Pink Air

Bad service 2.0

Blogs are a dime a dozen. Bad customer service experiences are about the same. So blogging about bad customer service is worth (0.1/12)² or about 0.0000694 USD. But I'm going to run through my recent experience with Dell anyway because it was bad in an interesting way.

My Dell beamer smoked and died about two months ago. After ruling out lung cancer, I checked the lamp which seemed fine, but I replaced it anyway. Still nothing. The beamer was almost four years old, so out of warranty, but had been used for only about 60 hours, a small fraction of its estimated service life. I called Dell service and was told, "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do." I went to the Web for possible solutions, but found instead a number of people complaining about similar problems and similar Dell response.

So I sent Dell an email explaining that I knew the product was out of warranty, but that it seemed defective and given their recent efforts to improve their fairly abysmal service reputation, maybe they would have a look at it. Nope. Out of warranty. But "thank you for choosing Dell." Fair enough, I responded, but no, thank you, I will not be choosing Dell again.

Here's where the "service" kicked in. For the next month, I received a series of messages from Dell, seemingly desperate to get in contact with me. Emails and the occasional unannounced call bounced around between Amsterdam, Maryland and Bangalore, trying to find the best time and number to get in touch. Twice, I waited by the phone for scheduled calls that never came. Eventually, they tracked me down here in California and when we finally met, voice to voice, they said (wait for it): "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do."

But they wouldn't leave it at that. I explained again that I knew it was out of warranty and didn't claim any legal right of redress, but that I still didn't think happy thoughts about Dell. I was passed to a supervisor and then a manager who, with increasing levels of authority and solicitude, repeated the same thing: "Out of warranty."

There were some interesting digressions. Like when the supervisor tried to sell me an Epson beamer for $649.99 (Supervisor: "That's a great discount." Me: "Umm. No, it's not. I'm looking at it on Amazon for much less. And why are you trying to sell me something at this point anyway?" S: "I'm not trying to sell you anything.") And when the manager said, "If only it were less out of warranty."

I kept saying, "Look, you're saying it's out of warranty. I understand that. But I still don't like Dell and will not buy a Dell product again. That's just the way it is." This seemed intolerable to them, but marginally more tolerable than actually fixing the thing. Finally, the manager offered to "take this to the engineers." I doubted they would spend much time thinking about a discontinued product, but it seemed to make him happy.

After hanging up, I went back to the Fortune article on Dell's efforts to improve customer service and it's funny. They talk a lot about communicating via social networks and product co-creation and monitoring online chatter: Dis the company in a blog or a Facebook group, and someone from a crack response team may even chime in, if only to let everyone know that Dell cares. They seem to have confused communication with service. "We're listening. And calling. And emailing. And Twittering." They don't say anything about actually making better products and standing behind them. Bad service on Twitter is still bad service. That's my 0.007 cents worth. Thank you for your time.

Interactive effects are the future

Brian Eno once said something like, "Effects are the future." Since I can't find the exact quote, I get to make up what he meant by it.

Computers get a bum rap from many artists, partly because machines have long been assigned the wrong role in the creative process. They were touted as substitutes for human judgment which demeans both machines and humans.

What computers are good at is storage and variation without prejudice. This means that, like a creative ad agency, they produce a lot of weird and trivial stuff. But every so often they make something that is interesting: valid, beautiful, useful, unexpected, out of the blue, sensible, open to competing interpretations, concrete, emotionally resonant, inspiring, generative, worth thinking about. And as Paul Arden said, a few of those usually make up for all the other crap.

I've been using Ableton Live for some time now because I find it relatively easy to produce things I find interesting with it. That is largely because I focus on the accretive, almost geological, application of filters and other sorts of effects rather than trying to produce interestingness ex nihilo. I tend to start with a simple melody or rhythm, then add or subtract multiple effects and connect them via a few parameters so that there is a little bit of feedback going on. A little bit of interaction between the elements of a mix is important because it means that the ultimate result is coherent. The ear perceives a relationship between the sounds even if I didn't put it there explicitly. And coherence is what distinguishes an interesting result from a beautiful mess.

