Month: March 2021

Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications Theory

One Billion Cows: Mandatory Symbolism and the Audience Divide

A representation of a cow is not a cow. Derrida!

Building on last week’s post about the tension in higher ed marcomms; that of the need to pursue the risk-tolerant needs of marketing while also being the caretaker of a brand, which is generally risk-averse.

Wrapping it up, it struck me that we’re dealing with bidirectional symbolism. On the brand stewardship front, I think this is a fairly straightforward proposition. A university or college’s brand boils down to just a few highly charged representations: a crest, a school name, a set of colours, the name of their sports teams. What people think and feel when they see the crest or hear the name is the essence of brand stewardship.

MarComms and the Journey to Symbol

I want to break down the marketing and communications journey from the thing to the symbol a bit more, however. If you asked me what marketing and communications was all about, I’d say something along the lines of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, in a way that attracts and keeps their attention.

Re-parsing that sentence in the context of symbol generation, though:

getting the right information to the right people at the right time, in a way that attracts and keeps their attention

This applies to pretty much every aspect of the thing, but taking research promotion as a f’rinstance, let’s walk through the path from The Thing Itself to the symbol of the thing.

Let’s talk about cows.

“Meuh” is French for “moo,” because I did the whole Magritte thing up top and… you know, I think I try too hard sometimes.

There are about a billion cows on Earth right now. That’s… that’s a lot of cows. It’s a mind-boggling amount of cows. It’s an abstraction of cows; if I try to think of a number of distinct cows that I can hold in my mind at one moment, I could probably get to 40 or 50 concurrent cows that I can maintain, mentally. A billion cows is a lot more cows than that.

So what happens if you’re promoting the research of somebody who is researching cows?

Before you even get to marketing and communications, you’re forcing the Reality of Cows through a number of abstractions.

Cow Abstractions

Start with one billion cows, and the totality of what those cows represent. Height, weight, feeding habits, milk and meat production, environmental impact, religious and cultural importance, cow subtypes, evolutionary history of cows, ethical considerations around cows and cow farming, cow behaviour and social structures, domestic v. wild cows… there is so much to cows.

But, we’re going to take the vast totality of one billion cows, and push it through the lens of a single field. What area of endeavour is approaching the totality of cows? Anthropology? Engineering? Socioeconomics? Philosophy and ethics?

From there, we’re going to pick an area of focus within that area of endeavour. A researcher looking at the environmental impact of cows’ methane production based on feed type.

It’s an impossibility for a researcher to research all billion cows individually. So we have to have a set of cows that the researcher can reasonably find or gather data on.

Then, we’re confined to the data that is actually collected.

The researcher — subject to the limits of funding, capacity, and the strength of data — will write and present findings that condense the totality of gathered data into some sort of paper or report. This may, or may not, make it into an academic journal.

Crossing the MarComms Line

Assuming something about the paper is noteworthy (and really, all papers are noteworthy, if you look at them hard and can take a creative view of talking about research), a news piece or press release further condenses the research into a short, public- or specialist-facing piece of content that abbreviates the paper into a digestible short read.

The story is, of course, accompanied by a dazzling visual, or short video, which represents a key concept or very high-level points as presented in the research.

But we have to get people to the story, so a social media post that takes the most powerful idea in the story is pushed out onto the fast-paced worlds of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Maybe somebody makes a rad TikTok about cow research!

The key element of the social post isn’t the text — sorry, writers — it’s the image or an even-shorter video that can get somebody to stop scrolling and listen up. This is often a reworked, condensed, or cropped version of the arresting image mentioned above that was developed for the story.

And the above points are forced through their own concurrent lenses of social media best practices — algorithmically, you’re rewarded or punished based on post engagement, so the juggling act is a constant tension (there’s that word again) between trying to maintain loyalty with the upstream complexity, and the need to push out something that’s gonna get hella likes or watch your social platforms collapse.

Good social media presence — which is one of the pillars of responsibility in this role — means using language, images and approaches that drive social media engagement, and doing that without compromising the integrity of what you’re speaking about is an exercise in compromise as much as creativity.

So — through a series of steps — we have reduced one billion cows, and the totality and vastness and complexity of cowness, to an animated cow GIF on TikTok over that “Oh No” audio snippet. Or, in a tortuously tall image (sorry, phone-scrollers):

Each step moves you from the total reality toward symbolism. The tension, obviously, is in finding the symbol that best preserves integrity of the original idea but also functions as an arresting symbol that can engage attention and curiosity.

But each step also invites higher levels of interpretation, and demands more of the audience to move them from symbol to each escalating step of reality, culminating most often in my world with the news piece, and sometimes — ideally — with people checking out the actual research.

