Absolutes on absolutes

In communications, like other job functions, the to do list doesn’t go away. There are always projects, new requests, new priorities, and fires to put out.

I’ve spent a decent portion of my career leading teams, and a large part of coaching people is helping them understand what is important and how they should spend their time. I love a good urgent/important matrix as a rough guideline.

The matrix above is helpful in a vacuum. The reality is that communications has a lot of stakeholders across different lines of business within an organization — from sales, to marketing, to biz dev, to the executive team. It’s a blessing and a curse.

A cross-functional role like communications is one that can make a meaningful impact across the whole company. Many roles are siloed. On the other hand (and understandably), every stakeholder thinks their thing is the most important thing.

Definitionally, that is not true. 

If everything is of equal importance, nothing is important.

At some point, you have to choose — choose what to prioritize, choose how to allocate your time, choose what not to do. 

Stand for something

I thought about this idea — if everything is important, nothing is — as it relates to communications in two ways.

The first is talking with press. I do a lot of media training as part of my day to day, and a lot of executives are inclined to try to get every key message or make every point in every answer. Like prioritizing, if every answer to every question tries to say everything at once, odds are, you’re not really saying anything at all. And that does not make for a great interview.

The other is brand. I’m not quite a Lulu Cheng Meservey in that you need to be controversial to succeed (though obviously, she knows what she’s talking about), but I do firmly believe that if your brand tries to be everything to everyone you are ostensibly nothing to no one. 

You have to choose. What does your company do? Based on your work, what do you stand for? Why should people care about what you’re building? There will always be critics who are unwilling to engage in any sort of intellectually honest debate (Hi Twitter and politics!) — trying to satiate those people or accommodate them in your brand messaging is a fool’s errand. They will never agree with you. They will never listen to you. They will never engage in good faith.

So don’t worry about them.

I do think listening and internalizing criticism is healthy (if levied in good faith, which is increasingly rare in The Discourse) and necessary for a functioning communications program. It’s important to know where you might get hit so you can proactively guard against it, but that doesn’t mean bending the core of your brand to please everyone.

No company is everything to everyone. Those who try to do so end up communicating nothing at all.

It’s all brand

If I blindfolded 100 people off the street and asked them to take a sip of soda and identify whether it’s Pepsi or Coke, most people would be guessing. I know lunatics that drink cases of Coke a week, but unless you’re a soda fanatic, I think it’s relatively non-controversial to say they taste, at least, pretty similar. Soda devotees, stay out of my DMs.

Unfortunately for Pepsi, that similarity is decidedly not reflected in revenue. “As of 2021, Coke dominates the market share worldwide with a share of around 48%, while Pepsi has a share of approximately 20.5%.” In the same year, “Coca-Cola also brought in more revenue: $38.7 billion compared to PepsiCo's $25.3 billion.” Coke is McDonald’s, not Burger King (despite the Whopper Whopper song that gets stuck in my head all the time). Coke is Nike, not Reebok. 

Are McDonald’s burgers really that much different than BK? 

Are Nike’s shoes really more well-made than Reebok? 

Does Coke taste really that different from Pepsi? 

For most people, the answer is probably not. The difference is the brand.

We perceive McDonald’s, Coke, and Nike as market leaders not because of what they do or what they make, but because of how their brand makes us feel and what we associate with their name versus that of their competitors.

Brand perception directly translates to revenue. To wit:

• McDonalds did $37 billion in sales; BK did $10B. 

• Look at this chart (h/t RetailDive) for Nike vs Adidas vs Reebok sales — Reebok is getting cooked.

You can have the best product. A bad brand can sink a good product every single time. 

The importance of brand

I’m a communications flack, so I’m in the bag for advocating for communications people and marketers of all stripes. Nonetheless, the truth is in the money — brand matters.

A lot of tech layoffs hit marketing and communications departments early. It’s a tremendous error on behalf of these companies because how a company shows up in the market (brand, marketing, etc and so on) is directly tied to revenue.

A startup can have the best product. If no one knows about it, what it does, or how it works you won’t sell.

A startup can have an inferior product. If you market it well, you can win. 

A startup whose core business strategy including managing its brand perception in the market will, on balance, fair better than those that do not.

I spoke with someone who mentioned their company was based in South San Francisco. That’s an intentional, brand-related choice. It’s not Silicon Valley; it’s not San Francisco; it’s South San Francisco. It is intended to convey something about their organization. It’s such a small detail, but that level of granular attention to brand earnestly makes me excited. To consider your address as part of your brand is king shit, plain and simple.

Most startups aren’t at the level of maturation to think about how they message their address, but it’s instructive in that everything a startup does “says” something — from the colors on your website to your company boilerplate to your booth set up at events to how your CEO dresses when he goes on TV, and everything in between.

That’s not to say that marketing and brand perception can always overcome any challenge — it can’t. But brand and marketing are absolutely integral to winning mindshare, marketshare, and creating revenue. 

