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 has played a significant role in the
schism in US society, there is a deeper, more nuanced truth behind the
deterioration of our politics.
The wedge that has been driven
into the fabric of US society has been driven in part by information
gathered about American citizens by the adtech ecosystem and fed into
algorithms that are employed by platforms and online publishers.
The
purpose of these algorithms is primarily to keep visitors “inside the
corral” of the publisher or the platform. The more time a visitor spends
in the corral, the more money the platform can realise from selling ad
space.
To do this, the platforms feed visitors ever more “engaging” content.
Experience has taught the algorithms that the more juicy the material,
the more likely they are to retain the visitor.
Consequently, the
algorithms feed us incrementally more lurid notions of our own
predispositions and connect us ever more closely with others who share
them.
In May 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported
that after the presidential election of 2016, a team of Facebook
executives undertook an internal study to understand how its policies
shaped the behaviour of its users.
The study concluded
that algorithms they use “to gain user attention and increase time on
the platform” were driving people apart.
According to the report,
“64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools...
Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
A slide from the
presentation said: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction
to divisiveness.” If left unchecked, it warned, Facebook would feed
users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user
attention and increase time on the platform”.
According to the WSJ story, “Facebook
is under fire for making the world more divided. Many of its own
experts appeared to agree – and to believe Facebook could mitigate many
of the problems. The company chose not to.”
This report revealed
the truth that Facebook and friends are more than a “bulletin board”
where people express their opinions. It unambiguously describes the way
these platforms actively direct people into extremist groups whose
purpose is to divide us.
But there’s more to this story. We need to be honest with ourselves.
For years, we have been hiding behind the skirts of Facebook and other
online platforms.
While these companies have taken the heat, it
has been largely unrecognised by the public that it is for the sole
benefit of the advertising and marketing industry that Facebook and
others do their squalid work. We are the hidden hand that guides and
finances these dangerous practices.
In light of the murder and
mayhem at the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, it has been suggested
that some in the Republican Party need to stop pretending they didn’t
understand the consequences of standing by quietly while dangerous,
irresponsible lies were being promulgated by members of their party.
I
would like to suggest that we in the advertising industry are no less
guilty of standing by quietly and pretending we don’t understand the
consequences – in our case, of our dangerous addiction to adtech and the
concomitant destruction it engenders.
For years, many of us have
described adtech as dangerous. It is now time to upgrade that
description to disastrous. The leaders of our industry – the ANA, the 4As, IAB, and the chief marketing officers of our biggest advertisers – must face up to what adtech is doing to our society and act immediately and decisively to reform it.
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 years by computer scientists, software engineers, cybersecurity analysts, advertising media specialists, and independent researchers.
On one side we have advertising and marketing trade organizations, agencies, and their security consultants who tell us that ad fraud is a minor problem that is being well-defended and, in fact, is shrinking annually.
On the other side we have independent researchers who tell us that ad fraud is a massive problem (recently estimated at over $60 billion) that is becoming harder to identify and is growing dangerously.
Both sides provide metrics and data that purport to prove their point. Who should we believe?
I would like to argue this proposition from a new point of view -- from the point of view of those of us who are not computer scientists and cannot interpret the impenetrable computer code that underlies cyber theft, and with the added knowledge of the recent shocking revelations about undetected hacking.
Rather than a mathematical or data driven argument, I will present a theoretical argument. Instead of data, I will provide logic.
Let's start with indisputable facts:
- The online advertising marketplace trades over $300 billion annually via computer systems.
- Every person, business, or government agency that has ever been hacked had authoritative assurances that it was secure -- until it turned out it wasn't.
- There are a multitude of ways that criminal actors have discovered for extracting money from the adtech ecosystem.
- Gaming the programmatic ecosystem (which transacts about 80% of online ad activity) has been shown to be astoundingly simple.
- There is no international governing authority, and consequently there are no cross-border penalties, for committing online ad fraud.
Now some assertions on my part:
It is folly to believe that hackers who can penetrate systems protected by the US military’s Cyber Command, the
National Security Agency, and
the Department of Homeland Security without detection could not easily penetrate adtech systems without detection.
There are governments in the world with both very sophisticated technology operations and economies that would massively benefit from the addition of billions of dollars.
Now some logic:
If the Cyber Command, the
NSA, and
the Department of Homeland Security can be fooled, I don't think it's a stretch to assume that fraud detection software can also be fooled. Consequently, if state sponsored hackers are fiddling the adtech ecosystem, it's likely that ad fraud detection systems aren't seeing it.
It would be amazing if state sponsored cyber criminals didn't view the adtech marketplace as ridiculously easy pickings and even more delicious since there are no consequences for being discovered.
Some conclusions:
If state sponsored penetration of adtech systems exist, the commercial fraud detection companies should be considered seriously overmatched. And, of course, the bold assertions of trade organizations, agencies or marketers are no more reliable than those of the fraud detection companies they rely on.
While we know that criminals and criminal organizations are active in stealing money from the adtech systems, we don't know if governments are. In light of recent revelations, however, it seems highly likely that state sponsored cyber operations would be powerfully attracted to the tens of billions of dollars that the adtech ecosystem is unwittingly dangling in front of them. If so, ad fraud is probably a lot harder to detect and a lot larger than anyone thinks it is.
Let's boil this down to two simple questions...
If you were a bad guy, and you could easily steal billions of dollars with a tiny possibility of detection and no possibility of consequences even if you were detected, why wouldn't you?
If you are a marketer spending substantially on digital advertising, what reason do you have for believing the metrics you're getting?
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 and LinkedIn. Here is a recap of some of the comments, and my reaction to them.
- Several people pointed me to studies that they believe prove the case. The ironic thing is that these are studies I myself have used to argue in favor of the proposition. But in trying to be intellectually honest with myself, while I personally believe the findings of the studies, I see imperfections in the methodologies that, in my opinion, would disqualify these studies as rigorous science to a meticulous researcher.
Principal among the imperfections is the assessment of creativity. In order to get a scientifically valid understanding of the effect of creativity on effectiveness we need to start with a pure assessment of creativity. Awards or other forms of industry recognition do not meet my standard of scientific validity. Here's why. Let's assume, as the awards shows do, for the sake of argument that it is possible for experts to competently assign assessments of creativity. In many, if not most cases, the people involved in evaluating creativity may have been exposed to the advertising and, directly or indirectly, to commentary about the advertising for a year or more. They also may have knowledge of the agencies or individuals who are responsible for the advertising and the creative reputations of these agencies or individuals. If this is the case, their evaluation of creativity may have been contaminated by cultural expectations or knowledge of, or inferences about, the effectiveness of the advertising.
If we are to be rigorous in our assessment of creativity our methodology needs to adhere to the accepted standards for all other types of rigorous research. In which case the experts assigned to assessing creativity should be required to do so blind. They should do so without knowing the following:
- Who created the advertising - Any commentary on the advertising - Any knowledge of the success or failure of the brand in question
This is the only way we can get a pure assessment of creativity without the unconscious contamination of outside influences or a priori inferences of success by the judges.
Once we have a rigorous, uncontaminated assessment of creativity, we can compare that to business results and get an unambiguous answer to our question (at least in my opinion.)
- Several people commented that the only criterion for creativity in advertising is sales success. I reject this out of hand. Without getting into a deep philosophical discussion, let me give three simple reasons why this is not acceptable to me.
