sutton017

We marketing people have a dreadful habit of taking the obvious and making it incomprehensible. So today I would like to go against the grain and take the obvious and make it more obvious. If you are someone who has to make decisions about how to spend marketing dollars, here are some principles I believe in for simplifying and clarifying your thinking. The first thing we have to understand about marketing communication is that there are no absolutes. There are just likelihoods and probabilities. When making communication decisions, our job is to assess likelihoods and probabilities. In other words, precision guessing . We need to reckon which of the many alternatives we are faced with has the highest probability of producing the result we are looking for with the budget we have. A second principle is to understand the limits of what we do. We don't have as much power to create business greatness as we think we do. There are too many important aspects of business success that a...

This post is adopted from a podcast I did last year. One of the questions I’ve been wrestling with for years is why online advertising seems to be incapable of building major consumer-facing brands. We’ve had 20 years of phenomenal growth of online advertising and yet I have trouble coming up with one example of a major consumer-facing physical brand that was built by online advertising. I can think of no examples of major brands of beer, soda, cars, toothpaste, paper towels, candy bars, soap, fast food, peanut butter — you get the picture — that were built by online advertising. After 20 years of existence radio and TV had built hundreds - if not thousands - of consumer brands. There are some who would argue that there are very big web-native brands that have been built by online advertising - e.g., Amazon, Google, and Facebook. I’m not so sure that advertising played a major role in the building of any of those brands, but let’s leave that argument for another day and just focus on...

Over the years this blog has written a lot of nasty things about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. As the world is coming to realize what a toxic pile of crap Facebook is, I thought we'd collect some of our favorites in one place. Here you go: On responsibility ... "It's very simple. Facebook is way too powerful to be run by a jerk like Mark Zuckerberg. He has... shown himself to be utterly inadequate to handle the responsibilities of managing an organization with the power and influence of Facebook. Or even understanding what the responsibilities are." On leadership... "The absence of probity and maturity that Facebook has displayed has been baked into the company's DNA by Zuckerberg's arrogance, and will remain there as long as his vapid philosophies define their culture...    "Young people are just smarter"    "Move fast and break things" This is the credo of an infantile egotist. You can draw a straight line from this nonsense to...

This post is adapted from my book " BadMen: How Advertising Went From A Minor Annoyance To A Major Menace. " Advertising used to be concerned with imparting information. Today it is concerned with collecting information. Online advertising, the predominant form of marketing communication, is largely reliant on "tracking" to accomplish this. Tracking is just a pleasanter word for surveillance. Our web browsers, our search engines, and the sites we visit use invisible software to keep track of everything we do and everywhere we go on line. Our emails and texts are read and archived by the providers we use. All this information is collected, stored, and sold to third parties. Usually without our knowledge or consent. It has proven to be easily accessible to hackers, foreign governments, and other malefactors. The preposterous rationale for all this abuse of our privacy is that it helps marketers provide us with more relevant advertising. As if the citizens of the world...

If you go to marketing or advertising conferences the first thing you notice is that every genius with a Powerpoint deck is an expert on the future. I attend way more conferences than is healthy.  I've been averaging about 12 of these a year, as speaking at these things is part of my business. I hear all kinds of hysterical and provocative predictions for the future. The one thing I don't hear is anything that turns out to be true. The history of these future-hustlers is pretty rotten. So here's a little exercise. Here are a dozen of the biggest advertising stories of the past couple of years. Go back and see if you can find any marketing geniuses who predicted any of the following: Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal ( here ) Martin Sorrell shown the door at WPP ( here ) Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress ( here ) Google fined over $5 billion by EU for illegal activities ( here ) ANA study finds "pervasive" corruption in media ( here ) Justice Department/...

Laughing@Advertising is my new book. Yes, this time I've gone too far. It's a collection of my most irresponsible and inappropriate blog posts, essays, and cave drawings. You might say it's 200 pages of insults, wise-cracks, cheap shots, and dirty words. In other words, fun for the whole family! I'm out to disrupt the disruptors -- those somber, imperious souls who have made marketing and advertising such an earnest and humorless endeavor. I am hoping this is the silliest, most injudicious book about our industry you've read. And in some unwholesome, subversive way, the truest and funniest. It is on sale now at Amazon. It is only available in paperback. There ain't gonna be no ebook. Why? Pixels aren't funny. At $6.99 the paperback is cheaper than most of the stupid-ass marketing ebooks you buy anyway. So quit whining and click here .   And don't say I didn't warn you. Update : Huge thanks to everyone. It launched yesterday and it immediately becam...

I was recently asked to explain what I do and why I do it. This always gets me mildly uncomfortable and sets me thinking. I know this sounds pompous, but the short answer is that I want to use whatever limited abilities I have to be a subversive force in the marketing and advertising world. I think we need subversive thinking. I am sure we don't really know all the things we pretend to know. I think this needs to be pointed out often and at high volume. The job of subversives is to undermine the dogma, conventional wisdom, and entrenched interests in our business by finding facts and espousing opinions that challenge our supposed experts. That's the only way well-articulated bullshit can be exposed. The marketing and advertising industries are in a very strange phase these days. Usually in culture and society it is the young people who challenge the tired legends and rituals to lay bare the flaws. But in our industry, it is the young who have become the guardians of the overwor...