This is a good time to shout out my Ryerson English professor, Roberta Imboden (RIP), who largely abdicated most of a Canadian Literature course one semester to talk to us a lot about Jacques Derrida. I still don’t really get Derrida profoundly (sorry, Roberta), but having even a baseline understanding of deconstruction and what it means for work to exist in a dynamic and collaborative relationship with the reader, rather than simply being in a constant “push” state, is maybe one of the most important things I learned in university. Lives of the Saints was also a real good book.

Symbolism isn’t front of mind for me in the daily, but maybe it should be more — the nature of representation, reduction, and the steps of complex compromise that go into knowledge translation. It’s a vital part of the job. I think I might look up some sort of Derrida refresher this week.

March 28, 2021

Soundtrack:

DJ Black Low, “Uwami”

Otzeki, “Now is a Long Time”

Whitehorse, “Modern Love”

Dinah Washington, “Lady Sings the Blues”

Categories
Higher Ed Marketing & Communications Theory

The Tightrope

Tightrope

Something I think about a lot is the fact that higher education marketing exists in a space between two overlapping and seemingly contradictory sets of needs. It’s a tightrope (which is admittedly an overly dramatic image; it’s more like a line on the ground, but that’s no fun to draw). You’re balancing two things: marketing, and brand stewardship, which exist in tension with each other in some important ways.

Thing 1: it’s marketing.

Marketing is inherently disruptive. There are as many ways to describe marketing as there are grains of sand on a beach. One of them is that it’s about making sure the right people know the right things at the right time.

That means you have to get the right people’s attention at the right time.

1a: Content with stopping power

Standing out means doing things that aren’t expected. To break expectations and halt somebody mid-Instagram scroll to force them to take notice.

That’s inherently risky. Because when something is new, it’s different. And when something is different, it requires interpretation. Interpretation means you’re inviting gaps in understanding, and the gaps are where the danger is.

1b: Simplifying the complex

It also means condensing things. I can write 10,000 words about how our school is the best school, in excruciating and accurate detail. I can’t drop that on Facebook and compete with a cute puppy or political outrage for stopping power. What’s the one thing people must know? How do I express it with as much impact as possible?

So you need to condense. Condensing moves you from the thing to a symbol of a thing… and we’re back to interpretation, and the hazard that people won’t interpret things in the spirit you intended them.

Thing 2: it’s brand stewardship.

This is inherently opposite to marketing. You need small-c conservative, hundred-year thinking. Ensure that you’re taking as few risks as possible that may damage your brand in the eye of your stakeholders.

I articulated this a bit in the risk ladder note a few weeks ago. But while the brand ladder shows where risk resides and where it should be tolerated, it doesn’t really capture the fact that the whole ladder lives in dynamic tension from rung to rung.

Brand stewardship overlaps marketing

The obligation to safeguard the brand actually has primacy over the marketing mission. So while the initial Venn diagram has marketing and brand stewardship overlapping, the marketing thought actually more accurately happens inside the brand stewardship circle:

Getting back to the ladder metaphor, brand stewardship tilts the ladder downward, if not lying it down flat. The appetite for risk to achieve the best possible marketing is subsumed by the need for caution in the brand space.

There’s some flex here — imagine the external circle growing and shrinking according to the mandate. A newer institution, without the benefit (and weight) of a lot of venerable history behind it, can take more risks. A new program at a venerable institution is in a middle ground where the program hasn’t accrued an identity that needs to be maintained, but it still exists in that larger context.

So what initially seems like an overlapping Venn diagram is really a contained one. It grows, it shrinks, and in vanishingly rare circumstances the “marketing” circle might eclipse the brand stewardship one.

Interestingly, and something I don’t quite have the brainwidth to unpack right now: both are really about symbols. Marketing reduces complex sets of information to compact communication units, moving them closer and closer to symbolism. Brand stewardship is about ensuring the smallest unit of information: a logo, a name — carries as much power and weight as a symbol possibly can. So one need drives you to symbolism. The other need is about preserving and adding value to an existing symbol. Hmm.

Obviously, this is not impossible to reconcile. It’s actually kind of fun to work through these challenges. This is where having a strategy is key. You need to figure out the marketing who/what/when/how, but you also need to figure in a creative approach that is disruptive inside a larger brand context.

It’s a tightrope, but people walk tightropes. They do it because it’s challenging, and fun. When you pull it off you’re doing something kind of amazing and dazzling the crowd. You get on the tightrope because you want that challenge. And while it’s scary while you’re walking it, it’s profoundly rewarding every time you get to the other side.

March 21, 2021

Soundtrack:

Bell Orchestre, “House Music”

The Kinks: “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society”

Kruder & Dorfmeister, “The K&D Sessions”

Categories
Marketing & Communications

Legal Overlaps

Justice!!