First, I would point to the argument made by Byron Sharp in "How Brands Grow" that one of advertising's primary functions is notnecessarily to grow sales, but to maintain sales and market share. Or as he says, keep the airplane at 35,000 feet. In a highly competitive world, it can take an effective advertising effort just to keep many high-flying brands aloft. This is rarely taken into account in most analyses of ad effectiveness.
Second, I would argue that the long-term effect of advertising on brand success is very hard to tease out of sales results that are calculated on shorter time scales.
Sales effectiveness over the course of the time periods taken into account by awards shows is not necessarily indicative of the big picture effectiveness of the advertising in question. I will once again defer to Prof. Sharp as well as Mark Ritson and Binet and Field who all make a compelling case for assessing the effectiveness of advertising over years (by the way, if you want to hear a so-called marketing expert who seems to be completely ignorant of these effects, listen to this idiot explain why TV advertising doesn't work.)
Third, one of the things that makes advertising a fascinating subject (and a
frustrating one to practitioners) is the role of probability. While I
firmly believe that creativity in advertising is a massive advantage
over banality, I also recognize that advertising I deem highly creative
has an inconvenient record of failure. In advertising there are no alwayses or nevers, only likelihoods and probabilities. I think I can safely predict that when the day comes that I am satisfied I
have seen a scientifically valid description of the relationship between
creativity and effectiveness, creativity will be found to be not a
guarantee of advertising success, just a more likely outcome.
Furthermore, and perhaps most important of all, if you assert that the only criterion for creativity is effectiveness, then you are trapped in a tautology: Creative advertising is more effective because effective advertising is, by definition, more creative.
- Inevitably, there were the dreary semantic arguments. What do we mean by "creative?" What do we mean by "effective." I don't want to go down that rabbit hole because there is no way out. Let me just assert (without an ounce of proof) that competent ad people know what we mean by "creative" and competent business people know what we mean by "effective." Let's leave it at that.
Just as in any form of art or craft, creativity is often
experienced subjectively. But that doesn't mean it has no objective
reality. To define creativity strictly as a function of sales success is to reject creativity as an objective reality. To do so in advertising is
no different from repudiating it in all forms of art, music, and
literature. Advertising may not have the same goals or gravitas as art,
music, or literature, but it can still be measured by the same standards
of excellence. It also can be subject to the same pitfalls. Creativity
without purpose can soon become indistinguishable from self-indulgence.
Let me repeat what I said last week. I am not a scholar on the subject
of advertising research and I am not aware of all the literature on it. Maybe there
exists a study I am not aware of that proves the case and would meet my personal standard of scientific
rigor. In fact, I hope that somewhere there is.
Until then I will be stuck in my personal predicament. Do I believe creative advertising is really more effective than mundane advertising? Without question. Can I prove it to you? Not exactly.
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 creative
director I am a strong believer in the power of creativity in
advertising. In fact, every neuron in my tiny little brain is committed
to this belief.
But there is another part of my brain (the part
that used to teach science) that tries to remind me about intellectual
honesty, and keeps saying to me, "How do you know this?"
I am not
a scholar on this subject. I have not gone through all the literature
and all the studies. But I have been exposed to some of the research on
the subject and it worries me.
The studies that I have seen and
read generally seem to take the following form. The researcher starts
with a group of ads that have been recognized as exceptionally creative
by experts or by respected awards organizations and compares their
real-world business effectiveness to advertising that has not been
recognized as such. The results are often convincing, and the "creative"
ads exhibit significantly superior effectiveness.
An argument one could make against this methodology (which I will not
make) is that it is dependent on two factors that ought not be taken at
face value. First, that the experts and award committees are actually
able to accurately discern levels of creativity. Creativity is a
notoriously difficult thing to define and the idea that the people who
have been tasked with defining it are particularly qualified to do so is
a difficult case to prove.
The second argument against this
methodology is about the business results that are used to measure
effectiveness. How do we know they are reliable? As someone who has
written more than his share of case histories, I am very sensitive to
the effect that imaginative writing can play in the description of
success.
If the people assessing creativity are not uniquely
qualified to do so, and if the measures of effectiveness are not wholly
reliable, then the conclusions cannot be taken seriously.
But I am
not going to criticize the methodology on this basis. For the sake of
argument, let's assume that the experts and awards committees are fully
qualified to define and assess creativity and the metrics that are used
to define business success are fully accurate.
I still have a problem.
Creative
awards are usually presented in the year following the initiation of a
campaign. You can't give awards for advertising created in 2020 until
the year is over. Consequently, awards committees and experts usually
don't get together to make their determinations until "awards season" a
few months into the following year.
So there can be a lag time of
between 12 and 18 months between the time a campaign launches and the
determination of its level of "creativity" by the experts. In this lag
period there is every opportunity for the people who are going to be
charged with determining creativity at a later date to be exposed to
business results of campaigns. Trade publications, advertising insiders,
the business section of newspapers, and industry gossip are reporting
on winners and losers every day of the year.
It is highly likely
that the experts are reading and hearing reports of advertising
successes and failures throughout the year. By the time they are tasked
with determining levels of creativity, the experts and the awards
committees have a very good idea of what campaigns produced highly
effective advertising the previous year and what campaigns fell flat. Is
it realistic to expect these people to ignore what they know about
success and failure when they are assessing levels of creativity?
I
find that hard to believe. It seems to me only natural that an
individual will give higher grades for creativity to a campaign she
knows to have been effective than to one she knows to have bombed. It
seems highly unlikely that an awards judge will deem a campaign very
creative if he knows the campaign was a disaster, the agency was fired,
the marketing director replaced and the campaign pulled off the air.
I
am not implying that experts and awards committees are remiss in their
duties or unprincipled in their decision making. I am merely suggesting
that they are human. The likelihood that a human will take something he
knows to have been a massive failure and compare it favorably to
something he knows to have been a massive success is not high.
If
this is the case, then the process can be, to a worrying degree, a
tautology. Campaigns known to have been effective are presented as being
highly creative, and campaigns thusly deemed highly creative are
presented as proof of superior effectiveness.
It can be a very simple but obscure example of circular logic.
I
still firmly believe that creativity is the single most important
determination of advertising effectiveness. But I wish I had a more
substantial, scientific basis for that belief.
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 sofa to drool on. Oh, and a little gratitude.
Gratitude,
by the way, is a commodity in very short supply. Regrettably, we seem
to have mountains of expectation but not much in the way of
appreciation. It's a socially transmitted disease.
So this Thanksgiving let's put aside harsh judgments for a day or two. Thank a fireman. Give a bum a buck. Kiss an in-law.
I
don't like Puritans of any stripe, but I like the idea of them having
the Indians over for dinner. I know the detente didn't last too long,
but any day you're eating sweet potatoes instead of shooting off muskets
is a good day.
Be grateful that you have shoes. Be thankful that your cat is healthy. Compliment someone's posture.
If
you can't do any of that stuff, then at least give thanks that you
won't be dining with Whoopi Goldberg or Donald Trump. That alone should
be enough.
Finally, do yourself a favor -- quit whining. That's my job.
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 weighted toward short-term promotional advertising.
The problem with this is that for a great many marketers surviving this week is a more compelling prospect than the promise of a magnificent brand five years from now. Many businesses simply can't afford to do advertising that doesn't deliver instant returns.
