Many of the great disappointments in life are when our fantasy or imagined expectation does not match with reality.

More often than not people blame reality not their imagination.  In the battle between expectation and disappointment it is easier to blame the other guy, not the image makers in our brains.

This is a issue that advertising must address.  After all, advertising is the purveyor of expectations when we tell people about products and services.  We help create the expectation that our clients deliver on when purchases are made.

It does make some sense to ask the question “Why do people rely on their imagination more than they rely on reality?”

I think it has to do with learning.

We imagine outcomes from a set of assumptions and then correct our models of expectation with reality.  That’s effective learning.  If I put the money in the vending machine, the reward drops out.  I expect it and reality confirms it.  So I can put money in again and I will get another reward.  Basic behaviorism or S-R theory – see B.F.Skinner or even Pavlov.

Sure, but with social situations our predictive mental models are not as accurate.  We don’t always have the correct information, or understand what the other person(s) motivations really are.

My wife is constantly talking out loud when she is driving.  Asking, rhetorically, “Why did that person do that!” (Expurgated version of dialogue).  Since she never gets a real answer I wonder why she keeps asking.  She never stops another car and interrogates the driver – as if the driver even noticed what they did or understood why they might have done it.  So her disappointment is often a lack of understanding for the other person’s motivation.

In advertising we are creating expectations of performance.  That is, we try to show what the product or service is and how it works.  Not all advertising is cognizant that viewers will not necessarily understand this basic.  Advertising that assumes viewers know what the product is had better be entirely certain or the advertising will be near useless.

If advertising does not clearly explain what, particularly, a new product is why would someone buy it.  I find this often the case with technology, specially technology toys.  The advertiser assumes that people know what the gadget does and starts to explain minor differences between their gadget and a competitor.  Not everyone understands the difference between an iTouch and an iPhone or an iPod.  As the market grows into those not obsessed with the item advertising runs the risk of excluding potential buyers by being too clever.

Advertising not only creates expectations of product performance, advertising creates expectations of context.  When is it socially appropriate to use a product and how does one use it within a social context.  Is it acceptible to walk or drive down the street drinking a Coke and eating a sandwich?  It didn’t used to be.  Now it is.

Advertising showed it to be okay.  Fast food marketers supported this with the development of a drive through window.  When Wendy’s introduced it, they thought people would be picking up food to take home.  Not so.  They wanted to eat it NOW!

Then automobile companies responded in the 1980s by including cup holders to reinforce the appropriateness of drinking beverages and eating while driving.  And if you can’t use your cell phone while driving (in many jurisdictions, and many more to come) who says it is safe to eat your burrito while you cruise along at 100 kph.

Now back to expectations versus disappointment.

We cannot cure rampant imagination.  What we can do in advertising is make sure we accurately show a product in its operation and its social context.

Today everyone is picking up on Matt Cutt’s story confirming Google does not use the keywords meta-tag in web ranking. Most people assumed they never used the Keywords tag for search rank, this confirms it. But one major point he makes is they DO use the Description tag in the search listings. So you should be sure that each individual page’s Description tag is unique, fits in a search result and has as much pull as it can.

Our business is communications.  But that doesn’t mean we want to communicate.  Really, we want to send messages.

Maybe we should call our business “messaging.”

Messaging is sending controlled communications to targets.  Communicating suggests some dialogue with feedback sought and responded to.

Our control of the message is particularly apparent in public relations.  When we see an interview with a media trained client, we take satisfaction in getting them to stick to the agenda, make sure we get the points across, hit the message points.

But the use of messaging takes the content out of communications by revealing only what is desired by the sender.  I am sorry to see politicians being trained in our disciplines so that they

We hear that the times when politician go “freelance” and improvise in an interview it is the first death knell of their career.

But our desire to focus our commercial messages are not the same as interviewing journalists, if any remain in existence, probing for information from our leaders.

Instead of communication, we get messaging.

The same happens on the news.  Instead of news, we get promotional messaging from the network, plus a few obvious new items.

Our industry should be ashamed at training politicians to do this.  But it is really a symptom of the blurring of the lines between commercial messaging and general communications.  Who knows where editorial starts and commercial begins anymore.

Can we regain communication?  Or is there too much to economic risk for honesty and spontaneity to creep back in again?

Or are we left with quality investigative journalism that reveals the truth about the weird creature discovered in Panama.

One of the key problems in the advertising industry is the concept that an ad is a form of expressing a legal contract.  Really?