I’m working on my LLM — a Master’s in Law — at the moment. It’s… well, it’s a lot, to be honest, even at one course a semester on top of a pretty consuming day job. But I’m learning a considerable amount, and leaning into it as something that overlaps with work.

LLM apparently stands for “Legum Magister”, meaning Master of Laws, and if you, like me, are very bothered by the fact that there is an extra “L” in there, apparently in Latin you indicate plurals in contractions by doubling the letter, which doesn’t seem right but I guess we’re learning Latin now too.

The LLM “flavour” I’m pursuing is five advanced law courses and a mini-thesis; as somebody without a law degree (JD or LLB — there’s that double L again), it’s been a bit of frantic dog-paddling to grasp some of the context and premises of the courses, but I’m getting there. After a couple of false starts (an interest in puffery, notionally, which kind of turned out to be an academic dead end, an initial paper topic in the legal incongruity of legislation on video game loot boxes, which turned out to be a bit more tangential than where I wanted to take this degree) I feel like I’m on strong footing taking courses that overlap with my professional space: privacy, copyright, hopefully trademarks soon, and/or patent law.

The course formula, more or less, rotates around a major paper (25 pages, ~8K words); it’s a lot of work, but I definitely get the pedagogy; it forces me to really dig into one aspect of the topic, and do a tremendous amount of research and writing on it. To date, I’ve completed a paper on last term’s course — privacy — and am currently whacking away at the paper on copyright.

In the interest of professional overlap, I’ve been looking at things that dovetail with what I do for a living. Last term’s paper, on privacy law and photo consent, actually turned out to be darned interesting, if I do say so myself — the notional idea of privacy in public, and how we seek and manage consent in photography and video at the day-to-day level in higher ed marketing.

I’m not going to share the paper here — my professor wants me to work on it a bit more, and submit it for publication in legal journals, and I gather that the making available of drafts is frowned upon in the circles that I’d be submitting it to.

But — spoiler! — we marketing people are not that good at law stuff.

There are a bunch of reasons for that:

First, there’s a lot of law to wrap your head around. PIPEDA, in Canada, is the most critical piece of legislation, but it’s under review right now with a major overhaul tabled last November. It’s federal, so applies to the entire country. But there are also provincial schemes, in Alberta and B.C., which have their own nuances and spins on legal privacy. Ontario is considering its own provincial privacy scheme as well. Quebec, as a civil law jurisdiction (the rest of the country is common law), has its own approach to laws and even its own charter of human rights (where a lot of privacy stuff resides), and is also currently looking at a bill to overhaul its provincial privacy statutes.

Second, there’s not that much action in the courts, or even in tribunals. One of the long, slow discoveries about the law for me is that it’s generally pretty elevated and really moves from abstract to tangible when something hits the courts — public or private. So what we understand of privacy legislation, PIPEDA, etc. is statutory, vague, and in many cases actually untested or not well-tested in the system. When the law is clear, it’s clear, but in one of the many areas where it’s kind of vague, clarity will only be achieved when somebody tests that vagueness, which means (a) somebody has to do something questionable, (b) somebody has to object strenuously enough to take it to the Privacy Commissioner or a similar provincial body, and (c) the Privacy Commissioner has to do something about it.

So while we’re not talking Mad Max levels of anarchy here, things are a lot… fuzzier… when you start poking at the law than I ever expected before I started studying it.

As for privacy last term, so for copyright this term… as a quick f’rinstance, I’m working on a paper on copyright assignment, and trying to figure out how students on placement from a college fit into the schema of “contract of service / contract for services” in terms of automatic copyright assignment to the employer. The intuitive stance is that they’re “employed,” but there’s actually more ambiguity than one might think.

If they’re on the kind of placement where they partially set their own hours, and especially if they use their own equipment (more common in this, the era of pandemic-related remote work), and if for some reason their placement duties overlap with something else they’re doing as a side hustle (say, a student who is working on photo assignments as a placement, but also setting up their own professional photography business on the side)… suddenly there’s the Sagaz test, and the status of their copyright assignments becomes a bit more dubious.

“But aren’t they apprentices, as defined in s13(3)” of the Copyright Act?”, you ask. “Show me the legal definition of ‘apprentice’ in the context of the Act,” I reply. And then you’re down a rabbit hole of “how has the term apprentice been defined in law in the past in Canada?” Is it strictly reserved for government-recognized, trades-related training programs? Or has the colloquial understanding of the word found meaning in the courts?

And until somebody takes it to the mat, pointing at a placement student in front of a judge and saying “this should be considered equivalent to an apprentice in the context of X,” and a judge decides, and any appeals on that decision are quashed, we don’t really know where a “placement student = apprentice, in the context of the Copyright Act” argument will land. It could be as simple as a judge saying “no, dummy, we’re defining ‘apprentice’ according to the Income Tax Act, and what a dumb thing to bring up”, but there’s a non-zero chance that a judge could read a broader interpretation of ‘apprenticeship’ into the drafting intent of the Act.