The advertising industry prides itself on being brand builders. Building successful brands is supposed to be the essence of what we do. But in recent years the ad industry has been guilty of cheapening some of the most important brands it controls -- its own. I am going to be picking on WPP because it is the biggest offender. But to some degree the same can probably be said about each of the major holding companies. WPP is the owner of some of the most famous and worthy brands in the history of the ad business: JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. It has been systematically dismantling the value in these brands. Today they are splinters of what they were. The holding companies have undermined their agencies from the top down and from the bottom up. What a holding company usually does is buy successful brands and manage them at arms length to, presumably, add value to shareholders. Examples of successful holding companies are Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble. Nobody buys a Berkshir...

In my newsletter Sunday, I republished a blog piece I wrote last week called "The Good In Online Advertising." It was not (in my opinion) particularly provocative or much different from stuff I have been writing about for years. The thrust of the piece was pretty easy to understand -- online tracking is mostly bad and dangerous and we'd all be a lot better off without it. My main point was that the issue of personal privacy in a democracy is a far more important matter than the (real or imagined) benefits of online tracking to advertisers. Prof. Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) who has a huge Twitter following, picked up on a few points from the newsletter and tweeted them out. Suddenly a shitstorm of Twitter (twitstorm?) broke out. If you have any interest in this matter I suggest you go back and read some of the threads. Here were the parts that were of most interest to me. Almost without exception, those who disagreed with the post missed the point. Arguments were put f...

For over 10 years I've been writing about how shitty, worthless, and dangerous I think most online advertising is. Today I want to talk about the good in online advertising. The best part of online advertising is that it funds an amazing array of free stuff (let's try to avoid the "it's not really free because you are the product" cliché for a few minutes.) Sadly, online advertising has been so debased by creeps and crooks, and oversold by hustlers and liars that it is sometimes difficult for us to appreciate the good in it. If we could eliminate the creeps, crooks and hustlers, and allow the web to provide what it is capable of providing...well, that's what this post is about. A look at the numbers illustrates clearly how much we value what we get online. The average person in America now spends almost four hours a day online. This is not inconsiderable. And we wouldn't be here if we weren't getting some substantial value from it. The key piece is t...

When you come to bat in a baseball game the first principle is to hit the ball. What happens after you hit the ball is out of your control. Where the ball happens to land and what the defense does is secondary. First you have to hit the ball. If you can't hit the ball the rest is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how strong you are, or how fast you run, or how beautiful your swing is. If you can't hit the ball, you are useless. In advertising there is also a first principle. The first principle of advertising is to attract someone's attention. If your ad doesn't attract someone's attention, everything else is moot. It doesn't matter how lovely it is, how wonderfully it is written, how strategically brilliant it is, or how precisely it is targeted. If nobody notices it, it is a complete waste and utterly worthless. Sadly, most advertising is invisible. Most advertising is ignored largely because it looks and sounds exactly like advertising -- and usually like som...

There are two types of lies. Lies of commission (when you say something that isn't true) and lies of omission (when you neglect to say something that is true.) The marketing industry is guilty of 10 years of lying by omission. I am specifically speaking about the events at which the marketing industry comes together -- our conferences. These are the occasions when the industry "gathers" and "networks" and "shares" all the dumb shit that we happen to be obsessed with at the moment. It seems that there is a new marketing conference every half-hour to solemnly explore whatever the marketing fad-of-the-month happens to be. The trade press, finding it ever harder to make a buck publishing, has jumped head-first into the conference business with a never-ending stream of "insider summits." The problem with these conferences is that while they pretend to be educational, they usually have a hidden motive that is antithetical to truth-telling. In fact,...

I know almost nothing about cosmology but I have a fascination with the subject. I read about it a lot. And, as a general rule, the more I read about it the more confused I get. It seems that recently there has been a great deal of angst among cosmologists about what the universe actually is. Many believe that our universe -- as unimaginably enormous as it is -- is really just a local event. They believe there are a multitude of universes -- a multiverse. And that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes. The idea seems strange as we have always defined the universe as everything there is. But I guess it is no stranger than quantum theory or any of the other barely comprehensible theories that modern physics has spawned. To me the more mysterious question -- the one that no one seems to ask -- is not " what is the universe?" but " where is the universe?" Most of us think that when the big bang occurred it occurred in empty space. There was this ...

