Pulled pork jumps the shark

Did you know you can now get a pulled pork burger at The Coffee Club at Fountain Gate? That's a chain coffee shop in a shopping mall on Melbourne's outer southeastern suburban fringe, notorious for being the stomping ground of TV uber-bogans Kath and Kim (albeit slightly disguised as "Fountain Lakes"). I wonder if they're sourcing the pork from Kel Knight, purveyor of fine meats?

Anyway, I think we can say the whole hip-inner-city-diner-pulled-meat thing has definitely jumped the shark, don't you?

New chapter in a Mitey strange tale of trade marks

Social media has been buzzing today with the news that Pizza Hut is launching a "Vegemite and cheese" stuffed-crust pizza variety especially for Australia Day.

I know what you're thinking: "What a great and fitting tribute to our national day." As if our hearts weren't already swollen to bursting with national pride from the absolutely awful Richie Benaud lamb barbecue ad for Meat and Livestock Australia.

Anyway, putting aside my cynicism, it's interesting to note that the online ad for this Pizza Hut taste sensation doesn't actually use the word Vegemite or any Vegemite trade marks. Rather, it's called "MITEY Stuffed Crust" and refers only to "Australia's favourite spread".

Those who are paying attention may recall that there was talk of a potential trade mark dispute when a panicked Kraft re-launched its bizarrely named and disastrous iSnack 2.0 as "Cheesybite" in 2009. Coincidentally, it was Pizza Hut who already owned a trade mark for "Cheesy Bites".

It's not clear what, if any, discussions, correspondence or agreements were entered into between Kraft and Pizza Hut at the time, but today's launch of MITEY Stuffed Crust does make me wonder why there's no explicit reference to Vegemite.

This brand name left me unmoved

I saw a moving van over the weekend bearing the name ACCURATE REMOVALS. It seemed like an odd sort of brand name, and it prompted me to wonder what happens when you use a less accurate removal company. So here are the Top 5 things that came to my mind...

• Your furniture is beautifully packed and handled, but delivered to the wrong address.
• On average, 17.3% of items miss the front door entirely and end up in the garden due to inaccuracy.
• "Melbourne, Australia? Oh wow, we shipped your stuff to Melbourne, Florida!"
• "Your refrigerator must have expanded in the heat, because we measured this doorway and it was definitely three-and-a-bit handspans."
• "Sorry your stuff's all wet. We misjudged the height of that railway bridge by - I dunno - 20 or 30 centimetres and tore the top off the truck."

Realistically, is being an accurate removalist a serious basis for differentiation?

It's time to re-think and re-brand our "national day"

It's mid-January, the lamb barbecue ads are back on TV and the stores are filling with tacky green-and-gold merchandise once again. But from a brand authenticity perspective, celebrating something called "Australia Day" on the 26th of January is ever more irrelevant and insulting with each passing year.

That date marks the proclamation in 1788 of a British penal settlement on Port Jackson in the area known as New South Wales... and the dispossession of its indigenous owners. Australia was NOT "established in 1788" as the T-shirts assert. In fact, the name "Australia" wasn't even officially adopted for the continent until it was suggested by explorer Matthew Flinders and approved by the British Admiralty in 1824. And the nation we know as "Australia" didn't come into being until Federation on 1 January 1901, when it also gained independence from Britain after decades of political lobbying by early national statesmen like Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin.

The bottom line is that the 26th of January is completely unrelated to the history of our modern nation - it commemorates only cruelty, injustice, colonialism and dispossession. It has nothing to do with nationhood.

It should be consigned to history, along with rum rations and the lash.

Bad copywriting. Kills credibility by up to 99.9%

I've written here before about how incongruous it is that therapeutic product claims directed at trained health professionals are subject to a rigorous code endorsed by the ACCC while general consumers - who are much less equipped and able to evaluate such claims - are not afforded the same degree of protection.

Here's an example of a therapeutic claim - on a bottle of Colgate Plax mouthwash - that not only goes unexplained and unreferenced, but is also written in such a way as to render it nonsensical.

