Spencer Keys

Long time, no Tumbls. Anyway, I saw this today and thought...

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:22:27 -0400

Long time, no Tumbls. Anyway, I saw this today and thought it’s a useful video to think about not only when designing a website or application, but almost any communication piece that is intended to leverage an action out of a (perhaps fleeting) interest in your product (whatever or whoever that may be).

A business meeting

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:03:28 -0500

mymorna:

(Translated from this blog: Alex Aka JJ LJ. Originally, this story was published by Alex in Russian. The translation is mine, sorry for any inaccuracies. Suggestions for improvements are very appreciated.)

Smith attended the meeting on Tuesday. There, he himself and his brain both died a slow and painful death, brought onto them by the other attendees, with Smith’s manager Lehare as leading murderer.

“Gentlemen,” said mrs. Redroot, “Our organization is facing a major challenge. We’re dealing with a project, for which we must depict several red lines. Are you willing to take on this assignment?”

“Of course”, Lehare said. As the company’s CEO he was always willing to take on problems that would be solved by someone else of the team. However, he instantly clarified: “We can do that, can’t we?”

The manager of the drawing department, Greyskin, quickly nodded: “Yes, definitely. This is Smith, our best specialist on the drawing of red lines. We’ve invited him to this meeting for exactly this reason, to hear his competent opinion on the subject.”

“Nice to meet you,” mrs. Redroot threw him a smile. “Well, you all know me. And this is Lily, our company’s specialist in the area of design.” Lily blushed and smiled self-consciously. She just obtained her economics degree and knew about as much of design as a platypus knows of the design of airships.

“In short,” Mrs. Redroot continued, “we must draw seven straight red lines. They must all be strictly perpendicular. Furthermore, some of them must be green and some transparent. What do you think, would that be realistic?”

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storyboard: Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online...

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:07:33 -0500

storyboard:

Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona

You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.

The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.

So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?

All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.

It must be daunting.

It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.

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"Was an Olympic Record Set Today?"

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:42:17 -0400

"Was an Olympic Record Set Today?":

Nice piece of event reportage from The Guardian.

"Also worth noting: They both discussed their mutual love of Kit Kat bars."

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:24:27 -0400

“Also worth noting: They both discussed their mutual love of Kit Kat bars.”

- Mitt Romney’s campaign, in an e-mail recounting his visit with British Foreign Secretary William Hague (via officialssay)

WHAT NOT TO DO: Create fake Facebook accounts to counter...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:35:17 -0400

WHAT NOT TO DO: Create fake Facebook accounts to counter criticism online. But if you really, really, really, really have to (*you don’t), create them months in advance.

http://mashable.com/2012/07/25/chick-fil-a-accused-of-setting-up-fake-facebook-account/

When a client completely ignores a deadline..

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:20:33 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

When there's an awkward silence during a meeting...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:20:29 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

When you realize your media list needs serious updating right before releasing an unexpected news announcement..

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:20:25 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

How you feel when you get unexpected negative feedback from a client..

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:20:21 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

Premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, and Premier of...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:14:14 -0400

Premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, and Premier of Alberta, Alison Redford, silently judge Premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall.

When someone asks me what Go T.V. is

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:10:50 -0400

campaignsick:

theatlantic: This Cease-and-Desist Letter Should Be the Model...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:03:53 -0400

theatlantic:

This Cease-and-Desist Letter Should Be the Model for Every Cease-and-Desist Letter

From ilovelibraries.org: The city of Troy, Michigan was facing...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:53:16 -0400

From ilovelibraries.org:

The city of Troy, Michigan was facing a budget shortfall, and was considering closing the Troy Public Library for lack of funds. Even though the necessary revenues could be raised through a miniscule tax increase, powerful anti-tax groups in the area were organized against it. A vote was scheduled amongst the city’s residents, to shut the library or accept the tax increase, and Leo Burnett Detroit decided to support the library by creating a reverse psychology campaign. Yard signs began appearing that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd - Book Burning Party on August 5th.” No one wants to be a part of a town that burns books, and the outraged citizens of Troy pushed back against the “idiotic book burners” and ultimately supported the tax increase, thus ensuring the library’s survival.