A few days ago, I discovered Motion, Apple's motion graphics program contained in Final Cut Studio. I now divide my life into Before and After Motion. Motion uses visual effects in a way that is similar to Live and other music software. With just a few filters exchanging a little bit of information over and over again, something big and complex and interesting can pop out. And since Live and Motion can also exchange some information, you can create interesting synesthesias with just a few clicks: Download Synesthetic mandala

The fact that this looks like an animated Grateful Dead logo begs the distinction between interesting (active) and mesmerizing (passive). In fact, there is some discussion among educational psychologists as to whether interesting material actually requires less active attention than boring material. It seems likely that we process interesting things more deeply, creating a mental model of the relationships between the parts which we can then manipulate, trying out variations not explicitly defined in the original material, rather than simply applying more attention to interpret it verbatim as we do with boring material. Which means:

1. As a brand holder, you want people to process your messages at this deeper level. Interestingness is much more powerful and inexpensive than effective frequency.
2. Interesting brands are brands that people find it easy and pleasurable to generate variations on. Generativity is a way to measure interestingness and should be a core brand measure.
3. We learn and create by generating and trying out possible variations on things. Like computers. And neither humans nor computers are demeaned by this shared characteristic.

The rate card that rates you

Not many companies are as interesting as Google. From their basic technology to how they make money, they repeatedly make you think "Okay, so that means..." and a bunch of new implications come spilling out.

Today's NYT outlines the workings of Google's "ad quality" team. Because the creative and placement variables of Google ads are relatively few and are controlled by Google, they can experiment with them and directly measure the results. This helps them determine how to price ads which makes them more money.

Even more interesting, one of the variables they incorporate into their pricing and placement model is the quality of the consumer's experience after they click on the ad:

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google.

Yikes! Better service (and can better products be far behind?) leading to lower ad rates? Some advertisers are confused and angry ("many advertisers complain that the company was, in essence, deciding who can and cannot advertise on its system") but Google seems to believe that the overall health/value of their ad system is increased when consumers believe that Google ads represent relevant and high-quality suggestions.

Most media discriminate among advertisers in some way. You're not going to see a Hooters ad in Vanity Fair anytime soon.  But I've never heard of a media company digging so deeply into the post-ad consumer experience and using it to directly affect rates. I can feel the possible implications radiating outwards...

Your URL is showing

I was buying a domain name at Network Solutions last week and between the choosing and the paying, there's a screen where they try to sell you a number of options. This is, of course, known as "upselling." It makes sense and it's not a problem if the options are relevant and the approach isn't pushy. And as long as you don't use the word "upsell" when you're talking to me. And the URL, whether they know it or not, is talking to me.

Marketing magic

There was a lovely article in the March 17th New Yorker by Adam Gopnik called "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life". (It's not online but there's an ancillary podcast here.) A number of bloggers have written that Gopnik's thoughts on how magic works apply to their own fields, especially the idea that their real product is a state of mind co-produced with the viewer; the result of an open-ended, semi-competitive engagement with the willing, active minds of an audience:

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of the effect but the magician's ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious...magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world.

[W]hatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information...Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Which is what an interesting marketing idea does. Brands like Nike and Apple don't have simple, static value statements or brand identities that require "mastering" our natural indifference through repetition and spectacle. Instead, they represent a tantalizing, permanent maze of possibilities.

Matrix branding

Suppose that our world is actually a simulation, a video game being run by somebody 5000 years from now on a PlayStation Bazillion. As a virtual character who wants to survive, how should you behave? While fans of The Matrix have had years to consider their options (Assimilate now? Wait until it seems prudent?), our deluded blue pill brethren must have been sloshing in their pods when the question was thrust upon them last week in The New York Times ("Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch").

A number of philosophers are quoted in the article, but the most practical advice comes from an economist (which is kind of a matrix glitch if you ask me) and author of the handy guide, "How To Live In A Simulation". His advice: "You should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation."

