I was in a job interview the other day. Yes, I’m looking for a job. I want to work for someone else for a while, since it wasn’t quite as fun playing with my own money/life/future at stake. And if I’m having fun, I am actually more productive, more creative, happier, and, well, I’m having fun. It kinda justifies itself.
The interviewer asks me, “Tell me your three favorite web sites.”
Three favorite web sites? Odd question.
I haven’t thought about what were my favorite web sites in years, any more than I put energy into thinking about what was my favorite color since I was in 2nd grade.
I realized that of all the criteria that I could use in choosing a favorite site — visual appeal, gadgets, etc — the one that mattered to me was how useful it was. Does it accomplish things that I want to do?
And I realized there’s one site which does most of the things I want, and does it quite well.
Google.
They have the best search — that has been a given almost since day one. Google Maps has the best map interface around. Google Earth is great. Google Docs has proven incredibly useful. News search and alerts. One of the best newsgroup viewers around. I used Adsense in my recent business, and Google Analytics. Picassa. Google Video and YouTube. And then there’s applications I haven’t tried, and know only by reputation — Gmail, and GOOG411 chief among them.
Every one of them guided by two basic principles: make it useful and make it easy to use.
Other sites I visit are single use — I might go once a day to find the latest from my social networks, or the latest content from a blog or daily cartoon I follow.
Visual design is great. Gadgets are great. Things that go bump and whirr and zing can be, well, fun or annoying. Usefulness and ease of use never go out of style.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, in prior blogs, but I keep going back to the title and premise of Seth Godin’s book All Marketers are Liars. After the reader opens the cover he retracts the statement, saying marketers are really just storytellers who get people to make themselves believe things which aren’t necessarily so. (In other words, they’re liars.)
He cites as an example Fiji Water — basically filtered tap water, sold at an outrageous price. But the bottle tells a story of a tropical paradise — all things good, all things pure, and hey, its expensive so it must be worth it.
There are a couple of recent lies, er um, stories propagated by recent ad campaigns that really caught my eye for the audacity of the tales they tell.
Life Takes Visa
A series of ads for Visa shows the wheels of commerce running along smoothly and efficiently until, horror of horrors, someone tries to pay without using a credit card. With the card, everyone is happy, buying and selling is fun and efficient. People using the card are smart, sophisticated, and part of a fast, fun, and efficient process. Everything is good. Without the card, everything stops. Things crash to the ground. People stare disapprovingly at the person without the card. And if he doesn’t use a card, he is shunned by those around him, slinking out of the store.
Never mind that in the real life, often the opposite case is true — paying by card is often the slowest method at some places of business.
The message is simple. Card good. Cash and check bad. The card means acceptance. The card is easy. Everything else is bad. It is an obvious fantasy, and presented with cartoonish absurdity. But the message is there, and is absorbed through repetition until it becomes a lie the viewer tells himself.
Free?
Everybody, sing along…
They say a man should always dress for the job he wants.
So why am I dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant?
Its all because some hacker stole my identity.
And I’m stuck here every evening serving chowder and iced tea.
I should have gone to…
Then there’s the quiet fast talking man at the end who says “Offer applies with enrollment in triple advantage.” Roughly translated that means, “it will cost you $15 per month to get this credit report.”
F - R - E - E, that spells “Free”
Credit Report dot com, baby….
They actually never say the report is free. It is free, when you buy their service. And all that repetition of the word free? Well, its part of their name, so they have to repeat it. If the viewer happened to convince himself he was going to actually get a credit report without paying anything, well, that’s his own fault.
Beyond the intentional confusion over freeness, is the basic tale told. The poor man’s story, in so many words, is that a hacker stole his credit info, ruined his credit rating, and he can’t get a good job without a good credit rating, so he’s stuck at some Long John Silvers style restaurant. But it all could have been prevented if he’d gone to their web site.
Fear, of course, is a great motivator, and the tale inspires it in abundance. This could happen to you. Never mind that not that many jobs run a credit report on new employees, and never mind that getting your identity stolen by a hacker is still a rare event, and never mind that the major credit agencies will provide a genuinely free credit report to everyone once a year, and never mind that the credit agencies have provisions to fix erroneous information.
Oh, and never mind that the kid in the commercial stuck at a fast food fish place probably can’t afford the $180 a year this free report will cost him.
But hey, they’re just stories being told. Its up to the viewer to decide whether to believe them. Its up to the viewer to tell himself the lie, right?