“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.”
—Edgar Allan Poe

The images of the San Diego fires coming across the television are stunning. A different sort of perspective, and a ton of information, is provided by this GoogleMaps page, which also includes links to a live Twitter update and a live radio stream.

Matt Heinz over on iMedia Connection has posted this article about building brand buzz. He starts off talking about brand police and notes that “the very concept of brand police is flawed and implies that we’re failing to effectively create and build a sustainable brand within our organizations (let alone leverage it).”

I disagree. There’s a difference between creating a brand experience or being a brand evangelist (which is what Heinz refers to in his United Airlines examples) and being one of the “brand police.” The article concludes with Heinz imploring the reader to “make sure the concept of brand police is thought of as a very short-term strategy, with an eye toward the long-term plan of creating an entire organization policing, reinforcing and strengthening its collective asset.”

Having “brand police” and creating a corporate culture in which everyone is a brand advocate is not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I would argue that the role of the marketing gendarmes becomes even more important the larger the company grows and the more mature the brand becomes.

An infinite variety of brand questions will inevitably arise as new company initiatives are brainstormed and undertaken. Who is to make the call as to whether this or that detail is the correct one for the brand, anyone or everyone in the company? Nope. That way lies brand anarchy. Final responsibility for keeping the DNA of the brand healthy and vital has to rest with brand marketing, i.e. the “brand police.”

Take a well-established brand like Nickelodeon. One of the tenets of their brand is to never call themselves cool; that’s for the kids to determine, not them. But think about the massive volume of collateral, presentations, paperwork and such that flows through the Nick organization. A bit of overzealousness while preparing a PowerPoint, a bit of self-referential coolness … and the brand DNA experiences another bit of erosion.

Or think about an emerging brand. Everyone in the organization is scrambling at the speed of business to get some positive cash flow happening. It’s awfully easy for someone to strike a deal or embark on a tactic that’s 180 degrees removed from what the brand marketers established up front … and the brand DNA experiences another bit of erosion.

In countless examples anyone can well imagine, it’s the “brand police” who need to be involved at crucial checkpoints in the business process to make sure that the brand personality is expressed correctly, and that the overall brand is being built up for long-term growth and not eroded for short-term myopia.

To put it another way: The well-defined and smartly communicated brand is like a well-written movie, play or television series. The employees, the brand advocates, are the cast and crew. The brand marketers are the scriptwriters. All are working together to present a complete, cohesive whole to the public.

It’s okay to go off script occasionally, but make a habit of it and you wind up with an episode of House that’s looks like an episode of Scrubs.

Takeaway for marketers: Academy Awards and Tonys and Emmys are great, but it all starts with a solid script.

The New York Times had a pretty good article yesterday about Web metrics, ComScore, Nielsen NetRatings, and the whole site traffic measurement thing. It’s always struck me as ironic that this online world of ostensibly precise measurement is anything but; the Style.com example in the article’s lead shows differences in traffic measures by a factor of four.

At some point, I hope surveys and extrapolation are supplanted by actual hands-on audits of the traffic logs of major sites by a reliable third-party traffic measurement service. Sure, it would be pretty labor-intensive, but we’re talking about an industry that measures its size in billions, not millions, with hefty double-digit annual growth. Seems to me like it would be a worthy investment for all, not least of whom would include the third-party service.

Takeaway for marketers: The online world is a realm of precise, undeniably perfect measurement? Bwahahahahaaaa!

You may (or may not) be hearing about the Writers’ Guild of America being on the verge of a strike, perhaps through stories like this one from the Wall Street Journal. If you have any inclination to dig a little deeper into the story, I urge you to check our Mark Evanier’s excellent News From Me and posts like this one, this one and this one for some inside perspective. Or just search for “WGA” over on Mark’s blog.