Amplified Ignorance

I talked a little before about the “Culture of Comment” and the predicament that brands find themselves in when facing an online world where the comment thread is always going to be longer than the article that sparked it.

It’s one of the things that killed the old model of “Interrupt and argue.” We’re no longer in an era where your brand can merely get in the way of a favorite TV programme or magazine article, state its case and hope to have won you over. Instead we’re in a world where people demand the right to argue back; and where they have the ability to do it. And it’s an unfair fight because while brands are monitored and restricted in their communication (they have to tell the truth or a version thereof) the people that they’re arguing with have no such restrictions.

Of course brands have tried to monitor and control these online debates. They’ve demanded the right to approve all comments before allowing them to be posted, they’ve hired moderators to answer the worst of the criticisms and they’ve hired Blog Lobbyists to ensure that not only is blog content favorable but blog comment is regulated too. Some of it works, but ultimately this is the wild west (or modern Russia) and ‘the law’ don’t go down too well ‘round these parts.

An aside. A friend of mine took some time out to travel. Like a lot of people who did this he took a Lonely Planet Guide. Well the problem that you have when everyone has a Lonely Planet guide is that the bits of the Planet that they recommend soon aren’t that lonely at all. Everyone is there. Add to this a sharp practice by savvy traders – on one street in Tibet there were four cafes all with the same name” – all claiming to be the original one recommended by Lonely Planet. All crammed with backpacks and their dreadlocked wearers.

Anyway he wrote about this on his blog. Two days later he had a comment from a Lonely Planet moderator, paid to monitor the buzz on the brand. They thanked him for the thoughtful way he’d written about the problem and assured him that they were looking for solutions. Unable to help myself I dived in with some solutions of my own – and three days letter got a ‘Thank You’ from the Web Watcher.

A couple of things to take from this. It pays to be watching the comments out there, amid the dross may be some solutions to problems – or better still a highlighting of problems that you didn’t know you had. You need to be careful in how you deal with the people that are writing about you, or they freak out and get all ‘They’re Watching Me!’ and finally when you do decide to intervene make it an invitation to a dialogue, not a ‘cease and desist’

Back to the point though. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops and listened to a 1000 treadmill conversations I’ve come to the conclusion that calling what we have a “Culture of Comment” is a little too flattering. What we actually have is “Amplified Ignorance”

Now those of you who know me will know that I tend to trace America’s hatred of nuance back to an educational system that tells you to circle the letter corresponding to the ‘correct’ answer and ignore the others. It’s a system that deals in absolute certainty, in black and white at the expense of gray and it leads to statements like “You’re either with us, or you’re against us” (try telling that to Sweden, or Switzerland)

In the UK the system tells you to take a side and argue it persuasively. In France to take each side and argue one against the other. I think it’s why the British make such good comedians, the French philosophers and the Americans such good Christians.

But “Amplfied Ignorance” is of course a wider cultural phenomenon. What the internet, comment boxes, twitter, text messages, facebook status boxes and ‘press one if you agree’ polls have done is two things. Firstly they have handed the bullhorn to anyone who wants it. And the people who most want to be heard on an issue are usually the people shouting about it. So it’s governed by the extremes. Secondly it’s condensed the space and time for response, so you can bang out any opinion in seconds, publish it and be pretty much certain that nobody is going to take the time to offer a thoughtful refutal. No harm, no foul you may say. But….

The internet is an amalgamator, what it does is take all of the data out there, weigh it and offer it up to people without editorializing. That’s how Google works, straight numbers. And when you have people shouting at the extremes and at each other, all of the time what happens is that the bullshit rises to the top of the search engine and becomes ‘fact’ – why it’s only a half step away from being on Wikipedia.

It’s this kind of thing that allowed the Republicans to ‘Swift Boat’ John Kerry. The facts were that Kerry was a decorated war hero where Bush had dodged going to Vietnam and may well have actually deserted his post in the National Guard (the records were missing). But through an ad’ that generated comment, that sowed doubt, that generated more comment that became the established orthodoxy somehow Kerry was painted as the less heroic. And he allowed it to happen, because he misunderstood the culture of ‘Amplified Ignorance’… he thought that having the facts on his side would win the argument for him. Big Mistake.

So how do you ensure that your brand doesn’t get ‘Swift Boated’ – that people don’t think that your burgers are made from eyeball and gristle and that the holes in your jeans aren’t individually scratched in by an Indonesian orphan?

How indeed.

I think that you have to start by going back to the basics of a brief. If you remember most good briefs wouldn’t ask “What is it that we want to say here?” instead they’d ask “What do we want people’s take away to be from this communication?” And the two are different. What you say and what people hear can be wildly different – as I found out when I did a campaign for a food that “Kids will love” and got back data that what people were hearing was “Not good enough to serve an adult” and therefore “not good enough for my kids either”

These days the planner has to ask a few new questions

i) “What responses will this communication provoke”
From the point of view of both the Brand Evangelist (out there to sell your brand to every person that they know) and the Brand Arsonist (out there to burn your brand to the ground)

ii) What ammunition can we give Brand Evangelists to help them argue the case online? What can we send them? What can we embed in the communication? Which links should they be cutting and pasting?

iii) To what degree do we want to acknowledge and neutralize the Brand Arsonists? Do we want the communication to address them head on? Do we want it to have a counter-argument embedded? Do we want to deflect them onto another issue?


A quick example. In every US Domestic Car focus group there’s an asshole. He’s full of technical ‘data’ and ‘facts’ that aren’t true, he’s really loud and at some point he WILL say “Found On Road Dead.” or “My Chevy wouldn’t make it as far as the levy” You can show him a campaign that shows that Ford’s are the most reliable cars in America, that they whup Toyota’s ass or that the new Malibu is the best build car on the road and that every independent source says so and he’ll brush aside the fact and restate the stereotype.

Internally agencies working on Domestic Car accounts got tired of hearing this and tended to discount it. But it was actually a huge problem out in the world. Everyone knew a Domestic hating asshole and his harking back 20 years to a stereotype that people knew was actually damaging the brand and stopping it moving forward.

The US companies took the high road here and decided not to attack the guy. Sticking instead to the data, the facts and 3rd party sources and hoping that they would get through eventually.

But it would have been an interesting exercise to look at work that either gave Domestic Loyalists a giant bandaid to slap over Asshole’s mouth or to look at work that took the guy head on – a “Hey Asshole” campaign, or an “Are you a domestic racist?” campaign

It worked for Skoda when they showed people running from the badge. The risks are high, it’s not always the right strategy, but it’s worth looking at.

Not a lot of answers here but something to think about. Whatever you do, someone is gonna hate it. And that hate will be based on prejudice. And that prejudice will fuel a lot of comment venom. You need to decide whether or not you want to deal with that. It needs to be a choice, not an oversight.