2011 Top 10 Best Of Bullshit

It's the time of year when everybody is making Top 10 lists. Here at The Ad Contrarian, we want to be part of the fun too, darnit.

2011 may have been an astonishingly stinky year, but one thing you have to say -- it's been a fabulous year for bullshit.

Since bullshit is our beat, we thought we'd make a list of the varieties of bullshit that made 2011 such a delight. So here is the 2011 Top 10 Best of Bullshit.

We'll count 'em down from #10 to #1:

10. Mobile Phone Bullshit: It's the era of 4G and every phone company has the best blazing-fast 4G network in the universe. So, one question -- how come I still can't get my f/ing email?

9. Nutrition Bullshit: Usuga beans grown only in the Olduvai Gorge make your liver lovelier and your pancreas pancre-asskickin'. 

8. "Reaching Out" Bullshit: If I hear one more dimwit say they "reached out" to someone there will be blood in the streets.

7. Security Bullshit: Note to Congress: hundreds of otherwise unemployable people standing around airports scowling at us while they do nothing doesn't make us feel safer.

6. Parenting Bullshit: Please, 12 pictures a day of your precious spawn on Facebook is a dozen more than we need.

5. Movie Bullshit: An amazing year. Check the ads. Every movie released was "the best film of the year."

4. Exercise Bullshit: We are all thrilled that you ran a 500K potato sack race. Really, we are.

3. Foodie Bullshit: I don't care how many stars that precious new restaurant has, there's nothing they make that's better than a pizza.

2. Celebrity Bullshit: One giant, pathetic freak show. A few hundred years ago entertainers were called 'fools.' Today fools are called entertainers.

1. Wine Bullshit: Just shut the hell up and pour it.

Today's Subject Is Bullshit

Today's subject is bullshit.

It is an important subject because it is the material of which contemporary society is built.

The world today is swimming in bullshit. It is drowning in bullshit. It is submerged, inundated, and deluged with bullshit.

This is a serious issue. The most harmful force in business, politics, and education is bullshit.

The good news for us in the advertising and marketing industries is that we are no longer the primary purveyors of bullshit. We used to be. And we have done such a lovely job at popularizing it, that others have copied and even surpassed us. Today, the great generators of bullshit are media and government.

Bullshit is so prevalent today that when a public figure says something that is not bullshit we are startled.

The reason for today's post about "bullshit" is that this week the Super Committee of Congress is supposed to issue its plan for fiscal reform. What is a Super Committee, you ask? Simple. It's a committee, plus bullshit.

You see, when you want to pretend you're doing something super special, when you're actually doing nothing at all, just add bullshit.

If you don't understand what all the fiscal fuss is about, here it is in simple terms. Our government used to collect 18% of GDP in taxes and spend 20%. This was not good as it left us in deeper debt every year. But recently it's gotten much worse. Now we collect 16% of GDP in taxes and spend 25%. This means that pretty soon we'll be in the same crapper that Greece is in.

Anyone with a brain can see we need to collect more money and spend less. Duh. But we no longer have people with brains. We have replaced them with Super Committees.

When this Super Committee accomplishes Super Nothing, I have an idea. Our "leaders" can appoint a Super-Duper Committee to accomplish Super-Duper Nothing.

And that, my friends, is bullshit in a nutshell.

Apple, Pepsi and Bullshit

Over the years, I have written a lot about Pepsi and Apple. These two companies have a few things in common, and one big thing that separates them.

They are both enormously successful. They are both conscientiously committed to innovation.

The difference is, when it comes to marketing, Apple keeps coming up with amazing successes while Pepsi keeps getting tangled up in its underwear.

It is my opinion that one major thing that separates the marketing abilities of these companies is something that is rarely talked about in business circles, but is a huge differentiator among organizations. It's the ability to recognize bullshit.

The world today is swimming in bullshit. It is drowning in bullshit. It is submerged, inundated, and deluged with bullshit.

This is a serious issue. One of the most harmful, insidious forces in contemporary business, politics, and education is bullshit.

Among the critical skills of talented leaders is the ability to identify bullshit in all its many varieties and disguises. It is my contention that one of the key reasons that Pepsi beverage marketing has been a mess is that whoever is running it cannot recognize bullshit. Below are some quotes I have published before from Pepsi executives:

"...how much are we encouraging the continual learning from inside our staff about how to leverage these technologies with inside of their communications and engagement plans but as well as just for their own personal communications and internal communication with inside each other and from employee to employee."

"[Before] it was more of a global coordination as opposed to a global management,...Technology, both social networks and mobile platforms, have created this global generation. We really want to connect our global brands with the global generation, and the best way to do that is with global management."  

In your wildest dreams, can you imagine Steve Jobs sitting still for this nonsense?