Somewhere in the days following Mad Men, the idea took hold that a commercial was an offer of a contract so all the legal conditions and disclaimers started to be added.

This was an extension of the need for commercials to be truthful.  Which, by and large, is in the advertisers best interest anyway.   Duping people rips your reputation a new one.

Anyone with a brand worth millions of dollars would be a fool to be untruthful.  Shady… well maybe.  But back to the contract question.

Most commercials are not looking to make an immediate sale.  They want the viewers to go somewhere else for the transaction – either to a bricks and mortar retailer or a website or somewhere.  That is where the details of the transaction should be ironed out.

The advertising is simply a lure.  True advertising should be honest; and so should lawyers.  But not all of them are.  Adding a bunch of mouse type that no one can read, or throwing in some disclaimers that make some lawyer happy but are otherwise of no benefit.  They obfuscate rather than clarify.  Which is what lawyers do.  Their goal is to get you to use their services, not to resolve things.

Some advertising, like that directed to children, does need to address the fact that kids don’t always understand everything.  But even then studies show kids grasp way more than adults generally give them credit for.

To me, the overall impact of the paragraphs of legal disclaimers in commercials like those for car deals is to suggest that the offer is disingenuous, shifty, insincere, laden with catches.  These undermines the sincerity of the offer.  Think of all the car advertising you have seen.  The big 3 American companies have been peppering us with legal mouse print for years and that has led us to distrust them.

An even bigger joke are the drug commercials.  The notion there is that your doctor is a dummy and doesn’t know to recommend “midixaflopin” for that serious condition you think you have.  Keep in mind, say the lawyers, that your suggestion may cause anal leakage and any of a range of side effects, including death.  So if you are stupid enough to recommend this compound to your doctor and die from it, well… we warned you – amidst a full bafflegab of other stuff pointing you in all directions.

My point again is that the concept of advertising as an offer of contract is flawed.  No one in their right mind takes every comment as being a legal comment?

A lot of our lives are led outside the limited vision of law – If I say “Have a nice day!” am I guaranteeing your happiness for 24 hours?  I think not.

Developing creative within legal parameters is like a game.  Thankfully, lawyers look at the words and never really understand it is the total impression of the message that matters.  That’s why they like contracts.  Contracts are two dimensional.  Video is three dimensional and can even add suggestions that create a fourth implicit level of communications.

We have had great success in dealing with legal parameters and skating with them.  But it takes a skilled copywriter to be effective within the legal muffler that is often applied.  (Some assembly required.  Batteries not included.)

Advertising should not be considered a form of contract.  But the power in today’s times are with the lawyers, not reason.

Opera has always been one of my favourite browsers for its innovations but gets little recognition from web users. Opera had tabbed browsing, full page zoom and the “speed dial” feature before any of today’s major browsers. Basically, if you want to know what new features will be coming in the next version of your favourite brower, just check out Opera and you’ll likely find it there already.

The only reason that I hadn’t been using Opera exclusively is because in previous versions, it did not display some web pages correctly. It seems to be getting better with that. Also, the last time I looked, I was not impressed with its “widgets” (known as extensions in Firefox), but there seems to be a lot more widgets available now. Another thing I did not like was that it did not have an “ad block” feature. It was stated by someone at Opera that they would never include this feature. Opera has a content filter feature, but it’s a bit complicated to use. I finally was able to get it working but I’m not impressed with it.

In addition to adequately addressing the issues I had above, Opera also has some other cool features (a few of which, I have not seen in other browsers). I will mention a few of my favourites.

Arrange Tabs
You can arrange your tabs to be cascade, tile vertically or tile horizontally. This is extremely useful for comparing websites without have to switch back and forth between tabs. To do this, you just need to right-click on the tab bar and select “Arrange”.

Open Previously Closed Tabs
This can be accomplished by just going into your history and looking for the tab you closed but this can be tedious. Opera has a single button that shows your most recently closed tabs. It’s located on the far right of the tab bar.

Open In a Different Browser
If for some reason the page is not displaying correctly for you, you can right-click and select “Open With” and choose another browser that is installed on your computer.

Tab Preview
If you mouse over a tab, it will show a small screenshot of what’s in the tab. Very useful to quickly find the tab you are looking for.

Notes
There is a feature that lets you add quick notes. I’m not sure if I’d use this feature but for people to visit a lot of websites, they might want to leave some notes about certain sites.

Read To Me (Speak)
Opera has a feature where you can highlight the text and have it read the text to you.

