Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online

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Advertising: Adobe Marketing Campaign Works With Coarse Language

In this instance, the brand is Adobe, which in a campaign getting under way this week seeks to support efforts by marketers to prove to their bosses that spending on advertising is not a waste of money. The campaign portrays products like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Social as valuable tools for marketing executives who want to debunk myths like “Social media is worthless” and “Marketing is baloney.”

Except that Adobe Systems and its agency — Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group — do not say “baloney” in the ad. Rather, they use an abbreviation for a word that a family newspaper would describe as a barnyard epithet.

The full epithet, with an asterisk replacing a letter, appears on a document that Adobe is circulating internally to explain that the purpose of the campaign is to prove that marketing can no longer be dismissed with the epithet because “today’s campaigns are rooted in hard data and powerful insights.”And the epithet appears unexpurgated in Web video clips that are part of the campaign, visible briefly on a Dymo-style label affixed to a fanciful detector contraption in scenes set in (make-believe) focus group sessions.

Adobe Systems will spend an estimated $10 million to run the campaign in the United States for the next three months. The decision to use the provocative language is indicative of a trend for ads to speak more in the vernacular than in the formal phraseology that was standard for so many decades. The frank language and colloquial expressions follow the loosening of societal standards for discourse, reflecting how marketers seek to mirror changes in consumers.

For instance, Procter & Gamble, for decades a model of rectitude in its ads, is now often adopting the look and feel “of YouTube video” when producing television commercials, said Marc S. Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer at Procter.

That is why in a recent commercial for Tide detergent, in which a couple talk about the value of Tide versus lower-priced alternatives, the actress playing the wife tells the actor playing the husband that he stinks at folding clothes — only she uses a far more direct verb.

“We’re a family company,” Mr. Pritchard said in a speech at the 2012 annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, and “there was more than a little discussion about that line.”

But new efforts for Tide that include the franker commercial have helped the brand grow “more than two-and-a-half share points in the last three months alone,” Mr. Pritchard said, referring to market share.

For Adobe, said Ann Lewnes, chief marketing officer at Adobe Systems in San Jose, Calif., the language represents “a bold and provocative way to get attention.”

“I think Adobe is not known for being provocative or bold,” Ms. Lewnes said. “We’re ‘a nice software company.’ ”

“But in this crowded space, with a lot of competition, the intent is to break through, jolt the market,” she added.

Asked if the strategy was risky, Ms. Lewnes replied: “I don’t think so at all. I think good advertising is always somewhat polarizing.”

The campaign is based on the premise that “marketers feel angry about being misunderstood,” she said, and the language in the campaign is meant to reflect that.

The campaign includes, in addition to the Web video, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and online; sponsored content on mashable.com and theonion.com; sharing the metrics of the campaign, in real time, on adobe.com; and social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. On Twitter, Adobe will use the hashtag “#MetricsNotMyths” to underline the campaign’s theme.

The barnyard epithet is appropriate for the campaign because “for a long time, people did not know if the work was working, so you had to use a little” baloney in discussing the effectiveness of the advertising with other executives in the C-suite, said Keith Anderson, associate partner and executive design director at Goodby, Silverstein.

“It made you feel less confident,” Mr. Anderson said. “But now, you can know, you don’t have to guess, you can have hard facts to back you up.”

The frankness of the campaign also signals that the agency and Adobe Systems realize “if we were flowery, overly clever, jargony, the more it would feel like we were doing the same thing we were saying people don’t need to do anymore,” he added.

“We did look at other ways of making that statement” than to use the epithet, Mr. Anderson said, but it was decided to proceed because “the goal is to be provocative and reset the conversation.”

The language also conveys that Adobe is “plain-spoken,” he added, “and talks the way people talk.”

The products being advertised in the campaign compose what Adobe Systems is calling the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which competes against products sold by many companies; among them, Ms. Lewnes listed Google, I.B.M., Kenshoo and Salesforce.