A friend of mine worked at a high level on the Apple account. He tells of a meeting at which the agency's planning director was presenting some typical planning hooey. After two minutes, Jobs put his head down on the conference table. After 5 minutes he lifted his head and said, "Lee, am I paying for this bullshit?"

Pepsi not only would have paid for it, they would have gone back for seconds.

Words Without Meaning

One thing we can all agree on -- there's a lot of bullshit in the ad business.

As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for presidential candidates, art critics, and branding consultants, we would lead the league in bullshit.

What occurred to me earlier this week was that we create two different kinds of bullshit. The first kind is intentionally misleading bullshit. You know, the "no pain reliever is stronger" (i.e., they're all the same) kind of bullshit.

The second kind is words without meaning. It's not misleading or deceptive, it's just bewildering.

I was driving to work and I saw a taxi. On the side of the taxi was their proud company slogan.

"Our People. Our Community."

It has the sound and structure of an advertising tag line. And it means absolutely nothing.

Who are "Our People?" The drivers? The owners? The customers? The citizens of San Francisco? Likewise, who is "Our Community?"

But more important, what about them? Even if we understood what was meant by "Our People. Our Community," what about them? Are they lovely individuals? Are they smelly degenerates? What? What's the point?

We are exposed to so much bullshit every day we can't even see it any more. The ad industry certainly didn't invent bullshit, but everywhere we step we spread a little.

Reading Assignment:
"On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt. A professor of philosophy at Princeton looks at our favorite subject. It's only 80 pages and it's terrific.

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Bigger And Badder

As I've said here previously, the agency business is comprised of two primary elements: ads and bullshit.

Pretty much everything we do that is not related to the creation or distribution of ads is bullshit.

There are many reasons why the globalization of the agency business is a bad thing. But worst of all is that the bullshit component, which was always secondary, has now achieved primacy.

Anyone who has worked in a large organization can tell you that bigness breeds bullshit. It's not that bullshit doesn't exist in small organizations, it's just that it flourishes in big ones.

Read their press releases. Listen to their leaders. Watch what they do compared to what they say. Talk to the people who work for them. For every ounce of advertising, they produce a pound of bullshit.

There was a time in this industry when all you had to worry about was making great ads. If you made great ads, smart companies would find you and you'd be successful.

Those days are gone.

The bullshit artists have created a culture of trendy nonsense, obfuscation and false goals.

And we all have to pretend to believe in it or we can't compete.

The agency business has become like politics: You are permitted to say everything but the truth.

Hypocrisy Update...
I've tried Twitter a couple of times and thought it was useless and pathetic. However, I am often reminded by my readers that I am a narrow-minded, reactionary, old ferret. Consequently, I am going to suffer for my art and re-establish my Twitter account for a while. You can find me here.

Interpreting Research Bullshit

We poor oppressed advertising and marketing people are daily fed many flavors of bullshit.

One of the least understood is research bullshit. Research, because it sports the veneer of science, is generally not subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as, say, media bullshit or creative bullshit.

But, make no mistake, research bullshit is just as pervasive in our sorrowful world.

Here at the headquarters of Ad Contrarian Labs, we like to feature some nice research bullshit every now and then just to stay on our toes and keep our readers on the lookout.

Yesterday I was reading a piece in the Research Brief From The Center For Media Research. Now, I have no idea where the Center For Media Research is, but based on the logo at the top of the page, I have a feeling it's a laptop in the basement of the MediaPost office.

Anyway, the story in question was a little convoluted so I'm not going to recap the whole thing (if you want to read it you can find it here.) But I want to highlight a couple of "facts" found in the article. The study in question, done by a company called Kibo, reported that...

• "94% of consumers do research online before visiting a store"
• "92% of consumers reported interactive content influences them to make a purchase"

Now these are very impressive numbers. They give the impression that people hardly buy anything before researching it online, and are amazingly influenced by interactive content. But as is so often the case with sneaky online data, it means nothing of the sort.

The problem here is not that the numbers are wrong, it's that they are grossly, and perhaps intentionally, misleading.

Here's how this baloney works.

It's hard to tell from the article what period of time this study encompasses, but it seems to be six months. Let's assume that.

So if you went online once in September to check the price of motor oil at Costco, you are one of the 94% of consumers who "do research online before visiting a store." You may have shopped for thousands of items in the months before and after and never gone online to do "research before visiting a store" but if you did it once, you are one of the 94%.

Similarly, if you happened to once come across a tweet that said you could save $1 on a pizza you ordered, then "interactive content" influenced you to make a purchase. You are among the 92%.

This is the same type of deceptive horseshit that a few years ago lead to the absurd "fact" that "60% of shoppers use QR codes." Yeah, right.