Just take a moment to consider that top line: KILLS GERMS by up to 99.9%. What does that actually mean?

Usually, if I see the phrase "Kills germs by...", I expect the rest of the sentence to be about the mechanism of action, for example "Kills germs by inhibiting enzymes involved in protein biosynthesis" or "Kills germs by disrupting cell membrane structure".

Alternatively, it could be read as claiming that each individual germ is rendered "up to 99.9%" killed. So germs are left at death's door, but not completely dispatched.

OK, so I think we know what they were trying to say - presumably Kills up to 99.9% of germs - but that's an inherently dodgy claim from which Colgate could easily walk away: "Hey, we only said 'up to 99.9% of germs', so if even 10% or 20% of germs survive, we're still OK".

Hey, Colgate... if you're going to make a health claim, for Pete's sake find someone who knows how to write one.

McDonald's "reinvigorated" brand vision. I'm not lovin' it.

One of marketing's major continuing problems is jargon. The fuzzy cloud of meaning around so many bits of marketing terminology continues to grow, fuelling the discipline's generally poor reputation and leaving it perpetually open to ridicule.

But surely McDonald's, as one of the world's best-known brands and most powerful marketing organisations, must have its shit together when it comes to communicating its marketing strategy clearly to staff and stakeholders...? Apparently not.

According to Advertising Age last Friday, McDonald's has just launched a "new brand vision... reigniting the 'I'm lovin' it' theme by introducing a new platform that puts more focus on lovin' with more uplifting content and conversations in the lovin' spirit". Hmmm... that sounds a lot more like an episode of Touched By An Angel than a brand vision.

In a carefully-scripted video message, McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl manages to cram a career's worth of circular definitions and contradictory marketing buzzphrases into just 4 short minutes of twaddle.

Her marketing philosophy, she says, centres on "powerful ideas", because "a powerful idea changes how we think, feel, act and what we do. It's everything." Great. So I waited... and waited... but I didn't ever hear a powerful idea. If there was one, it was buried under piles of empty phrases, picked up and tossed about like discarded hamburger wrappers in the wind.

McDonald's is on "a journey... to change the relationship and the conversation". Which conversation? The one with the person on the other end of the drive-through speaker?

McDonald's will focus on engagement, "knowing that engagement leads to customer experience". Er, no. Customers have an experience whether or not they're engaged.

McDonald's wants to "evolve with our customers"; but while they're evolving, they're also having "an open, transparent dialog(ue) with our customers". Do you want fries with that?

In the age of social media, words like engagement, conversation and dialogue may have become compulsory marketing speak but they're completely worthless unless marketers can clearly define what they mean, how they can be measured and how they are linked to customer value and competitive advantage.

In the end, despite what Ms Wahl introduces as a "brand transformation", it turns out that the 10-year-old tagline "I'm lovin' it" will remain at the centre of McDonald's positioning and marketing communications.

Sure, there's a cute new ad execution from Leo Burnett, suggesting that a bit of lovin' from McDonald's can bring mortal enemies together. But call it what you will - brand transformation, vision, platform, journey - I can't see anything visionary or transformational there. No powerful idea. Nothing supersized.

Just the same old meal deal.

Seven News continues to fuel Ebola panic and hate

A woman with vague symptoms is admitted appropriately, cautiously and without panic to a top class medical facility in Brisbane for testing and observation. And what picture does Seven News use to illustrate the story online? A disturbing image of people in Hazmat gear dragging a body bag, with no caption to put it in context.

How ironic that Seven's current series of medical reports by Dr Andrew Rochford is called "Healthy Truth", because the truth about Ebola is the last thing they seem interested in reporting. Ebola is less contagious than flu. It doesn't spread by air. Only those in direct contact with the secretions of someone with Ebola symptoms can catch it.

It's way past time that Seven and other news organisations did what they are supposed to do... their role and duty in a civilized, modern society. Stop misleading and report the truth. Keep the community informed instead of scared. Give balanced, rational coverage and stop fuelling hateful, xenophobic and racist attitudes like the ones we see exhibited by the morons in the comments on Seven's website and social media pages.

