Best of 2012 - Interactivity: Get Over It

Here's my 3rd post in The Ad Contrarian Best of 2012 collection. This is getting to be fun. Instead of having to write every night, I just copy and paste. So much less troublesome. It's called "Interactivivty: Get Over It" and it's from March 12, 2012

From CNNMoney, last week...

"Imagine if Joe Smith, in need of a new car... presses a button on his remote and instantly receives more information about a Ford F150, including where he can buy one. Meanwhile, Joe's wife, Sally, watches a later ad for a Sony phone. The product on the screen is sleek and modern, and Sally wants it. She can turn her emotion into ownership, purchasing the phone with the click of a button."

Yeah. Imagine if monkeys flew out of my butt.

A decade ago, paragraphs like the one above were appearing all over, promising us that interactive TV (ITV) would be the latest thing that would change everything. People would be watching a TV spot, and they'd see something they liked and they'd click and be taken to some long-form info-something. Then they'd click again and buy right from their screen.

Also, interactive web ads would be so much more appealing. engaging and enticing than traditional advertising. People would see our banners on the web and be fascinated by them and then click to learn amazing new things about our products and then order right from the page.

And our adoring customers would come to our Facebook page and engage with our brand and comment about how much they love us and share it with all their friends.

Only one problem: It's all bullshit.

• Every experiment with interactive TV (ITV) has been a disaster.
• Click-through rates on banner ads are below 1 in a thousand.
• Engagement rates on Facebook are below 1/2 of 1%.

It turns out that people on line react to ads the same way people off line react to them -- mostly they ignore them. And when they do bother to read them, they overwhelmingly do not interact with them.

Characterizing these ads as "interactive" isn't a description of consumer behavior, it's an  illustration of advertiser delusion.

Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.

While people are interactivatin' like crazy with each other, interactivity with ads is miniscule. Unappreciative bastards. Don't they realize we built all this shit just to sell them something?

The latest group to fall victim to the siren song of interactivity is Canoe Ventures, a consortium of  Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and four other cable companies that tried to resurrect ITV. Last week they shut their doors and laid off 120 people.

This is the last time I'm going to say this, so pay attention. In the digital world, people are passionate about interacting with each other -- not brands, not ads, not you, not me.

Get over it.

Interactivity: Get Over It

From CNNMoney, last week...

"Imagine if Joe Smith, in need of a new car... presses a button on his remote and instantly receives more information about a Ford F150, including where he can buy one. Meanwhile, Joe's wife, Sally, watches a later ad for a Sony phone. The product on the screen is sleek and modern, and Sally wants it. She can turn her emotion into ownership, purchasing the phone with the click of a button."

Yeah. Imagine if monkeys flew out of my butt.

A decade ago, paragraphs like the one above were appearing all over, promising us that interactive TV (ITV) would be the latest thing that would change everything. People would be watching a TV spot, and they'd see something they liked and they'd click and be taken to some long-form info-something. Then they'd click again and buy right from their screen.

Also, interactive web ads would be so much more appealing. engaging and enticing than traditional advertising. People would see our banners on the web and be fascinated by them and then click to learn amazing new things about our products and then order right from the page.

And our adoring customers would come to our Facebook page and engage with our brand and comment about how much they love us and share it with all their friends.

Only one problem: It's all bullshit.

• Every experiment with interactive TV (ITV) has been a disaster.
• Click-through rates on banner ads are below 1 in a thousand.
• Engagement rates on Facebook are below 1/2 of 1%.

It turns out that people on line react to ads the same way people off line react to them -- mostly they ignore them. And when they do bother to read them, they overwhelmingly do not interact with them.

Describing these ads as "interactive" isn't an indication of consumer behavior, it's an indication of advertiser delusion.

Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.

While people are interactivatin' like crazy with each other, interactivity with ads is miniscule. Bastards. Don't they realize we built all this shit just to sell them something?

The latest group to fall victim to the siren song of interactivity is Canoe Ventures, a consortium of  Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and four other cable companies that tried to resurrect ITV. Last week they shut their doors and laid off 120 people.