One of my favorite marketing gags is the one in which marketing people take a huge creative success and attribute its success to some horseshit marketing process that was completely irrelevant to the idea. Such is now the case with the famous "FCK" ad for KFC. Here's a quick recap for those who haven't seen it: KFC had a major delivery screw-up in the UK and ran out of chicken. They ran this wonderful ad... The ad has won all kinds of accolades and awards. And, as advertising successes often do, it is now becoming some kind of bullshit morality lesson about client-agency relations. An article in MarketingWeek recently informed us that this particular success... "...highlights the importance of having an agency that really understands a business. Mother had been KFC’s agency for less than a year when the crisis broke, but already felt fully integrated. That was possible because KFC immersed Mother in the brand, inviting it along to its restaurant general mana...

There is a certain type of imbecile who can't see anything other than what is right in front of him. He has no peripheral vision and no rear view mirror. He thinks the world started the day he was born and everything that has happened has happened on his watch. He thinks that "disruption" is a new thing. He has no idea that progress has always meant that old technology would give way to new technology. He thinks this is new. He has no idea that things are always changing but that change is rarely cataclysmic. He thinks that every new technology will "change everything." He is astonished that the web hasn't killed television. He is surprised that 90% of shopping is still done in stores. He is amazed that 97% of cars still run on gasoline. He is astounded that social media marketing hasn't destroyed traditional paid advertising -- but has actually become traditional paid advertising. Actually, he is not astonished, surprised, amazed, or astounded by any o...

There was a time when being a copywriter was a lot simpler. It wasn't simple, but it was simpler. We would be given a stack of documents about 1,000 pages deep -- primary research, industry information, briefing documents, strategy hypotheses, meeting memos, competitive category ads, focus group transcriptions, and no shortage of opinions and mandatories -- and our job was to turn this mess into 30 seconds of persuasive copy. It was a rigorous exercise. There were some copywriters who could never master the art of rummaging through a pile of paper to find the essence of what needed to be said. There were some who were very good at finding the essence, but not very good at finding an interesting way to say it. The very best could do both. But the burden of being a copywriter today is much less straightforward. Today's copywriter is not really sure what she is. Is she a brand builder, a click maximizer, a storyteller, a community builder, a content provider, a conversation starte...

There was a time when I taught science for a living. Don't get the wrong idea, I know very little about science. The only reason I was doing it was that it was impossible for the New York City Board of Education to find enough qualified people. Later on in life I served for a year as Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences. Once again, it had nothing to do with my credentials in science, it had to do with their need to do better marketing for their scientific endeavors. However meager my background in science, hanging around with scientists and science teachers taught me one thing very clearly -- there is a big difference between facts and bullshit. And to put it simply, in the advertising industry the science we get is terrible. It is mostly conducted by interested parties with a point to prove. In the real world of science, research that is conducted by interested parties is viewed with great skepticism. In the real world of science, rese...

Today, about a million or so people will pack the streets of my home town, Oakland CA, for a parade to celebrate the Golden State Warriors who last week won their 3rd National Basketball Association championship in 4 years. This is a phenomenal achievement that has been equaled by very few teams in the history of the NBA. The NBA has a few things in common with the ad industry. For one thing, management people and coaches are highly mobile. Steve Kerr, head coach of the Warriors, was once General Manager of the Phoenix Suns. Alvin Gentry, head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans (who the Warriors defeated in the Western Conference semi-finals) was most recently assistant coach under Steve Kerr with the Warriors. As a result of management and coaching mobility there are very few secrets in the NBA. The systems, the data, and the tactics are all well-known to everyone and are easily interchangeable. While there are some management groups and some coaches that are certainly superior to oth...

There is evidence all around us that advertising is in a downward spiral, characterized by... Consumer disgust with advertising Loss of confidence in agencies Massive confusion by brands about how and where to advertise Widespread belief that advertising has become less effective Uncontrolled fraud and corruption One of the reasons for this nosedive is that the ad industry is in a cycle of stupidity that it can't seem to extricate itself from. The longer the silly fantasies of online advertising go unchallenged, the more entrenched they become. The more entrenched they become, the more they seem axiomatic. The more they seem axiomatic, the less willing people are to challenge them. The less people are willing to challenge the childish nonsense that marketers have to come to accept as fundamental to their strategies, the further the ad industry will deteriorate. Here is some of the foolishness that brands have come to believe, and that few are willing to challenge... Consumers want ...

If you’re new to the business world, you may soon find yourself in a marketing meeting and become very quickly disoriented. This is because marketing people speak a language that is disconcerting to the human ear and mystifying to the human mind. To help you through this bewildering experience, here at The Ad Contraria n Global Headquarters we have created a glossary of terms that can help you understand what marketing people actually mean when they talk: Engage - bother Brand architect - account executive Authentic - true sounding Transparent - natural looking Content - anything on the web Branded content - anything on the web with a logo Compelling content - content Conversation - retweet Follower  - stranger who wants something for nothing Advisor - LinkedIn term for unemployed Community - strangers who once clicked Meaningfulness - (no one knows) Branding - anything with a logo on it Activation - when marketing people actually do something Workshop - meeting Rou...