What's obvious here is that if the researchers wanted to do a serious analysis on the impact of "online research" on shopping, and the influence of "interactive content" on purchasing behavior, they would have reported on the frequency of each behavior, which is much more relevant, not the reach. But I doubt it would have made for very clickable "facts."

I mean, what kind of story would you have if the facts turned out be...

• 6% of items are researched online before they are bought
• 2% of purchases are influenced by interactive content

The Two Elements Of Advertising

The natural world as we know it is composed of 117 elements. Some of these elements we are very familiar with, e.g. oxygen, gold, carbon. Some we have never heard of -- meitnerium, darmstadtium and ununquadium.

Some elements occur naturally and are all around us. Nitrogen, for example, comprises about 75% of the air we breathe. Some we can only create for millionths of a second by smashing atoms of elements together at very high velocities -- or having my daughter drive into them.

The advertising business, on the other hand, is composed of only two elements: ads and bullshit.

Ads used to be the dominant element in advertising. Unfortunately, in recent years the industry has been much more prolific at making bullshit.

Rummaging around in the ad industry, it's often hard to identify the bullshit. Here's a very simple way to recognize it. Everything that goes on in an agency that is not related to the creation or dissemination of ads, is bullshit.

If you would like a nice, close-up look at bullshit, I recommend this video. It is part of a presentation made a few weeks ago about the "new" package for Tropicana orange juice by its designer, Peter Arnell. I put "new" in quotes because the package is now old and dead.

The new package was yanked after about a half hour because it was such a piece of crap and provoked a firestorm of criticism and customer unhappiness.

Going back a few weeks, before the firestorm, and looking at the pretentious bullshit that was being served up is very entertaining and satisfying.

Whenever some designer starts out with, "We started on a journey..." as if he was climbing the fucking Himalayas instead of playing with crayons, you know there's some massive bullshit heading your way.

My favorite line in the video: "We wanted to take the orange and put it somewhere."

Oh, you put it somewhere, all right.

A Very Intricate Nonsense

In journalism there is a phenomenon called "burying the lead." It happens when an incompetent reporter doesn't understand the essential point of a story, and buries it beneath secondary points.

In the advertising business, we also bury the lead. But mostly, we do it intentionally.

"Our click rate was .042% which is about 22% above the category norm of .035%. Our re-targeting really helped with a .7% rate. By using behavioral scoring we achieved... and our optimization matrix...this lead to an uplift rate of... and a year-over-year ROI increase of almost 33%."

I have been at a few too many of these "bury the lead" meetings.

The meeting will continue on to discuss how the re-targeting was implemented and how we optimized and what behavioral elements were included in our plan and how we can continue to increase our year-over-year ROI, and will never get around to the real story.

The real story is this: For every 10,000 ads that were delivered we got 4 clicks. And we don't know how many of those clicks were fraudulent and how many were accidental.

The era of "big data" is quickly becoming the era of "big bullshit" -- bullshit on a grander scale than ever before. We've always had ability to bullshit with words. Now we have the ability to bullshit with math. We've always had bullshit artists. Now we have bullshit scientists.

For a wonderful analysis of how we are raising irrelevancy and obfuscation to new heights, I highly recommend this post by Doc Searls. Doc is a brilliant guy who was one of the writers of The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the foundational documents of the digital era. I have, at times, poked fun at it. But I have great regard for Doc and his intellect. Here's a snippet from his post:

When I was doing research for The Intention Economy, the most important input I got came from Doug Rauch, the retired president of Trader Joe's. One big reason for Trader Joe's success, he told me, is...that it minimizes marketing bullshit. It has no loyalty program, no coupons, no discounts and none of the expenses any of those involve, including the cost of running a big data mill. ...By avoiding this kind of thing, Trader Joe's spares itself the cognitive overhead required to rationalize complicating the living shit out of everything, which is what marketing tends to do—and does now, more than ever, with Big Data.

Here's a pretty good rule of thumb for understanding what's really going on at the next online advertising presentation you attend: The deeper the dive, the more calculatedly they're burying the lead.

Thanks to George for pointing me to Doc's post

How To Improve Your BS Detector

In high school, we were taught that everything in the world is made up of just a few elementary particles like electrons, protons and neutrons.

It's the same in advertising. As I've said on other occasions, the advertising industry is made up of just two elementary components -- ads and bullshit.

Consequently, one of the most valuable skills today's busy ad professional needs to develop is the ability to differentiate between bullshit and not bullshit.

There are a number of methods that work well. One that I have been utilizing recently is what I call the "for example" method.

Here's how it works.

Let's start with something that's not bullshit. Tom says, "There are a lot of crappy shows on TV." Jane challenges that and says, "Give me an example." It's hard to say what show Tom might give as an example. This is because Tom's statement is true and there are an abundance of stinky TV shows Tom could cite.