This is the last time I'm going to say this, so pay attention. In the digital world, people are passionate about interacting with each other -- not brands, not ads, not you, not me.

Get over it.

Battle For World's Most Valuable Consumer

Last week, I was invited to speak at a conference sponsored by the 4A's and the law firm of Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP. The topic was "The Battle For The World's Most Valuable Consumer."  I published my remarks on my company website and received some nice comments, so I thought I'd publish them here. 

Good morning boys and girls.

I’m going to try something amazing today. I’m going to try to talk and change Powerpoint slides simultaneously. This is not a core competency. It's sad. A few months ago I was the ceo of an ad agency. I had departments full of people who did nothing but advance powerpoint slides for me. Now look at me.

Okay, my talk today is entitled The Battle For The World’s Most Valuable Consumer.

Who is the world’s most valuable consumer? Actually, it’s my wife. But that’s a whole other slide show.

The world’s most valuable consumers are people over 50. And the title of this talk is a big fat lie because the truth is that there is no battle for these people. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s start at the beginning. Before I began my advertising career 130 years ago, I was a science teacher. I taught science in the NYC public schools for 3 years. This, by the way, is a very compelling argument for home schooling.

I was not much of a teacher and really didn’t know much about science, but one of the things teaching science taught me was a very deep respect for the scientific method.

Scientists work really hard until they are able so say that they know something. They have to do experiments, and repeat their experiments, and then their peers review their methods and assumptions, and then their peers repeat their experiments, and then they publish the results and then people can comment and question and look for flaws. And after all this torture and scrutiny, if their results hold up, then they can say that they actually know something.

Knowing something, it turns out, is completely different from thinking you know something.

So then I left teaching and got into the advertising business. And the first thing that struck me was that in the ad business we didn’t really seem to know very much.

We thought we knew things…we had all these rules and principles and philosophies and ideas about what made good advertising…but I couldn’t find any facts.

We did things that looked and sounded like science…we used the language and the tools of research… we had clip boards and questionnaires and lab coats … but we didn’t use the scientific method. We rarely if ever used controls. We didn’t repeat our experiments. We didn’t have peer review of our methods. And no one ever repeated our work to validate it.

Now, I’m not here to pick on market researchers. Our lack of rigor is not their fault. We simply don’t have the time, money, or inclination to do the type of rigorous experimentation that academics and scientists and some industries do before they can say they really know something.

Over time, making a nice living helped me accommodate myself to the idea that we didn’t really know what we thought we knew. But it never stopped bothering me. And so I developed a very annoying habit – I stopped believing advertising experts.

I don’t care what school you went to, or what credentials you have or what awards or medals you’ve won. If you don’t have the facts, and you can’t explain them to me simply and clearly, I’m sorry, I'm skeptical. I will defer to a certain professor Einstein on this subject who once said, "It should be possible to describe the laws of physics to a barmaid." 

Now one of the doctrines of the ad industry that fell into this category of things I never fully believed was why we spend so much of our time, money, and energy talking to young people and so little on older people. I always assumed that there must be some pretty good facts to justify this somewhere and I just hadn’t run into them.

So about 6 months ago when I retired from my agency I had some time on my hands and I started to look into this issue. Now I stipulate that there are certainly some things that I haven’t found or read. But what I have seen and what I have read leads me to believe that we don’t know what we think we know.

In fact, I have come to believe that most of us target young people because we see everyone else doing it and we assume that somewhere there must be someone who knows why the hell we're doing this and has a good reason for it. In other words, somewhere at the end if all this there’s a smart person with facts.

Well, if there is a smart person somewhere with the facts on this, I haven’t found him yet. Here’s what I have found.

• People over 50 have about about 70% of all the wealth in the country

• They are responsible for about half of all consumer spending

• They buy 62% of all new cars

• Despite the fact that many are retired, they still have 55% higher annual income than some other adult demo groups.

• And on average they have a net worth about 3 times that of the rest of the people

• They dominate 94% of CPG categories.

• They are the internet’s largest demographic constituency.

• They are much easier and much cheaper to reach than any other demographic group.

• And, according to Nielsen, they are the target for 5% of all advertising.

