pop psychology – Page 5 – Sonya Ellen Mann

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Why Your Company’s Billboard Sucks

Posted on April 3, 2015April 8, 2015 by Sonya Mann

iPhone 6 billboard ad in San Francisco — Photo by Kārlis Dambrāns.

I like to critique billboards (read: make fun of them). There’s plenty of material along the freeway or in downtown areas. A few of them are good. The frequent winner is Apple, with their colorful-but-minimalist ads. Recent displays have been boring–dude, I know what an iPhone looks like–but at least they make sense. (Granted, the “Shot on iPhone 6” campaign is brilliant, but I haven’t seen it many places.)

Most billboards are headscratchers, especially Verizon and AT&T ads, which are full of inscrutable acronyms. To this day I don’t know what LTE stands for, and I don’t care enough to look it up. This indicates that Verizon and AT&T have failed, especially since I actively pay attention to advertising, unlike most people.

Verizon billboard — Photo by Mike Mozart.

Verizon proudly announces, “We’ve doubled our 4G LTE bandwidth in cities coast to coast.” Okay, um, what does that even mean? Here is a better thing for Verizon to say: “Fast, reliable texting and data, available all over America.” Or something to that effect, preferably shorter and simpler.

People seem to think it’s fine to resize a magazine ad and slap it on a building. They are wrong! Often the magazine ads aren’t very good in the first place, so this is doubly ineffective. I am consistently amazed by how many billboards neglect to communicate extremely basic information: 1) the company’s name, 2) what the product is and what it does, and 3) what action the potential customer should take.

Here is a train billboard for a good cause that totally fails:

Are you 1 in 26? Epilepsy billboard on the train — Photo by Elvert Barnes.

When you look at this ad, the immediate question is, “Am I one in twenty-six what?” The answer is “epileptics”, but unless you stop to examine the lower lefthand corner, you won’t figure that out. Very few people are going to slow down to closely examine the small print. This ad just doesn’t work, because billboards are usually not the place for high-concept, or even intermediate-concept, artwork. Billboards need to be punchy, delivering their message immediately.

billboard: Shot on iPhone 6 — Photo by Elvert Barnes.

There are situations where you can ignore the basics. For instance, if you’re Apple and everybody already knows what your brand sells and how to get it. At that point you can do high-level emotional marketing. (See also: beer and car ads.) Most brands are not in this position. They try to be clever and complex, although it would be wayyy more effective to say, “We are [name]. We sell [product]. Find us at [location/website].” A+ if you can figure out how to say that your product is superior, but brand recognition is probably all you should shoot for with a billboard. Remember, most people aren’t paying attention. They’re looking at the road. If they’re on the train, they’re looking at their phone. Your billboard should be SUPER SIMPLE, easy to comprehend at a glance.

HipChat billboard ad, a play on the cult comedy Office Space — Photo by Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph.

The HipChat billboard above toes the line between “Ahhh I see what you did there, that’s funny” and “Huh?” Joking about the horrible boss from Office Space is cute, but you have to pay attention to the ad to get it. You also have to have seen Office Space. (Steve Carell’s character from The Office would have been a similar-but-better choice.) Sure, some people are going to notice the billboard, get the joke, and enjoy it, but most people aren’t going to pay attention long enough to go through all that. At least HipChat’s logo is big and readable, but the explanation of the service is too small for people to scan while changing lanes.

I could do more examples, but I’ve probably harped on this enough now. What do you think? Comment below, or hit me up on Twitter/Facebook.

UPDATE: I wrote an instructional follow-up post.

Office Space boss

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.

Human Character, Defined by the Junk We Accumulate

Posted on March 17, 2015August 9, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Let’s juxtapose some quotes to force a narrative:

“[People] are not passive victims of an inherent, accelerating logic of digital technology. We can and do make choices about how we interact with machines. […] Human beings build the present and imagine the future with tools designed for certain purposes, and there are more reasons than ever to think about what kind of society we want those tools to advance.”

Judy Wajcman on how digital technology makes the world feel accelerated.

“Do you really think it’s a coincidence that most of the buttons you press on the web are labeled with the word submit?”

Dave Pell of NextDraft on Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy needs. (See also: “50 Shades of Apple Watch” lololol.)

“Objects — even ones that seem beautiful or benign — communicate ideologies and narratives, and sometimes those ideologies and narratives are ugly and oppressive and violent.”

Collette Shade on colonialist toile fabric. (The quote that inspired this blog post.) Finally:

“Things don’t work out the way you expect, and then they come back in a context you couldn’t have imagined. I guess that’s history.”

