Apple Has Nothing To Say

Almost 2 years ago, when Steve Jobs stepped down as ceo of Apple, I wrote... 

Advertising will be an early indicator of whether people without vision and taste are moving in at Apple.

One of the things I said to look out for was "Creeping Brandism"...

Creeping Brandism: The Apple brand was built bottom-up. That is, the products defined the brand. Virtually every Apple ad was about a product, not  the brand (okay, there was "Think Different" but that didn't last.) Keep an eye out for the erosion of this discipline.

Well, guess what? After almost 2 years of ineffectual advertising, Apple has thrown in the towel and resorted to all-out brand babble. Here is their latest effort.

Apple has been taking a beating from Samsung who have come at them aggressively. Their response? Mealy-mouth "branding" baloney.

Apple was once the rebellious, ballsy badboys of the tech industry. They knew how to build a brand -- you built it with persuasive advertising about excellent products. They have given up that ground and now sound like pompous, overfed CMOs. Steve must be spinning.

Industry insiders have reported that the agency is very unhappy with the process. Working for Jobs was never a picnic, but at least the end product always had some bite. This stuff is mush.

At the time I wrote,

The product pipeline will take years to screw up. But the ad pipeline can be screwed up in no time.

After "Siri" and "The Genius" campaigns and this, the "ad pipeline" is now officially screwed up.

Apple has two problems. First is that they have nothing to talk about. They haven't produced anything of major interest to consumers in a long time.

Second, they have lost their voice. They no longer know who they are. And neither do we.

The $7.5 Billion Ad Swindle

There are two outrageous scams going on simultaneously in adland. They are interconnected and both are related to banner (or display) advertising.

The first scam is the unscrupulous selling of online display ads.

The second is the tacit cover-up of frauds perpetrated by online ad networks and ad exchanges.

First, the sales scam.

• A recent study by comScore, reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, found that 54% of display ads paid for by advertisers between May 2012 and February 2013 never appeared in front of a live human being.

• Even the ads that "appeared" weren't always visible. Among the ads that actually "appeared," the criteria the research company used for considering an ad "visible" was ludicrous. If half the pixels were viewable for one second, the ad was counted as "visible." The industry itself, as represented by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), has no standard for determining if an ad is "visible." The issue with "visibility" occurs because a banner ad that may technically "appear" on a page may not be visible to a person who does not scroll up or down to that portion of the page, or the ad may not load while the person is viewing that portion of the page.

In plain English, this means that over half the ads that advertisers paid for, in essence, never ran. And among those that did run and were deemed "visible," an undetermined number weren't.

But that's not the most disturbing part. If companies want to piss away their money on worthless crap, that's their business. If they're too stupid to know what they're buying, they deserve what they get.

The disturbing part is the tacit cover-up.

Can you imagine the outcry if it was found that gas pumps were showing 20 gallons pumped when they were only pumping 10 gallons?

Can you imagine the riots that would occur if it was found that banks were embezzling half the money from their depositors?

That is exactly what is going on in the world of display advertising. Half of what is being paid for is apparently being stolen. And of that which is not being stolen, an unknown amount is apparently worthless. And nobody seems to give a damn.

Nobody's been fired. Nobody's been sued. Nobody's gone to jail.

Incompetent, greedy agencies, and crooked online ad hustlers are just going about their business as if they hadn't screwed advertisers out of billions of dollars. Pathetically clueless CMOs are keeping their heads down and pretending they don't know.

Where's the outrage? Why are the victims of this fraud not holding their agencies responsible? Why is the press not reporting on this? Why isn't this front page news in every trade journal and website?

This is the biggest advertising story of the decade, and it's being buried.

The day after The Journal ran their story, I checked Ad Age and Adweek. I couldn't find a single mention of it. I found stories about hot dog eating contests, and  Rupert Murdoch's divorce, but not a peep about the multi-billion dollar swindle being perpetrated on advertisers. (In fairness, Adweek has done some quality reporting on this story. But their reporting has put the size of the fraud at about 5% of what it may actually be.)

Here's why nobody wants to know too much.

How does an agency answer a client who asks, "You mean more than half the money you were supposed to be custodian of was embezzled from me and you knew nothing about it?"

How does an ad network answer, "You mean all those clicks and eyeballs you promised me never existed, and you knew nothing about it?"

How does a CMO answer his management when they ask, "You mean these people screwed us out of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars in banner ads and you had no idea what you were buying?"

Everyone is in jeopardy and everyone is in "protect" mode. Everyone wants to maintain deniability. Nobody wants to know too much.

If display advertising were to suffer the disgrace it deserves, imagine the fallout.

Imagine the damage to agency holding companies whose "trading desks" are buying online media at one price, marking it up, and selling it to their clients at a higher price. The justification? They're "adding value." How's that for a laugh?

Imagine the damage to Facebook, which at last report gets over 80% of its revenue from display.

Imagine the damage to online publishers whose bogus, inflated numbers probably constitute their margin of profit.

If the comScore findings are correct and projectable, it means that of the 14 billion dollars spent on display advertising last year in America, 7.5 billion was worthless and constituted some degree of fraud or misrepresentation.

Last month, before this study came out, I wrote...

"Everything about online advertising is corrupt... The promises are corrupt. The data is corrupt. The suppliers are corrupt. And the buying and selling is corrupt...This industry is in desperate need of investigation."

Will the advertising industry be successful in its ongoing attempts ignore or bury this story? I don't think so. Soon enough someone big, smart and influential is going to realize what's going on and all hell will break loose.

Father's Day

This story comes from my book "101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising."


The Talkative Child

Since Sunday was Father's Day, and I'm sick to death of writing about advertising, I thought I would serve up a little Father's Day reminiscence.

My daughter was a very talkative child. In fact, when we went on car trips it was not unusual for her to talk non-stop for 3 hours. Anyone with a motor-mouthed child knows that this is not an exaggeration.

One day we were on such a trip -- my wife and I in the front seat, my 5-year-old daughter in the back in her car seat. We were about 45-minutes into one of her relentless monologues, when suddenly the question popped-up: "Mommy, where do babies come from?"

We looked at each other, gave the nod, took a deep breath, and dived right in.

We told her about eggs and sperm and penises going into vaginas. She received this information in stunned silence.

Then came the kicker. We told her about how she was special. How, because of some medical issues, the doctor had to take the eggs from mommy and the sperm from daddy and put them together in a dish and then put the fertilized egg back into mommy.

Now she was totally lost in thought. You could almost hear the wheels spinning and smell the synapses burning.

One minute went by, silence.

Two minutes went by, silence,

Five minutes went by, silence.

Finally she spoke.

"Mom," she said.

"Yes?" replied my wife.

"I'm so glad you didn't have to do it the regular way."