhone
• Anyone need a new iPhone?
• Do we agree iPhone is the best phone available?
• Is this your new iPhone?

Maybe you are not shocked. Of course you matters! 

As every marketer knows, along with new, now, free and save, you is one of the Top 5 "power words." You addresses the reader, assuring he'll read the ad. 

As the late Herschell Gordon Lewis says in The Art of Writing Copy, “Unless the reader regards himself as the target of your message, benefit can’t exist." You guarantees this.

And then there's this.

This will shock you (the title of this post) is a click-bait headline that introduces a subject without introducing it.

Good writing forbids the use of this as a subject: its use is considered sloppy, because this is an ambiguous "empty suitcase."

But good copywriting isn't always good writing.

This as a subject intrigues readers enough to click, in order to get the whole story. It exploits their curiosity, relying on a rhetorical trick researchers call "forward referencing."

This will shock you creates suspense readers can only relieve by... clicking.

Do Your Ads Have a Point... of Impact?

Seventy years ago, direct-response copywriter Victor Schwab ran an absurdly long ad for his agency titled “100 Good Advertising Headlines."

Though as corny as Kansas, the 7,500-word treatise is still remembered today because Schwab used it to reveal his "secret sauce" for headlines.

Good headlines entice readers, just as bad ones repel them; and always display two attributes, according to Schwab. 

Good headlines "select, from the total readership of the publication, those readers who are (or can be induced to be) interested in the subject of the advertisement, and promise them a worthwhile reward for reading it.”

Today we might say good headlines aim at your 1,000 true fans and deliver irresistibly clickable content; but Schwab's two principles still apply: targeting buyers and offering value are the only way to guarantee an ad has impact.

It's no surprise recent research by Conductor shows customers respond to "reader addressed" headlines; or that research by Demand Gen Report shows "content-enabled" campaigns—where content, rather than a product, is the value offered—produce high open and click rates.

Who’s Coining All this Lame Marketing Terminology?

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Slack and Company, LLC, a leading global b2b marketing strategy and services provider based in Chicago.

It must either be technology vendors or some mysterious cabal laughing up a storm as we compliantly adopt their subpar terms.

Do you ever wonder who coins all the imprecise and often confusing marketing jargon and industry terms we toss around like stationary lemmings every day?

I'm referring to terms like “account-based marketing,” “programmatic advertising,” “native advertising,” “content marketing,” “big data” and more.

A few years ago, at BMA15, the seventh of seven consecutive annual global conferences I organized for the Business Marketing Association, we had Second City actors do a hilarious sketch about a very secretive “Committee on Marketing Terminology,” whose job was to coin such terms and then laugh uproariously when they somehow caught on with their victims—us.

In so many cases, the new terms being promulgated by software vendors, marketing consultants, academics and who knows who else are just new fancy-pants names for existing and well-understood and widely used techniques.

Account-based marketing

For starters, take “account-based marketing.” Marketers in the b2b space have been doing ABM for decades, if not longer. We certainly have been—for virtually all of our 30 years. Better known as “key account marketing” or as “whale hunting” by the politically incorrect among us, ABM simply means sales and marketing working extremely closely together to target and land often very large prospects through individualized efforts.

ABM is the antithesis of mass b2b marketing, where you’re targeting hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or, if your target is small businesses, millions of business buyers—at generally a very low cost per impression. In contrast, a company could spend thousands—even tens of thousand—of dollars via ABM-style targeting of single prospects.

Yes, ABM is account-based, but targeting down to audiences of one or 10 or 20 is the key to the technique. “Account-based marketing,” as a term, is sloppy, imprecise and confusing. “Key account marketing” is much better.

Programmatic advertising

A newbie term within the past five years, “programmatic advertising” is a problematic term because no one really knows what “programmatic” means.

Here again, what’s at the heart of the term—and the capability it describes—is targeting. As in, “targeted messaging.” Of course, because technology is behind it, what is even more definitive is “targeted one-to-one messaging.”

“Programmatic,” in conjunction with the term “advertising,” is a relatively new marketing capability that lets us b2b marketers target messaging to just the 1,952 or 345 or 672 decision-makers and influencers that we want to reach through advertising instead of just, for example, email.

Maybe “programmatic advertising” ought to be called “no-waste advertising.”

Content marketing

Well, you may regret you got this far with me, because my biggest peeve is with this term, for which even Joe Pulizzi, popularizer of the term and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, denies any paternity.

Of course, as with the above capabilities and a few more to follow, we’ve all been doing “content marketing” for years. It’s just that it used to be called “marketing” or “marketing communications.” Putting high-quality, value-drenched, captivating information in front of buying audiences at every major stage of the buy cycle is most definitely nothing new.

Unfortunately, “content marketing” does not conjure up quality. It conjures up, at least for me, an image of just plain stuff ... or stuffing. As in what goes into a sofa, a turkey or even a landfill. Content can be good, bad or indifferent—a thought that led me two years ago to do some coining of my own: “brandfill,” for boring, bland or bad content marketing.

Native advertising

Native advertising is just “whored media,” the replacement term the Second City actors behind the Committee on Marketing Terminology coined in their BMA15 sketch.

More seriously, it’s just a newfangled term for “advertorial,” a long-lived term for advertiser-sponsored material pretending to look, feel and read like independent news content.

Damn, there I go using that word “content” indiscriminately.

Big data

We’ll end today’s rant or diatribe with “big data.”

The Second City players coined a replacement term—“obese data”—and, yes, it got guffaws. In reaction to the term, I actually had another BMA15 speaker give a presentation about “little data.”

Just as “preventative” is not a word (but “preventive” is) and “very” is used way too often as a modifier, why don’t we just call data by its real and best name—“data”?

How new marketing terminology and jargon come to be—first use, spreading to others and then adopted by all of us, no questions asked—is a great puzzle to me. When I figure it out and have a plan to “sunset” the coiner cabal, I’ll let you know.