Let me repeat the key fact here. Despite the fact that people over 50 are responsible for about half the consumer spending in the country, they are the target for 5% of all advertising.

I have stared at this slide for weeks, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

According to Nielsen, they are “The most valuable generation in the history of marketing.”

Forbes calls them “the most ignored wealthy people in the history of marketing.”

I submit to you that if I could get you to forget for a minute that you’re in the advertising or marketing business and I showed you this slide, you’d say there is something radically wrong here.

Usually, when I give this talk it is 45 minutes long and I give several examples of the inexplicable disregard marketers have shown for older people. But I only have 18 minutes today so let me give you one recent example.

In a piece last month, the The Wall Street Journal reported on so-called “youth cars.”
According to the Journal:  

"Appealing to the young has auto makers designing and marketing to the "millennial generation"—that group of consumers in their 20s and 30s... But senior citizens are making Swiss cheese of those efforts."

The percent of sales of youth cars that are actually sold to the youthful target of 18-34 year olds is 12%. Meanwhile we are substantially disregarding the 88% of the population who actually buy these cars.

 Of course the people responsible for this have to justify it. How do they explain this anomaly?

"The baby boomer generation is the largest cohort in the marketplace," said one automotive marketing executive. "Just by virtue of their numbers being so large, we'll continue to see them skew the data for a long time."

So, you see, older people aren't really customers. They don't really buy things. They don't spend real money. All they do is "skew the data." In the same article, the president of a market research firm had this to say:

"So when marketing messages are for millennials, there are a lot of things that are attractive to the older generation."

Sorry. Older people are buying these cars in spite of the mistargeted marketing and advertising, not because of it.



Can you think of any other demographic, ethnic or social group that anyone would claim is best influenced by targeting someone else? The whole science of marketing is based on finding the most relevant message and delivering it to the most probable buyer. Except when it comes to people over 50. Then all the rules are suspended. Because these people don't count. They just "skew the data."

So why are marketers and advertisers ignoring people over 50?

There are a lot of reasons. It starts with the demographics of our industry. 80% of all workers in the professional and business services sector are under 55. Can you imagine what that number is in advertising agencies and marketing departments?

Go into any creative department in any ad agency in America and it is a miracle to find anyone over 50.

And yet, in every serious creative field you can think of older people completely dominate.

 • Last year, the five Oscar nominees for Best Director were Woody Allen, Michel Hazanavicius, Terrence Malick, Alexander Payne, and Martin Scorsese. Average age: 62.

 • The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction went to Jennifer Egan, age 50

 • The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Bruce Norris, 52
 
 • The Prize for Music went to Zhou Long, 59

 • The Poetry award was won by Kay Ryan, 67

 • The Noble Prize for Literature went to 83-year-old Tomas Transtromer. And this year’s prize was just announced. It went to Alice Munro, 82

 • The Emmy for Best Comedy went to Modern Family, created by Christopher Lloyd, 52 and Steven Levitan, 50

I guarantee you, not one of these brilliant people – not one -- could a get a job in the creative department of an advertising agency today.

We have all the numbers and all the data, yet we are blinded by things we think we know that we don’t really know-- myths that we have been taught, and fairy tales about people over 50.

Let’s look at some of the fairy tales.

Fairy Tale #1: People over 50 are downsizing 

Here’s the reality. Between 1999 and 2009, spending by people 55 to 64 grew 45%. People aged 55-64 outspend average consumers in virtually every consumer products category. In fact, people 55-64 buy 30% more new cars than people 25-34. In fact, people 75 to dead buy more new cars than people 18-34.

Fairy Tale # 2: Older people are dying out 

The reality: Between now and 2030, the population over 50 will grow at about 3 times the rate of adults under 50. We are not losing our old people, we are losing our young people.

Fairy Tale # 3: By advertising younger, you automatically reach and influence people over 50

Advertisers believe that by advertising to 25-49 year olds we will reach the 50+ market as “spill.” But a study done by one of our associates recently showed that a typical media plan directed at 25-49 year olds had a 50+ component of only 15%. It is not just the media thinking that is wrong, it is also the message. According to The New York Times, the generation gap is wider than at any time since the 1960’s. 2/3 of people over 50 say they are less likely to purchase a product if they find the advertising offensive. And guess what, the same 2/3 say that advertising has become cruder and more offensive.

