Messages Metaphors

MESSAGES, METAPHORS, AND LOOKING FOR LOVE:
THE INTERNET, YEAR 2000 (AS OF MAY 24)

James R. Rosenfield

July 2000

The Internet changes everything. And everything changes the Internet.

How fluid it is, how quick, and how intertwined with the physical world, which it mirrors, and which, increasingly, mirrors it. Perhaps reality and virtual reality aren't opposites but complements, wrapped around each other like strands of DNA.

Look at our metaphors. The recent "Love Bug" crisis highlights the biological cast of our Internet imagery: "Worm, Bug. Virus." Rich and rapid caches of information are described as "robust," a word the Oxford English Dictionary grounds firmly in the world of living organisms. And how technological our images have become in speaking about ourselves: "Mark McGwire is hard-wired to hit home runs," a sportswriter recently commented. "She's programmed to embellish the truth," someone said to me yesterday. "It's a web," remarked a psychologist, talking about treating depression.

The metaphors wrap around each other like strands of DNA also, perhaps bringing us a message from the distant or (according to people like Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines) not so distant future, when humans and machines interpenetrate each other.

Major Internet events whirl around at warp speed, tectonic plates on amphetamines. My own sense of recent periodicity goes back to 1998, visits 1999, and tries to keep up with things now that we're in the 21st Century. They talk about Internet time, the lightning rhythm that's fast becoming the pace of our lives. I think they're right.

5 WATERSHED EVENTS FROM ANCIENT HISTORY (1998)

I've discussed these events previously, but they're worth reviewing.

1) The dissemination of the Starr report on Bill Clinton via the Internet. This was the first time that a major public/governmental event appeared on the Internet prior to other media. The news was out on the Internet first, and millions of people accessed it. When future histories are written, the Starr report may bear the same relationship to Internet development as the Army/McCarthy hearings did to TV.

2) The Procter & Gamble summit conference in the summer of 1998, "Why Isn't Advertising on the Internet Working?" P&G invited competitors, consultants, and Internet agencies to discuss the failure of Internet advertising. Experts pointed out that no one had coined a memorable slogan on the Internet. Even worse news: As people get more Internet-literate, they begin ignoring banner ads. The conclusion (which is pretty obvious if you understand media) was reported in multi-page stories in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal: The Internet is a direct marketing medium, not an advertising medium.

Advertising is a right-brain-hemisphere communications discipline. It works best on television (a right hemisphere medium), ideally by inculcating shards of impressions into the passive brains of half-alert couch potatoes. As soon as you call for behavior, the spell is broken.

The Internet-like direct mail-is an interactive medium, by definition left hemisphere. The advertising industry wants the Internet to be like television, but it can't be-the wrong part of the brain is involved. It takes time to sort all of this out. Marshall McLuhan said "Media are put out before they are thought out." But the sorting has begun.

3) Amazon. com's instantly rescinded decision to sell book "recommendations" to publishers. Amazon.com customers had been happily allowing the company to guide their book choices via reviews. The New York Times revealed, though, that Amazon was quietly selling "reviews" to publishers. Amazon at first defended the practice as analogous to the publisher-funded displays you see in bookstores, but quickly backed down.

What this showed was how the Internet is changing commerce. The personalized, interactive, somewhat tribal relation customers have with Amazon.com made the promotions seem like betrayals. It's due to what Dave Pottruck, CEO of Charles Schwab calls the "social fabric" of Internet commerce. Interactivity creates involvement, which can easily become emotional involvement. The passive experience of browsing through a large bookstore lacks the interactivity, and therefore the emotional charge that made Amazon customers think they had been suckered. Also adding to the emotional charge: a compensation reaction to the disembodiment and abstraction of the Internet.

Amazon.com may be a business, but it acts like a club. Internet commerce, at least in its early stages, seems to want to be club-like. Apropos which, Amazon's Jeff Bezos reminds us in an ad that word-of-mouth on the Internet becomes a mass medium. Companies now stinting on service-and the number is legion-should pay attention.

4) The explosion of E-commerce in the U.S. during the 1998 holiday season. Everyone, most notably the merchants themselves, was taken aback at the unexpected growth of Internet buying during the 1998 holiday season. It wasn't precisely a success. Inventory and shipping problems created massive consumer disappointment, a reminder of the rude way physical reality intrudes into cyberspace. But it's par for the course for new media and new channels to suffer logistical growing pains.

