Over the past week, I’ve been following a hilarious Twitter feed called @BPGlobalPR, which may soon overtake @LTrainRat as my favorite parody Twitter account. The person or people behind the feed lampoons not just BP and its response to the Gulf oil spill, but the very notion of PR spin, with tweets such as:

• ANNOUNCEMENT: No one is allowed to look at our oil. All Gulf residents are required to close their eyes until this is over.
• As part of our continued re-branding effort, we are now referring to the spill as “Shell Oil’s Gulf Coast Disaster”. #bpcares
• If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair

Yesterday, the anonymous tweeter revealed himself … sort of. In a post authored under the (clearly pseudonymous) name “Leroy Stick”, the author explained the motivation behind the feed:

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements.  No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing.  That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them ….

Why has this caught on?  I think it’s because people can smell the bullshit and sometimes laughing at it feels better than getting angry or depressed over it.  At the very least, it’s a welcome break from that routine.  The reason @BPGlobalPR continues to grow is because BP continues to spew their bullshit.

But Stick saved his most trenchant criticism for the very idea that companies in crisis should focus on PR:

Do you want to know what BP should do about me?  Do you want to know what their PR strategy should be?  They should fire everyone in their joke of a PR department … and focus on actually fixing the problems at hand ….

The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND.  You don’t own it because it is literally nothing.  You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand?  Have a respectable brand.  Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.

It’s very easy for those working in PR (along with many other fields, including marketing and politics) to become so focused on shaping people’s perceptions of something that they become untethered from the underlying reality. Stick offers a useful reminder that good PR should be the end result, not a tactic.

Take one of the most frequently cited crisis responses in the past three decades: the Tylenol poisonings back in 1982. Johnson & Johnson is widely acknowledged to have handled the crisis perfectly, instituting a nationwide recall and agreeing to replace any capsules purchased by customers with solid tablets.

The point is, J&J didn’t respond the way it did because they had smart publicists (though I’m sure they did), or because they were following the rules of Crisis Management 101. They responded that way because the company had a corporate culture that accepted responsibility (even though, unlike the BP oil spill, the disaster was not J&J’s fault) and was led by people whose first priority was keeping the public safe, not avoiding embarrassment or protecting the J&J brand.

Any publicists trying to glean lessons from J&J’s experience should focus not on displaying transparency after disaster strikes, but rather fostering an ethos of transparency long before anything goes wrong. By the time the likes of a @BPGlobalPR come along, it’s already too late, at least in the short term (though it’s never too late to make long-term fixes).

The paradox is that doing the right thing is usually the best PR strategy as well. The single most important thing BP could do to get better press is “plug the damn hole“.

First of all, while I applaud the fact that the companies profiled are experimenting with different ways to fund journalism, I had to laugh at this passage about True/Slant:

In fact, if you break it down, True/Slant pays its writers more than the amount of revenue their work generates at the current online advertising rates. Stripped down as it is, the start-up isn’t yet turning a profit, and it’s now in the process of raising a second round of venture capital.

I asked Bateman, as a matter of raw economics, how much an individual article is worth to True/Slant’s bottom line, on average. He told me he calculated it out: around $10.

Ah yes, the old “lose money on every sale but make it up on volume venture capital” plan that worked so well during the dot-com boom. A piece of advice to any of the VCs talking to True/Slant: Make sure they use your money to hire an ad-sales staff.

Then again, Rice himself doesn’t show much of a grasp of basic numbers when he mentions that “individual articles, if sold at the going rates, bring in between a penny and nickel each time a reader looks at one.” I don’t know whether Rice transcribed his notes incorrectly, misheard his interview subject, or got snowed by a fast-talking head of sales, but basic arithmetic should have told him those numbers were BS.

Think about it for a second. Earning one penny per pageview equates to a $10 CPM. A nickel is $50. (And that’s assuming the site is selling all of their ads. In reality, unsold inventory generally means that sites’ net-effective CPM is far lower than what advertisers are actually paying.) If publishers were commanding CPMs like that, the industry would be flush with cash and Rice would have to find something else to write about. Or to put it another way, if sites like True/Slant are making $10 per article on CPMs of $10-$50, that means those articles would be getting between 200 and 1,000 views apiece.  If True/Slant’s traffic numbers were really that piddling, the Times wouldn’t be wasting time covering them, and again, there’d be no article.