Brian Phillips on the lost-and-found World War II battleship Musahi.

Phillips is talking about “things” in the sense of “general events”, but his observation is equally true when “things” are material objects. Humans have an uneasy relationship with stuff. We want it — lots of it — but we also worry about being tethered to our possessions. We wonder, “Will I be distracted from what’s really important?” We wish we could suppress the desire to acquire. Someday our warehouses will subsume us, those buildings formerly called “homes”.

Photo of a yellow apartment building by Toni. — Photo by Toni.

I’m happy to worry about this; the alternative is misery porn on Hoarders. At the same time, anti-materialist fretting is odd, because we are physical creatures and therefore inherently bound to a material world. (Should we all be as unabashed as Madonna?)

Stuff is scary because it occupies a stunning amount of mindspace, without us noticing that the mental real estate is taken. We intellectual types prefer to understand what’s going on — control is even better. Interacting with the basic layer of life, the touch-smell-taste experience, tends to be fairly unconscious. Sure, there are think-pieces aplenty about the Apple Watch and every other new comm-tech offering, but when you use something all the time — for instance, the internet, which to be fair is not exactly an object — you can’t constantly meditate on the implications of your habits. Brew K-Cup coffee every morning and I promise that you’ll stop thinking about the environmental impact. (Or just buy a reusable steel version!)

We don’t notice until after the fact, but the expectations paired to objects are fluid. Look at the history of the telephone. What began as a device for limited audio communication is now the most boring feature of a pocket computer. What started as a newfangled contraption only used when the great expense was worth it has evolved to be a prerequisite to American normalcy. Alright, “normalcy” overstates the case, but circa 2013 more than 50% of American adults owned smartphones. Also in 2013, my parents got rid of their landline. The meaning of the word “phone” has changed substantially. The concept of a thing begins to morph immediately after its inception.

What do we do about any of this? What’s the call to action, the kicker? IDK. Maybe: we need to pay attention to our stuff and what we do with it. Archaeologists and anthropologists will tell you, a society is defined by its material residue. So is an individual life. To which we must respond…

“The whole point of being a person and not a brand is to at least try to get some dumb enjoyment out of things.”

Jia Tolentino of Jezebel in an interview about ladies self-promoting on Twitter.

Mytho-Psychology

Posted on March 4, 2015March 4, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Originally this was the intro to a Bustle post about the symbolism of spring fashion, but I decided the intellectualism was too much for that venue.

In the days of yore, back when fire was a relatively recent tool in the human arsenal, back when the night sky was populated by constellated gods, humans constructed mythological systems to make our lives more meaningful. To give ourselves psychological safety. We didn’t understand nature and without advanced technology, our environment was terrifying. The world was vast, sometimes unpredictable, harsh — and yes, lovely.

The Witch's Craic — Photo: *The Witch’s Craic* by Barry Lewis.

During prehistory, up through the Middle Ages (depending on your continent), “science” didn’t exist in the way that we conceive of it now, as an ordered, logical process. People saw things and extrapolated from their observations, but magic was as valid an explanation for an unknown phenomenon as physics, if not more so. In some places, witchcraft is still a popular framing of power and knowledge, as demonstrated by Mischa Berlinski’s astonishing “Zombie Underworld” story.

Before math and chemistry, mythology saved us from the pain of uncertainty. We built systems of origin stories, hero stories, and human stories, to give our lives an explanatory context. Many of these stories mimicked the patterns of the natural world. The boom of a storm made sense because Thor, the Norse god of thunder, was hurling his warhammer. Every year the flowers bloomed again when Persephone emerged from Hades’ underworld kingdom. In ancient Egypt, the Nile flooded at the water god Hapi’s discretion.

Now we have a tradition of science, which purports to illuminate weather, diseases, and animal behavior without ritualistic romance. And yet we hold onto mythology. Urban legends flourish, as do mysterious horror stories, both exemplified by Reddit’s “No Sleep” community. There is something essentially human about magic. We refuse to give it up. Our reactions to fear and love feel like they supersede science, and we need another force to express them; gravity won’t suffice. We are drawn to allegory, to symbols. As esteemed scholar Joseph Campbell writes in The Masks of Gods: Primitive Mythology:

“The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the firetheft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution—appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same.”

Basically, mythology has existed as long as human language, and it’s still around. Cyclical stories are an essential part of human culture. However, most modern people don’t consciously incorporate mythology into their lives. Maybe we should.

L0065557 Ivory statue of the deity Shen Nung — Photo via Wellcome Images.

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