Link-bait

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:04:11 -0400

I have learned three things in the past 24-hours:

1) Writing a blog post about Justin Trudeau will get you more views than anything else you write about policy and politics.

2) There is something deeply dissatisfying about getting love only by Facebook, where political interest level seems, to me at least, to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

3) When you do manage to get that Facebook love, it is even more dissatisfying to know that people are sharing your link, but you have no idea who they are, what they’re saying to contextualize the piece, or whether people are liking it there.

Justin Trudeau's Dance of the Seven Veils

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:25:08 -0400

On Monday, the National Post’s John Ivison wrote a critical piece on Justin Trudeau, arguing that he doesn’t have what it takes to be Liberal leader. Initially I was going to put the column down to filler and a means of increasing web traffic, especially given Trudeau’s clear statements that he does not want to be leader, but the interesting piece was this throwaway line:

A Trudeau leadership team is being quietly assembled, even while their man continues to insist that he will sit out to spend more time with his family.

Ivison bizarrely buried the lede - to my knowledge, this had previously been reported nowhere before. Since then, on-again, off-again Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella has said this is more than a rumour and, according to unnamed sources, Trudeau is running.

I moved from Ottawa, back to Vancouver, almost a year ago so I have no special insight on the scuttlebutt in the capital, but the story provides an interesting opportunity to draw parallels between Canadian and American leadership politics, and visit an oft-cited 2006 piece, “Declaring for President is a Dance of Seven Veils”, where NPR’s Senior Washington Editor, Ron Elving, argued there is a process presidential candidates go through to show they are serious about running for president, including:

“Testing the waters” where you meet with potential supporters to determine your appeal
Announcing the formation of an exploratory committee
Officially forming the exploratory committee
Dropping the “exploratory” part of the name in official filings
Telling a prominent journalist or talk show host that they feel the call but need the approval of their family
Formally announcing their candidacy
Ruling out any interest in the vice-presidency

The reasons for this drawn out process are, in my estimation, three-fold:

First, a presidential hopefuls want to win but they rarely want to gamble on the risk of tarnishing their image as a result losing their existing power; the Dance of the Seven Veils allows a candidate to construct a series of plausible exit points where he or she can save face if support is lower than expected, opposition research on him or herself shows substantial weaknesses (evidence of lawsuits, affairs, financial impropriety, substance abuse, etc.), or the candidate finds the requirements of campaigning to be too overwhelming.
Second, the Dance of the Seven Veils maximizes exposure through the creation of seven unique points for media to write stories about the candidate’s leadership ambitions. Announcing one’s candidacy without lead-up robs the candidate of the ability to preview how his or her candidacy would be covered by the media, and only guarantees a single media cycle’s worth of attention, if at all. In particular, if the media have not been slowly conditioned to think the candidacy is a big deal, those final few veils may not be covered with the desired level of punch.
Finally, the Dance allows the campaign to steadily influence media’s perception of the candidate and ensure they are seen as running for the right reasons, rather than for less noble reasons.

Some of the parallels between American presidential politics and Canadian party leadership races are obvious, and some don’t hold. For instance, Canadian electoral rules do not incent the creation of exploratory committees and there is no vice-presidency, but there are alternatives to getting the message out. In particular, utilizing the rumour mill of Ottawa’s very small community can achieve some of the same ends, as John Ivison’s column shows.

There is also the ability, through surrogates with prominent commentary platforms in the media, to publicly hypothesize about a candidacy and allow journalists and other activists to glom onto the idea of the candidacy and publicly evaluate it without getting the candidate’s hands dirty.