Archimedes wept.

• Global Ad Business in 2010:  $544 billion
• The average city dweller gets 51,000 ad messages per day
• Cost of 30-second spot on American Idol:  $750,000
• 4 global companies buy 80% of advertising
• Ad spends by industry:
  • Food:  $3.2 billion
  • Cars:  $15 billion
  • Political:  $2.6 billion

These figures, which paint a simple but enlightening portrait of  the ad industry, appeared onscreen throughout the film Art&Copy, a documentary on great ad campaigns and the legends behind them (trailer above).  In the movie, the ad creators tell fascinating stories behind some of the most famous commercials of all time, several of which were almost nixed by nervous clients.   They included Macintosh’s “1984″ Super Bowl Ad (Lee Clow of Chiat\Day, directed by Ridley Scott!), Alka Seltzer’s “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz”  jingle (Mary Wells), Nike’s “Just Do It” (Dan Wieden and David Kennedy), “I Want My MTV” (George Lois), and “Got Milk?” (Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby, directed by Michael Bay!).

A common theme among these successes was a campaign leader who disrupted established norms and didn’t compromise a strong vision.  Mary Wells Lawrence, founder of game-changing agency Wells Rich Greene, was such a person (she’s the blonde you see in the trailer).  If you read her autobiography, “A Big Life (In Advertising),” one major takeaway is that it takes someone like Wells Lawrence, who had the dual gifts of contagious confidence and an ability to pinpoint the exact right strategy and message for a brand, to effect the kind of change needed to move the advertising industry forward.  Most often Wells dictated her clients’ actions, not the other way around, taking the bold steps necessary to turn companies’ fortunes around.  She made Braniff Airlines paint their planes bright colors, Alka Seltzer sell its tablets in packets of two (hence “plop, plop, fizz, fizz”), and General Mills introduce a new snack called Bugles.  Focusing on the reach and unique engagement opportunities provided by TV, she made advertising one of the most vital activities for any business.  I would love to have been in the room during one of her big idea meetings with a client.  She was Don Draper to the tenth power.

Flash forward to today.  Who are the leaders that will create similar success stories for online video advertising?  Someone needs to make a big splash.  This week Daisy Whitney interviewed ad execs from Mediavest, Starcom, and AAAA* about the challenges and opportunities of online video advertising.  They spoke of helping clients understand audiences, harnessing data and simplifying it for clients, and identifying and measuring the value of an ad.  These are all valid answers.  But where is the big thinking?  Where is the ad agency saying to a client, “You need to change the way consumers think about your product.  The consumers you want are online, and you have to reach them with online video”?  When I was meeting with agencies and media buyers to seek sponsors for our online series, I encountered a consistent message:  We love online video and realize its potential, but the clients just aren’t there yet.  We can’t convince them to change their thinking or their TV budgets.

Perhaps the age of big campaign advertising and outsized figures like Mary Wells Lawrence is over.  I just worry that without such figures the  online video revolution will continue to be held back.

If you’ve made it this far in the post, consider a great quote from Wells Lawrence about effective advertising:

Love in advertising is an attitude toward the product and also toward the reader and the viewer.  In some subtle way, every ad, every commercial should produce a feeling of love between the product and the potential buyer.

*AAAA=American Association of Advertising Agencies

I’m in the LA Pilot.

It’s lousy.

The box is slow, often taking several seconds to register button presses on the remote. Kind of like modern-day cable company DVRs in that respect.

The live TV guide only shows three channels at a time. There’s no number buttons on the remote, so you have to page up or down many many times just to do a simple channel change.

The quality of the cable channels is beyond horrible. They look as good as video downloads on the internet did about 10 years ago. All cable audio is plain ol’ stereo – no DD here.