Which is what makes the law a pretty fun thing to study, but also a pretty frustrating thing to try to figure out. If you like absolutes, this is not a great space to be spending a lot of time in.

So — in the interest of keeping this reasonably brief (and getting back to writing that copyright paper, and the other Business of Sunday), I can park this at “law is hard.”

But! Writing this, I realize there’s a lot of space (and work) in the privacy/consent area I could and should be unpacking, so you can expect more of that in this space. I can’t run my paper here, but I can certainly revisit the themes and ideas — and law — that it unpacks. More on that! Soon!

March 14, 2021

Soundtrack:

DJ Black Low, “Uwami”

Snow Palms, “Everything Ascending”

Andrew Bird & Jim Mathus, “These 13”

Categories
Marketing & Communications

Hopping Off the Marketing Moebius Strip

A free pass

Here’s a terrible truth: outside of the 40-ish hours I work every week, and the morning I spend writing/drawing this thing… I don’t think much about marketing.

Yet another terrible truth: I find “24/7/365” marketing culture kind of unnerving.

I’m legitimately a bit jealous of anyone who has found their jam to the point that it’s all they want to do or think about. Since about the age of 12 and my first paper route, I’ve never gone more than a week without some sort of job… and I’ve never found a “love what you do” profession to the point that I’m ardently chasing or thinking about work in my free time.

Other people have written more, and better, about the constructed realities of online life and social media, exacerbated by a pandemic pushing us all a little more toward digital over the last 12(!) months.

I’ve certainly noticed that my feelings of constant guilt over not being marketing-minded every minute of every day have been exacerbated by Facebook and LinkedIn. The steady drip of Type-A high-performers continually broadcasting triumphs, sharing articles, pushing white papers. It feels like if you’re not on the treadmill, you’re getting left behind.

I definitely feel like I’m being left behind.

I scroll through social media with a lurching dread rising in my gorge that everyone else is working harder, being more brilliant, doing more.

But… countervailing that fear, and outweighing it… I also don’t feel like making my life about just one thing.

It’s a consequence of having a magpie mind, and more interests and ideas than I can pursue in three lifetimes. I’ve made some furniture and designed some t-shirts; I’m pursuing a Masters in Law. I cook a lot, practice the banjo, obsessively tag a ridiculous music collection, canoe, build hobby websites. I’ve done radio shows and podcasts. I’ve written bad drafts of books I never finished. I own and operate the world’s smallest art gallery.

Point being: when I’m off the clock, I’m off the clock. I don’t read about marketing. I don’t watch documentaries about marketing. I don’t listen to podcasts about marketing.

I avoid the marketers writing for marketers who read about marketing and then talk about marketing with other marketers.

It’s a Moebius strip: it connects to itself. It’s a closed ecosystem.

And I suspect people like me are the ones injecting new ideas into that space when they return to it.

In other words: I think studiously avoiding thinking about marketing when I’m not being paid to think about marketing… makes me much better at marketing.

What am I doing today, after this? I’m not sure: possibly re-reading Dan Slott and the Allreds’ exemplary 2014-16 run on Silver Surfer. Maybe trying to do some make-up cooking after a disastrous curried-tofu-couscous experiment from the other night. Possibly shopping for a frame for some amazing artwork from a friend. Probably working on a paper for a copyright law course I’m taking this semester. Tonight, Sunday night movie with my wife — her turn to pick, I have no idea what’s going to happen there.

But… not marketing.

And what am I going to bring back with me on Monday? I don’t know. But I’m getting new inputs. From time with my family and friends. From nature. From all sorts of media — music, books, comics, video games. I think the lateral connections bring something that the direct connections don’t. And — ergo — not doing marketing is good for marketing.

So — a bit of self-reflection and self-therapizing here, but also a permission slip for anyone else who feels a sense of lurching dread when they look at all the 24/7 marketing minds whirring away out there, and wonder why they’re not wired that way, or feel like they’re being outpaced.

It’s okay. It’s better than okay, it’s good. We need people to forage out into the wide world and bring the new things back.

As much as some goofball on the Internet with a blog can sanction you to think about and do other things, I sanction you. I’m waving my hand in a weird way and saying something vaguely Latin. You have my blessing and best wishes.

Go forth and do not think about this stuff for a while.

I’m going to.

March 7, 2021

Soundtrack:

Dominique Fils-Aimé, “Three Little Words”

Ween, “Shinola (Volume 1)”

Art of Noise, “And What Have You Done With My Body, God?”