In Trudeau’s case, it seems to have all started coincidentally, because of a boxing match.

Recognizing the different context of Canadian politics, I propose a Canadian Dance of the Seven Veils:

Testing the waters
A friendly opinion column about how good the candidate would be as a leader
A featured profile that gives the candidate an opportunity to say they’re not interested but argues, regardless, the candidate would be a strong leader
Letting it be known that a campaign team exists
Telling a prominent journalist or talk show host that they will be making a final decision imminently
Formally announcing their candidacy
Ruling out the suggestion that you’re running for a prominent position in another candidate’s team

Assuming Ivison and Kinsella are both correct, Trudeau has already been conducting the “testing the waters” phase for some time. As Paul Wells noted in his glowing piece on Trudeau in Maclean’s, he is a fundraising machine that travels the country constantly, visiting ridings everywhere. If the Liberal Party of Canada’s website can be relied upon as a definitive schedule of LPC events, he is by far the party’s most active headliner – even moreso than Bob Rae.

Following Trudeau’s surprise defeat of Tory Senator Patrick Brazeau, Lawrence Martin provided the clearest example of the call to leadership, concluding, “If the party is to rise again, it may well be that it needs someone of daunting name and spirit to remind the country of its daunting ways.”

A month later, Paul Wells produced the profile that gave him ample opportunity to both deny his leadership ambitions while simultaneously expand on his views of the country and his party.

And now it is being stated with certainty in the media that the campaign team is in place and that Trudeau intends to run.

Stephane Dion’s more direct line to running for Liberal leadership (if I recall there was little advanced fanfare) shows that the Dance is not a requirement of winning the position, but it is helpful, and maybe necessary in Trudeau’s case. As somebody who has frequently been touted as a leadership candidate, on the basis of his name and charisma alone, he has needed the time to reset the relationship between himself, the media, and the Liberal Party at large, so he can be seen as a person of greater substance that’s answering a call to run, rather than appearing to feel entitled to the position.

If Trudeau is following the path as I have set out, the next stage will be a surprise announcement that he’s about to decide whether or not to announce. Given that Bob Rae has already dropped the fifth veil, Trudeau will be pressured to announce quickly before Rae runs away with it all. However, as the very nature of the Dance allows, he may drop out at any time with his dignity intact.

Mr. Mulcair Goes to Edmonton, Giving Canadian Climate a New Dilemma

Wed, 30 May 2012 23:53:39 -0400

Originally posted to George Hoberg’s Green Policy Prof blog: http://greenpolicyprof.org/wordpress/?p=825

Spencer Keys and George Hoberg
May 30, 2012

Today the Pembina Institute released astudy contributing to the growing expert consensus that Canada has a mild case of Dutch disease. Later this week, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is travelling to Western Canada to further argue his own unique form of Dutch disease.

What a difference a month can make.

Six weeks ago we argued that there is a political narrative available to environmental advocates looking to find a coalition between themselves and the labour movement, which can also drive a wedge in Stephen Harper’s Western Canada-and-Ontario coalition that gave him a majority in the 2011 election: the Dutch disease argument that a rising petrodollar makes Canadian manufacturing exports more expensive and has created a decline in Ontario’s manufacturing sector.

Since then several events, both extraordinary and coincidental, have turned Dutch disease into the most significant policy debate the country is facing. It began with Mulcair, on CBC’s The House:

“It’s by definition the Dutch disease: the Canadian dollar is being held artificially high, which is fine if you’re going to Walt Disney World; not so good if you want to sell your manufactured product because the American client, most of the time, can no longer afford to buy it. We’ve hollowed out the manufacturing sector. In six years since the Conservatives have arrived we’ve lost 500,000 good-paying, manufacturing jobs; more than half of them because we’re not internalizing the environmental costs.”

Mulcair’s comments set off a firestorm of controversy, putting him on the opposite of most political pundits, many economists, the government, and the Western premiers.