E-commerce is exploding because of a classic intersection between technological adaptation and consumer needs. Catalogs in the U.S. exploded for the same reasons: technological adaptation to 800-numbers and credit cards, and impatience with the time-consuming, service-deficient nature of conventional retail buying.
5) Priceline.com is launched. Early stage technologies invariably pour old content into new forms. In the beginning, television consisted of live drama and vaudeville acts. The new medium only knew the messages of theatre and radio. Film in those early days seemed like the wrong message--why do movies when you can broadcast live? (In retrospect, the live dramas of the 1950s seem like bad cinema, rather than good television.) Advertising was off base also, with most commercials at first being direct response, the wrong mode for such an essentially passive, right-hemisphere medium. It took a few years before messages grew into the medium, and video, the most powerful media form of the last half of the 20th Century emerged, as did image advertising, the most powerful commercial communications form.

What we now call e-commerce (which for sure is a transitional term) is mostly old content. For all the technical legerdemain of Amazon.com, you can duplicate the experience in the physical world. Priceline is different, though: A new kind of message for a new kind of medium.

Listen to what Priceline impresario Jay Walker says in a recent interview (Harvard Business Review, November-December 1999):

"In the traditional model of commerce, a seller advertises a unit of supply in the marketplace at a specified price, and a buyer takes it or leaves it. Priceline turns that model around. We allow a buyer to advertise a unit of demand to a group of sellers."

Wow! But what's in it for the seller? Can this be (I hate the expression) the classic "Win-Win?" Maybe:

"The Priceline system…enables sellers to see, for the first time really, the latent demand in the marketplace-the demand that exists beneath the established price of the product or service. And because the customer's offer is irrevocable, guaranteed with a credit card, it's real demand-the seller can count on it…

"Because the seller is anonymous through the buying process, it gets two clear benefits in addition to the incremental sales.

"First, it gets a brand shield. If it had publicly advertised a lower price for its product or service, it would have eroded its brand. But since it can accept the unit of demand without letting the buyer know the brand in advance, it suffers no such erosion.

"Second, the seller gets a price shield. It can maintain the integrity of its established prices because it never advertises that a lower price is being billed. The seller avoids the problem of free riders-people who take a discounted price even though they would have been willing to pay the full price."

Wow, again!

3 KEY PHENOMENA OF RECENT HISTORY (1999)

1) 1999: The year of the bubble (postmodern tulip mania!). Dotcom fever swept the markets away, ignoring both the laws of economic gravity and the marketplace. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics always kicks in, as it's now done. Plus, sooner or later you need customers. You won't get any, though, if you're offering solutions for which there are no problems, the case in so many of the pure-play dotcoms.

Bubbles always burst, and new technologies always proliferate into multiple organisms, few of which survive. There were something like 170 U.S. auto manufacturers in the early years of the last century. It didn't take long for most of them to fail, but the auto became (along with radio and the telephone) the most important technology of the first half of the 20th Century. Similarly, Peapod might fail, the NASDAQ might crash, and Amazon itself might go under, but all of these events would be typical of early stage technologies, and would have no relevance to the Internet's impact on 21st Century economy, culture, and society.

2) From "surfing" to searching. "Surfing" has always been a bad metaphor, as Steven Johnson points out in his brilliant book, Interface Culture. It's borrowed from TV channel surfing, and the Internet is emphatically not TV-like. Ad agencies will remain confused about this for some time--they're hung up on the screen, panicked about the Internet bleeding budgets from TV, and ignorant about the nature of media and human cognition. TV is right-hemisphere, the Internet is left-hemisphere, and the twain don't meet.

The Internet is about searching, not surfing. It's about links and connectivity, not about the mindless discontinuity of TV channel surfing. In 1999, we started to hear the expression "Surfing the Net" less and less, and more and more "I got a good deal on eBay." When technologies begin to mature, the machine drops out of the language. In the early days of TV, neighbors used to come over to my parents' house to "watch television." When TV became a mass medium, people began to look at shows, rather than "watch TV." Our metaphors are more important than our statements.

3) Click rate on U.S. ad banner ads almost zeroes out. Banner ads--at least in their customer acquisition incarnation--work only when people are surfing. As mentioned above, searching is the real Internet mode, and when you're searching, you don't have time or attention for extraneous matter. Therefore, the almost disappearing click rate on banner ads.

Most banner ads are old content poured into new forms. If you use banner ads to cross-sell to existing customers, and build them according to direct marketing principles, with an offer and a reason for clicking, you can be successful. But you can also do the same thing with a link, at less cost, and get prospective customers to your form sooner.

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