The campaign is supplementing a more mainstream effort for Adobe, Ms. Lewnes said, which is also created by Goodby, Silverstein and carries the theme “Adobe &.” To indicate the connection, the campaign carries the theme “Adobe & marketing.”

Siletz Language, With Few Voices, Finds Modern Way to Survive

But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)

“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.

Since February, however, when organizers began to publicize its existence, Web hits have spiked from places where languages related to Siletz are spoken, a broad area of the West on through Canada and into Alaska. That is the heartland of the Athabascan family of languages, which also includes Navajo. And there has been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy, Switzerland and Poland, where the dark, rainy woods of the Pacific Northwest, at least in terms of language connections, might as well be the moon.

“They told us our language was moribund and heading off a cliff,” said Mr. Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room full of tribal basketry and other artifacts here on the reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland, Ore. He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will conquer the world, or even the tribe. Stabilization for now is the goal, he said, “creating a pool of speakers large enough that it won’t go away.”

But in the hurly-burly of modern communications, keeping a language alive goes far beyond a simple count of how many people can conjugate its verbs. Think Jen Johnson’s keypad thumbs. A graduate student in linguistics at Georgetown University, Ms. Johnson, 21, stumbled onto Siletz while studying linguistics at Swarthmore College, which has helped the tribe build its dictionary. She fell in love with its cadences, and now texts in Siletz, her fourth language of study, with a tribe member in Oregon.

Language experts who helped create the dictionary say the distinctiveness of Siletz Dee-ni (pronounced SiLETZ day-KNEE), or Coastal Athabascan as it is also called, comes in part from the unique way the language managed to survive.

Most other language preservation projects have a base, however small, of people who speak the language. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, for example, which went online this year, focuses on one of the most widely spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.

The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the Living Tongues Institute, a nonprofit group, in partnership with the National Geographic Society — which helped start the Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and now uses it as a blueprint — are all centered on languages still in use, however small or threatened their populations of speakers may be. Matukar Panau, for instance, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has about 600 speakers remaining, in two small villages.

Siletz, by contrast, had become, by the time of the dictionary, almost an artifact — preserved in song for certain native dances, but without a single person living who had grown up with it as a first language.

There were people who had listened to the elders, like Mr. Lane, and there were old recordings, made by anthropologists who came through the West in the 1930s and 1960s, but not much else. Mr. Lane wants to incorporate some of those scratchy recordings into future versions of the dictionary.

What can also bridge an ancient language’s roots to younger tribe members, some new Siletz learners said, is that it can sound pretty cool.

“There are a couple of sounds that are nowhere in the English language, like you’re going to spit, almost — kids seem much more open to that,” said Sonya Moody-Jurado, who grew up hearing a few words from her mother — like nose (mish), and dog (lin-ch’e’) — and has been attending with a grandson Siletz classes taught by Mr. Lane.

“They’re trailblazers, showing the way for small languages to cross the digital divide,” said K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore who worked with the Siletz tribe and the other partners to build the dictionary. Professor Harrison said he went to Colombia recently, talking to indigenous tribes about preserving their languages, but when the laptops opened up, the Siletz dictionary, with its impressive size and search capabilities, was the focus. “It’s become a model of how you do it,” he said.

When settlers were streaming west in the 1850s on the Oregon Trail and displacing American Indians from desirable farmland, government Indian policy created artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into one place even though the groups spoke different languages and in many instances had little in common.

The Siletz people were among the largest bands that ended up here on this spit of land jutting into the Pacific Ocean. By dint of their numbers, their language prevailed over other tribes, and their dances, sung in Siletz, became adopted by other tribes as their cultures faded.

“We’re the last standing,” Mr. Lane said.

But the threat of oblivion was constant. In the 1950s, the tiny tribe was declared dead by the United States — a “termination” from the rolls, in the jargon of the time. The Siletz clawed back — clinging to former reservation lands and cultural anchors in songs and dances — and two decades later, in the mid-1970s, became only the second tribe in the nation to go from nonexistence to federally recognized status. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians now have about 4,900 enrolled members and a profitable casino in the nearby resort town of Lincoln City.