This is not just an unpleasant reality of business, it is a fact of life. Short term and long term objectives are not always aligned. There are many things we do for short term benefits that are harmful in the long term.
The world would be a much simpler, more reasonable place if we could abandon the habits that make life livable in the short run, and precarious in the long run. Sadly, the world doesn't work that way.
Tactics can often be a matter of life and death, while strategy is often a luxury. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everyone has a strategy until they get hit."
Having spent centuries in the ad business, one thing I learned is that the tactical always seems to drive out the strategic. When the rubber meets the road, and decisions about spending money have to be made, if financial resources are scarce, the tactical always wins.
One of the most powerful and unrecognized benefits of a successful brand is the financial wherewithal to support both tactical and strategic advertising. Most businesses don't have the means to do this.
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, Ford, Chevy, AT&T, Tide, Crest, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, Toyota, Tylenol, Kleenex, Budweiser... OK, I'll stop.
Things are a lot more complicated these days. Media has fractionalized into much smaller entities while media consumption has increased significantly. It is not nearly as easy as it once was to reach mass audiences. While you once only had to choose among 3 or 4 video (TV) options, today you have hundreds. While you once had a few dozen print options to analyze, today there are literally millions of websites serving a similar function. A media strategist's job is far more daunting.
One of the results of this change in media reality has been a change in media strategy. Whereas brand builders once believed that wide reach was essential to building a dominant brand, this belief has gone out of fashion. It has been replaced by the belief that the most effective use of media is one-to-one, personalized messages.
I would like to offer, for your consideration, an alternative point of view.
It is beyond question that it is much harder for brand builders to reach mass audiences these days. But I would like to question the presumption that because reaching mass audiences has become more difficult, pivoting to a personalized, one-to-one media strategy is the correct response.
In other words, have we recognized the disease but prescribed the wrong medication? The fact that online media technology now allows us to tailor
messages to individuals, doesn't necessarily mean it's a better idea. The fact that it's more convenient doesn't necessarily make it more suited to the job of building brands.
And the fact that mass reach is much harder to achieve does not mean that it is a bad strategy. It just means that it takes more work and perhaps it takes a more sophisticated strategy - and more sophisticated strategists - to execute properly.
Sadly, we have taken media strategy in the opposite direction. Despite the extraordinary complexity of the digital media ecosystem we have substantially tethered our media strategists to the most crude and unsophisticated aspirations -- high click rates and low CPMs. You can sit in media meetings for months listening to highfalutin' jargon, you can suffer endless data analyses, you can scrutinize this-ographics and that-ographics, but in the end when the reports come in and the chips are on the table, most likely it's going to come down to the crudest, least sophisticated and least challenging of outcomes -- clicks and CPMs.
This is evidence that the principles of brand building have been subsumed by the practices of the direct marketing industry.
The fact that brands that were built in advertising's era of wide reach like the aforementioned McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi, Nike,
Apple, Ford, Chevy, AT&T, Tide, Crest, Bank of America, Visa,
MasterCard, Toyota, Tylenol, Kleenex, Budweiser...still dominate their categories a couple of decades after digital personalization became a "thing," ought to at least give us pause to consider that perhaps we have misdiagnosed the situation.
There is also evidence outside advertising that mass reach is an essential ingredient to brand dominance. Newer mega-brands like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla, who were launched without huge advertising budgets, have profited from widespread media attention. They've achieved wide public recognition through PR, news stories worth billions, the shenanigans of ceo's, and the actions of investors and business commentators. Although not necessarily tied to advertising, their successes are also evidence of the power of mass attention in media.
One of the key ingredients in creating a dominant brand is fame. As I suggested in Advertising For Skeptics...
"There are several ways for brands to achieve fame. Some do it by being clearly superior and generating exceptional word of mouth. This is obviously the best way to become famous. Some get lucky. They’re good copy. In their formative years these brands spent very little on marketing but (it was) hard to open the business section without finding references to them.
Others become famous through imaginative PR initiatives, clever stunts, the charismatic personalities of their leaders, or a combination of these things. There are many ways to achieve fame. Sadly, positive word of mouth is wonderful, but rarely manageable. The likelihood of the press falling in love with you is one tick above zero. Imaginative PR is invaluable but very hard to come by. And charismatic leaders are one in a thousand and, let’s be honest, usually assholes. The most expensive way to become famous is through advertising. It is the most expensive, but also the most reliable. It is the only avenue to fame that you can buy your way into."
It may be that mass reach is still the key to building a dominant brand, but we need more sophisticated marketers and more sophisticated media strategists to show us how to achieve wide reach economically in an era of media fragmentation.
What we have a hard time finding are huge dominant
brands who have achieved their stature through one-to-one, personalized
media.
Instead of giving up on mass media because it is expensive and difficult to achieve, and defaulting to a problematic and largely unproven theory of personalized media, perhaps we need some smart people to create a better model of what mass reach in the modern advertising world looks like.
The essence of building a dominant brand has not changed -- because human nature has not changed. We are still far more likely to purchase products we are familiar with and we believe are socially acceptable.
To those who think narrowly-focused, targeted media are more powerful than mass reach in building dominant brands, I would continue to pose this question: Do you think Donald Trump would be president if The Apprentice had been a webinar?
"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 minute.
The
horrible murder of George Floyd was treated by the marketing industry
this week as an opportunity to express sincere desire for change. Sadly,
it also exposed our talent for hypocrisy.
While brand marketers
were exhorting us to end practices that cause social damage to black
Americans, they were themselves deeply engaged in some of the most
pernicious practices.
I have my own standard for evaluating a
company's true commitment to social justice. It is this: to what
extremes does it go to avoid paying taxes?
Taxation may be
unpleasant. Tax dollars are often squandered on idiotic schemes. Paying
taxes may reduce a corporation's returns to investors. But taxation is
by far the most potent source of resources for societies to redress
social ills. Taxation funds education. Taxation funds housing. Taxation
funds health initiatives. Taxation funds social services.
There is
no way around this -- when corporations take extraordinary measures to
avoid paying taxes, they are doing extraordinary harm to citizens who
have the greatest need for education, housing, health, and social services. If brands really believe that Black Lives Matter they must
stop starving our country of the resources to improve black lives by
hiding their taxable profits in offshore tax havens. Like it or not, to a
substantial degree, taxation is the engine that funds social justice.
There
will be those who say that these tax dodges are perfectly legal. In
many cases they are. This fact impresses me not one bit. If you're going
to use social media or paid media to pound your chest about social
justice, you have a higher responsibility than just to obey the letter
of the law. There is little honor in being legally compliant and
ethically opportunistic.
Dear business colleagues -- if you really
want to help heal this country here's step one: Pay your fucking taxes.
Until you're willing to do that, please instruct your marketing
departments to spare us the high-minded pieties.
Let's make this so simple that even a ceo can understand it: You can't be for social justice and against paying taxes.
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 Treverton, who distinguished between two kinds
of problems: puzzles and mysteries. His distinctions have great value
for us.
Puzzles, he wrote, are problems for which there
is not enough information. An example of a puzzle: Where is Jimmy Hoffa
buried? If we had more information, we would know the answer. If
someone told us “Jimmy Hoffa is buried in New Jersey,” we’d know a
little more than we know now. If they said,“He’s buried in northern New
Jersey,” we’d know even more. If they said,“He’s buried in the
Meadowlands,” we’d have an answer to our puzzle.