Now let's take a look at something that is bullshit and see how a similar scenario plays out. Tom says, "Twitter is a great way to generate big sales." Jane challenges that and says, "Give me an example." We absolutely know, in advance, what example Tom will give -- either Zappos or Old Spice. How do we know this? Because Twitter is not a reliable way to generate big sales, and the only serious examples that exist are a tiny number of cases that are far outside the normal range.

I found this method to be valuable during the great account planning scare of the '90's. Whenever someone would make some outrageous claim about the magical power of account planning, I would ask for examples. I would always get the same example -- "got milk."

So here's the "for example" principle of bullshit detection: If you know -- in advance -- the only examples an advocate for a general proposition can cite, then what he's advocating is probably bullshit.

And speaking of BS......scientists now say that what we were taught was wrong. Electrons, neutrons, protons and the like are not the elementary particles that everything is built with. As a matter of fact, most of the universe is constructed of stuff we can't even detect called "dark matter." The universe is strange. Even stranger than advertising.

Apologies... for a goof in yesterday's post. Usually when I screw something up I can fix it quickly. Yesterday I was on an airplane all day and couldn't.

The Malignant Cumulative Effect of Tiny Misdemeanors

Last week, the 2009 Bully Award for Outstanding Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit -- the Turd d'Or -- went to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

It's hard to understand how something like this comes into being, but I think I've figured it out.

I call it "the malignant cumulative effect of tiny misdemeanors."

Baseball provides us a good example. For years baseball players were taking steroids. Everyone who cared to know, knew. The owners knew. The players knew. The league knew. The press knew. The interested public knew. Everyone knew and nobody cared. There was a tacit agreement -- you didn't say it out loud.

Then one day, it changed. Someone said it out loud. Steroid use in baseball became exposed to the clear light of day.  Suddenly, everyone was outraged. The public was shocked. The owners were scandalized. The press was indignant.

It must have mystified the players. Until then, they had probably thought of steroid use as nothing more than a technical misdemeanor that everyone knew about and winked at.

The same happens in business. You make a presentation. You know there's a little piece of it that's bullshit. But it goes well. No one calls you on the bullshit and you see that it makes for a nice pitch.

So next time you embellish it a little. And again, it goes well.

After a while, the bullshit metastasizes. And you keep getting more and more successful. Eventually, you lose track of what's bullshit and what isn't.

Pretty soon you're calling your presentation "Breathtaking." You're talking about "perimeter oscillations" and "emotive forces shap(ing) the gestalt of brand identity" and "brand identity...dimensionalized through motion" and the "establishment of a gravitional pull to shift from a 'transactional' experience to an 'invitational' expression" and you're making preposterous statements about cans of soda and the "relativity of space and time."

And, amazingly, it's still all going great.

Then one day the context changes. Your lovely line of patter appears somewhere it's not supposed to appear. It gets exposed to a new standard of reality.

What seemed brilliant in the cloistered confines of corporate conference rooms is revealed as ludicrous and laughable in the clear light of day.

In tiny, imperceptible increments you have gone from brilliant visionary to preposterous bullshit artist.

True Detective: How Bullshit Becomes A Fact

There is so much bullshit in our business that sometimes you have to wonder where it all comes from. Yesterday I decided to "peel back the bullshit" and see if I could reconstruct how something that was completely wrong wound up being represented as a fact in reputable publications like Forbes and The Drum. Here's the story.

Yesterday Samuel Scott tweeted out a quote from an opinion piece in The Drum.

Anyone with half a brain knows that millennials are nowhere near having the most spending power. In fact, on a per capita basis they have the lowest spending power of any adult group. People over 50 control 70% of the wealth in the US, and are responsible for about half of all consumer spending.

So I decided to do a little detective work and try to figure out where this bullshit "fact" came from. In doing so, I got a nice close-up look at the astounding ignorance that is embedded in our industry and how bullshit, repeated with enough frequency, becomes a fact.

I started with the piece in The Drum. It was called "Why direct-to-consumer companies are using Influencer generated content to win over the market." It was a thinly disguised self-promotion piece full of the usual data hysteria. As noted above, the piece claimed that millennials "have the most spending power of any generation."

As justification for this claim, the article linked to this article in Forbes entitled "How To Tap Into The Millennial $200 Billion Buying Power With Social Media" which asserted that "By 2018, they will have the most spending power of any generation." 

The article offered no back-up for this claim other than a link to this thing called "41 Revealing Statistics About Millennials Every Marketer Should Know." This piece lived on an agency website, was written by someone who was two years out of college who called herself a "Marketing Strategist." The marketing strategist had this to say...

Once again, there was no back-up for this claim other than a reference to something called "Bazaar." Searching for this source lead me to a pdf from 2012 entitled "Talking To Strangers: Millennials Trust People Over Brands" by a company called Bazaarvoice that sells some kind of software for harnessing the power of "user generated content." (Remember that?)