School was also once the enemy of tribal languages. Government boarding schools, where generations of Indian children were sent, aimed to stamp out native ways and tongues. Now, the language is taught through the sixth grade at the public charter school in Siletz, and the tribe aims to have a teaching program in place in the next few years to meet Oregon’s high school language requirements, allowing Siletz, in a place it originated, to be taught as a foreign language.

Siletz Language, With Few Voices, Finds Modern Way to Survive

But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)

“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.

Since February, however, when organizers began to publicize its existence, Web hits have spiked from places where languages related to Siletz are spoken, a broad area of the West on through Canada and into Alaska. That is the heartland of the Athabascan family of languages, which also includes Navajo. And there has been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy, Switzerland and Poland, where the dark, rainy woods of the Pacific Northwest, at least in terms of language connections, might as well be the moon.

“They told us our language was moribund and heading off a cliff,” said Mr. Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room full of tribal basketry and other artifacts here on the reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland, Ore. He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will conquer the world, or even the tribe. Stabilization for now is the goal, he said, “creating a pool of speakers large enough that it won’t go away.”

But in the hurly-burly of modern communications, keeping a language alive goes far beyond a simple count of how many people can conjugate its verbs. Think Jen Johnson’s keypad thumbs. A graduate student in linguistics at Georgetown University, Ms. Johnson, 21, stumbled onto Siletz while studying linguistics at Swarthmore College, which has helped the tribe build its dictionary. She fell in love with its cadences, and now texts in Siletz, her fourth language of study, with a tribe member in Oregon.

Language experts who helped create the dictionary say the distinctiveness of Siletz Dee-ni (pronounced SiLETZ day-KNEE), or Coastal Athabascan as it is also called, comes in part from the unique way the language managed to survive.

Most other language preservation projects have a base, however small, of people who speak the language. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, for example, which went online this year, focuses on one of the most widely spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.

The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the Living Tongues Institute, a nonprofit group, in partnership with the National Geographic Society — which helped start the Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and now uses it as a blueprint — are all centered on languages still in use, however small or threatened their populations of speakers may be. Matukar Panau, for instance, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has about 600 speakers remaining, in two small villages.

Siletz, by contrast, had become, by the time of the dictionary, almost an artifact — preserved in song for certain native dances, but without a single person living who had grown up with it as a first language.

There were people who had listened to the elders, like Mr. Lane, and there were old recordings, made by anthropologists who came through the West in the 1930s and 1960s, but not much else. Mr. Lane wants to incorporate some of those scratchy recordings into future versions of the dictionary.

What can also bridge an ancient language’s roots to younger tribe members, some new Siletz learners said, is that it can sound pretty cool.

“There are a couple of sounds that are nowhere in the English language, like you’re going to spit, almost — kids seem much more open to that,” said Sonya Moody-Jurado, who grew up hearing a few words from her mother — like nose (mish), and dog (lin-ch’e’) — and has been attending with a grandson Siletz classes taught by Mr. Lane.

“They’re trailblazers, showing the way for small languages to cross the digital divide,” said K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore who worked with the Siletz tribe and the other partners to build the dictionary. Professor Harrison said he went to Colombia recently, talking to indigenous tribes about preserving their languages, but when the laptops opened up, the Siletz dictionary, with its impressive size and search capabilities, was the focus. “It’s become a model of how you do it,” he said.

When settlers were streaming west in the 1850s on the Oregon Trail and displacing American Indians from desirable farmland, government Indian policy created artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into one place even though the groups spoke different languages and in many instances had little in common.

The Siletz people were among the largest bands that ended up here on this spit of land jutting into the Pacific Ocean. By dint of their numbers, their language prevailed over other tribes, and their dances, sung in Siletz, became adopted by other tribes as their cultures faded.

“We’re the last standing,” Mr. Lane said.