On the
other hand, there are mysteries. Mysteries are problems for which we
have plenty of information, but no accurate analysis. An example of a
mystery: Why do inner-city schools do such a crappy job of educating kids? There are
thousands of studies. Every education department of every university in
America has done a study on this; every committee of Congress has done a
report on it; every editorial writer has a theory about it, and every
pundit has an opinion. And yet, we have no definitive answer. More
studies and more information are not likely to yield an answer. What is
needed is an accurate analysis of the voluminous information that
already exists.
Gladwell gives a wonderful example of
the importance of distinguishing between puzzles and mysteries. In 1943,
during World War II, the Allies were concerned about Germany’s boast of
having developed a “superweapon.” Did they really have a superweapon,
or was it just propaganda? There were two ways to deal with this
problem. It could be dealt with as a puzzle, and spies could be sent out
to gather more information. Or it could be dealt with as a mystery, and
information the Allies already had could be analyzed.
Fortunately,
American intelligence had a bunch of brainiacs who were known as “the
screwball division.” They were “slightly batty geniuses” who were
brilliant at analyzing information that was readily available to anyone.
So instead of sending out spies disguised in mustaches to infiltrate
German munition factories, the intelligence community gave the brainiacs
German newspapers and radio broadcasts. These guys pored over the
information that already existed and accurately predicted that the
Germans had, in fact, developed a new weapon, the V-1 rocket. And they
also accurately predicted both that it had been stalled in development
and when it would be ready.
As a matter of fact, in
retrospective analysis, these guys had been correct an amazing 81% of
the time in their analyses during the war. A success rate many times
higher than the spies.
How does this apply to us? We ad
people are almost always tasked by our clients with solving some
variation of the following problem: How do we sell more stuff? Sometimes it is a subset of that question like -- who is our target
customer? or, what should our primary ad medium be? or, which of these campaigns
should we go with? or, what should our brand position be?
One hundred
percent of the time these problems are dealt with as puzzles, not
mysteries. We always assume that one more study will yield the magic
answer. Research is commissioned. Spies are sent out to live with
customers, or to interview them, or hold group discussions with them.
The
results of these endeavors are all too frequently disappointing. The methodologies are usually dressed up to appear scientifically bullet-proof. But the initial enthusiasm for the process often recedes when the answers aren't conclusive or unimpressive real-world results start rolling in.
On the
other hand, most companies have stacks of research and reams of data
about their customers and about their industry. This mountain of
existing information is almost never consulted. In my
entire career, I have never seen or heard a marketing problem treated as a
mystery. I have never once heard a marketing officer say,“You know, we
have all this research we’ve done over the years and all this data from
the industry. Before we do more research, I want someone to go through
this stuff and tell me what it means.”
Why do we prefer
to deal with business problems as puzzles rather than mysteries? Because it's easier. Going through thousands of pages and discerning patterns is hard work -- the important patterns are not usually visible on the surface. It requires a special intelligence to
be able to examine imprecise, unfiltered, inconclusive, often contradictory
information and come up with a correct analysis.
It is much more comforting to send a
researcher or planner out with a fake mustache and give her six weeks to
come back with an answer. Unfortunately, as we all have experienced, an alarming amount of the research we do yields little of actionable value. The following year the report becomes part of the
dusty heap of poorly analyzed information sitting around adding to
the mystery.
So what are we to do?
The
key is to break down the tyranny of titles and find out who our
"slightly batty geniuses" are. Simply because an individual has the title
of “account planner” or “research director” or "global strategy guru" or “CMO” doesn’t make him an expert detective. In my experience, planners and
researchers tend to be puzzle doers, not mystery solvers.
However,
there are people who are just naturally good at solving mysteries.
They may come from the
accounting department or the creative department or the media department
or the sales department. We need to identify these
people in our organizations.
Before spies are sent out, these people
need to be exposed to all the information that exists and allowed to
weigh in on the questions we’re all trying to solve.
The hard part of solving marketing problems is not getting more
information, it’s figuring out what the information we already have
means.
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 everything," I have some dispiriting thoughts. It won't. Circumstances change but human nature doesn't.
Did the Bubonic Plague make our species more kind, gentle and selfless? Did the Spanish Flu? Did World War I? Did WWII?
At best, disasters lead to temporary outpourings of kindness, gentility, and good deeds. For those who think the CV-19 experience has made us less selfish and more community-minded, I invite you to come to California and try to buy some toilet paper.
One thing every sensible marketer learns very quickly is that as a rule people act in their own self-interest. You may think this cold and disheartening - and it probably is - but it is nonetheless true.
Are there examples of amazing people doing incredible things for others at the expense of their own safety? Yes, and we should be forever grateful for the existence of these wonderful people.
Are there examples of average people being especially thoughtful in their behavior. Yes, and we should be proud of that.
But will we be a changed and chastened species when this is all over? I doubt it. Our memories are short and soon after the CV-19 experience is gone, I am pretty sure we will revert to the usual norms of unpleasant, irresponsible behavior.
The same is true in advertising. For now, many of our major marketers are trying to put their best feet forward with responsible, gentle advertising. This won't last long. Nor will our industry's self-control. Soon the ad industry will be leveraging the CV-19 experience to our advantage. As I wrote 10 years ago in a piece in Adweek entitled Ads in the Age of Hysteria...
"...if there’s one thing we ad hacks understand, it’s the relationship
between anxiety and cash flow. We’ve spent decades creating anxiety in
consumers... Now we can apply the same principles to our clients. And so we have
created an ongoing hysteria-fest called The Thing That Will Change
Everything. The object is to keep marketers in a constant state of
anxiety about the future.
The more we can convince them that everything is changing around them —
and they need us to interpret the changes — the longer we stay employed."
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 more these branding experts can link "branding" to business success, the more of a market they are creating for their services.
First of all, I don't like the word branding. It's like so many words in the dreadful lexicon of marketing -- far too open to interpretation to mean anything specific. There is nothing stupid you can do with a logo that can't be excused as "branding."
Yet, despite my misgivings about branding "experts," I believe that creating a well-known, desirable brand is the highest achievement of advertising. So what the hell are we talking about here? Let's do a little thinking.
As stated above, creating a well-known, desirable brand is the highest attainment of advertising. There are people who would disagree and say that creating a best-selling product is advertising's highest attainment. They are wrong. Advertising alone cannot create a best-selling brand or product. There
are far too many elements in marketing, and business in general, that influence product sales. Advertising cannot affect product quality, distribution, pricing, product design, etc. As Mark Ritson often points out, marketing is a lot more than communication.
In the long run, no amount of brilliant advertising and its concomitant brand value can overcome a shitty, ugly product that tastes bad, is hard to find and is unaffordable or unprofitable.
And yet brand babblers seem to think that every business problem is a branding problem. They rattle on and on about the power of "the brand" until you want to shoot yourself. Or them. They inflate the importance of what they do and disguise their ignorance of the complex nature of business success, behind a vague, non-specific curtain - the magical mystery module of "branding."