And if Dr Andrew Rochford wants to be seen seriously as a medical communicator and not just a novelty ("oh look, a real doctor doing current affairs"), he must take a leading role in this.

Mindless mildness from Johnson & Johnson highlights a double standard

Have a look at this picture of a common supermarket product and consider the following: In the world of the average consumer, what does "mild" mean? Surely mild is only ever a comparative term - as in "mild, moderate, severe" for grading diseases or "mild, medium, hot" for spices. Can something simply be mild without reference to something else which, by comparison, is not?

And how do you prove mildness? "Clinically", no less...?

In the ethical side of its operations - prescription drugs and medical devices - US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson would never get away with using a hanging, unqualified comparative like "mild" in promotional material targeted at health professionals. The ever stricter Medicines Australia Code of Conduct, authorised by the ACCC, expressly forbids this kind of wording, and their competitors would launch a volley of complaints the moment the package hit the shelves.

So why is J&J permitted to base its promotion of a consumer product on a vague, meaningless and possibly misleading term, completely unsupported by any attribution to trials or any other form of science? After all, consumers are actually far less able than clinicians to validate and question a claim like "clinically proven mildness".

The facts about Abbott and Endeavour Hills: There was never any threat.

Victoria Police finally confirmed on Friday that Numan Haider, fatally shot after stabbing two officers in an incident at Endeavour Hills police station last week, had not been threatening prime minister Tony Abbott.

Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton said that police did not believe there was any current threat to the community, nor was there ever a threat to the Prime Minister, connected to Mr Haider, The Age reported.

But the horse has bolted. This important clarification will go largely unnoticed. Many people in the community will remain convinced that Haider was plotting against Australia's democratically-elected leader on behalf of fanatical overseas “Jihadist” interests.

How did the “threats against the PM” story start and how was it propagated? It all seems to have started very vaguely, via that time-honoured journalists’ trick of saying “we understand” when referring to a rumour:

Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius would not go into detail about why they wanted to speak to the man, but the ABC understands he had made threats against Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

A later News Limited story under the byline of Simon Benson actually clarified that the threats were only in the heat of the moment, at the time of incident:

Witnesses said he (Haider) made verbal threats against Prime Minister Tony Abbott then stabbed both officers.

Senior intelligence sources confirmed the attacker had made threats against the PM moments before a local police officer drew his gun and shot him dead.

But subtly, that fact is twisted later in the story – without any source being cited – to imply that Haider had made previous threats against the prime minister and that THIS was why security agencies had been watching him:

The man was under surveillance for having allegedly made threats against the PM.

Clearly this is just plain wrong, and very poor journalism. There is no evidence that Haider ever threatened the PM prior to the incident at Endeavour Hills.

And what about the oft-repeated line that Haider had been tracking Tony Abbott, with the obvious implication that the young man had been planning some kind of attack? This also appears to have taken hold, without any corroboration.

Early in the evolution of the story, some media outlets quoted the ABC as saying that "the 18-year-old Muslim extremist had been researching Prime Minister Tony Abbott's movements", taking particular interest in his plans to travel to Melbourne in coming months. I’ve looked and I can’t find any original source for this. However, on Friday, News Limited outlets were reporting that this “research” consisted of a Google search and had happened at some time in the past:

Haider’s passport was cancelled after authorities discovered he had done a Google search to try to find out when Prime Minister Tony Abbott would visit Melbourne and where he planned to go.

Then on Saturday, without citing any source, Gerard Henderson in an opinion piece in The Australian stated baldly that "Evidence has emerged that Haider was tracking the movements of senior politicians, including Tony Abbott". What evidence is that, Mr Henderson?

In fact, a story in The Australian the previous day, again quoting Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton, reported that Australian Federal Police were still looking into whether Haider researched Prime Minister Tony Abbott's movements and that the AFP did not have any "specific" information about potential threats to Mr Abbott.