IRPP Report

Coincidentally, little more than a week after Mulcair’s interview on The House, the Institute for Research on Public Policy released a report evaluating the significance of the Dutch disease. Specifically, the authors noted there has been “little rigorous analysis of the linkages between energy prices, the exchange rate and manufacturing output in Canada.”

The authors used a two-step process, first determining the relationship between energy prices and the Canada-US exchange rate, and secondly determining the role of the Canada-US exchange rate on manufacturing output.

The first conclusion was that, since 2003, “a 1 percent increase in energy prices was associated with a 0.54 percent decrease in the value of the US dollar relative to the Canadian dollar,” which is much larger than the 0.15 percent decrease in the preceding 1992-2003 period. By comparison, non-energy commodity prices were associated with a 0.73 percent decrease over the same post-2003 period.

For the second conclusion, an analysis of 80 manufacturing industries was conducted and, while 53 out of 80 indicated some level of Dutch disease, only 25 were statistically significant while the rest were functionally the equivalent of no relationship as all. Interestingly, while there was no negative relationship for automotive manufacturing, the biggest negative effects were in textiles, apparel, and leather, “which together account for less than 2 percent of manufacturing output.”

Industry Canada Study

Inconveniently for the Harper Government, it was also revealed recently that an Industry Canada sponsored study being published in the journal Resource and Energy Economics, found some support for loss in manufacturing unemployment due to Dutch Disease. Unlike the IRPP study, the Industry Canada study looked at losses in manufacturing employment. It concluded that, of those jobs lost to exchange rate fluctuations, 33-39% is due to increases in energy commodity prices. However, given the results of the IRPP study, we can reasonably assume that this constitutes a much lower loss of employment than the headline numbers suggest.

Today’s Pembina and MacDonald-Laurier Reports

Using regional economic impact models produced by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the Pembina Institute argues that large regional disparities are occurring as a result of the oil sands boom. In fact, the authors of the Pembina study reject the Dutch disease label as inadequate to capture what is happening in Canada today. Instead, they argue the distribution of benefits and rapid growth is “a uniquely Canadian strain of the Dutch Disease that could be called “oilsands fever” – a strain that is beginning to create clear winners and losers in Canada’s economy and could pose a significant risk to Canada’s competitiveness in the emerging clean energy economy.”

The authors emphasize the challenges facing provinces without significant natural resource production in attracting and retaining skilled labour in, the overwhelming hold on the economic benefit from oil sands production (94%) by Alberta alone, and the inflationary effects. Their prescriptive elements include establishing a federal savings fund, eliminating preferential tax treatment for the oil and gas sector, convening an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada to continue study of the problem, have a federal committee study regional competitiveness, and establish a Canadian energy strategy.

However, the waters of the Pembina report have already been muddied by a MacDonald-Laurier Institute report arguing the opposite conclusion from the same data by the Canadian Energy Research Institute. MLI finds a significant positive impact from the oil sands, in absolute terms, for every province in the country.

The two studies are using the same data. The different conclusions from the reports reflect the different perspectives of the groups. MLI emphasizes the absolute magnitude of the contributions of oil and gas to provinces outside of Alberta. Pembina doesn’t disagree, but emphasizes the economic and political effects of the unbalanced distribution of these benefits, an issue on which MLI is silent. Neither study can convincingly say whether the positive economic spillovers of the oil sands are more or less powerful than the negative dynamic of the Dutch disease. Even MLI’s concluding sentence reveals how incomplete our understanding of these competing forces is: “While the so-called “Dutch Disease” mechanism may operate, in practice it is partially (perhaps more than fully) offset by the gains to the overall Canadian economy documented by these studies.”

Analysts will continue to differ about the magnitude of the Dutch disease dynamic and whether and how policy changes should be made to address it.