One-click Add to Bookmark
Recently, someone had complained to me that after upgrading to Internet Explorer 8, the single-click “Add to Favorites” button was replaced with a “Add to Personal Toolbar” button. He was very upset about this because he was used to having that button. Opera still has this button, but you need to customize your tab bar to add it.

Opera Turbo
A new feature of Opera 10 that isn’t of much use to me but may be useful to someone else, is Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo speeds up browsing on a slow connection. It doesn’t display pages correctly but if you only care about the speed, then this may be something you’d be interested in.

Opera 10 Browser - A screenshot of me drafting this blog. (edit - left, preview screen - right)

Some of these features are available in Firefox via extensions but they are all built in as part of the Opera browser! And they are all nicely integrated into the interface so that they are not in the way but are easily accessible. Another thing I’ve also heard is that Opera is working on speeding up the execution of javascript. What that means (for those of you who aren’t programmers) is that certain pages that use a lot of (client-side) programming, will load faster.

If you’re interested in new innovative ideas for browsers that aren’t available in most other browsers, you should check out the Opera browser.

The advertising industry glories in cleverness.  Clever ideas are what wins at all the award shows but it can also be what loses the customer.

Sometimes, I think folks in our industry use their cleverness to feel superior over the poor schmucks who are their target market.  They rationalize that artists are sometimes obscure, requiring a commitment from the reader/viewer to understand the message?  And they are artists.  Really?

Perhaps, but we are not artists pursuing art for art’s sake.  We are professional communicators translating our clients’ objectives into advertising and marketing communications.

Being in the business, I admit I do like clever stuff a lot.  But I also know when it misses the mark by a beat or even a half of a beat.  If we are looking at concepts and our folks don’t get the message immediately, we usually forget that potential concept.  It went past clever into cryptic.

Our job is to serve information to our audiences, not get them to consider, examine and delve into the message to get the point.

Why? Well, our messages compete with a cacophony of other messages daily for our target’s attention.

Our goal is to be provocative (get their attention), clear, persuasive and compelling (get action).  Notice that clever or entertaining are not part of what I want to be.  Although sometimes these are part of being provocative – but not always.

It would be easy for me to pick on a few ads that are so clever they are cryptic.   I personally get confused at all the drug ads that assume you know what the darn drug is for as they rattle off the side effects.  But I am not a medical groupie and don’t know.  So these advertisers are dealing me out of the target, whether I should be in it or not.  If I don’t understand the point of the advertising, I move on to look or hear something else.  You had a chance Mr. Advertiser, but you lost me.

I have always felt that making a dull, every day product interesting was the highest challenge for creativity.  Anyone can make a feel good commercial about a social cause,  since the target is already feeling emotionally positive about the topic.   But make a great commercial about a functional product — now there’s real talent.

The downfall of being too clever is that it not only confuses your audience, it can alienate them.  True the ones who “get it” think you are their clever buddy.  But when that is too few, you lose.  Too clever might as well be too stupid.

Our advertising agency will be the first agency in the world with a drive through window.

Our office is in an old Victoria house with a door to the lane way running next to us, so we may also be one of the very few who can actually offer this.

Retrofitting the door will be easy, an order microphone and headsetted cashier might be harder.

Why would we do it? More than thirty per cent of fast food sales go out through the drive through window. We were wondering if we can achieve a 30 percent growth by adding this feature.

Imagine all you clients, “Business building communications ideas direct to you, in the comfort of your own car.” On your way from one meeting to another… stop by for a quick injection of creative input with a side order of media plans.

How can we offer this? Well it seems from many clients’ perspective, advertising agencies these days are only about execution. Back in the days of the Mad Men, agencies were marketing counsellors to client strategy for marketing. No more. The agency is rarely at the grown-up’s table when feeding time rolls around. Strictly kids table. Strictly execution.

Agencies are paid to come up with pretty pictures and nice, catchy lines but less likely business building ideas.

That’s why we have always called our company Advertising and Marketing Counsel. We are literally, not an advertising agency.

While we still want to be thoughtful counsellors for our clients, we recognize that many times there is no lead time and clients just want us to sling some ideas against the wall and see if they stick… or slide down the wall. For those occasions, there is the drive through window.

And our ideas are prepared to your taste, from wacky to insightful to (in our best Spock voice) totally logical. You choose. Add more hot sauce if you like. They are available in traditional formats like print, radio or television as well as digitally. We offer tweets, sweets, stunts and grunts.

We are really good at coming up with ideas quickly and making sure they are relevant and compelling. But we do not offer fries with our work.