So… there you have the facts. No evidence of stalking of Tony Abbott, nor of threats - except (allegedly) at the moment of Haider’s attack on the two police officers - nor of conspiracy... except for the media getting together to make news out of rumours, half-truths and bullshit.

Strip clashes: Why can't the AFL get it right?

Yesterday's AFL Elimination Final between Port Adelaide and Richmond was hard to watch, and not only because of Richmond's painful performance. I found that the combination of bright sun and deep shade at the Adelaide Oval plus the confusingly similar strips of the teams made for very difficult TV viewing. And I simply couldn't understand why that was the case, when the issue of a strip clash had been raised and - I thought - settled during the week, with the unusual decision to allow Port to wear its traditional SANFL "prison bars" stripes. Yet again, the AFL got it wrong, and it continues to set itself up for failure by not having a simple, fail-safe strip policy.

Some teams and supporters seem to be stuck in the 1950s with the concept of black shorts for the home team and white shorts for the visitors. But that harks back to an era when every team had its own home ground. The concept of "home" and "away" games is meaningless in 2014 - the vast majority of AFL games are played at a ground where neither team is actually at "home" - yet the AFL seems to be gutless about dragging these laggards into the 21st century.

It's actually pretty simple. Teams don't need a "home strip" and an "away strip" as well as a "clash strip" - that's just unnecessarily complicated and confusing. I'm not a neuropsychologist, but I know that it's a basic precept of visual cognition that the eye and brain differentiate objects more rapidly and easily when they contrast. This applies to players as much as it does to spectators and TV viewers, although the limitations of image capture and reproduction make it even more crucial for TV audiences.

To maximise contrast in every game, every AFL team needs just two strips - one predominantly dark and one predominantly light. Forget the irrelevant "home" and "away" shorts - the colour of the shorts goes with whether the strip is predominantly dark or light. Let the home team choose first, or toss for it. And AFL teams should be forced to comply with the light/dark protocol. If they dig their heels in, they will be continuing to damage the game as a whole. While we're at it, guernsey designers should forget fancy swooshes and ribbons and stylised animals - just stick to traditional stripes, sashes, hoops and yokes. From a few rows back or on TV, you can't tell whether that's a majestic swooping brown hawk on the jumper or just a big skid mark.

Why Richmond and Port Adelaide couldn't have played yesterday in the colours they're wearing in the picture above is beyond me. Port had a huge home ground advantage anyway - what difference could it possibly have made what colour shorts they were wearing?

The Marlboro Man and the Australian Open

It might be hard for some younger people to imagine, but in the early 1980s the Australian Open tennis tournament (then held at Kooyong Stadium each December) was sponsored by Marlboro cigarettes. In fact, they were the "naming rights" sponsor, and the tournament was widely referred to in the media as the Marlboro Australian Open.

Activists and supporters from organisations opposed to tobacco marketing and sponsorship, including Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products (MOP-UP) and Billboard-Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGA UP) organised effective protests on Glenferrie Road opposite the stadium, with a simulated "marble row" of headstones and a giant inflatable cigarette, easily visible from the South Eastern Freeway (now Monash/CityLink).

As part of a growing movement against tobacco sponsorship of sport at the time, I wrote and performed this song on community radio station 3CR's Health Show. It's my one and only "protest song"...

The Marlboro Man rode on out from the range
With his profits distending his belly,
And he cunningly thought, if he sponsored some sport
He could still get his ads on the telly.

So he went down to Kooyong and laid out some cash -
Just a pittance for someone so wealthy -
And he said, with a cough: "If this really pays off,
It might even make smoking look healthy."

He said: "Get me the best tennis players on Earth -
I want McEnroe, Borg, Gerulaitis!
It'll be so damn good, I'd play myself if I could...
But I can't - I've got heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema... and chronic bronchitis."

Eventually the Victorian government acted, not only to end tobacco sponsorship of sport, but to fund sporting clubs and healthy activities using revenue collected from tobacco taxes, via the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), the first of its kind in the world.