Mulcair, Polluter Pays, and Gaps in the Research

Returning to Mulcair’s comments on the CBC and elsewhere, in discussing the Dutch disease he continually emphasizes the critical importance of applying the polluter pays principle. In doing so, Mulcair is describing something that is similar to, but not exactly, Dutch disease, and calling it the same. He claims that Dutch disease occurs when you fail to internalize the environmental costs of resource extraction; specifically, because companies do not have to pay the full cost of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, they are able to develop resources at a faster rate than they would otherwise be able to do, and therefore putting more upward pressure on the dollar than would be the case if the costs were properly internalized.

This argument about internalizing environmental costs is Mulcair’s own distinctive addition to the concept of Dutch disease. Unfortunately, none of the studies summarized above actually deal with the argument that Mulcair is making, leaving a giant hole in the current research.

Climate Hawks and the Dutch Disease

It is particularly surprising that the Pembina report does not address the polluter pays part of Mulcair’s argument because the environmental impact of the oil sands have been central to the group’s mission, and placing an effective economy-wide price on carbon seems to be the natural go-to recommendation in all the group’s reports on the topic. Why would Canada’s leading climate hawk environmental group pass up the chance to make the case for effective carbon pricing in another politically salient way?

We can only speculate that they believed including it would produce an undesirable political backlash. They are already well-known for having that position, and when they have made the case for effective carbon pricing in the past they have been accused, like anyone else who mentions the idea in Canada, of advocating regional wealth distribution. And perhaps because Mulcair’s comments have been considered so incendiary, emphasizing the polluter pays component would have associated the group too closely with a divisive partisan argument.

The dilemma faced by Pembina in this report is a dilemma for many climate hawks: does it make political sense to embrace the Dutch disease narrative? Analytically, it would seem preferable to keep the issues separate. Designing effective climate policy for Canada is an enormous task in its own right, why complicate it by including it in the same package of initiatives design to address Ontario’s struggling manufacturing sector. Even the strongest serious cases for the Dutch disease argument suggest that there are greater and more important forces at work in Canada’s manufacturing challenge than the explosive growth of the oil sands.

But politically, climate advocates are not getting any meaningful traction in Canada, so aligning themselves with the Dutch disease argument makes sense if Mulcair’s political strategy can be a winning one. Nik Nanos, one of Canada’s preeminent pollsters, believes this is a high reward manoeuver for Mulcair, who is looking to shore up support in Quebec and expand into Ontario, for much of the same reasons as were previously discussed in this blog.

Analysts vs Advocates, again

While Mulcair’s rhetoric may be beyond what is well supported by economic analysis, as noted by John Ibbitson he probably does not have much to lose from adopting more extreme positions than the evidence warrants (yet). A sizeable portion of the public agrees with his viewpoint – enough to make a difference in key areas. According to Harris/Decima, 51% in Quebec agree with Mulcair in Quebec, while 47% in British Columbia and 37% in Ontario do.

If the choice comes down to oil sands expansion with demonstrably inadequate environmental checks and balances, or a sketchy economic argument with powerful narrative potential, the choice seems pretty clear for climate hawks.

WHEN I AGREE TO DISCUSS SOMETHING I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ON TELEVISION

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:09:28 -0400

editorrealtalk:

Truth.

When your client wants top tier media coverage and no one even knows who they are

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:44:52 -0400

99problemsbutapitchaintone:

barackobama: idrownideas: The best campaign counter-attack...

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:46:57 -0400

barackobama:

idrownideas:

The best campaign counter-attack video I HAVE EVER SEEN. Obama 2012

”So we’re going to call their BS when we see it and we need your help to call them on it too and set the record straight. So share this, tweet it, facebook it, I keep hearing about tumblr and whatever that is…please use that too. Thank you.”

-Stephanie Cutter / Deputy Campaign Manager at Obama for America.

And a Tumblr shout-out.

This is really spectacular: short, authentic, direct, and it feels personal even though it’s clearly intended for tens of thousands of activists.