Once again, there was no detail or proof, just this assertion...

The attribution for this claim was a footnote about a book...

1. Kit, Yarrow and O'Donnell, Jayne. Gen BuY: How Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail, 2009.

The book in question was published in 2009 and was one of those "millennials are a new species" things that were all the rage until it turned out that millennials were pretty much just like everyone else. I couldn't find a direct claim in the book (frankly, I didn't look very hard) that "millennials have the most spending power of any generation." The closest thing I found was this:

"Generation Y, those born between 1978 and 2000 has overtaken baby boomers in sheer numbers and is poised to do the same with its incomes by 2017..." 

Of course, this turned out to be completely wrong. Millennial income did not overtake baby boomers in 2017. According to Business Insider, in 2018 in the US baby boomers out-earned millennials in every state in the union. "In all 50 states and Washington, DC, the median millennial made less money than the median Gen Xer or baby boomer...The gap in median income between millennials and baby boomers ranged from the older generation making about 25% more than millennials in Iowa to 65% more than millennials in Alaska."

The average millennial income is about $35,000. The average baby boomer income is about $46,000. There are about 9% more millennials than baby boomers, but their income is about 24% less. So even though there are substantially more of them, in aggregate their income is way behind baby boomers.

Here's a graph that demonstrates that income per capita among baby boomers is far higher than millennials.

One more thing. Even if millennials had higher income than baby boomers, that still doesn't mean they would have "the most spending power." Spending power is not a function of income. It is a function of income plus accumulated wealth plus access to credit. According to the Federal Reserve, baby boomer wealth is more than 15 times greater than that of millennials (which means they also have way more access to credit.)

So let's recap the timeline.

- In 2009, a book incorrectly predicted that millennial income would surpass baby boomer income by 2017.

- In 2012, in a self-promotional pdf by a software company, this false prediction was misinterpreted to mean that millennials would have "more spending power than any other generation" by 2017.

- In 2017, a piece of "content" on an agency website, written by a "marketing strategist" two years out of college, used this quote from the software company to assert that millennials "will have the most spending power of any generation by 2018."

- Later that year, an article in Forbes used the assertion on that agency website to justify a claim that, "By 2018, they (millennials) will have the most spending power of any generation."

- And yesterday, in 2019, an article in The Drum leaning on the piece in Forbes, proclaimed that millennials "have the most spending power of any generation."

And that, my friend, is how in the slovenly and slipshod world of marketing, bullshit becomes a fact.

What's Everyone So Afraid Of?

I am sometimes approached by editors of advertising or media publications to write pieces for them. In the course of trying to convince me to contribute tendentious pieces to their publications (and not get paid), invariably the following sentence is uttered:

"We're so tired of all the bullshit"

Often when I attend a conference and one of those gee-whiz presentations about the latest online advertising magic is made, people will later approach me at the bar and whisper "what a bunch of bullshit." (By the way, I'm at the bar because that's where they keep the pretzels.)

One recent morning I was having coffee with a person who manages media and marketing conferences and he told me that the biggest problem he has in creating interesting programs is that every presenter wants to be the futurist guru who talks about whatever the hype-cycle miracle of the week is, and all the other speakers are too chicken to challenge.

What I want to know is, what's everybody in advertising so fucking afraid of? Why won't people say what they really think? Even after 10 years of totally erroneous "everything is dead" nonsense, are we still too timid to defend our business and stand up to these buffoons?

Why do publishers keep publishing "all the bullshit" if they're so tired of it?

Why will people only call bullshit in whispered tones in the dim confines of the hotel bar?

Why won't speakers get up and speak their minds?

There is a kind of creeping, low-grade McCarthyism in the advertising world. Everyone's afraid to challenge the loudmouths. "Thought leaders" go from conference to conference being dead-wrong, and everyone is so terrified of being thought odd or old-fashioned that they refuse to speak up.

The ad industry is becoming stinkier and stinkier. And I don't know what smells worse, the bullshit or the chicken shit.

Is The Great Twitter Scare Waning?

Can it be that The Great Twitter Scare Of '09 is starting to wane? Comscore reports that Twitter usage in the U.S. dropped about 8% in October. That's a lot to drop in one month.

In fact, Twitter usage has dropped in two of the last three months. The only month of the last three in which it grew was September, in which it grew less than 1%. 

Digital Agency Guy Makes Sense

As you all know, I like to take swings at bullshit. Lately, social media bullshit has been my favorite target.

However, as I often say (but am never remembered for) it is not social media per se that makes me gag (after all, I am a blogger,) it's the nonsense promulgated by social media zealots, hustlers and bullshit artists that gets me going.