Kmart and BWM bowdlerise a classic hit for TV

With the aim of extending the feel of its "Bom Bom" campaign of 2013, featuring the music track of that name by Sam and the Womp, Kmart Australia has recently launched a new TV ad. Here's how their agency BWM explains it:

BWM Melbourne's new spot for Kmart shows how irresistible value feels, by celebrating and sharing the 'Kmart feeling' that transforms low-price products into a wonderland for the imagination.The spot features track 'The Clapping Song' by Shirley Ellis.

It's a pleasant enough ad, if a bit derivative of the kind of thing Bonds has been doing for a number of years. But something about it has bothered me from the start. Although the agency claims on its YouTube channel that the ad features 'The Clapping Song' by Shirley Ellis, the lyrics have clearly been changed from that familiar classic hit of the 1960s without acknowledgment.

For some unknown reason, it's been bowdlerised. Here's how the Kmart version goes, with the original lyrics in brackets:

Three, six, nine
The goose drank lime (wine)
The monkey chewed tomato (tobacco)
On the streetcar line
The line broke
The monkey got woke (choked)
And they all went together (to heaven)
In a little row boat.

Unnecessary? Over the top? Political correctness gone mad? I can only guess that advertiser and agency are trying to avoid any possibility of complaints to the Advertising Standards Board about inappropriate references to alcohol and tobacco consumption and a fatal public transport accident.

Anyway, please enjoy the original (also covered by The Belle Stars in the 1980s) in all its offensive glory...

Toyota Klanger: Worst-ever rock song adaptation for advertising?

With the footy season reaching the pointy end, we're sure to see a lot more advertising from Toyota, official sponsors of the AFL Premiership. Sadly, that will mean many more exposures of the horrendous current 30-second TVC for Toyota's large family 4WD, the Kluger. This ad is based on what must be the worst-ever adaptation of a popular song as an advertising jingle. Think of the much-loved Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Down On The Corner", then read these lyrics:

Early morning netball
It's sideline coffee time
The boys begin stretching
Soccer's next, let's ride
Need another latte
To cheer on the team
Dad and the four kids exhausted
Mum will be up for a week.

Unbelievably clunky, unfunny and far from clever. Add a half-hearted and poorly-enunciated vocal performance and every visual cliché about "soccer moms" and WASP families you can think of, and you have an absolute shocker of an ad.

Is this really the best creative idea Toyota's agency Saatchi & Saatchi could come up with to differentiate the Kluger from its competitors? Apparently they reckon a lame anecdote about Mum drinking too much latte is something the target audience will relate to and find funny and appealing, in a way that helps build preference for Kluger.

It might work marginally better as an ad for decaf coffee. Or birth control.

Political parties: Forget "message". Try vision, values and leadership

With three days to go, I've pretty much given up hope. But reflecting on this excruciatingly awful 2013 Federal Election campaign, I still can't help wishing for the impossible... a glimpse of vision from a political leader somewhere.

Ask a party leader why we should vote for him/her and the answer is inevitably framed narrowly, with reference to the other parties. Even the Greens pretty much go with "Because we're not them...".

Surely a better question is "Why do you want to lead us?" Forget the other parties and tell us what you and your mob actually believe in. What are your fundamental values? What motivates you? What's your vision for the nation?

Both major parties are so often heading down the same cynical path on issues like asylum seekers and climate change that we can no longer rely on observed actions and stated policies as a guide to their values and beliefs. Yet I think we crave something more meaningful.

To extend this a little, and with reference to what I do for organisations (businesses and not-for-profits), it continues to puzzle me why political parties spend massive amounts on communications and "message" consultants, researchers and pollsters, but apparently fail to work internally on their core strategy first.

Put simply, message doesn't drive meaning. What I consistently tell marketers is that they must identify or decide what it is they really stand for FIRST, before they even think about the implications for communication. I don't see why the parties that aspire to govern us should do things any differently.