Wise words for any Sim, but particularly appropriate for those of us generated as marketing characters. The things we work on are just simulations that we're trying to get lots of people to run in their minds. If they find those simulations interesting, then maybe they'll keep running them into their next store visit, conversation or lifestage. 

All you need is Live

At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)

But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)

But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.

Some insight into insights

Since Uli pointed it out, I've read Jeremy Bullmore's insight into insights a number of times. It's one of the most interesting things on briefing and advertising in general I've ever read.

He defines insight in terms of its effect rather than its inherent qualities. An insight is creatively generative, it leads people to think in a new way about something, to see a whole new field of effective possibilities that had been invisible. And in order to be evocative in this way, it has to be kind of allusive. It must "avoid the direct and the explicit".

This last part is what makes the article truly (and recursively) insightful for me. An insight has to be interesting. It can't just be a statement of fact that is then made interesting through creative interpretation. It has to be based in fact, but have gaps to be filled in, that beg to be filled in, by the reader.

I used to think that we had to come up with a catchy summary of each brief so that the client and agency would have a quick and attractive "elevator shorthand" to communicate and sell the idea internally. Over the past few years, I've come to see that the elevator phrase, truncated, alliterated and, strictly speaking, inaccurate though it may be, is usually a better, more insightful, brief.

What is an insight?

Planners are often asked to deliver insights. Some even say that "finding insights" is what planners are for and what defines planning. But now, after years of pretending to be a planner, I'm finally prepared to admit that I've never really understood what an insight is. 

My impression is that people are asking for a new piece of information about the way an audience interacts with a brand, product or category. I imagine the gold standard for this kind of insight is something like, "Hip German mothers are meeting on particular subway lines in the middle of night for impromptu diaper changing parties." Then we put up ads in the coolest U-bahn stations, branded changing tables on selected trains, start a Windelbahn group on MyVideo and Bob ist Ihr Onkel.

Is it novelty that transmutes plain old information into insight? And to whom must it be new? It's presumably the audience whose reaction matters most, but they already knew what they were doing. In fact, it's the reaction of the creative team and most importantly, the client, that usually determines whether a fact is an insight and the seed of a campaign. And if they say, "Diaper trains! Wow! I never would have guessed! That's interesting!" it would take a particularly masochistic planner to question whether their interest will be matched by that of the Windelbahnmutter herself.

Maybe an insight isn't a new piece of information, but a new way of interpreting  existing information. The effect is not so much "I never knew that" as "I never thought of it that way before". Which implies that the insight, as the thing that changes minds, needs to be communicated to the audience, not simply used as a way to get to them or prove that the brand somehow "knows" them.

I'm not sure. I do feel that the Tyranny of The Insight, like the Tyranny of the Big Idea, is an increasingly obsolete way of thinking about both branding and planning. At the same time, I can't help thinking that having insights, whatever they are, is better than not. So, what's your definition of an insight?

Soft reset

A useful but clunky way to define planning is "interestingness management". Interest and time are related in many ways, some fairly linear (boredom) and others less so (nostalgia). Keeping a brand interesting means steering its storyline through time. And sometimes an interesting, emotionally satisfying plot twist requires a change in character. The trick is to make changes that enrich the brand, that are developmental rather than just different.

By going backwards to the beginning, Casino Royale brings the 007 brand forward in this way. The most interesting Bond film in maybe forever, it dispenses with the cloying, happy-go-lucky playboy of the past 30 years in favor of the "ironical, brutal and cold" character that Fleming originally conceived. But the real interest-generating aspect of the movie is not just the novelty of a new Bond, but the revelation of an earlier, unfamiliar Bond who makes emotionally satisfying sense of the flip, emotionally vacant character we've grown (over-) accustomed to.

After watching "Bond 21", I'm pretty sure that when Bond 22 comes out in two years, I'll pay the $32 for a ticket. I'll forgive it its predictable annoyances (egregious Sony product placement, the odd Bruckheimian fireball). I'll think about how it enriches or enfeebles the franchise and try to convince you that it's interesting in either case. All of which adds up to a fairly comprehensive description of the behavior a strong brand is supposed to generate.