Fairy Tale # 4: People over 50 are “stuck in their ways” and will not switch brands

The reality is baby boomers are just as likely as young people to try new products. 61% say that “in today’s marketplace, it doesn’t pay to be loyal to one brand.” Guess what the number is among people 18 - 41. Exactly the same.

Fairy Tale #5: If you get them young, you’ll have them for life.

This is the “lifetime value” delusion. A few months ago, the wrongness of this argument was exposed in a study published by the journal Science. 
A team of psychologists released a study which discredited what we call “Lifetime value” and the scientists call "the end of history illusion" i.e., the illusion that things will remain as they currently are and we will stay like we are now.   According to one of the authors of the study we simply do not realize "how transient our preferences and values are..."  And if you think that targeting millennials now means you’ll have them for life, here’s some sobering news. A study last year reported that 80% of millennials looked for the lowest price possible when shopping, and that 60% are more inclined to bypass their favorite brand if a cheaper alternative is available.

Fairy Tale # 6: People over 50 want to be like young people.

This may be the oldest and perhaps the most damaging of the fairy tales. Do older people want to be youthful? Yes. Do they want to be like young people? No. This is a crucial distinction which seems to be completely lost on our industry. People over 50 have their own idea of what it means to be youthful, and I promise you it has nothing whatever to do with Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus or the young, hip doofuses we are bombarded with in advertising.

People over 50 are not who we think they are. They grew up smoking weed and listening to James Brown. They invented the personal computer. They helped develop Google. They didn’t invent sex, but they invented the sexual revolution.

For the most part, they are healthy, wealthy and wise. They are not grandma and grandpa.

They do not look like this...

They look like this...

In my opinion, the idea that people over 50 want to be like young people is simply the narcissistic excuse that the young people who dominate our industry use to not bother learning or understanding older people.

I have come to the conclusion that the rationales we use for targeting young people are highly questionable and that there is little to no factual evidence to support these practices.

I believe we do not ignore older people for the reasons we give. These are just rationalizations we use because we prefer to identify with the excitement of youth than the dullness of middle and older age.

I have come to the conclusion that we are spending 10’s of billions of dollars on questionable practices based on questionable assumptions.

Now maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a logic that I can’t see in which half of the buying power of the country is only worthy of 5% of our effort. But I don’t think I’m wrong. I’ve been around advertising too long to accept the idea that there are mysteries about it that average people like me can’t understand.

Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that there is no place for advertising to young people. There certainly is. But at 95 to 5, I believe we are way out of balance.

The 50+ generation is not just a niche that needs sidebar attention. They are the mainstream. There are now 101 million people over 50 in America. In just 5 years, half of all American adults will be over 50. They are the hard core of our economy. They are the group that determines the success and failure of most products.

It’s time to think outside of health care, financial services and erectile dysfunction -- to all the other mainstream product and service categories that are heavily patronized, and often dominated, by people over 50.

The sooner we recognize this and adapt our marketing and advertising thinking to this reality, the sooner we will all enjoy the attention and the financial benefits of the most valuable consumer group in the history of the world.

Thanks.

Playing The Other Guy's Game

Over 20 years ago I left the agency business for the first time. We had sold our agency to a "global" network and after two years of working for them I decided it was not the life for me. I took the money and ran.

For three years thereafter I did creative services (mostly TV spots) directly for clients. In that three-year period I pitched against ad agencies half a dozen times. I only lost once. I learned a very important lesson during those three years -- clients hated agencies.

Behind their backs, they laughed at agency "strategic abilities." They put no value on "account service" ("all it does is keep the agency from fucking up, it doesn't do a thing for me.") They thought media planning and buying were commodities they could get anywhere. The value they saw in agencies was in creativity. They believed the only place they could get good advertising was from an agency. If they could get it somewhere else, they would.

