Blog – Page 35 – Sonya Ellen Mann

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Native Advertising Hubbub

Posted on March 26, 2015September 11, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Edit: Contently studied this topic with disturbing results. I reserve the right to revise my opinion!

I wrote the following post in response to a brief Twitter conversation (screenshotted below) and an article by Jeff Jarvis: “WTF is promoted-native-sponsored-brand-voice-content? It’s an ad. That’s WTF it is.”

Anthony De Rosa (chief editor of Circa News) has a point. In effect, sponsored posts are advertisements. But the experience of reading one is more complex than that.

No one is going to click on an article billed as an advertisement. They shouldn’t, because reading several hundred words of traditional advertising copy would be tiresome. However, paid-for editorial can feel different from a hard-sell ad. Using a new term for a distinct practice does not constitute deceiving readers. Jarvis’ survey demonstrates that the terms currently being used are inadequate, but that doesn’t mean “advertisement” is the only option. I agree that clear language is needed, but I don’t agree with the conflation of regular ads and “content marketing”.

To cite an example that I’ve used before, this is a traditional Marriott ad:

Whereas this is a post sponsored by Marriott:

Underneath the vague disclosure—that part is not exemplary—is an actual story. Marriott paid for the essay and I associate it with them, but the text ignores Marriott. An unnamed hotel is mentioned once, but that’s as close as it gets. The purpose of this sponsored post is to link luxurious wandering with Marriott, which it accomplishes. Without being totally evil.

TL;DR? Be honest with readers, yes, but there’s no need to unnecessarily hamper native advertising. It’s frequently executed abysmally, but so is everything.

Priceless Fashion Guidance From Fran Lebowitz For People With Short Attention Spans

Posted on March 24, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

I know very little about Fran Lebowitz, but I know that Kathleen Hale’s interview with her is fantastic. Choice quotes:

“American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that’s not at all what fit means.”

“Shirts don’t go bad, they’re not peaches.”

“I wish that real estate were cheaper and clothes were more expensive.”

“If you’re 18 right now, you think you invented platform shoes. You think you’re doing something new. You think you’ve invented something so ugly that it’s beautiful.”

“Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—’Oh, I’ll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.’ Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board.” (YES. This is how I feel about Pinterest.)

“What’s so great thing about clothes is that they’re artificial—you can lie, you can choose the way you look, which is not true of natural beauty.”

Note to self: learn more about Fran Lebowitz.

Crazy People Aren’t Real

Posted on March 22, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

A quote from the story “Jumpers” by Ted Friend, about Golden Gate Bridge suicides:

“Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, ‘How are you feeling today?’ Then, ‘What’s your plan for tomorrow?’ If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, ‘Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.'”

I cried when I read that passage. Later in the essay, Friend reports:

“Kevin Briggs, the empathic patrolman, was surprised to learn, when he and some colleagues had a week’s training with a psychiatrist earlier this year, that suicidal people ‘are real people—not crazy people but real people suffering from depression.'”

The implied dichotomy is crazy people versus real people. So… I’m not a real person? Or maybe he means that paranoid schizophrenics, “raving” homeless people, aren’t real. If you’re too crazy you don’t qualify as “normal” so you’re hardly a person at all, right? This is Briggs’ insight after mental health training.

I can’t believe this ludicrous world. Whenever it starts to seem okay, I read something like this.

All the troubles lie on his shoulder — Photo by Rana Ossama.

How To Give A Good Presentation

Posted on March 20, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

I wrote a quick essay to promote my dad’s video series, Action Presentations. As a web phenomenon, Medium makes me queasy, but I think it can be a useful marketing tool. Longform social media, basically.

The essay is called “Capture The Audience And Keep Them Awake”. In it I summarize the information that my dad’s videos cover in depth. Pretty sassily: “Your audience is not very smart and they don’t care about you.” Amirite or amirite?

Audience @ LeWeb 11 Les Docks-9308 — Via OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS.

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