This weekend I read an intelligent piece called The Content Delusion by a digital agency guy, Eric Karjaluoto. Not only did he make sense, he did it without using the words "conversation" or "engagement" even once. And that, my friends, is a record.

On The Other Hand

Last week, after I  posted  Distinctions That Need To Be Drawn a few commenters pointed me in the direction of this thing from Razorfish.

I got through two paragraphs of this cliche-fest and had to quit before my brains fell out.

On the other, other hand, nice little illustration on the page by my former colleague David Fullarton.

Friday In Seattle

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking to the radio industry group up in Seattle (the PSRBA.)

The topic of my talk was "The Three Most Annoying Trends in Advertising." And, as I said to them, it was hard to pick just three.

I believe they taped the event and I hope to get a look at it soon. If it's not too embarrassing, I'll post it here.

The Geniuses Who Run Our World

The City of Oakland (where I live) has a very high dropout rate among high schoolers (over 30%) which it would like to lower. Like all political entities, the city will do everything possible except address the actual problem -- bad parenting.

Of course, the first thing they did was to have a conference. A conference is a great thing to have because it gives you the feeling that you're doing something while you're actually doing nothing. It's activity without progress.

At the conference, the following suggestion on lowering dropout rates was seriously discussed -- eliminate the grade of "D."

Apparently, in the educational bureaucracy these days, whether kids actually learn something is of secondary importance. 

The Geniuses Who Buy Online Media

Interactive maniacs are always going on and on about how efficient online advertising is because of geo-targeting and behavioral targeting and who-know-what-kind-of-bullshit-targeting.

So yesterday I went to my company's Facebook page. There I found an ad for Nissan.  First of all, no one has been to our Facebook page in about a year, including me. The only reason I got there was because I clicked the wrong link. Second, our biggest client is Toyota, which it says right on our page.

So some knucklehead at Nissan is paying good money to advertise on a site nobody goes to in a social media environment that is completely hostile to his brand.

That's some smart marketing, baby.

Bully Awards Update

So far, we've had great response to the Bully Awards for Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit. If you'd like to nominate something, just click on this link. As soon as I get some time, I'm going to start posting the nominees and give you a chance to vote. Some should be posted by Monday. Nominees accepted until December 1st.

"Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Plagiarism"

Here at Ad Contrarian global headquarters, our editorial board is delighted when other bloggers quote us, link to us, or reference us.

However, believe it or not, we work hard on this blog and don’t take kindly to it when people steal our stuff.

In October of 2008, a post appeared here called “Top 10 Bullshit Professions”. It was a semi-hilarious romp through the world of dubious occupations. It has proven to be one of our most popular posts.

Imagine our surprise recently when we came across a post on a blog called Innovation Playground dated March 17, 2009 entitled: "What's The Value Of Bullshit? What Are The Top Bullshit Professions?"

Reading through it, we couldn't help but notice some astounding similarities to our post of 5 months earlier:

Me: "...I used only one criterion in creating the list: Do they really know anything or are they just making shit up"
Him: "The criterion in creating the list are based on: 1/ Do they really know anything?... 3/ Do they just making shit up?"

Me: "The Ad Contrarian Top 10 Bullshit Professions"
Him: "My view of the top 10 bullshit professions"

Me: "Financial Advisors: Monkeys throwing darts."
Him: "Investment Managers… Monkeys throwing darts…"

Me: "Career Counselors: If they knew anything they'd find themselves better jobs."
Him: "Organizational Change Consultants: If they knew anything they'd transformed themselves first."

Me: "Branding Consultants: Why didn't I think of this scam?"
Him: "Motivational Gurus: Why didn't I think of this scam?"

Me: "Psychotherapists: Practitioners of the world's most advanced form of pseudoscience".
Him: "Psychotherapists: ...practitioners of the world's most advanced form of pseudoscience."

Here's a lesson for you, pal. It's a small web after all.

Bloggers: Has this happened to you? What have you done about it?

The Brilliant Oscar Levant...
is the author of the quote that entitles this post.

Slime Ball Update:
As of 8:20 am PDT, this "Innovation Playground" creep has taken all the negative comments he received this morning off his website and closed it to comments.

Awards Of Merit

Earlier this week we awarded the Turd d'Or to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

In the course of evaluating all the entries for the 2009 Bully Awards there were a number of nominees worthy of merit.  I would like to review a few of them and add some commentary.

"It's About Understanding Conversations" 

This was our runner-up. One of the wonderful things about this entry was how the message and the messenger meshed so nicely.

As one commenter said, "That dude ... has my vote. What a d-bag. He deserved a smack down..."

About the actual content of the video, another commentor said, "It's... completely unbearable to watch. After 30 seconds you feel a sharp decline in 'will to live'..."