But the threat of oblivion was constant. In the 1950s, the tiny tribe was declared dead by the United States — a “termination” from the rolls, in the jargon of the time. The Siletz clawed back — clinging to former reservation lands and cultural anchors in songs and dances — and two decades later, in the mid-1970s, became only the second tribe in the nation to go from nonexistence to federally recognized status. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians now have about 4,900 enrolled members and a profitable casino in the nearby resort town of Lincoln City.

School was also once the enemy of tribal languages. Government boarding schools, where generations of Indian children were sent, aimed to stamp out native ways and tongues. Now, the language is taught through the sixth grade at the public charter school in Siletz, and the tribe aims to have a teaching program in place in the next few years to meet Oregon’s high school language requirements, allowing Siletz, in a place it originated, to be taught as a foreign language.

App Smart: Powerful Tools for Learning a Language

But learning to speak another language is hugely rewarding and gives you access to amazing insights into other cultures. So I’m still learning, and nowadays the task is a little easier. Rather than having to pore over a book and answer multiple-guess questions, you can find sophisticated apps to help. These study aids are also easy to take everywhere.

The app I’ve found most powerful is Babbel. It’s a companion to the bigger Babbel online package and covers 11 languages. The different language apps are all similar, and they’re free on iOS and Android. You can set up a free account to keep track of your learning, and this will let you try the full fee-carrying online program.

Though Babbel apps may seem like mere companions to its online service, they’re potent language-learning tools. Each has 2,000 to 3,000 words split into topics that start with the basics like food and drink, then move to more complex ones like society and environment. Each topic has subcategories. In the relationships topic, for example, categories include family, couples and social life. Tapping on one takes you to the business end of the app, where the learning is split into three sections.

The first section runs through a list of words and phrases. It’s no simple flashcardlike “learn this word” experience. The app has tricks to help you memorize words, including great matching images, a speech recognizer that scores you on how well you say the text out loud (you can skip this, but you’d be missing out) and simple games like matching phrases in English to the ones you’re learning.

The second section is all about consolidating your learning with more sophisticated games that help with fewer English-based clues. It helps you understand how the words fit into a more complex paragraph or statement, which are written on-screen and read by a native speaker. Section 3 is a vocabulary reminder that can be used later to remind you about spelling or pronunciation.

The best thing about the app is that it remembers your progress and shares it with your profile online. You can access it from different places (like your iPhone or iPad) and then from your PC, where more complex packages round out the learning process with features like writing exercises. The app is also refreshingly clean and simple to look at, so there’s very little to distract you from the business of learning. However, you may find it a bit dry, which, let’s face it, may be an issue, particularly if you have bad memories of language class from your school days. A Wi-Fi or mobile data connection is needed to upload your data, by the way.

I’ve found the app invaluable and inexpensive. Babbel’s makers say they will bring the full course content from their online process to their mobile apps next, including beginner’s sections, grammar and phrase books.

If Babbel’s simplicity doesn’t appeal, then you may like apps from Busuu. It has a similar style of teaching words and phrases alongside an image and with recordings of native speakers, combined with games and exercises to really carve the language into your memory. There’s even a bit of gamification as the apps award you “busuu-berries” if you complete an exercise. You can donate them to someone to motivate them. The apps also hands out stars and digital badges for motivation.

It’s a bit more sophisticated than the Babbel app because Busuu has writing exercises that you submit to other users. You then comment, correct and mark their effort, and then you can check through the crowdsourced responses to your own. It’s a useful trick that offers alternative viewpoints on how words are used in context.

But the Busuu apps are ad-supported and visually more cluttered than Babbel. The iOS version I tried did crash from time to time.

Of course, there are many other apps to help you learn languages, including a powerful one from Rosetta Stone, though this is tied to its not-inexpensive learning package. So try one out, learn something new and if you spot me on the street feel free to say “Bonjour,” or “Bom dia!” or “Ni hao.”

Quick Call

Amazing Alex is a new game from Rovio. It has all the cuteness of Angry Birds, also from the same maker, but it’s a very different and more puzzlelike game that uses simple physics. It’s $1 on Android and iOS, and $3 for the iPad version.

App Smart: Powerful Tools for Learning a Language

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