Coco Pops and contemporary culture

On Triple R FM's Breakfasters this morning, Stew Farrell was lightly ridiculing a newspaper story about advertising targeted to children when something curious happened. His co-presenters, Fee B-Squared and Lorin Clarke, seemed to become quite uncomfortable at Stew's repeated naming of the breakfast cereal brand Coco Pops (which was the subject of the story) and effectively truncated the discussion, even though it was absolutely clear that he was responding to a news item and this was in no way a case of "cash for comment".

The idea that mentioning brand names is somehow unpleasant or distasteful in non-commercial media is quite widespread. I've written here before about the ABC's unworkable and, at times, hypocritical "no brands" policy. But I haven't previously detected the same attitude among public broadcasters.

Let's be sensible about this: brands are a cultural reality. Like it or not, brands are one of the ways in which we make sense of contemporary Western life. It's almost impossible to discuss anything important or meaningful in our lives without mentioning a brand or, usually, numerous brands. Our memories are often linked to, and activated by, brands, brand names and advertising jingles. We don't do it consciously and we certainly don't do it in expectation of a commercial reward. Notwithstanding often valid critiques in works like "No Logo", brands are here to stay.

And just because it's a breakfast cereal or an unhealthy product doesn't mean a brand is unworthy of discussion on public radio. 3CR's Health Show was very actively involved in fighting - and ending - Marlboro's sponsorship of the Australian Open Tennis Championships in the early 1980s.

After all, Triple R is a brand, too. Its pivotal role in Melbourne culture over nearly 40 years is inextricably linked to numerous commercial brands: music venues, record labels, bands, festivals, cafes, TV shows. Silencing brands would be doing a disservice to the culture of the city Triple R serves so well.

Blurred vision and pointless positioning

More than a decade ago, while waiting for my visitor's pass at the gatehouse of the Australian HQ of a multinational pharmaceutical company, I noticed a new sign proclaiming their vision. It was so extraordinarily bad that it remains imprinted on my mind to this day. It read:

Achieving together to lead in healthcare.

It was a classic example of the sort of vision statement that can only be written by a committee. Ugly to read and say. So cautious as to be incomprehensible. Undifferentiating. Uninspired and uninspiring.

Achieving what? Achieving to lead? What does that even mean?

A vision statement is supposed to give employees, customers and stakeholders an unequivocal and inspiring view of what makes your organisation unique and how it aims to make the world a better place. Seeing such a hopelessly ill-directed and badly written statement made me think no-one was in charge and no-one really knew what the company was on about. Its performance in subsequent years tends to suggest perhaps that was indeed the case.

I was reminded of that pharma classic today when I saw a slogan carefully signwritten on the side of a smart-looking utility vehicle bearing the name of an air conditioning maintenance firm. It read:

Partners of first choice.

A positioning statement is supposed to define the ways in which you would like customers to perceive your offer as different and distinctive compared with those of your competitors. But this one is also meaningless and uninspired.

Being seen as a partner rather than a supplier is every service provider's aim. There's nothing new or distinctive about that - it's old news, as stale and hackneyed as saying you offer solutions. And being first choice is surely the goal of every provider of air conditioning services - they probably differ only in terms of which customer segment they decide to target.

My point is, if you are going to bother telling the world what you stand for, make it count.

If you lack the internal resources to work through it and develop something distinctive and meaningful, then seek outside assistance. And if your consultant comes up with twaddle like Achieving together to lead in healthcare, then sack him/her and get someone who knows how to develop insights, capture ideas and make words work.

Give polls a chance. Or STFU.

We all know there's a problem with political polls. Every time a new poll is published, we have 24 hours of headlines, questions shouted at politicians at every doorstop, denials, pundits attributing causes to every "dip" or "surge" and the polls themselves dismissed as meaningless or "dodgy". But the fault isn't usually with the poll. Here are just a few reasons why:

1. Political polls are conducted transparently and with robust, documented, methodology. Poll methodology is typically provided (if the media organisations or critics care to ask for it) along with the findings. Indeed, it's in the interests of market research companies to provide details of their methodology in order to support the credibility of their findings. It's just that the media and others aren't usually that interested. Of course there are technical flaws and merits in every approach - pollsters and psephologists may argue at length among themselves about methods and significance, but you'll rarely see those arguments played out in the mainstream media. Margins of error are also provided; but they too attract scant attention while tiny changes in voting percentage are discussed ad nauseam.
2. Stated intention today is not a reliable predictor of future behaviour. This is very well documented in the academic marketing literature - all sorts of factors have been shown to have the potential to cause the consumer not to follow through with his or her intention. A poll that asks "If a Federal election were held today..." sets up an artificial situation, making it even less likely to be a good predictor of the future. Even with the best design - and the best will - the findings of such a poll can only be used as a very rough guide to what might happen in the (impossible) event of an election being held today.
3. Local factors may significantly alter intentions. Voting involves a complex process - it's very different from answering a phone call or completing a survey online. For example, a significant proportion of those who provide opinion poll answers probably have no clear understanding of who their local candidates are, or will be, at a future Federal election. What if I told the pollsters that I intended to vote Liberal but when I eventually see the picture of the Liberal candidate on the How to Vote card, I don't like the look of him or her? Or I was intending to vote Labor but I recognise the Greens candidate as a former local Councillor who did some good things for the community? These may be small effects, but when countless column inches are devoted to differences of 1 or 2 per cent, they may well be very relevant.
4. Correlation does not equal causation. A movement in poll numbers - even a change that falls within the margin or error and thus can't even be thought of as a "real" change - invariably provokes a flood of analysis seeking to explain its cause. No change in voting intention should ever be attributed to any specific piece of political business - an announcement, a scandal, a photo op or a fuck-up - based on a piece of descriptive research like an opinion poll. Only a properly-controlled piece of causal research, where the impact of one particular factor can be investigated while others are controlled for, can provide strong evidence of causation; for example, was voting intention statistically significantly different among those who had seen a particular speech or interview, as compared with those who hadn't? Even then, there might well be confounders - people who saw the speech might be better informed about politics than those who didn't and this might be related to their long-term voting intentions.

My point is, when polls are discussed, dissected and ultimately despised, don't dismiss the research as "dodgy" unless you've examined and understood the methodology. To put it bluntly, don't blame the polls or the pollsters - blame the pollies and the press.

How conservatives and bigots delude themselves - and their followers - about history

I don't normally get political here, but the reaction of some conservatives in the US to the re-election of Barack Obama has been absolutely astonishing, sometimes even to the point of being hilarious. And there's something worth reflecting on about the extent to which a strong belief and identification with a brand like conservatism can completely change the way someone looks at the world. Even undisputed facts, history and science.

As commentator Rachel Maddow puts it, the conservative movement is "stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world".

Conservative political pundit Pat Buchanan claimed this week that Obama's re-election has "killed White America". And then, in support of that contention and acknowledging that "of course" he thinks whites are better than other people, he claimed that "Anything worth doing on this Earth was done first by white people." Buchanan then cited examples that prove exactly what Maddow says - conservatives are living in some kind of "truth bubble" of their own making.

"Who climbed Mount Everest?" Buchanan asked rhetorically. "White people."

Er, maybe half right at best. Tenzing Norgay (a Nepali Sherpa) was right there on the summit with Hillary, and numerous Sherpas were an integral part of the team that made the first successful ascent.

"Who invented paper?" asked Pat. "White people."

Wrong again, Pat. Papermaking was invented in China and spread through the Middle East to medieval Europe in the 13th century.

"Who discovered algebra? White people."

Sorry, Pat. Strike three and you're out. The roots of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians and the word comes from Arabic. There's even a clue in that the word starts with "al".

How symbols lose their meaning...

If you've seen much of the London 2012 Olympics so far, especially online or print coverage, you'll almost certainly have seen a pic of a medal winner biting his or her piece of bling. It took me just a few minutes to find the images above; no doubt many thousands of pics like these have been taken already, just a few days into competition.

The origins of the tradition of biting the medal are well known: gold is a soft metal, and biting on a coin (or medal) could establish its authenticity or purity. No doubt the first athlete to do it was making a spontaneous and genuine gesture of amused disbelief ("Wow! Have I really won gold?!"). A few more athletes imitate the first, and it remains something the athletes own. But then the press pack get a hold of it, and the spontaneity and meaning are lost.