Here at TAC global headquarters, we hope this video serves as a cautionary example to those inclined to blather on about "conversations" and "brands." 

"Synergy-Related Headcount-Adjustment" 

This did not receive as much popular support as I thought it deserved. Personally, I found it to be just about the most perfect example of corporate pr bullshit I've ever encountered.

To call firing thousands of people a "synergy-related headcount-adjustment" is the work of an evil genius. As one commenter said, it was "...full of the most vile form of bullshit around."

The fact that it was attributed to two guys named Simon Beresford-Wylie and Bosco Novak made it even more delicious. Dickens could not have named them better.

"We Started On A Journey..." 

This was another entry that I thought would receive more support.

As I said upon first viewing the piece, when some designer starts his pitch as if he was scaling the fucking Himalayas instead of playing with crayons, you know there's some massive bullshit heading your way.

One other thing I particularly liked was this sentence, "..there was a strong drive to bring a big messaging on to the carton where the single biggest billboarding was..."

This is a wonderful example of a big breakthrough in bullshit in the past few years. Marketing geeks have taken the gerundive form and applied it to nouns instead of verbs. So while a gerund used to be a nice little trick to turn a verb into a noun, bullshit artists are now using it to turn a noun into another noun. Why a noun needs to be turned into another noun nobody knows except the knuckleheads who think it sounds fancy. Rarely do you see it twice in one sentence. I was impressed. 

Full Disclosure...
....I have to admit something here. I never watched the full "Windows 7 Launch Party" or the full "Saturn Novel Adventure." I'm not as tough as I pretend to be.

Announcing The 2009 Bully Awards

The Ad Contrarian is proud announce the first annual Bully Awards for Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit.

In keeping with modern protocols, your job is to be "engaged" and "interact" with these awards by nominating your favorite piece of marketing or advertising bullshit of the past year.

It can be an article from a publication, a website, a PR release, an ad, a video clip -- any piece of communication about advertising or marketing -- just as long as it's bullshit.

A brown ribbon panel of bullshit experts will determine Bully Award winners.

Here's how to nominate something for a Bully:

1. Post a comment on The Ad Contrarian blog with a link to the piece you would like to nominate.

--or--

2. Send an email to adcontrarian@gmail.com with a link, scan, or description of your entry.

You may nominate as many stinky droppings as you like.

As entries arrive we will post some of them so you can see what your fellow Ad Contra's think is bullshit.

If you nominate a winner, you will receive the prestigious Ad Contrarian Turd d'Or, and a free drink next time you're in San Francisco.

Twitter, ROI, And Bullshit

I’m a simple man. Annoying, but simple.

Among my simple needs is a yearning to understand things. Understanding something, science has taught us, turns out to be a lot different from thinking we understand it.

Much of what passes for “understanding” in the world of advertising and marketing is merely the correct memorization and repetition of phrases.

But knowing the words doesn’t mean you understand the concept. As Richard Feynman brilliantly pointed out, someone who knows the name of every plant knows nothing about plants. He knows what people call plants. Knowing the names of things is not the same as knowing things.

This struck me a few weeks ago when I was reading an (unbelievably naïve and amateurish) article in Ad Age titled Study: Twitter Marketing Drives $716 Million In Car Sales. It reported that Twitter recently released a study which showed that advertising on Twitter had accounted for over 700 million dollars in car sales. According to the story, for every dollar a luxury compact car brand invested in Twitter, they received a return of over 17 dollars.

My initial reaction to this was that it was unmitigated bullshit.

Without knowing anything about the actual calculation of the ROI in question, I am certain it is a case of mistaking correlation with causality (you can read about that here.) It reinforced my belief that almost every ROI number I have ever seen or read is, likewise, bullshit (you can read about that here.).

Here’s my simple-guy logic:

If you were to discover an investment that yielded you a return of 17 times your capital, why would you not invest every dollar you have in it? You’d have to be crazy not to.

If you could get a 17 to 1 return on dollars by putting them into Twitter, why not put every cent you have into Twitter?

I did some math. Let's say that during a 2 month period I invested $1,000 in marketing on Twitter. After two months I would have a return of $17,000.

Then let's say I re-invested it for another 2 months. And let's say I did this six times.

At the end of my little experiment I would have a return of $1,419,857,000 on my original $1,000 investment. A billion-and-a half on a thousand dollar investment. Man, this Twitter thing is awesome!

Intuitively, everyone knows these ROI numbers are bullshit. Which is why no one takes all their money and places it to win on so-called "return on investment."

According to Ad Age, the numbers in this case were calculated by a "marketing analytics company" that just happens to have a partnership with Twitter. If I didn't know about the enormous strength of character in the marketing industry, I might think that sounds a little cozy.