Many well-known and respected brands have died ignominious deaths (e.g., Polaroid, Oldsmobile, Kodak) -- not necessarily because their "branding" sucked, but because either their products couldn't cut it anymore, or they fell behind the competition, or their financials were cockeyed, or some non-communication aspects of their marketing strategy were inadequate.
To wit, I suspect that one of the economic consequences of the current CV tragedy will be the demise of several "major brands" who have been living on investor money instead of operational income.
Successful "branding" can help make a product more desirable and it can raise the perceived value of a product. In general it can raise the likelihood that a business or product will be successful.
Yes, creating a desirable brand is the highest achievement of advertising, but...
No, creating a desirable brand is not nearly a guarantee of business success.
There are a lot of contingencies in creating a successful business. There are nuts and bolts, and wind, rain, and snow, and salt and pepper, and a little of this and a lot of that.
Despite the implications and assertions of brand babblers, in no way does successful "branding" lead inexorably to a successful business. Getting "the brand" right is a significant component of marketing success, but you gotta get a whole lot of other things right first.
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 enough. In 1700 the average Brit consumed about 4 pounds of sugar a year. By 1900 the annual per capita consumption was 90 pounds.
Until experience kicks in you never know what the effects are going to be. At first, they didn't know about the effects sugar had on teeth.
It is reported that Queen Elizabeth's teeth turned black from sugar. Not that long ago, many women in England had their teeth pulled in their twenties.
The point is, when something comes along that magically satisfies a craving there can be harsh and unintended consequences.
In the 20th century the advertising industry had a gaping hole. We had very little scientifically reliable information on the efficacy of advertising. Mostly what we had were anecdotes and case histories - in other words, bullshit tarted up to look like facts.
The 21st century brought us technology. And with technology came the promise of science and an enormous appetite for data, measurement, and mathematics.
Data, measurement, and mathematics are important aspects of advertising when consumed in reasonable quantities. But when the craving for numbers becomes a mania, there are sure to be unintended consequences.
We humans are emotional creatures. The release from deprivation tends to create an obsession for that of which we have been deprived. Ask any sailor.
We ad humans have been kicked around for so long because our discipline has been devoid of the benefits of reliable science, that when technology came along we went from 4 pounds to 90 in about three seconds. We are swallowing all the technology we can stuff into our mouths as quickly as we can regardless of its relevance, reliability, authenticity, or the detrimental effects (corruption, fraud, scandals, political and social disruption, the deteriorating quality of our product) it is having on our industry.
Desperately hungry for the gratification of science, we are gorging on technology and finding that our frenzied indulgence is rotting our teeth.
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 relevant, more timely, and more likable.
Our ability to listen to consumer conversations through social media and react quickly couldn’t help but connect brands more closely with their customers.
The opportunity for people to interact with media was certain to make advertising more engaging.
And yet, by the mostly unanimous opinion of people inside and outside the ad business, the past decade has been a shit show...
Rather than creating advertising that is “more relevant, more timely and more likable” we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided. The New York Times says, “The Advertising Industry Has A Problem: People Hate Ads”
Marketers are taking advertising in-house or hiring consulting firms to do what we once did
Public regard for our industry is at an all-time low
The ANA claims corruption in our industry is "pervasive"
Between one and two billion devices are reportedly armed with ad blockers
Regulators and governments are on our ass with a vengeance
Tens of billions are being stolen by ad fraud
Scandals involving privacy and brand safety are reported every week
Social media is undermining confidence in democratic institutions
Consumers are becoming disgusted with tracking and spying
What went wrong? Pretty much everything.
I hope this book will give you some things to think about that are antithetical to much of what the advertising and marketing industry now take for granted.
If you've ever wanted to stand up at a marketing meeting and scream, I can't stand this bullshit anymore...
If you've ever suspected that advertising people don't really know things they think they know...
If you've ever had the feeling that there are famous people in our business walking around with nothing but a powerpointful of jargon and bullshit...
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 mistake, let's talk about baseball.
In Major League Baseball's National League, pitchers have to hit. They are very bad hitters. Not because they lack athletic ability, but because they usually didn't hit much, if at all, in high school, college, or minor leagues. Hitting major league pitching is indescribably hard and if you rarely hit as an amateur coming into the major leagues and trying to hit is a nightmare.
Because pitchers are such bad hitters, National League teams usually have between 3 and 5 automatic outs in every game they play. This is a significant hardship because in every 9-inning game you only get 27 outs.
But baseball people are smart. They don't spend a lot of time trying to teach pitchers how to hit. Yes, they have them take batting practice to keep their timing up, but they figure that there's a limited amount of time to be spent in training, and it's best spent improving a pitcher's pitching technique rather than his hitting technique. In other words, there's more benefit in improving what he does well than in trying to improve what he does badly. Many marketers don't understand this.
Every company has strengths and weaknesses. The temptation to focus immoderate amounts of time, energy, and money on tweaking weaknesses rather than maximizing strengths can be overwhelming. To wit...
For many years I did advertising and marketing work for a large fast food corporation. Marketing regimes at large corporations like this don't usually last long. In my 16 years in their stable of agencies, I lived through several marketing regimes. As each new marketing regime took control it was inevitable that they would look at research and discover that - surprise! - they did not score well with consumers on healthfulness. What fast food company does? And the wild goose chase would begin.
Instead of focusing on improving what they could do well and try to deliver a better hamburger in a cleaner store in less time, they would go on a "let's pretend we're healthy" kick which would go nowhere. Months of work and zillions of dollars would be wasted because time and money spent on a non-productive exercise was not spent on making what they could be good at better.
When new marketing "leadership" shows up at a successful brand, it is highly likely that the very first thing they will do is try to identify what "the problems" are. It makes them seem smart. If left unchecked this inevitably leads to trying to fix what the company does poorly instead of maximizing what the company can do well.
In other words, they try to turn pitchers into hitters.
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 been "interactivity." Consumers who could barely stand to watch or read ads anymore were suddenly going to want to interact with them and join conversations about them.
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Georgia; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
Because people wanted to interact with pop musicians, famous athletes, and movies stars we thought they'd want to interact with us. Not.
The idea that the same consumer who was gleefully clicking her remote to escapefrom TV ads was going to joyfully click her mouse to interactwith online ads is going to go down as one of the great marketing fantasies of all time.
Our second dumbest idea is "personalization." Somewhere marketers got the idea that personalized one-to-one targeting is superior to mass media reach. (I'll have a lot to say about this in my new book "Advertising For Skeptics" set to be published within the next few weeks -- start saving now!)
Amazingly, the same people who babble on about "personalization" also won't shut up about "storytelling." They can't see the contradiction. They don't understand that storytelling and personalization are enemies. Storytelling is about shared, universal narratives. Personalization is about individualized messages.
Jesus on the cross, Joan of Arc at the stake, George Washington and the cherry tree are not "personalized." They are powerful storytelling because they are universal. They are known by masses of people. That's their power.
If you want to create successful stories you have to tell them out loud and in public. If you want to get all personal you have to do it privately.
We have become so absorbed in our own insular feedback loop that we have lost any sense of the connection marketing has to the basics of human communication. You can't be pro-storytelling and anti-mass media.
As usual the marketing industry is so far up its own ass with its new technology toys that technology trumps common sense. The fact that we can do personalized, one-to-one advertising is not a compelling reason why we should.
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 man in history."
