In this issue:

The cruellest humour
Pirate Radio & Television forgets their audience

When unclear communication works
The Bank of Canada's dance with information

How to distribute your
bulk e-mail
(as long as it's not spam)

Politicians tripping over their tongues
Calling someone a Nazi almost never helps you make friends

Communication tip of the month
Get a GRIP

Advertising Watch
The cruellest humour

Humor is a difficult tool for anyone. We've all felt the shame of a joke that fell flat, or worse, offended someone we were trying to amuse. Black humor is particularly dangerous, yet appealing as well. It gives us a terrific opportunity to deflate some inflated egos, but it can easily miss and hurt others than the target.

Perhaps the cruelest example is a radio spot I heard only twice in the late spring, for Old Milwaukee Beer. It was part of a campaign of such humorous ads which feature an overblown radio announcer in a mock-serious voice. In this particular case, the announcer asked if the current stock market trends had wiped out our savings, and any chance of a comfortable retirement or a university education for our children. "Well," the announcer went on, "at least you can still save five dollars on a two-four of Old Milwaukee Beer."

Sorry, but that's going too far. Yes, many people have seen their investments and savings, and their hopes, evaporate. I certainly don't think there's much that a brewer or an ad agency can do about that, on the whole.

But what were the writers of this ad thinking? Or the producers? Or the client, for that matter?

Let's think about the effect on the audience. How will they feel, those who have lost significant amounts of money in the stock market? I'm not thinking about millionaires, but about the working family with a house in the suburbs, a leased car, and some investment instruments to save up enough money to send their children to university - exactly the people described in the spot. The punch line, "At least you can still afford beer," is simply horrifying to people in this situation.

With a cut-price product and marketing strategy, Old Milwaukee is not going after the upscale end of the market. So they're not appealing to the upper-middle-class, those with substantial investments that have been decimated by the economic gyrations of the past 24 couple of years. Maybe the message is aimed at a market segment that never had investments in the first place. So this ad is an opportunity to laugh at the misfortunes of the slightly better-off. It's humour, but nasty humour. Even among the target audience, this kind of joke will offend many who may sympathize with those who have lost money.

I get the joke. It's just not funny. Will it sell more beer? I haven't heard the spot since May, so I guess not.

Another communication disaster that could have been avoided.

Pirate Radio & Television's logo: yes, it hurts.

On June 19, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, made a speech about the state of the Canadian economy. He cited Mad Cow Disease, SARS and weakness in the U.S. economy as factors that would "likely mean a very weak second quarter" of 2003 for the Canadian economy. While he didn't explicitly say that would mean the Bank would cut interest rates at its next "fixed date" for setting such rates, financial analysts across the country immediately stated that his speech had "hinted" at cuts.

Last week, as economic statistic reports indicated lower-than-expected inflation rates, and the central bank "strongly hinted" at further interest rate cuts, the Canadian Press service reported.

This is the pattern for speeches and media releases from Canada's central bank: statements about the results of research on the state of the economy and the national and international factors that affect it, followed by pronouncements and prognostications from other sources about what he means.

The situation reminds one of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. In response to a question or a petition, the oracle would enter a trance, communicate with the god, and finally deliver an enigmatic statement. The challenge then was to figure out what it meant: marry the girl, invade Troy or go back to the farm?

Similarly, every statement that comes out of a central bank elicits a flurry of statements, reviews, interpretations and predictions from private-sector economists, bank spokepeople, stock market analysts, business pundits and anyone else with an opinion on the economy - which is to say, just about everybody.

This phenomenon isn't restricted to Canada, but can be observed in every "G7" nation and in fact in almost every industrialized country with a sizeable economy and a central bank that controls interest rates and that makes an effort to manage exchange rates. It's most pronounced, of course, in the U.S., the largest and most powerful economy in the world and home to the largest, most powerful central banker, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve Bank. Each time he opens his mouth, the economies of the whole world shake, turn and ripple.

The tendency for the wrong words from these mouths to shake up an economy is the reason that central bankers are so circumspect with their prognostications. Their statements become self-fulfilling prophecies; on the other hand, they can't come out and predict a boom in the hopes of staving off a bust for fear of looking like complete idiots - and who wants an idiot for a central banker?

This leads to the dance we see now: the central bankers are obliged to make statements about the economy, but are equally obliged not to say anything that will cause hardship. So we see the banker-economy waltz: the banker's statements make a small step in one direction, the economy hesitating follows, the central banks take a step or two more in response and so on. Meanwhile the chorus of economists and analysts keep singing, hoping to be right in their predictions at least half the time.

From a communications point of view, it means that the central bankers must not be clear in their analyses. They hedge and fudge predictions of economic downturns to prevent a complete economic rout, and they avoid enthusiasm about strengths in order to avoid inflation. So the analysts must then try to determine what they really mean, that is, what they would say if they could. When Mr. Dodge says "a weak second quarter," the question is, does he mean a shrinking economy? A recession? Or just much lower growth or a flat economy? When he warns against inflation, does he really mean a boom? And what does that mean for the Bank of Canada's next setting of interest rates?