Here are some thoughts about ROI calculations:

1. Never believe the ROI calculation of an interested party.

2. Never believe the ROI calculation of a short-term promotion. It never accounts for all the zillions of dollars spent building the brand that made the promotion even possible. It may be a valid calculation of something, but it is not a valid ROI.

3. Unless you have a clear definition of the factors included in the ROI calculation, and the formula used to derive the calculation, you know nothing about ROI. You know something about what people call ROI.

Advertising: The Science Is Terrible

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, research must be validated and verified by disinterested third parties before anyone takes it seriously.

The "metrics" you get from Facebook, the "data" you get from your consultants, and the reports you get from your agency are all unreliable at best and bullshit at worst.

The most unpleasant part of trying to find out just how crappy the science you are getting is is that you have to be a real prick to do it. You have to ask the people delivering the "science" the following questions:

• What controls did you use in your study?
• Did you repeat the study to verify it?
• Have you had peer review to substantiate your methodology and your conclusions? 
• Did you have a third party replicate your study to validate it?

In virtually all cases the answer will be stunned silence and you will be treated with thinly disguised contempt for asking such silly questions.

We have gotten used to bullshit masquerading as science, and we accept this bullshit without appropriate skepticism.

It is remarkable that an industry that spends half a trillion dollars a year thinks it knows so much and actually knows so little. Now that our industry has caved in to the silly notion that data will be our savior, it is more important than ever to question the science behind the data.

The closer you look, the uglier it gets.

Three Reasons To Like Gary Vee

If you ever tell anyone I said this I'll deny it, but I kinda like Gary Vee. I know he's full of shit but I can't help liking the guy.

Here are three reasons I like him:

1.  He gives hope to those suffering from DDD (Delusional Disrupter Disorder.) These meatballs think that Gary's "just a poor boy with a vision" hooey is a model for success. They don't understand probability. They have about as much likelihood of gaining success from Gary's homilies as I have of winning a hugging contest. Nonetheless, he gives them hope.

2. Our business has two kinds of bullshit - the cold bullshit of the data weasels and the hot bullshit of the Gary Vees. You can have your Powerpoint-addled jargon-spewing data-monkeys. I'll take Gary's hot bullshit any day.

3. He had to grow up in New Jersey with the name Vaynerchuk. You try it.

We Were Only Kidding

MEMO
To:          The Ad Industry
From:     Phi Theta Gamma
Subject:  Only Kidding
Date:       March 28, 2011

Okay. We're sorry. We were just kidding.

We know we may have confused some people. And some of you may have actually blown some money, but we really didn't mean any harm. We just thought of it as a stupid joke.

Honestly, we really didn't imagine anyone would take this stuff seriously. It was just, like, one night we were sitting around the fraternity house studying for a dumb-ass marketing final and smoking a j and Larry said, dude, this stuff is such bullshit, let's just, like, invent our own marketing bullshit.

And so we start riffing, like "marketing is a dance contest"...no..."marketing is a cheese slicer"...no..."marketing is a conversation"...and we all kinda cracked up. It sounded like the kind of crap marketers would say. I mean, a conversation? With marketers? Who would do that? Ever talk to a marketer?  Fucking morons.

So now we're thinking we're on a roll and Vic says, let's do some bs about "brands" because, you know, they're always going on and on about brand this and brand that.... So how do we get brands into this bullshit deal? So Chris says -- this one killed us -- what if we say "consumers want to have a relationship with brands?" Now we're peeing our pants.

Yeah, says, Vic, I want to have a relationship with my mayonnaise, and Chris says, I want to have a relationship with my clock radio, and I say, I want to have a relationship with my toilet paper.

Now we're on the floor.

So then Jimmy says, dude, all these marketing guys are totally queer for tech. Let's invent some tech bullshit thing that's going to replace TV ads. So we blazed another spliff. Okay, says Ian, how about podcasts...no, that's dead...how about widgets...no, dead....Eddie says, you know that pathetic Twitter thing that all the old geezers do? What if we say nobody needs to do TV ads anymore because all you have to do is send out tweeters, or whatever they call that shit. So now Vic can't breathe he's laughing so hard.

So here's where it gets weird. The next thing you know, all these companies are having interns sitting around tweetering to their customers and thinking that this is going to save them millions because they won't have to pay Tiger Woods or some other dipshit to be in their stupid TV spots. Then they're having, like, webinars and conferences and people are writing books and guys who couldn't deliver pizzas are making speeches and writing blogs...

Anyway, you know the rest of the story... we were too stoned to realize that Jake the jack-off was recording the whole thing, and his ugly-ass ex-girlfriend Wendy found it on his iPhone and uploaded it to YouTube. So now everyone in the frickin universe knows that all this new age marketing shit we invented was just a big goof, and the Dean is all up our ass and my father is super-pissed and...

Well, anyway, we're sorry. But it was kinda fun.