Apparently, the advertising industry has decided that it is no longer in the creativity business.

According to the OmniPub press conference in Paris on Sunday, and the analyses in the news media yesterday, the primary rationale given for the merger between Publicis and Omnicom had nothing to do with creativity. It was mainly about their ability to compete with Google and Facebook in the collection and utilization of data.

It is not clear to this shallow mind how this new entity will be any more competent to collect and utilize data than the two old entities. I am not alone.

“I think it’s a total misdirection to think that you can leverage the scale and advantages of big data if you’re bigger. Quite the opposite,” says Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan. “These aren’t technology companies, and you don’t get better tech development out of consolidation.

Having run ad agencies myself, it is my experience that the important data about consumer behavior comes primarily from 1) the brand, and 2) media and media research companies.

Traditionally, the agency's role has been to 1) misinterpret the data 2) create questionable strategies from the data,` and 3) buy media carelessly. The idea that the agency will now be the collector and keeper of data and the go-to developer of media technology seems highly unlikely.

There are still a few agencies around that do terrific creative work and still a few clients who value it. But if we are to judge by the rationale these two agencies gave us for their merger, the agency business is betting its future on the assumption that clients will believe that the value they can get from data and technology is greater than creativity.

Let's assume for a moment that all this techno/data hysteria is valid. Since Google and Facebook essentially control web advertising, OmniPub's strategy must assume that their clients will trust them to know Google's customers better than Google does and Facebook's customers better than Facebook does. Otherwise, why not just use the data Google and Facebook (and every other online media channel) will give you for free when you make a buy?

It is hard for me to believe that even clients are that stupid.

The ad industry has decided to play the other guy's game. They are now competing in an arena in which they have distinct disadvantages. They are not as good at data or technology as their competitors. They are quietly abandoning creativity, although it is still the one and only thing that clients can't get somewhere else.

Richard Pinder, former COO of Publicis says...

“...the bulk of the enterprise’s activity is still about finding, creating and executing inspirational ideas to motivate the world’s population to choose one brand over another...there is a point beyond which scale can actually be a disadvantage—talent feels lost, ideas get killed by people who have no idea what the clients’ needs are and everything takes too long and costs too much”

Or as we like to say:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

It is very tempting to predict that the ad world's desperate attempt to remake itself as a technology industry will lead to failure. But I've been around business too long. I am too  cynical to underestimate the remarkable power of big and dumb.


The Type A group will be doing a closed-circuit broadcast to about 200 TV stations today throughout North America on the subject of "The Battle For The World's Most Valuable Consumer" (people over 50.) If your group can profit from this one-hour talk, you are urged to contact us.

Comparing Apples and Amazons

My recent foray into publishing an ebook has been a real eye-opener.

I am a very big fan of Apple products. I believe they make beautiful products that are generally easy and delightful to use. The service in their retail stores is usually outstanding.

Dealing with "corporate" Apple, however, has been a complete nightmare. They are the epitome of everything that's wrong with the tech industry. Trying to get a response from them is next to impossible. Trying to get an answer to a simple question is useless. When you get a response, trying to decipher it is beyond the abilities of mortal men. Attempting to get a live human on the phone is out of the question.

Here's my story.

A few weeks ago I published an ebook with Amazon. It was a pleasure. The instructions on their website were clear. Once I had it formatted, it took just a few minutes to upload it and then just a few hours for it to appear in the Amazon store.

Having heard that publishing something to Apple's iBookstore was more complicated, I started the process weeks before Amazon. I filled out the necessary forms on line. Then I waited.

After a few weeks I sent several emails inquiring about my application and trying to get acknowledgement that it had even been received. I heard nothing. I waited a few more weeks. I sent another email on Dec. 7th asking about the status of my account. One week later I received a return email that was completely incomprehensible.

Not only could I not understand it, our IT guy, who manages the computer needs of 72 people spread out over 2,000 miles couldn't understand it. Not only could he not understand it, the Apple business team (we are an Apple business customer) that handles our account couldn't understand it.

It has now been well over a month and I have no idea what the hell is going on, what the status of my book is, or where to go to find an answer.