* * *

I’m also in the LA Pilot. The box is in my bedroom…I have it unplugged. It’s REALLY loud. I have the aerial on my roof plugged into the box pointed at Mt. Wilson, so I have excellent quality of signal. But one huge thing they missed in their sales pitch is that their “cable” channels don’t broadcast in HD. The OTA channels that I get normally CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX are all HD when they’re supposed to be, but Syfy, msnbc, discovery are all SD and they look terrible. The box has a cooky UI, but the lack of HD killed this for me. We’re talking 3D TVs and they’re coming out with SD…sorry guys.

* * *

sometimes slow responses to remote, SD cable channels (also the programming is different from what is showing at the same time on DirecTV or Cable), I found that the audio is often out of sync on recorded show playback, no sports channels, the UI is frustrating, no number pad for direct channel selection is clunky, until I connected my roof antenna the indoor antenna reception was intermittent and dropped signal. My OTA picture is excellent now.

These were all Beta testers, so perhaps Sezmi fixed some of the quality issues.  But with TiVo announcing its Premiere products yesterday, the company can’t afford more negative experiences.

By the way, when I brought up rumors of Hulu getting $40, he suggested that the figure covers all of a sponsor’s ads within an episode, not just a single spot.  Is there anyone who can confirm that that’s how it works?

This is an intriguing proposition on several fronts.  For the consumer, Sezmi is the first company to offer a legitimate regular TV-web video combination as a single experience.  No jerry-rigging required, no depending on Hulu to have the right episode backlog.  Sezmi has gone directly to the cable networks to get their programming (some of which will still be live) and to the studios to get movies and classic TV on demand.  Not having ESPN yet will be a dealbreaker for some, but one would only expect the channel lineup to get stronger the longer it’s able to stick around.

For content producers, especially web video, Sezmi offers not only the chance to be a side-by-side choice with traditional TV options but also another potential source of revenue.  Sezmi says it will share a cut of its subscription fees with networks, similar to the way cable providers pay channels a per-subscriber fee.  It’s unclear if that payment extends to web video providers, although the lineup already includes ON Networks and Crackle, so just the possibility of being treated the same as cable networks is a positive step.

(This would be a great acquisition for TiVo, by the way.  It would be so easy to roll this out to its installed base of over a million users already used to using a DVR and probably dying to ditch the cable or satellite company.)

Who knows if Sezmi will get enough penetration to earn a profit.  As LA Times Bit Player blog cogently noted, “The company’s underlying assumption is that TV viewing is shifting away from scheduled programming in favor of on-demand viewing.”  How fast or to what degree that shift happens is uncertain, but here at last is an innovative attempt at the convergence we’ve all been waiting for.

*not clear whether you still need to pay someone else to maintain broadband Internet service, which would obviously mitigate some cost savings

The other day, the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published a piece entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. Shortly afterward, the editors noticed something strange: the post attracted a number of comments from users upset for reasons that had nothing to do with anything the post said:

when can we log in? …

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! …

please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy…

I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends …now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

It turned out that the post had briefly appeared at the top of Google results for the phrase “Facebook login” (as I write this, it’s currently No. 4), and users were clicking on it thinking they were being taken to Facebook. Once they got there, some of them scrolled down to the comment form, saw the Facebook Connect prompt (which reads “Sign in with Facebook”) and were confused when entering their login information didn’t take them to Facebook. Even after RWW put up a disclaimer at the top of the page explaining how to get to Facebook, complaints continued to pour in; there are currently 620 (though most of the later ones are people poking fun at the mistake).

The next day, Jolie O’Dell, RWW’s community manager, did a follow-up post explaining what happened, and trying to draw some lessons from the experience. At a general level, I agreed with most of what O’Dell said: “Users don’t care about what you care about,” “users don’t read your copy or look at your branding,” and “users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.” It was also classy of her not to simply make fun of the commenters for being dumb. But the fact is, they were being pretty dumb, and I would have liked to see her grapple a bit more with what that says about the usability paradigm.

I first encountered the concept of usability back in the fall of 2000. In the aftermath of the disputed presidential election, Salon ran an article evaluating the infamous “butterfly ballot” from a usability perspective. At its heart, usability is a consumer-centered worldview: the onus is on designers to make things easy for new users to learn and efficient for repeat users to accomplish their desired tasks. If, for example, a number of voters were confused by the butterfly ballot, that didn’t mean they were stupid, it meant the ballot’s designers had made a mistake. Voting is an easy task that most people do without putting a lot of thought into, so designers should avoid any elements that increase confusion. In an era of increasingly empowered consumers, incorporating usability into design — whether for websites, products or store design — is a no-brainer.

