Ten Ideas That Made Us Think

1.

AUGUST 2010

The Hackneyed Advice of Crisis Communications

In August, the New York Times published a front-page, 5,000-word “analysis” of the alleged lessons from the communications crises of BP, Toyota, and Goldman Sachs. Typically, the article brims with conventional PR wisdom about “getting the facts out.” Far more useful is Eric Dezenhall’s knock-down of the favorite chestnuts of the crisis communications business. Here’s Dezenhall on why “speaking with one voice” – a staple of PR corporate counsel – isn’t realistic in the face of the growing ranks of crisis capitalists:

These crisis capitalists include an agglomeration of reporters, victims, bloggers, tweeters, plaintiffs’ lawyers, regulators, legislators, non-governmental organisations, activists, short-sellers, anonymous sources, technical experts, analysts, media hounds, opportunists, and a cavalcade of amateur crisis experts. Crisis targets can speak with their own voice, but they won’t drown out all the others. 

2.

SEPTEMBER 2012

The Tower of Tech Babble TED Built

While most of us were on August vacation, Evgeny Morozovpublished the essay of the year. What starts as an evisceration of trendy technology evangelist Parag Khanna ends with a tour-de-force takedown of the entire pop-idea culture spawned by TED: 

Today, TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. 

3.

NOVEMBER 2012

Death of Twinkie Gives Rise to Overbaked Purple Prose

What was it about Hostess Brands announcing it was shuttering its factories that has led the opinion industry into an outburst of over-interpretation and a search for deeper meaning?  

The Washington Post offers a long eulogy for the “cream puff of the proletariat,” insisting that “Twinkies have lodged themselves into the cultural firmament.” In his New Yorker article, “Who Killed Twinkie?,” James Surowiecki argues that the one-time pastry king was a victim of Schumpeter’s creative destruction. “Its core problem,” he writes “has been that the market for its products changed, but it did not.”
 
Not to be outdone, Paul Krugman posits that the Twinkie Era “offers lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century,” and he uses these lessons to launch into a sermon on plutocrats, tax rates, and collective bargaining. And Dan Barry, writing in theNew York Times, lets nostalgia get the better of him, as he pines for the days when a cellophane-wrapped ring-a-ding “tasted like America.”

Enough to make you enjoy healthy snacks.

4.

MAY 2013

Sham Sommeliers

Shocking, if wholly unsurprising, account of the “art” of winetasting. Perhaps the best evidence yet of the fraudulence of the whole enterprise:

Researcher Frédéric Brochet invited 54 wine experts to give their opinions on what were ostensibly two glasses of different wine: one red, one white. In actuality, the two wines were identical, with one exception: the “red” wine had been dyed with food coloring. The experts described the “red” wine in language typically reserved for characterizing reds. They called it “jammy,” for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its “crushed red fruit.” Not one of the 54 experts surveyed noticed that it was, in fact, a white wine.

5.

JUNE 2014

How to Conduct an Interview

Tyler Cowen leads an in-depth conversation with Ralph Nader, whose comments are largely predictable. Cowen’s questions, however, are the opposite. While never confrontational, he challenges Nader on every topic. A few examples of Cowen’s tough/respectful approach to interviewing:

When you look at how much [corporations] actually pay after various forms of maneuvering or evasion, maybe they pay 17–18 percent, which is more or less in the middle of the pack of OECD nations. So if corporations have so much political power in the United States, why is our corporate income tax still so high? 

Wouldn’t you admit the fact that Swedish-Americans have better health outcomes than Swedes, and Japanese-Americans have slightly better health outcomes than Japanese, and so on?  

If I look back at your career, what do you think is the main thing you’ve been wrong about?  

6.

NOVEMBER 2015

“Marketing and Advertising Industries Hate Older People”

The British blog Ad Contrarian takes aim at the “demographic cleansing” of the marketing and advertising industry “where there is almost no one over 50 left”:

A milestone in marketing stupidity has been reached. According to a September report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, a majority of consumer spending (51%) is now done by people over 50. These people are the target for 10% of marketing activity. On the other hand, marketers spend five times as much money marketing to millennials, the moronic obsession of every marketer on the planet, than any other group.

The item adds this damning statistic: millennials buy 12% of new cars but they  are featured in about 99.9% of new car ads.

7.

MAY 2016

The Best Commencement Speech Ever – or the Worst? 

The late author David Foster Wallace gave a graduation talk at Kenyon College in 2005. It’s “often praised as being the best commencement speech of all time.” It was even published as a book, with the pompous title, “This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, on Living a Compassionate Life.” A sufficient amount of time has now passed to allow Emily Harnett to offer a different, devasting analysis of the Wallace speech: 

Tell your audiences that they’re too smart to want a certain thing and give it to them anyway. Remind everyone that they’re too hip for corny dad sermonizing and then double down on the corny dad sermonizing. This is a great way to write a commencement speech—not by avoiding platitudes, but by drawing an enchanted circle around yourself where the things we thought were platitudes can be revealed as dazzling truths. Where all of us can be consoled, if only for an instant, by the notion that the insight we lack has been here all along! Just hiding inside of our clichés.

8.

MARCH 2017

Do Bad Movies Deserve Bad Rotten Tomato Scores?

Boo hoo. Director/producer honcho Brett Ratner goes to the Sun Valley Film Conference and decries the responses appearing on Rotten Tomatoes to his movie, Batman v Superman. Here is Ratner looking for sympathy for a film that made $900 million: 

When I was growing up film criticism was a real art. And there was intellect that went into that. And you would read Pauline’s Kael’s reviews, or some others, and that doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s about a number. A compounded number of how many positives vs. negatives. Now it’s about, “What’s your Rotten Tomatoes score?” 

In fairness, Rotten Tomatoes does link to hundreds of reviews ofBatman v. Superman. For example, this one from NPR:  “What a ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it's being drowned in lava.”

9.

JUNE 2017 

How to Explain Complex Ideas

John Gruber of Daring Fireball, an Apple insider site, makes an interesting observation about how physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman, a Nobel laureate in physics, believed that our ability to write a “freshman lecture” on any topic was the real test of whether we really understood the concept. Gruber says the same culture exists at Apple:

Engineers are expected to be able to explain a complex technology or product in simple, easily understood terms not because the executive needs it explained simply to understand it, but as proof that the engineer understands it completely. 

10.

JANUARY 2019

Herb Kelleher’s Rule Breaking

It is unlikely that we will ever again see a business leader as iconoclastic as Herb Kelleher, the Southwest Airlines founder who died earlier this month. A single paragraph from the obituary inThe Economist confirms as much:

When one airline ran an ad claiming that Southwest was a cheap carrier, he had himself filmed with a bag over his head, saying the airline was prepared to offer the same to any mortified passenger. When another started a price war and halved its Dallas-Houston fare to $13, Southwest countered: pay full price and get a bottle of vodka or whisky in return. When a rival airline complained that Southwest pinched its slogan and began advertising itself as “Just Plane Smart”, he suggested the two chairmen settle the matter over three rounds of arm-wrestling instead of using lawyers.

There’s more. Kelleher was an early client of advertising guru Roy Spence, and Spence’s recollections of Kelleher are priceless. And the 1975 James Fallows profile of the early days of the airline wars shows Kelleher’s role in the battle of “the not-so-friendly skies of Texas.” 

Our Holiday Book List

At the end of the year, everyone at High Lantern Group selects books they have read this year (or any year!) and offers them as recommendations to colleagues. Our tradition is to pull the list together and let each member of our team pick one of the books as their own gift from the firm. We are happy to share our list this year – our gift to you, faithful reader. Happy Holidays.