My opinion of Apple has taken a very significant dive. It seems that when you get beneath the surface they are no different from the rest of the tech industry. All they want to do is sell you something. Once they do, you can go screw yourself.

By The Way:
Thanks to everyone who has bought the book. It has been a consistent best-seller in its puny little category. If you haven't bought it yet, remember: Kim Jung Il didn't buy it either. Look what happened to him.

Kev Sticks Little Weenie In Big Mouth

Kev, Kev, Kev... when are you going to learn to keep your stupid fucking mouth shut?

As regular readers know, I have a love-hate relationship with Saatchi & Saatchi Chief Global Douchinator Kevin Roberts. I love to ridicule his pompous horseshit (like here, here, and here) but I hate to listen to his dopey ramblings.

Well, ol' Kev went and did it the other day. He stuck his little ol' weenie in his big ol' mouth.

According to Business Insider Kev thinks the debate over gender diversity in the ad industry is 'over'. I'm sure all the people whose gender is diverser than his will be interested to learn this.

But before we get to ripping Kevin's skin from his stinking carcass, let's have a look at the context from which such ignorance and arrogance develops.

There is a certain type of middle aged male for whom business success and shit tons of money are not enough. Their egos need more. They need to believe that their power and money did not come from crass commercial pursuits, but from some inner vital force.

I call it Guru-itis. It is the belief that your fame and money make you a visionary. And that you have an obligation to educate, inspire and coach us poor fools into achieving your higher plane of enlightenment. 

You can find these creeps all over Silicon Valley, and in board rooms throughout the world.

Here are the symptoms of Guru-itis: 

• You believe that the future is happening now but we mortals just can't see it. You, of course, can.
• You believe the everyday concerns of average people are silly relics that need to be transcended.
• You write a book about how people would be so much more productive and happy if they would just follow your shining example.

In the rarefied air of these Spiritually Enlightened Worldwide Blowhards, the concerns of us peasants  -- you know, like salary, advancement, and control over our lives -- are silly last-century trifles that we need to get over. 

According to these masters of the universe, everyone needs to join hands and have a harmonious view of life in which all are celebrated and appreciated, despite how assiduously we're being ignored, abused, and patronized by loudmouth aristocrats.

When you understand this, you understand Kev's fondness for New Age holistic horseshit. Usually it's just vapid marketing nonsense that doesn't really hurt anyone except the cretins dumb enough to listen to him. But this time he's in big trouble.

First Kevin blames the victims. According to him, when he tries to promote women into positions of creative leadership, two out of three times he hears...

'I don't want to manage a piece of business and people, I want to keep doing the work'," 

It's funny that he should hear that. I worked in the agency business for 200 years and I never heard that once. Not one fucking time. Never. 

Next Kev thinks the reason there are so few women in leadership roles  is because they're millennials and, you know, millennials are, like, a new species.

"If you think about those Darwinian urges of wealth, power, and fame — they are not terribly effective in today's world for a millennial because they want connectivity and collaboration."

Hey, Kev, connect and collaborate this.

On general principles I'm happy to blame millennials for just about anything, but I think Kev has turned out to be the only living human who believes the moronic crap we're fed at those idiotic "millennial summits." 

After blaming millennial indifference for our industry's blatant sexism, Kev actually trots out the "look how happy the slaves on the plantation are" argument.

"...we are trying to impose our antiquated shit on them, and they are going: 'Actually guys, you're missing the point, you don't understand: I'm way happier than you.' ...'We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by'."

Yeah, you plantation owners have no idea what fun we're having picking your cotton. We're having a blast out here in the fields while you dinosaurs are wasting your lives back there at the manor house sipping mint juleps.

It is astonishing that he even suggests this crap.

Then we get to the fun part.

Where he really makes his big mistake is taking on Cindy Gallop, a powerful advocate for women in advertising. I never met Cindy, but from what I've read I'd say that in about 30 seconds she could wrestle Kevin to the ground and force feed him his underwear.

Kev, Kev, Kev... a little advice from an ol' pal.