But the comment-thread fiasco challenges that concept. One of the main tenets of usability is that if lots of people make the same mistake, the fault lies with the designer (and it’s  safe to assume that for every RWW visitor who posted a complaint, more simply left in frustration). On the other hand, let’s face it, confusing a tech blog for Facebook is unbelievably stupid. And when I say “unbelievably”, I mean it in a literal sense. If, last week, an RWW designer had proposed making changes to ensure visitors to the site didn’t accidentally confuse it with Facebook, she would have been laughed out of the room. It’s still not clear — short of adding that disclaimer to every article they run on Facebook, which would of course be silly — what RWW could do to prevent a similar meltdown. (Nor is it clear they really need to. The confused visitors do not represent RWW’s target audience, and will probably never visit the site again.)

By no means am I saying that we should ignore usability. Make your website as intuitive as possible for the average user. Subscribe to usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s newsletter, and keep up on his latest research. But keep in mind that even if you do everything right, we still live in a country where 7 percent of people — more than 20 million — believe Elvis is alive. Some stupid you just can’t plan for.

Update: Mike Melanson, who wrote the original RWW post, has a new one up pointing the finger at Google:

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it …

While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven’t necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago.

The most interesting moment for me came during Q&A.  An actor putting out a web series told of how she got all her friends to work for free as crew and asked, so is it okay to use SAG actors and have them work for free?  Mark Friedlander of SAG’s new media department responded by promoting SAG’s fantastic and simple new media agreement that producers can use to negotiate in place of the union’s arduous processes meant for large TV and film studios.  But when the moderator followed up by asking, “So can actors work for free?” he responded, “No, not for free.”

The paradox between subject matter and location crystallized right then.   SAG hosts a panel advocating the “build it and they will come” model, but apparently it doesn’t have the same faith in such a model for its actors.  You can’t blame SAG for that position since its mission is to protect actors.  But it does highlight a kind of NIMBY phenomenon in online video.  Everyone says, “You give your stuff away for free, but of course I’ve got to get paid.”  Not exactly a sustainable, long-term ecosystem.

In one sense, job boards are similar to other types of advertising markets, but while a typical advertiser is looking to sell as much product as the audience is willing to buy, an employer advertising a job has a very limited inventory; namely, a single open position. And it’s not like they can just give that position away on a first-come, first-serve basis, or sell it to the highest bidder. So as the scale of responses increases, so does the work the employer has to do to process them and pull out the top candidates.

What does that mean in practical terms? As a hiring manager, I’m reluctant to post a listing on a mass job board, since I know I’ll get inundated with responses, many of which will be a poor match. As a job seeker, I’m reluctant to apply for those jobs, since the odds are very good my resume will get stuck at the bottom of a large pile. That disconnect has allowed niche job boards like ours to cut into the business of the market leaders by promising employers an applicant pool that is more relevant but also more manageable.

So does that mean the Monsters of the world should be acquiring niche sites? Well, that might be a better use of their money than buying HotJobs, but if niche sites are successful, they ultimately bump up against the same scale constraints as the big boys. A better strategy is to move beyond the “classified ad” approach and try to figure out a better way to match up employer and applicant. For example, in this video, eHire CEO Ben Sabrin explains how his company is looking to move from “searching” to “matching”:

eHire is positioning itself to compete with recruiters, not job boards, but the principle is the same. Building a bigger job board while still relying on the same human bottlenecks is like assembling a massive military force and then equipping the soldiers with slingshots. The next generation of job-board successes will come from companies who can combine technology and community, rather than scale, to improve their matching process.

If you want to criticize MTV for anything, how about the fact that the network that had supposedly cornered the youth demographic completely missed the boat on the two biggest trends to hit that market in the past 10 years (MP3s and social networking)?

* For the record, that stands for “Three Meaningless Initials”, though as anyone who’s watched “Jersey Shore” could tell you, the other phrase associated with that acronym is equally appropriate.