3. January: Zuckerberg writes a Wall Street Journal op ed defending Facebook and gets roundly roasted for it.
4. January: British health minister threatens to close down social media after 14-year-old girl commits suicide after seeing disturbing content on Facebook-owned Instagram.
5. February: It was discovered that Facebook was paying kids as young as 13 to install spyware on their phones.
6. February: A committee of Parliament in England denounced Facebook as "digital gangsters" and said, "Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts'..."
7. February: The Wall Street Journal discovered that people were entering private information into apps and, unknown to them, the apps were feeding the info to Facebook.
8. March: Federal investigators summoned a grand jury to investigate criminal implications of Facebook's agreement with over 100 tech companies to provide them with information about 100s of millions of FB users without their knowledge or consent.
9. March: Facebook leaves hundreds of millions of user passwords unencrypted.
10. March: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sued Facebook for allowing "advertisers to exclude people from seeing housing ads based on their race, religion, background and other characteristics"
11. March: In the wake of the massacre of 50 people in New Zealand which was live-streamed on FB, the Prime Minister of Australia threatened to jail social media execs.
12: April: It was discovered that a Mexican company had stored over 500 million Facebook records in plain site on the Amazon cloud for anyone to access.
13: April: Bloomberg reported that almost 400,000 crooks have been using Facebook for as long as eight years as a marketplace to buy and sell criminal materials.
14: April: The Daily Beast reported that "Child Brides in Africa Are Advertised on Facebook and Sold to Old Men."
15. April: The New York Times reported that "Regulators on four continents are preparing for a long-awaited showdown with Facebook..."
16. May: In an article in the NY Times, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, called for its breakup.
17: July: FTC fines Facebook $5 billion for Cambridge Analytica scandal.
18: August: Netflix airs "The Great Hack" about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. PBS airs "The Facebook Dilemma," savaging the company and claiming it has blood on its hands.
19: September: TechCrunch found another unprotected data base online which contained the phone numbers and user IDs of 419 million Facebook users.
20: September: The BBC reported that a study by Privacy International determined that "Intimate data, including when people have had sex, is being shared with Facebook."
21: September: Massachusetts attorney general found that Facebook lied when they said they suspended 400 apps to remediate after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In fact, they suspended 69,000 questionable apps.
22: September: A study conducted by researchers at Oxford University found that "Facebook remains the No. 1 social network for disinformation...Organized propaganda campaigns were found on the platform in 56 countries."
23: October: Facebook agreed to pay a group of advertisers $40 million to settle a suit which claimed that Facebook had inflated its video metrics by as much as 900%.
24: October: Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University defending Facebook's policy of airing political advertising they know to be false.
25: October: BuzzFeed reported "How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers."
26: October: P&G announced that they had built their own data base of 1.5 billion people because they don't trust the numbers of Facebook or Google.
27: November: Aaron Sorkin, writer of the movie "The Social Network," savaged Zuckerberg's "free speech" hypocrisy in a NY Times op ed.
28: December: CNET reported "more than 267 million Facebook user phone numbers, names and user IDs were exposed in a database that anyone could access online."
29: December: In response to an inquiry from two U.S. Senators, Facebook admitted it can track peoples' location even if they opt out of tracking.
My favorite Zuckerberg quote: "I've developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems."
I can't help but wonder what important problems Mr. Zuckerberg thinks he's solved.
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Georgia; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
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 have to endure The 10 Best Everything of the Year, but this year we have also to endure the The 10 Best Everything of the Decade.
For some reason that I can't fathom the advertising and marketing industries seem to be particularly fond of these idiotic lists. I guess it has something to do with click bait. The trade rag publishers have probably discovered that everyone wants to know who they have dubbed The Best Influencer Marketing Follower Fraud Celebrity of the Year or something.
Not being one to miss out on an opportunity to be stupid, I have a list of categories that I don't think have been covered. So here we go... The 10 Best Remaining Marketing Subjects for 10 Best Lists of the Decade.
The 10 Most Frightening Retweets of the Year
Best Use of Metaphor in an Email Subject Line of the Year
10 Most Incomprehensible Unsubscribe Pages of the Year
Best Insincere Facebook Birthday Wish of the Year
The 10 Most Fascinating Articles About CMOs of the Decade
10 Most Memorable Privacy Policy Updates of the Year
5 Most Poetic LinkedIn Articles about Blockchain of the Decade
10 Best Mutilations of the Name "Zuckerberg" of the Year
10 Most-Unemployable-People-Who-Started-a-Podcast-this-Decade of the Year
10 Best Years of the Decade
And, as always, the most heartfelt use of the term...Happy New Year!
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 otherheroic marketing and advertising practitioners. Since it's also a year that ends in a 9, they're also giving awards to The Same Truckload Of Brilliant Geniuses Of The Decade.
I would like to start a new way to think about awards. I would like to recognize an ignored and underserved minority -- the invisibles.
My thinking goes like this. Having spent hundreds of years in the advertising business, there is no doubt in my mind that the advertising and marketing industries generate far more bad ideas that never get produced than good ideas that get produced. Anyone who has spent 10 minutes in an agency will agree with me.
This is why we have creative directors, account managers, and CMOs. Someone has to separate the wheat from the shit.
As a former creative director, I would estimate that for every ad I approved I turned down at least 10 (I'm sure some of my former colleagues will get a good hearty chuckle from that estimate, but for the sake of this essay, and in the spirit of the Holiday Season, let's assume I wasn't quite as big a prick as they might claim.)
The point I'm trying to make is that if the ratio of bad to good is somewhere near ten to one, there is a very large gap in our appreciation of the importance of saying no.
We celebrate the people who create good ideas, but we do not celebrate the people with the good sense to shit-can the bad ones. And yet, bad ideas may have as much potential to do harm as good ones have to do good.
Some valuable activities are highly visible -- like the creation of a wonderful ad idea, or a brilliant media idea. But other valuable activities are invisible -- like the rejection of dumb ones.
Imagine if someone at Pepsi had quietly said no to the Kendall Jenner monstrosity of a few years ago. That person would have invisibly delivered an enormous benefit to Pepsi, but she would never have been recognized for it. Imagine if someone at Peloton had the sense to say no to their dumbass spot. The invisible person would never be known, no less win an award, but would have contributed mightily.
So let's just take a minute to thank all the brilliant, creative, brave, and invisible people who, in the face of often strident and self-righteous opposition, had the good sense and balls to say no to stupid fucking ideas.
Then, of course, there is the other kind of invisible excellence. It is the wonderful work of highly talented people that does not get approved.
Among the ranks of the aforementioned creative directors, account managers, and CMOs there is no shortage of imbeciles. As anyone who has ever worked in business is surely aware, a highly-placed idiot can kill or cripple the excellent work of dozens of people.
A good deal of excellent, award-worthy work gets killed every year by the arbitrary stupidity of dimwits. (Once again, I'm sure some of my former colleagues are getting a good hearty chuckle from that but, again for the sake of this essay, and in the spirit of the Holiday Season, let's assume I wasn't quite as big a moron as they might claim.) The result is that there appears to be a much smaller pool of excellent ideas than there actually is.
I think there's a term for this called "survival bias." In other words, we believe there isn't much excellent work being done because only a fraction of it survives. The excellent work that gets killed or mutilated is invisible.