I have a feeling Cindy is about twice the man you are and I'd be careful to stay out of her way. She'll chew you up, and spit you out just to stimulate her gums.

Well, it's been fun having someone like Ol' Kev to kick around these past few years. But I'm afraid the fun is over.

Kev, it was nice knowing you.

UPDATE: A couple of hours after I posted this, Kev was shown the door.

Further Thoughts About Kev

Last week I did something unusual. For the first time in my recollection, I posted on this site on a Saturday morning.

What motivated me do so was reading the now infamous interview with Kevin Roberts on the Business Insider site.

Being outraged by his stupidity, I started to write immediately. I intended to post it, as usual, on Monday morning.

But something told me that this was going to explode in a hurry and that if I wanted to say something original I had to do it immediately. So I posted then and there.

As regular readers know, over the years I have been particularly harsh with Roberts. I was annoyed by him before it was cool.

But something is bothering me now and I can't get over it.

When it comes to free speech, I'm kind of an absolutist. I think it is a healthy thing for people to be able to express their opinions - no matter how ignorant or offensive - without fear.

As a self-styled contrarian, I have often been out on a limb and been ridiculed for it. That's fine. If you're gonna shoot your mouth off you have to be prepared to face the consequences. But it's easy for me, I can't be fired from my blog.

The fact that Kevin was put on "administrative leave" or whatever the hell they call firing these days, bothers me. It bothers me that governments cannot punish us for what we say, but companies and clients can. (Update: Roberts resigned this morning)

I fully understand that business big shots can do substantial damage to their companies by saying dumb things. And I also understand that Publicis has a responsibility to protect its employees and shareholders from the harm that can be done by this kind of ignorant bombast.

But I wish there was a way to accomplish that without creating an environment in which people in our business are going to think twice before they express an unpopular opinion. No matter how stupid it may be.

As Rory Sutherland said: 

"People in advertising say stupid things all the time. If you are a creative person, it's part of the job description. You see how far you can push the line, rather as in stand-up comedy. That's what ideas are for - in evolutionary terms they are experimental actions. I always argue that the value of an advertising agency is that it fosters a culture where you can make stupid suggestions and still get promoted: many great ideas start with a kind of daft, Pythonesque suggestion, which is then beaten into more sensible shape - the kind of stupid suggestions you couldn't make in a government department, or a client company. I am thus slightly wary when people are fearful of speaking freely."

I don't know what the answer is. How do you discourage stupidity without restricting the right to be stupid?

The Ten Amendments

Since Christmas and Hannukah are this week, I am publishing this guest post I received recently from a Very Important Being.

I am starting to get annoyed with you people. The universe is a large territory to cover and I’ve got a lot on my plate. I take my eye off you for a couple of thousand years and what do I find when I get back? You’re putting rings through your eyebrows and pineapple on your pizza.  What the hell is wrong with you?

I have been reading the books that I’m supposed to have dictated. Are you kidding me? I asked some guy to knife his baby? I let my son get hung up with nails? What would I do that for? (Okay, maybe if he was Donald Trump or something.)

Let’s get this straight. I didn’t write any of those books that I’m supposed to have written, okay? That stuff you're always killing each other over was written by people who thought I talked to them— in other words, crazy people.

I don’t have any favorite people or favorite countries or favorite religions or favorite anything. To be honest, you're all mostly just a pain in my ass and I don’t really care that much for any of you. Although sometimes I root for the Steelers.

Can I explain something else? I didn’t invent you. You’re here because all those little amoeba and bacteria I made needed a way to move around faster. Some of them evolved into you. Now you carry billions of them around with you everywhere you go. Mostly, you’re just rapid transit for bugs. So get over yourselves.

The more I watch you, the more I believe you’re completely crazy and unreliable. Consequently, I have written this essay in the hope that you’ll stop acting like morons.

I know you have your “Ten Commandments” so I’m going to call this The Ten Amendments. You can consider these amendments to the commandments. I think it’s kinda cute. Agree?

Okay, so here are The Ten Amendments. Pay attention please:

Amendment #1: Be Nice.
Now how difficult is that? Quit yelling at each other and shooting each other and writing nasty anonymous comments on blogs. Would it kill you to smile a little?