Costco is a great example of the power of brand. The company is incredibly successful but it doesn’t do much advertising. They have a lot of stuff that you can buy in bulk on the cheap. The CEO will murder people if they raise the price of a hot dog. We all know what we’re getting, and we all think the same thing when we think of Costco because their brand perception is strong, and that results in revenue — “Gen Z and young millennials are more likely to shop for groceries at Costco.”

In today’s day and age, companies and executives are more scrutinized than ever before. Brand perception matters more than it ever has, and managing it should be P0 for executive teams at startups across all industries. 

Those that don’t might end up like Reebok.

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My love/hate relationship with Nest

Sometimes, Nest — the Google-owned “smart” thermostat — annoys me to no end. It, per Google, attempts to “learn what temperature you like and build a schedule around yours.”

It’s primarily using machine learning to predict your habits and save you money on your heating and cooling. If you didn't know, “machine learning is a pathway to artificial intelligence. This subcategory of AI uses algorithms to automatically learn insights and recognize patterns from data, applying that learning to make increasingly better decisions.”

1: There is AI in my thermostat. That’s low key pretty wild. 

2: It kind of sucks at it. It does things no person would do — change the AC to 67 and then 30 minutes later change it to 68 and then later to 72. I just want it to turn on the AC at night so it’s a bit cooler, raise the temperature during the day to 72 or 73, and then back down again at night. I do not have the technical acumen to tell you exactly what algorithms Nest uses, but I can tell you that I have been thinking lately about turning off Nest’s ability to learn — if I can even do that, I have no idea — and just set my schedule on my own. 

3: I am not trying to dunk on Nest. I really like the app. It’s easy to use and well-designed. I am sure the people who worked on the predictive algorithms are smart and nice and do their best. Being able to adjust my heat or AC from my phone is an incredible luxury. And if you told someone in the 90s that their AC learns from their past behavior to know when they want it cold and when they want it hot and does so without their input, their brains would simply melt out of their ears. 

I realize it’s weird to have such strong feelings about a thermostat, but it made me truly take notice just how prevalent these technologies are, right now, today.

It’s all grey for me

Spoiler alert: When you open your phone with your face, it’s facial recognition. Facial recognition is AI. The problems with some facial recognition are incredibly well documented — you can Google it — and I do not have the technical acumen to tell you about the viability of the technology going forward nor the purported improvements in accuracy nor can I recommend any constraints about its uses. There are smarter people who can answer those questions.

What I am telling you is that this stuff is here, right now. And meaningfully regulating it is nuanced. People who say “facial recognition is bad and evil and we should ban its use everywhere” and then use it to open their phones have lost the plot. I’m not saying we should conflate the use of facial recognition to open our phones with its use by a government entity or other institutions that hold power in our society — but that’s exactly how conversations around these technologies go. 

It’s all or nothing, and life is rarely so black and white. Conversations about these technologies should at least be nuanced enough to help people understand what is going on in the world around them — they can decide if they care or what to do about it. 

For me, I don’t really care about AI being used to flip on the AC or unlock my phone (maybe I should, and maybe my apathy is part of the problem). All these smart systems collect all our data and aggregate it for training (another topic for another day), but I also don’t really care what Google is using my historical thermostat data for.

What I do care about is how everything around me recommends stuff to me. Social media, online shopping, my thermostat — everything is a recommendation engine. “Hey, you liked ABC, you might like XYZ.”

In Quartz, a reporter said, “My TikTok For You page is lovely,” when writing — rightly — about how chaotic Twitter’s For You feed felt when it first rolled out (and depending on how many spam bots you see, maybe still feels that way). I think the distinction between a recommendation engine that “works well” and one that doesn’t is pretty fascinating. I am not criticizing the author here — I have similar feelings of elation when Netflix recommends a show I didn’t know about and subsequently loved.

I will say it again for the people in the back — I am not technical enough to know the fine details of how any of these systems collect a user’s specific historical behaviors and data and habits and patterns and aggregate that with data from millions of other people across dozens of systems, from shopping habits to geolocational data to every demographic and behavioral data point that I KNOW these companies have — in order to make recommendations for me. 

But I do know it happens.

And I do feel weird about the fact that everything I consume is somehow pushed through this prism of AI-powered recommendations curated just for me. This isn’t limited to the digital world —  Oracle has a case study about maximizing grocery store revenue by using AI to optimize what products go where and on what shelves in stores. 

Even when the recommendation engines work well, something in the back of my mind still pauses at the idea that human existence is curated by technologies like AI. That could be a powerful force for good — I happen to be a techno-optimist — but we’d all be idiots if we didn’t recognize the possibility for things to go awry. 

Smarter people might have some historical analog — 30 years ago, I imagine what newspapers and cable news in the US decided to cover and not cover — and how they covered it — could radically transform how human beings experienced and understood the world around them. I don’t dispute that there’s always been some filter through which information is passed. But with AI, it feels different. It feels more common, more frequent, more ingrained, and less noticed. 