Imagine all the good ideas for Pepsi that must have died so that Kendall Jenner could live.
It is my belief that the invisible marketing and advertising contributions are at least as important to our industry as the visible contributions. The only problem is, well, they're invisible.
So to all the talented, sensible, and invisible people who contributed to our industry this year by saving us from bad ideas, and to the creatively excellent people with wonderful ideas that suffered ignominious invisibility at the hands of nitwits, thank you.
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 "stories" and helps me explain and expose one of the great logical errors of our industry. I call it the "untold stories" problem. Here's how it works.
Most of the information we get about the success or failure of advertising and marketing activities comes in the form of a story:
- A press release
- An article in a trade publication
- A feature in the business section or on a TV business report
- A case history presented at an industry conference or event
The stories that reach us are often superficial -- they are mostly just headlines lightly dusted with a few specifics, some meticulously curated numbers, and a generous helping of spin. This is because marketing strategies are valuable trade secrets and keeping them confidential is crucial to business success. You don't just give 'em away. As a result, the stories we get are often devoid of some important specifics that are key to understanding the true nature of the activity.
Nonetheless, for every story we are exposed to, there are a thousand untold stories we don't get to read or hear about. These are the non-spectacular stories, created in non-spectacular fashion, by non-spectacular brands -- in other words, they are about 99.9% of everything that ever happens in marketing.
I don't think it's terribly controversial to suggest that we are far more likely to hear success stories than failure stories. Ask any business reporter. The number of PR releases she gets about the brilliant new campaigns being launched will outnumber the releases she gets about the failure of campaigns by about a zillion to one.
After all, who wants to embarrass the CEO, alarm the Board, scare the shareholders, frighten the puppy dogs, and reveal themselves for the bewildered bumblers they are? It's a lot wiser to be forthcoming about your successes and circumspect about your failures.
However, when this tendency becomes terribly dangerous is not when it is applied to a specific case history, but when it is applied to primary information we get about marketing fundamentals in general (not just particular brand campaigns.)
I would wager great stacks of money that the untold stories of the mediocre performance of virtually all marketing activities outnumber the widely told stories of success by a hundred to one. This is doubly true of (but not limited to) the shiny new object activities like social media, content marketing, virtual reality, native advertising, "personalization," blockchain, and whatever new marketing miracle happens to be trending this week.
The narratives we are exposed to about marketing activities, and the belief we have in these activities, are profoundly skewed by the bias toward trumpeting success, not failure.
This is perilous. It leads to conferences, books and, god help us, Powerpoints, extolling the efficacy of undertakings based on wildly unrepresentative samples. It gives our entire industry a false impression of the value of these activities.
It leads us to throw money at expensive, wasteful tactics. And it reinforces the lemming-like attraction of naive marketers to the trendy fantasies that have dominated our industry for the past decade, often through widely read "success" stories.
It is not that the stories themselves aren't true. It is that the results being reported may be wildly divergent from the reality to be found in the total number of stories on the subject, the vast majority remaining untold.
Before you take any story about advertising or marketing as indicative of a general truth, you'd be wise to assume that just the fact that it is being told at all makes it likely that it is one or two standard deviations from normal. You should assume that the overwhelming number of stories that haven't been told on the subject aren't nearly as rosy.
In marketing, the untold stories are usually the real story.
.
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. Why? I think the answer goes something like this.
While you might like to have the better burger, it's more important that you have a burger that isn't risky. While you might like to stop at a place that is comfortable and relaxing, it's more important that you stop at a place that isn't icky.
McDonald's may not make a great burger, and it may not be the most lovely environment, but you have a high level of expectation that the burger won't make you sick and the place won't be icky.
In other words, Bubba's may very well make a better burger, but McDonald's is good enough and relatively risk free. The aversion to unknown risks trumps the likelihood of superiority.
So the question is, why do you believe McDonald's is good enough and safer? I think the answer is simple. McDonald's is famous. Fame creates many advantages.
In all the jabbering about marketing, and all the strategic gymnastics that marketers put themselves through, the simplest and most obvious objective of marketing should be to create fame. Brands that are famous have an enormous advantage over brands that aren't famous.
The world's largest, most successful brands -- the Apples, Nikes, Cokes, Pepsis, Toyotas, McDonald's, Tides, Budweisers, Doves, et al -- all have one thing in common -- they're famous. Does that mean that fame guarantees success? Absolutely not. But it makes the likelihood of success massively greater.
Those of you looking for holes in this argument will say it's circular. It's not the fame that's causing success, it's success that's causing fame. That argument is good for about 30 seconds until you realize that each of these brands spend billions every year to stay famous.
There are several ways for brands to achieve fame. Some get lucky. The press falls in love with them, follows them everywhere, and provides them with zillions of dollars of free exposure -- Google, Uber, Amazon, Tesla -- are examples. With very little marketing activity these brands became enormously famous. Others become famous through imaginative PR initiatives, clever stunts, or the charismatic personalities of their leaders. Or a combination of these things. There are many ways to achieve fame.
Sadly, the likelihood of the press falling in love with you is one tick above zero. Imaginative PR is wonderful to have but very rare to come by. And charismatic leaders are one in a thousand.
The most expensive way to become famous is through advertising. It is the most expensive, but also the most reliable. It is the only avenue to fame that you can buy your way into.
Those of you who know me probably know where I'm going next. Online advertising has not been very impressive at creating widespread fame. While there are certainly some brands who have achieved a level of fame through online advertising, after 25 years there are no Apples, Nikes, Cokes, Pepsis, Toyotas, or McDonald's.
The philosophy behind online advertising is deeply flawed. "Experts" tell us that highly personalized, precision targeted, one-to-one advertising is far more capable of performing successfully because it reaches “the right person, at the right place, at the right time.” This may be true if you have the least ambitious marketing goal -- to generate a click. However, if you have the highest marketing goal -- to build a successful brand -- I have seen no evidence that this is true. In fact, I have seen considerable evidence to the contrary.
Mass-media advertising is demonstrably more effective at brand building than precision targeted, highly individualized advertising. Personally targeted direct response advertising certainly has its uses. But the number of exceptionally famous brands created by direct response advertising is somewhere between zero and nothing. The number of exceptionally famous brands created by mass media is enormous.
Highly individualized advertising makes advertising a private, rather than public, experience. Online, we all live in our own little personalized, precision-targeted digi-world. This is not an environment that is conducive to growing a brand.
To a substantial degree, mass media advertising is public advertising and online media advertising is private advertising. It's hard to become famous in private.
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 sofa to drool on. Oh, and a little gratitude.
Gratitude, by the way, is a commodity in very short supply. Regrettably, we seem to have mountains of expectation but not much in the way of appreciation. It's a socially transmitted disease.
So this Thanksgiving let's put aside harsh judgments for a day or two. Thank a fireman. Give a bum a buck. Kiss an in-law.
I don't like Puritans of any stripe, but I like the idea of them having the Indians over for dinner. I know the detente didn't last too long, but any day you're eating sweet potatoes instead of shooting off muskets is a good day.
Be grateful that you have shoes. Be thankful that your cat is healthy. Compliment someone's posture.
If you can't do any of that stuff, then at least give thanks that you won't be dining with Whoopi Goldberg or Donald Trump. That alone should be enough.
Finally, do yourself a favor -- quit whining. That's my job.
