Ijust came across WebWord, an interesting site with some parallel interests to mine. I would love to know more about who’s behind it but I can’t find any links to a bio on the site. One of their posts was about the curious popularity of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. It lists some plausible reasons, e.g. “Readers feel smart because often they’re figuring out the clues before the book’s characters do.”

There’s a temptation to condemn a popular book because it is badly written, by which I suppose I mean not written in the best traditions of English literature. I slag it off for this reason even though I enjoyed the book very much and finished it in a couple of sittings.

In a way The Da Vinci Code, like many airport blockbusters before it, is actually very well-written, at least in the sense that it is very fit for purpose. It makes you WANT to read it. It is literally a page turner.

I can’t think of many examples of people trying to write non-fiction in a thriller format but it would be an interesting idea. In fact I can think of one example: Richard Neustadt’s Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective. JFK was a huge fan of Fleming’s James Bond stories and Neustadt wanted to catch and keep his attention so he wrote this politico-military history in the same sort of style.

Of course the widely-publicised plagiarism court case can’t hurt. I was in a bookshop at Heathrow last week and saw both books - the Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail - prominently displayed side by side.

Iread today in New Media Age that “unreliable and slow sites resulted in etailers losing £84m in the final three months of 2005.” My web hosting company boasts that it has 99.9% server uptime. This means that they expect at least eight hours of downtime a year. That 0.01% has a real money cost.

In Moondust, Andrew Smith’s fascinating book about the moon missions, it says that the Saturn V rocket had six million parts, “meaning that, even with NASA’s astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong on a good flight.”

There are two points here. First, impressive-sounding numbers are often not so impressive on closer examination. Nobody says “our servers fail for at least eight hours every year” because 99.9% uptime sounds better but they mean the same thing.

Second, this ambiguity is why genuine guarantees are so valuable in business writing. For example MessageLabs promises “100% protection from both known and unknown malware.”

When it comes to e-commerce, space rockets and virus protection, there’s a big difference between 100% and 99.9%.

“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is
to be one. … The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and does what he wants
to do” - Bob Dylan

“I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole, I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance. I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that despite the recent triumphs of science, man hasn’t changed much in the last 2000 years and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I believe in courtesy: the rituals by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. I think that we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which we call, for convenience, “nature” - all living things are now brothers and sisters … we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.” - Kenneth Clark

“All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.” - Marshall McLuhan

“Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.” - Aristotle

“If we don’t find something pleasant, at least we’ll find something new” - Voltaire

I’m away from my computer for a few days so I’ve pre-posted some interesting quotations to fill the gap. Normal service will resume on the 30th.

Since I’m going away for a few days, I’m posting a special bonus post today. A couple of years ago I was in a waiting room ready to go into a focus group thing for the BBC. The subject was the kinds of science programmes that should be shown in BBC 2 television.

I love science programs. In 1981 there was a Horizon about the development of computer graphics that was the inspiration for an entire ten-year career in computer games. Other programs about space, computers, aviation and so on have inspired and moved me over the years. I was delighted to be there.

But I hadn’t realised that science had become old hat. Yesterday’s news. Perhaps even something sinister and dangerous. WHile we were waiting, a conversation started about horoscopes and star signs. After about five minutes I launched into my now-traditional tirade about horoscopes: there’s no scientific basis, all ‘readings’ apply to all readers, etc. etc. etc. I expected everyone to agree with me. Not a bit of it. A roomfull of intelligent-looking young people rounded on me. “What do you know about the wisdom of the ancients,” was one phrase that sticks in my mind.

The most popular programme ideas that came out of the focus group were “the science of celebrity addiction” and “inside Hugh Grant’s brain.” Really. I’ve never been to a focus group again.

So, I was delighted to read about this event - “The selfish gene - 30 years on“. Several of my friends were tutored by John Krebs and Richard Dawkins when I was at Oxford and Krebs made an amiable figure wandering around my college, Pembroke, where he was a tutor. Sadly I never met either of them. I was particularly drawn to Krebs’s citation from “River out of Eden”:

“‘Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principals and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icaraus don’t.’ “

The internet may be transforming the way consumers shop but it appears to have done nothing for the way our industry spends its marketing budgets. Business as usual won’t cut it.

Apparently, chief marketing officers at European finance companies are guilty of failing to shift their budgets online, even when it would do them good. Google’s recent research lays part of the blame at the door of the ‘traditional’ media agencies. The answer, according to Google, is simple: spend more online and break free of those damned stuffy agencies. They want you to throw more money at it. How very traditional…

Here are some less ‘traditional’ questions. Regardless of their size, how are the budgets allocated? Does the money go to the right people? What’s the point of spending tons of money to drive people to financial services websites if they can’t understand what they read when they get there?

Again and again, I see clients dedicate a tiny fraction, if any, of their budget on the most fundamental jobs such as writing web copy. Rather than hire an expert who understands how to write for the medium AND gets the technology, they leave it to design agencies, marketers and the last minute. They’re still paying for copy one way or another but they’re not getting what they pay for.

I agree that spending online lags behind changes in consumer behaviour but I also believe that what is spent could be spent more wisely. A few agencies are waking up to the need for a specialist approach. For example, Jackie Cooper PR has just employed a full-time blogger. Of course, the PR industry never looks a gift revenue stream in the mouth. But kudos to JCPR for forward thinking.

I’m willing to bet that behind Google’s disparaging use of the term ‘traditional’ agency is the idea that they just ‘don’t do’ online. Shame on them. But for those who ‘do do’ online, how about a little recognition that it is constantly evolving. It is simply inexcusable to fob clients off with a one-stop-shop new media package. It might have worked a couple of years ago but there are more options now: blogs, wikis, podcasts, chat forums, fan sites, etc. etc.

How many more Flash-driven quasi-interactive brochure-ware sites do we have to endure before someone embraces the full potential of online technology? And the full range of specialist agencies? Campaigns and customers expect better and there are rich rewards for agencies that deliver.

For instance, research shows (well if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em) that good website copy can improve understanding, credibility and sell through. This is doubly true when it comes to complex products like financial services or technology. Do you really want to trust such a crucial job to anyone who can string a sentence together? Or someone who doesn’t know the difference between a blog and a wiki, even if their job depended on it?

Google’s research cites lack of knowledge as the main reason for not shifting budgets to where they’d have most impact. If the poor, confused CMOs don’t get it, I think it is because their agencies don’t get it. Success is a powerful argument and getting more bang for the same buck is another. Who knows, maybe when they see some campaigns using the full range of technology and deploying specialists to do it they may see a good reason to shift more money online, however hard those ‘traditional’ agencies push them in the other direction.

[This post was originally submitted to NMA magazine as an opinion piece in response to some research put out by Google about online advertising spending.]