Only time will tell if it’s good or bad, but it’s here all the same. 

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Slide decks are TikTok for business

Slide decks are just TikTok for businesses, and they suck. 

• TikTok, for those who don’t know (though it has 140+ million users in the U.S. alone, a problem to discuss for another day, so I’d be shocked if you didn’t know what it was) is a short-form video platform.

• Attention spans are shrinking. There is much ado on the internet about this re: Gen Z (the kids are always the punching bag!). 

• A 2015 study by “Microsoft found that the average human attention span had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just eight seconds in 2013 – less than that of a goldfish. This is directly related to how we consume information — social media networks and digital platforms optimize for short, short, short bits of information.”

• To wit, on TikTok, “viewers engage significantly with videos between 21 and 34 seconds” long. 

• Notably, that’s longer than 8 seconds from the decade-old Microsoft study, but it’s not exactly a long time.

• C-suite executives’ consumption of information is following the same trend — slide decks are the method through which staff relay materially strategic information to leadership for decision-making.

• Slide decks are the business equivalent of “short form” content. Attention spans are shrinking for everyone, including CEOs — not just Gen Z. 

• That is bad. 

• The solution is long form writing. 

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Jeff Bezos (I know you know him) presents an alternate view to slide deck culture (h/t to Joshua Steinman, a man on the internet I do not know, for sharing this clip from Lex Fridman’s pod):

“My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document,” he explains. “I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. The meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution . . . you get real breakthroughs.”

Bezos goes on to describe the process of meetings at Amazon and the philosophy and process behind the memos:

“A typical meeting will start with a six page, narratively structured memo. And we do study hall. For 30 minutes we sit there silently together and read, make notes in the margins. Then we discuss. You could say read these memos in advance, but people don’t have time to do that and they come to the meeting having skimmed the memo or not read it at all . . . Now we’ve all read the memo and have an elevated discussion. This is better than a slide show, where one of the problems, PowerPoint is designed to persuade, it’s a sales tool. Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You are truth seeking. The other problem is that it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience.”

You can watch the whole clip here, but the last sentence is, in my mind, the most important.

As a comms flack, I cannot tell you how many slideshows I’ve built, meticulously planning my speaker’s notes to explain a strategy, only for the conversation to veer off course. I am a confident presenter and speaker; I am inclined to buy into the idea that decks sabotage good presentations.

Decks inherently do not provide the audience all the information up front. Decks do not enable deep thinking about the subject at hand. Decks do not afford the opportunity for a truly elevated conversation.

Why? In a slide deck, it’s a common best practice to make slides less text dense and then give a deeper voice over when presenting.

But what if the speaker's notes were also written down, along with the text on the slide? What if, instead of saying them out loud, goals, strategies, and tactics were written, and edited, and edited, and edited, and edited, and polished, and refined, and edited some more, over the course of weeks?

Why wouldn’t we want to choose the form of communication that most saliently articulates the strategy or decision matrices required — if it’s something important?

Beats me. I’m pro memo. I dig long form writing. Inject a well written profile piece right into my veins (I love this profile of Mitt Romney, this piece on acclaimed director Michael Mann, and this piece on acclaimed ex-Patriots coach, Bill Belichick).

Keep the important thing the important thing

Lots of people say “Keep the main thing the main thing.” It’s also true of the important things. When a task, strategy, conversation, or decision is earnestly important, it is worth spending time on. It’s easy to get caught up in urgent tasks, putting out fires — especially in a startup environment, where moving quickly is both the nature of the beast and a competitive advantage relative to bureaucratic industry giants.

The Navy Seals have a saying: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The emperor Augustus (how often do you think about the Roman Empire?) made a similar phrase popular: Festina lente. It translates to, roughly, “make haste slowly.” 

Both address the same concept: When doing something, if you take your time and do it deliberately and right the first time, you’ll reach your destination or achieve your goal more quickly than if you just go fast without intention, making little or no progress forward or even worse, retreading ground because you went too fast in the other direction.

Now, back to long form memos and slide decks, with Navy Seals and our favorite emperor in mind. 

I’m sure many people have thought, “this meeting could have been an email.” Meetings centered around slide decks, because they are so hard for the audience, often veer away from their intended purpose. We waste the time of attendees, we leave the meeting with unclear next steps or no next steps at all. We are moving quickly, but we aren’t moving forward.

A well-written, long form, intentional document solves those problems. Bezos’ model of allowing attendees to spend time reading the memo allows everyone consumes the content exactly as the author intended. It requires the author to spend time on a crisp, salient memo — ensuring they are not wasting their audience’s time.

The resultant discussion is one that is valuable. New questions are asked and answered. Input is received. Direction is clear. Next steps are actionable. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

You are glad this meeting was a meeting because you are moving forward.

Important things are worth spending time on to get right. 

Long live the long form memo.

Festina lente.