Aesthetically, it now almost always looks ugly and ridiculous; many of the medallists look uncomfortable or at best bemused. They are clearly being coaxed by photographers to do it.

But when even silver and bronze medallists are being bullied into making what is now a meaningless gesture, it has clearly lost its meaning and become just another stupid journalistic cliche.

The trouble with “content marketing”

I had no idea, but apparently I’ve worked in “content marketing” for more than 20 years. Of course, it wasn’t called that when I started my career in a marketing communications agency specialising in one of the most information-intensive promotional contexts imaginable: marketing prescription pharmaceuticals to GPs and specialists.

No-one mentioned “content marketing” when we pitched, developed and published custom newsletters, journals, symposium proceedings and product monographs on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies.

It wasn’t called “content marketing” when we developed and ran third party-accredited case study programs to support the launch of a new class of drugs, or when I sat in a hotel room at an international congress writing overnight newsletters highlighting the important clinical implications of a new multicentre trial, to be faxed to Australian doctors the next morning.

And it wasn’t called “content marketing” when I ghost wrote opinion pieces for business publications or prepared a CEO’s “From my desk” column for customer newsletters.

But these are all examples of targeted strategic communications designed and executed to meet very clear communication objectives, driven by marketing strategy.

Worryingly, much of what I read about content marketing seems to put the current vogue for “content” way ahead of the “marketing” bit. I’ve seen countless blog posts from content “experts” with “10 Great Ideas for Content” and "Tips for Content", as though sheer quantity matters more than purpose and relevance. It's worse still when one of these gurus describes content marketing as a "strategy" in its own right, and claims it's "cost-effective and easy"... without any evidence. And the content marketing buzz seems to value examples of how to generate content over actual case studies demonstrating true marketing effectiveness and ROI.

I’ve learned over the years to be very wary of any new fad that puts a word in front of “marketing”. Marketing is marketing. Buzzwords, new communications channels and marketing gurus come and go, but the fundamentals of marketing remain. “Content marketing” is not a new kind of marketing. At best, it’s about some new communication tools; at worst, it’s putting the cart before the horse.

And I really dislike the word “content”. It carries connotations of a communications space or void that simply needs to be filled, as though a novelist told her publisher “Here’s my 500-page novel, now I just have to develop the content”. By extension, the people who come up with “content” run the very real risk of being seen as merely “content providers”. There’s nothing inherent in the term “content marketing” that gives the content provider (or “Chief Content Officer” – ugh!) credit for having an understanding of marketing strategy or skills in writing and commercial creativity, or that imbues the content with a specific strategic purpose.

As I've suggested above, “content” in marketing is as old as the hills, and not just in areas like pharma marketing. Long before the web and Facebook, FMCG marketers seeking ways to increase the range of customer usage occasions put coupons for recipe books on their packages: every Chocolate Ripple Cake made in the suburbs meant two extra packs of Arnott’s Choc Ripple biscuits sold. Young stamp collectors were encouraged to join the Junior Philatelists’ Club and get the quarterly Stamp News. These are classic examples of what today would be called “content”, but driven by clear objectives that can be linked to real measures of success.

Remember that marketing is about value. If your content doesn’t help you create superior customer value and hence confer competitive advantage, then what’s the point? And if your content is really valued so highly by your customers, then why are you giving it away to your competitors and their customers too?

Moreover, creating and disseminating quality content has real costs or, at the very least, opportunity costs even if you sit at your desk and do it yourself.

Everyone involved in planning, designing, developing and delivering content must know why each piece of content is being created, captured or curated and where it fits strategically. To be more specific, which customers and what customer behaviours is the content intended to influence, and how? And, in a world chock full of content, why should the customer pay attention to yours?

Just because we have new social media to play with doesn’t mean marketers, PR practitioners, “content engineers” or whatever we’re being called this week can ignore the fundamentals of marketing and marketing communications.