The remarkable thing about this is that the foggy communication works. The "market" - that is, the collection of minds that make the big economic decisions that affect all our lives - has become skilled at interpreting the statements and scaling up or down from the modest predictions of the central banker to the real economic impact. When Dodge says "modest growth" without attaching any real numbers to his predictions, the market has tended to put a value on it that turns out to be fairly accurate most of the time. This points out the self-fulfilling nature of these predictions.

Just imagine: if Alan Greenspan actually said "depression," what would the chaos in the markets be like?

Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge (image source: ctv.ca)

How to distribute your bulk e-mail
(as long as it's not spam)

E-mail newsletters: now you, too, can create and distribute a professional-looking newsletter, including formatted text in columns, graphics and photographs, via e-mail.

It shouldn't be this easy.

The free e-mail programs like Microsoft's Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator will not only display HTML content (as long as you have that option selected), they'll also create messages with HTML content, including graphics and tables. With Outlook Express and Outlook, and with other programs that you have to actually pay for, you can even create tables or simple layouts in a word processor, then import them into the e-mail. If you know an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or PageMill, you can create even more complex and visually-creative messages. And it's easier than creating a whole Web site.

• Tip: Don't embed your graphics in the e-mail message. That just causes problems when a recipient wants to forward your e-mail to someone else: the graphic files don't get transferred the same way by all e-mail clients (the applications that read and write e-mail), so further recipients typically just see boxes with a red x in them. Instead, as you would with a Web page, save your images in a folder that's available on a Web site. In the e-mail, choose your graphics with the URL (http:// … "). This way, when an e-mail client opens your message, the program calls for the image file on the Web, which is universally available.

Distribution: the hard part
The hardest thing to do is to distribute your newsletter or bulk mailing to a large list. You don't want to use your standard e-mail client to send e-mail to a big list of hundreds of readers. For one thing, using Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora or even Netscape Communicator to do that gives each recipient the e-mail addresses of every other. Not only does that add a lot of unattractive header material to the top of your document (and one of the things you've been trying to do is make it look attractive), many of your readers may resent this distribution of their coordinates.

A review of electronic mail-merge software applications that manage mailing lists and send each recipient a separate copy of a message is available in PDF format on the Written Word's Web site.

Mach 5 Mailer: editor's pick

Atomic Mail Sender

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Summer communication gaffes
What were they thinking?

This one surely will hold its position as the worst series of political communication gaffes of the year, if not longer.

On July 2, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi compared Martin Schulz, a German deputy to the European Parliament, to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

"Mr. Schulz, I know there is a producer in Italy who is making a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I will suggest you for the role of commander. You'd be perfect," Berlusconi said.

Germany's Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, later said that Berlusconi apologized by telephone, but this was denied by the Italian PM.

A week later, Stefano Stefani, Italy's industry undersecretary, called German tourists in Italy "arrogant, hyper-nationalist blondes" who "invade Italy's beaches" every year. This statement prompted German Chancellor Shroeder to cancel his planned, annual family vacation in Italy this year. Even though Stefani later resigned over the remark, Shroeder did not change his decision to cancel his vacation, and the image of the current ruling government of Italy.

What were these men thinking? These statements break the biggest taboo in our society, invoking the spectre of the Nazis. There is no way that any public figure, let alone a politician, can get away with that. The best defense that the two can come up with is that they were "joking." That's a lame excuse at the best of times.

Italian Prime Minister and current President of the European Union, Silvio Berlusconi

Communication tip of the month

Get a GRIP

Often, the hardest part of communicating effectively is getting started. I call it "blank screen syndrome" -- that inability to get started writing.

Sometimes it's a case of having too much to say and trying to cram too much meaining into one introductory sentence. Sometimes the problem is not knowing where to start.

Here is a step-by-step solution, which I call "getting a GRIP." Answer these four questions:

Goal - what are you trying to achieve with this particular communication? As professional communicators, we don't write for the joy of it (although joy often comes into it). We're writing to achieve a purpose. Think of your communication as a set of tools that will help you achieve that purpose.

Reader - or audience. Who are you communicating to? What do they need? What motivates them? Why should they care? The more you know about your audience and the better you can describe them, the more you can write communication that will make them respond.

Idea - the main theme of your communication. For each document or Web site or speech or whatever item you're working on, you need to identify the main idea. If you can't sum up your main point in one sentence, you haven't made it clear in your own mind - and you can't make it clear to anyone else.

Plan - outline your document. In addition to your main idea or theme, you have other ideas to write, to support, prove or extend the main idea. Write an outline putting everything into some kind of order. Don't skip this stage, no matter how short your document is or how confident you feel in your own abilities or in your grasp of the topic. Write down a brief, point-form outline before you start composing any document.

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