The Only Ad Bozo You Can Trust

As regular readers know, I consider people who make predictions idiots.

They almost always turn out wrong and they give smart-ass big-mouths like me wonderful opportunities to make fun of smart-ass big-mouths like them.


Every now and then, however, I step outside my comfort zone and make a prediction. When it turns out wrong I conveniently forget about it. But when it turns out right, I really like to rub it in.


Today, we're going to do some rubbing.


Back in May of 2009, when social media mania was at its hysterical high point, I wrote a post called Looking For Volunteers.


In it, I wrote the following...

TAC predicts that when the frenzy over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media calms down and the dust clears, email and search will continue to be the dreariest and most productive forms of online advertising.

Well, guess what? McKinsey released a report a few weeks ago about the astounding failure of social media to drive sales (my words, not theirs.)


The title of the piece was Why Marketers Should Keep Sending You E-Mails and it reported a finding that...

E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.

To repeat, nearly forty times as effective as Facebook and Twitter combined. That's a lot of times. And we're talking about email here. Not exactly the most profound or sophisticated type of advertising.

Now, being honest, I have no idea how McKinsey conducted its research or whether its worth anything or not, but they agree with me, so I'm here to tell you it's a brilliant piece of work!

They also published a chart...

And what does this chart demonstrate?

Well, ahem, I believe it shows that despite the frenzy over Facebook and Twitter, email and search continue to be "the dreariest and most productive forms of online advertising."

Which demonstrates once again that The Ad Contrarian is the only ad bozo you can trust.