Appropriate Technology

Digital Signature Authentication (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We changed healthcare insurance providers about a year ago, the new ones being cheaper but - as it transpires - infinitely more annoying. I'd say something like 'yer pays for what yer gets' but experience tells me this is rarely actually the case.

One of their more endearing quirks is requesting a medical report for every claim. This means a call to the provider to request the report and then a traipse down there to pick it up. It's yet another Little Job You Don't Need.

Imagine my glee, then, when the American Hospital's medical records people called to say the report was ready, they could send me a request form to fill out and send back and they would then email the medical report to me. We had, it appeared, finally emerged kicking and crying into the digital age.

This was nothing compared to my rapture when the form arrived gleaming and simply buzzing with potential in my inbox. This wasn't any old form - this was an Adobe EchoSign form. For those who haven't come across EchoSign, it's a cloud-based service that allows you to fill out and digitally sign forms and contracts, validating your identity via Adobe's server. It's smart, neat, secure, highly convenient and - for a Gulf-based organisation, incredibly leading edge. Impressed to bits, I filled out the electronic form and digitally signed it, then sent it back.

You know what's coming, don't you?

They called me up. No, sir, you have to sign the form. Yes, I signed it. No sir, you have to print it and sign it then fax it to us. Or you can scan it and send us the form that way.

But this is a digital form, with a digital signature. In fact, this form is produced using a technology that is entirely meant to support a digital signature. In fact, your hospital has actually paid for this technology as a specific form-signing digital signature solution. It's like buying a new car then pushing it home. It's like having a dog and barking. Do you have a dog? Who does the barking around your place? I mean, surely you're not serious.

Yes sir, we are. The form needs your signature.

I cannot begin to tell you how angry it made me. I don't know why, really. It's just yet another example of technology being used muckle-headedly, we see them every day. It's yet another example of an organisation not 'getting it', but we see those every day. I should be used to it, inured to it. I should shrug it off with a 'Pfft, another one'. I managed to wend through an entire morning of insane, time-wasting governmental bureaucracy getting my ISBN number last week giggling all the way. Why, then, did this little piece of idiocy reduce me to apopleptic, towering rage?

I've come to the conclusion I need a holiday.

Liars

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am never at my best in job interviews. I’m a disastrous candidate (I was once stopped in the middle of an interview to be told my ‘interview persona sucks’) and even worse as an interrogator. Never a great lover of formality, I find the stilted nervousness appalling.

The other day a candidate asked me what was the difference between PR and advertising. It struck me as an odd question to ask in an interview for a PR job, but I did my best to answer it. And my answer boiled down to this.

Public Relations - as I see it - is the communications discipline. It is about driving structured, benefit-led change. In my professional career, fifteen years now, in public relations I have never told a single lie. Never.

But advertising is all about lying. It's what they do, constantly. What amazes me is how we put up with it, consigning it to the dump bin of background noise when actually we should be protesting it. Look at HSBC's most recent radio ad in the UAE. "At HSBC, we believe that..."

No you don't. That's simply a lie. You do not collectively believe in personal loans with 'keen' (6.5% is competitive, apparently.) interest rates. It's not a corporate value. In fact, your offer is not driven in any way by a "belief", other than a commercial imperative. So why do you find it appropriate to so glibly misrepresent yourselves in this way?

Axe does not make men attractive. Oh, sure, it's an amusing way to highlight the 'brand essence' of the product. It's also a lie. It smells like toilet freshener. I have yet to meet a woman attracted by the smell of toilet freshener. Pantypads don't make you a more successful mum and microwave dinners don't mean more time to enjoy the family. Famously, I would contend a Mars a day doesn't really help you work, rest and play. It just tastes nice and is bad for you. There's no medical evidence to support the unsupportable claim.

It has long been a catechism for me that assertion without proof is a lie. And yet this is what advertising does constantly. Feel the radiance warm your skin, taste the joy of the open road. Dare to dream the dream. Oh, and while I'm at it, why does the 'Hundred reasons to buy a BMW' radio ad only ever feature reason 82? Do you think they even have a list of 100 reasons to buy their blasted cars?

And on and on we go through a litany that touches pretty much every commercial we see. A constant barrage of the untrue, indefensible and mis-characterised. And we let it wash over us rather than pushing back and asking brands to kindly just stick to the facts, the truth.

Which is what you have to do in public relations. Because if you don't, you'll get called out. In public. It used to be by journalists, now it's by every mobile phone in the country.

I can't say the interview was a great success. It contained some very long silences...