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This piece appeared in Campaign Magazine UK one week after the riot at the Capitol in Washington DC There is nothing ambiguous about the role the marketing and advertising industry has played in the radicalisation of US politics and the horrifying events of recent days. There is a clear line connecting adtech and radicalisation. While it has been widely reported and acknowledged that social media…
The recent alarming revelations of Russian hacking of 250 US Government agencies, which went undetected by our most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses including the military’s Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security must lead us in the marketing business to reevaluate our thinking about ad fraud. The scope of online ad fraud has been argued about for…
Last week I wrote a post that posed the question, "Is Creative Advertising Really More Effective?" As someone who has been a lifelong advocate for the power of creativity in advertising, I admitted that while I believe the answer is a resounding "yes," I don't know of any rigorous studies that could prove it to a scrupulously scientific skeptic. The post elicited a healthy conversation on Twitter…
As long as I've been in the advertising business there has been a very large question smoldering under the surface of my skin: Does advertising that we deem to be more creative actually produce better business results, or is that just a fond wish that "creatives" and our supporters have invented to justify treating advertising as an art, and not just a blunt instrument? As a former copywriter and…
Today I am repeating my annual Thanksgiving post which I have run for many years. And, yes, that crack about Trump was there years before anyone could have imagined... Thanksgiving is my kind of holiday. It doesn't require gods or miracles or tragedies or victories or angels or kings or winners or losers or flags or gifts. All you need is some pumpkin pie, a big-ass flat screen, and a comfortable…
Loudmouth ad weasels like me are always going off on the need for advertisers to abandon their addiction to short term-ism and focus their attention on the long term imperative of building their brands. There is plenty of evidence (including that of Field and Binet) that in the long run marketers are better served if their ad budgets are more weighted toward brand-building advertising and less…
There was a time, not that long ago, when advertisers could reach just about everyone pretty easily. All it took was a lot of money and a simple media buy on a handful of TV, radio, and print outlets. Back then, harnessing the power of mass media was not a guarantee of success, but it was almost always a key component. It helped create enormous brands like McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Apple,…
"By 2017, American companies had put at least $2.6 trillion into offshore tax shelters...Nike had $12.2 billion.... The company estimates that if its $12.2 billion was repatriated to the U.S., it would owe $4.1 billion in U.S. taxes... Designating its profits this way allows the company to avoid paying even a dime of U.S. income taxes on these profits..." - The Oregonian. More about this in a…
I was rummaging through old blog posts and came upon this one from almost 13 years ago. Since no one read my blog 13 years ago, and I liked this post, I thought I'd re-post it. An article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker leads me to believe that advertising people can learn something from spies about solving business problems. Gladwell tells us about a national security expert, Gregory…
I wrote this a few days ago but didn't post it because I felt uncomfortable about posting non-positive things during this unpleasant period. However, after reading the great Mark Ritson's column today, and seeing that he isn't afraid to be level-headed, I decided to stand with him. We are a seriously imperfect species, we humans. For those who think the corona virus experience will "change…
I sometimes listen to branding "experts" talk and wonder if they live on the same planet I do. I hear them say... Consumers want to “join the conversation” about brands. Consumers want to co-create with brands. Brands need to create communities of engaged consumers to be successful. Consumers want a relationship with brands. Consumers want brands that align with their values. I suspect that the…
For a good part of human history food didn't taste so good. That's why spices from the Far East were such treasured commodities in the West. In the seventeenth century sugar imported from New Guinea and India became more easily available in England and started becoming very popular. One of the prime reasons was that it made tea taste a lot better. But Brits went overboard on it. They couldn't get…
I like to think of my new book, Advertising For Skeptics, as an undiluted bounty of heretical, unpopular, and aberrant thoughts about our industry. It is now available at Amazon . The past decade was expected to be a golden age for advertising. We had amazing new tools and amazing new media. Our ability to personalize advertising and reach consumers “one-to-one” was sure to make advertising more…
One of the biggest dangers successful brands face is falling into the hands of dumbass marketers. Successful brands are usually created by an inscrutable recipe of hard work, good product ideas, luck, and competent marketing. After a period of success there is always a second (or tenth) generation of marketing. Many new generations of marketing make a similar mistake. Before we get to that…
For the past couple of years, the advertising industry has been fixated on two themes: the creative side of the business has been preoccupied with "storytelling," and the media side has been hooked on "personalization." What no one seems to realize is that these two goals are contradictory. We'll get to that in a minute. First, a little overview. The dumbest idea of advertising's digital age has…
Here are 29 ways the "move fast and break things" jerk-offs soiled our lives in 2019. 1. January : It was discovered that Facebook-owned WhatsApp was being used to spread illegal child pornography. 2. January : Researcher Aaron Greenspan, former running mate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, said that Facebook's claim of reaching 2 billion people is a lie and said Zuckerberg "may be the greatest con…
We have double torture this year. Not only are we ending a year, we're also ending a decade (pettifogging killjoys will take great pains to instruct us that the decade doesn't technically end until next year. I don't care. I'm celebrating this year. Next year we could all be dead. In fact, at the rate we're going, we probably will be.) The torturing part is the dumb lists. It's bad enough when we…
It's holiday season which means it's time to give awards for the "_______ of the Year" Every advertising and marketing organization, publication, and media interest group is giving awards to The Real Time Online Digital Media Analyst Of The Year, as well as other heroic marketing and advertising practitioners. Since it's also a year that ends in a 9, they're also giving awards to The Same…
Have you ever wondered why the highly touted marketing miracles never seem to work for you? Stick around. In recent years, copywriters, "branding" experts, "strategic" thinkers, and advertising and marketing agencies have evolved a conceit in which they refer to themselves as "storytellers." Although it is largely self-inflating bullshit, I enjoy this conceit. It puts an emphasis on the concept of…
Let's do a little thought experiment. You've been driving all morning on a two-lane highway and you're getting hungry. You come to the small town of Nowheresville and at the intersection there are two hamburger joints. One is McDonald's, the other is Bubba's Burgers. It is highly likely that Bubba makes a better burger than McDonald's. But it is also highly likely that you will choose McDonald's.…
Today I am repeating my annual Thanksgiving post which I have run for many years. And, yes, that crack about Trump was there years before anyone could have imagined... Thanksgiving is my kind of holiday. It doesn't require gods or miracles or tragedies or victories or angels or kings or winners or losers or flags or gifts. All you need is some pumpkin pie, a big-ass flat screen, and a comfortable…
This week an old piece of mine from one of my books got some attention on Twitter when someone posted it. I decided to update it and repost it today. One of our axioms here at The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters is that in today's world of marketing, delusional thinking is not just acceptable, it's mandatory. Digital media have been the primary cause and the primary beneficiary of delusional…
Greg Stern is Chair of the 4As. Unfortunately for Stern, his chairmanship has coincided with the most unsettling, corrupt, and damaging era in the history of the ad industry. In recent years, we have assiduously cataloged the problems the ad industry is facing (here's a good place to start .) Earlier this week, Stern wrote a piece for Campaign in which he tried to frame the confused and weakened…
Email was fun, but we can do better. It's time for us to disrupt the entire personal communication ecosystem. We need to upgrade to fmail. Email was good for two types of things: 1. Receiving annoying messages from people we know who want something from us, and 2. Receiving annoying messages from people we don't know who want something from us. The time has come for us to bifurcate. I love to say…
There's a very old business gag about losing money on every sale but making it up on volume. While the premise of losing on every transaction but making up for it with lots of transactions may be ridiculous, in our confused world of marketing it has become a foundational principle. Essentially what most brands are doing when they flood the web with idiotic social media posts and self-serving…