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 thinking. The fascinating thing is that the cycle of delusion has been going on for almost 20 years and we still don't recognize it.
Here are the 6 stages of digital delusion:
1. The Miracle Is Acknowledged: It may be podcasting or virtual reality, blockchain or the Ice Bucket Challenge, Pokémon Go, QR Codes, or "content." Whatever it is, it is going to "change everything." It will be the focus of hysterical attention in the trade press and will often find its way into the business section of the newspaper.
2. The Big Success: A company somewhere has a big success. This is where the danger starts. The success is plastered all over every trade magazine and analyzed at every conference. It is "proof" that the miracle is real.
3. Experts Are Hatched: Clever "experts" gather up a Powerpointful of bullshit and march it around from conference to conference. They write articles, and even books, on how not to be left behind.
4. The Bandwagon Rolls: Everyone who knows nothing is suddenly asking the marketing department, "what is our (latest miracle) strategy?" Fearing that she will be thought insufficiently trendy, every CMO is suddenly looking for an agency that is expert at (latest miracle.)
5. Reality Rears Its Ugly Head: The numbers dribble in. Oops...people are ignoring our miracle by the billions. The miracle seems to be working for everyone but us!
6. The Back-Pedaling Begins: "Well, it's just part of an integrated program..." say the former zealots. The experts start blaming the victims, "Hey, we never promised...We told you you had to... Just wait, you'll see..."
This cycle has repeated itself so many times that it's comical.
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 state of the agency business as a hopeful jumping-off point
for "positive change." That remains to be seen.
In
the course of doing so, Stern took some ill-advised and unnecessary cheap shots at people who have done nothing but radiate credit on our industry.
Stern's
article is framed as his reaction to presentations and comments he has
heard recently at industry conferences. He starts out by saying that the
"overriding messages have spanned from hopeful to dire." Fair enough.I attend lots of conferences, too, and I hear the same baloney.
Next
he gives us his "real talk" outlook: Yeah, it's tough out there but
this is no time for negativity. OK, if we were in his shoes we'd do the same.
Then we get the obligatory parade of clichés
about "transformation," "disruption," and "collaboration." Once
again, fair enough. In his position, I'd throw a coin in the jargon
jukebox, too.
But
then things go very wrong. Instead of honestly asserting that there are reasons to be concerned about the
direction of the agency business -- which is shocking news to absolutely no
one -- he looks for scapegoats.
He starts by planting the seed that conference organizers sometimes have unwholesome ulterior motives...
"a conference sponsor’s agenda will often come through, whether implicitly or overtly."
He follows it up one paragraph later with...
"I recently attended a small, private conference in San Francisco, where the tone wasn’t even cautiously optimistic."
This
is patently false. I spoke at that conference. It included some of the
most upbeat and inspirational speakers you could hope for. It including
Margaret Johnson, Chief Creative Office and Partner at Goodby, Silverstein &
Partners, Sarah Mehler, CEO of Left Field Labs, and Mark Figliulo, founder of
FIG.
These are three amazing, talented, and cheerful people who made me,
and I'm sure everyone else in the room, proud to be in the
ad business. I don't know what presentations Stern was watching, but the assertions that the nature of these presentations "wasn't even cautiously optimistic" is beyond explanation.
The
conference in question is nothing short of excellent. It has been so for 10 years in which time it has displayed the type of integrity that some of our advertising "leaders" could learn from. The implication that it was influenced by some treacherous "sponsor's agenda" is, there's no other way to say this, simply truth challenged.
Another of Stern's cheap shots made me sick. Stern characterized one of the talks as follows... "one industry big thinker phoned in a presentation (literally)"
I'm
not going to abuse anyone's privacy by naming names, but the speaker in
question is a very brilliant person who's had a stellar career in
advertising. He made a phenomenal presentation despite terrible hardships. He could not come to the conference because of a heartbreaking illness to one of his children. Instead he
did his presentation over the phone from London. I just hope for Stern's sake that
he never has to "phone in" a presentation for a similar reason.
Stern owes an apology to the organizers of the conference for implying that there was some kind of sinister "sponsor's agenda" lurking in the background. There most certainly was not.
He also owes an apology to the speakers mentioned above for the nasty and condescending characterizations of their excellent and inspiring talks as "not being even cautiously optimistic."
***
But of course, since I was on the agenda, it wasn't all lollipops and roses. Stern says...
"The
Ad Contrarian delivered his usual rant, only somewhat paraphrased as
'no one in digital advertising has any idea what the hell they’re
doing.'
While I will gladly stipulate that no one in digital advertising knows what the hell they’re doing, this is a grossly inaccurate characterization of my talk.
In
fact the lead organizer of the event, one of the most highly respected
advertising lawyers in the industry, wrote to me after the event to
say...
"Several
of my colleagues who dropped in....told me you were the best, most
entertaining, and important speaker we’ve had at the firm in anyone’s
memory."
But,
as we all know, you can never trust a lawyer. So judge for yourself. I am posting my entire talkhere. Read it and see if the distinguished 4As Chair's characterization of my talk is fair.
Make
no mistake, I was highly highly critical of the industry and I could
see how it would make Stern squirm. But if he wanted to counter my
argument he had a perfect platform to do so in his article in Campaign. Instead he
opted for an ad hominem cheapshot.
It's hardly fair to lay all the troubles of the ad
industry at Stern's feet. I
have no idea what the chair of the 4As is supposed to do other than go
around mumbling platitudes about transformation, disruption and
collaboration. I understand why Stern wrote what he wrote. He's
in the wrong place at the wrong time and he's had a tough go.
However, mean-spirited, self-serving commentary should remain the purview of blogweasels like me. It doesn't reflect well on the chair of the 4As.
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 bifurcate.
Email can remain the system of choice to connect with the people we know. It would be made up primarily of messages concerning...
- Meetings we don't want to go to
- Dinners we don't want to eat
- Parties we don't want to attend
- Weddings taking place on days we were planning to play golf
- People cancelling lunch plans
- Naughty jokes that aren't funny
- Political opinions that are hilariously funny
Then there's fmail.
First of all, let's not pretend we don't know what the f stands for. Fmail would constitute about 99% of what is currently called email. It would include...
- Notifications that we have to update Flash
- Invitations to attend the Double Secret Real-Time Programmatic Insider Summit
- Amazing deals on airline flights to places we don't want to go
- Amazing deals on hotel rooms we don't want to occupy
- It's someone on LinkedIn's birthday!
- How do rate our recent stay at St. Larry's Hospital?
There are other changes that need to be made to the messaging ecosystem. Just to get the ball rolling... If you're a male athlete, please don't text me pictures of your dick. Also, if you're a Russian female athlete, please don't text me pictures of your dick.
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 nonsense masquerading as "content" is hoping that their lack of ability to derive a cogent, commanding concept for their brand can be disguised and tarted up with a torrent of moronic bullshit.
They even teach this nonsense in marketing programs with concepts like "always-on" marketing, and denigrate the essence of marketing effectiveness by claiming that "the big idea" is dead.
Of course, when you don't have the talent to create something worthwhile the next best strategy is to declare it dead.
McDonald's former CMO claimed that in 2016 they would create 5,000 pieces of online content. That's one piece of shit content every 24 minutes of the work year. Since starting a Twitter feed, McDonald's have posted over half a million tweets.
