United Church ad campaign / Wonder Cafe review

You don't need to believe in God to enjoy the United Church of Canada's new ad campaign. Where can I get me one of those for my dash!

That said, I have some serious misgivings about the ad campaign and the related website Wondercafe.ca. One imagines that the UCC wouldn't invest $10M if they didn't strongly believe that it was going to put more bums in pews. I find it hard to believe that the UCC even has that kind of do re mi but that's a topic for another time... Anyway, it's a big investment and for what?

Does it show the UCC to be hip? Hipper than most, mostly... but practically not everywhere; congregations vary widely.

Does hip translate into interest in attending church? Maybe. It can't hurt, though I imagine there are those who would argue that hipness is actually counter-religious, like liberalism, a kind of softening of moral values. Maybe a lot of people are looking for that kind of experience, a sort of cool hanging around religion to see if any of it rubs off. Works for me.

Does it matter? Yes, if your concern is to keep the doors of the Church open. Yes, if you believe that people are better off with religion than not (and there's LOTS of evidence to support that theory) and that getting their attention is worth any amount of effort. But not if you think that getting people's attention this way, through big media (corporate, centralized, manipulative and mercenary, without any real moral foundation) is pretty much anti-Christian at its very root.

Conclusion about the ad campaign: Like most advertising, creating brand recognition produces benefits but maybe not in the ways or at the time you expected.

Wonder Cafe is another story. It's a really nicely designed site, though the type is maddeningly small and brown as a motif is a little on the scatological side. But the site has plenty of features; a weekly poll, a topical essay by someone prominent each week, a discussion area for that topic; a "discussion lounge" where you can comment on some pre-set themes like Parenting, Politics or Health, and an area where you can create your own topics. Called blogs, the latter are not really blogs. Your first post stays at the top and people comment, or you add your own subsequent thoughts, below... not a "log" at all really, which makes you wonder how knowledgable the folks who decided to call it that are. Also, once you start your "blog" you are stuck with that first post at the top, can't edit it. Have another idea and you have to start over again with a new "blog". And the first blog, well, it drifts down to the bottom, as each new blog created goes at the top of all the blogs created. So far there are 83. I started mine the day after the ads came out. It was no. 5, but given the reverse chronilogical ordering, it's now no. 78. Buried basically. Nobody's going to discover it at this point. All I can do, if I actually want people to read what I might write there, is to delete it (which I can do, yea!) and start over (boo!)

The E-Z Squirrel animation is kinda funny and got some media attention. And the ad campaign materials are there too, which would be useful from a general info-on-the-Web perspective if the whole thing wasn't in Flash. The ads and all these other cool features don't have unique URLs so you can't bookmark them, return to them directly, send specific pages to your friends. Unless you like trying to unravel such things by looking at source code, in which case you can locate some discrete bits of content, like the bobble-head Jesus .jpg.

There's also this wierd sort of internal email thing. If you register you get a "mailbox" and can send mail to other registered users. It's another level of possible interaction I suppose but I don't really get what it's for when the whole idea of the blog thing is to talk "publicly."

So notwithstanding the lame "blog" effort and the vague "email" thing, it's a pretty full featured experience. You could spend quite a bit of time there surfing around, leaving comments, for sure.

But will you? I don't think so. After the novelty wears off, I don't think people who really want, on a regular basis, to turn over various issues in a religious context are going to go there. There are lots of other venues for that type of discussion and they aren't organized by churches.

This is going to be an expensive site to maintain and my feeling is it will run its course in maybe 6 to 8 months and it'll take the UCC a year or more after that to realize it isn't being productive and pull the plug.

While it may sound old school, this ain't going to be the Slashdot of progressive religion.

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