Amendment #2: Stop Whining.
You call it praying. I call it whining. Isn’t it obvious by now that I don’t pay attention to any of that stuff?

Amendment #3: Keep Your Stupid Opinions To Yourself.
With all due respect, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, so button it. Shooting your mouth off just annoys everyone.

Amendment #4: Eat Your Salad Before The Meal
What’s with this salad-after-the-main-course thing? What are you, French or something?

Amendment #5: Do more screwing
It’s a nice, inexpensive way to have a good time. And you’ll sleep better. Just one thing – close the windows so you don’t alarm the neighbors’ children.

Amendment #6: Don’t Change Lanes So Much
You drive like idiots. Stay in your damn lane.

Amendment #7: Quit Watching So Much Crap
"Kim's Fairytale Wedding?" Are you crazy?

Amendment #8: Take Those Bluetooth Things Out Of Your Ears
Do you really want to look like the biggest jerk at the airport?

Amendment #9: I Don’t Think It’s So Terrible To Put Parmesan Cheese On Seafood Pasta.
I know some people make a big fuss over this, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

Amendment #10: Clean Out Your Closet
You’ll feel better. Trust me.

So that’s all you have to do. I’ve got bigger things to worry about than what you eat, and what songs you sing, and whether you kneel down or light candles or wear a hat. I’ll leave that up to you. Also, don’t  pay any attention to those people who say they represent me -- I don’t need agents.

One last thing. Try to be helpful, okay?

Your friend,
God

The Cluefree Manifesto

Nine years ago, something called the Cluetrain Manifesto appeared. It became a kind of web-geek Declaration of Independence in which online zealots threatened to hold their breath until someone paid attention to them. It is apparently the basis for the "coversationalist/social media" branch of online dogmatism.

Always years behind the times, TAC came across it just last week, and published it on Monday. It's probably best to read it before you read today's post.

The target was too easy to pass up, so we had to create the "Cluefree Manifesto." Here it is.

The Cluefree Manifesto
95 Theses

1. Markets are conversations. Supermarkets are arguments.
2. Markets consist of aisles and checkout counters and really good stuff like Doritos and Mountain Dew.
3. Conversations among human beings are usually tiresome. You’re better off doing a crossword.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically shrill and irritating.
5. People recognize each other and wisely cross the street.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible when we actually looked at each other.
7. Hot links subvert haute cuisine.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, intrusive international interest in intestines is intentionally and inevitably intense.
9. These networked conversations are enabling really hot pictures to emerge.
10. Markets are getting more organized. Like when they have those good olives in the cheese section.
11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from their IT department.
12. There are no secrets. Except how to change line spacing in Powerpoint.
13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Paycheck" is the only thing standing between the two.
14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. Especially when all those big shots inhale helium and start talking like chipmunks or something.
15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the "Cluetrain Manifesto."
16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone. Except, of course, their customers.
17. Companies that assume online markets are the same as markets that carry Hot Pockets are kidding themselves.
18. Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are probably confused by the structure of illiterate sentences like this.
19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. Or they can just go there and stand in line like the rest of us.
20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. Especially when you buy a can of Mountain Dew for a buck when you could have bought a whole six-pack for a buck ninety-nine. How stupid is that?
21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor. And stop issuing “manifestos”.
22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. It means hilarous banter about farts and poop and stuff like that.
23. Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Like when the girl is on top...yeah, baby!
24. Bombastic boasts—"Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us."—do not constitute a position.
25. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships. But be careful, those Ivory Steps are slippery.
26. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets and sometimes of their dry cleaners.
27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, their manifestos invite parody.
28. Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside their pants.
29. Elvis said it best: "Pass the Oreos, darlin’."
30. Going out for Chinese is the corporate version of going steady.
31. Networked markets can change pajamas overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change shirts over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Who has the mustard?"
32. Smart markets will find check-out clerks who speak their own language.
33. Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. Unless you’re a ventriloquist or something.
34. To speak with a human voice, companies must not make long lists of “95 things.”
35. But first, they must belong to a community and register to vote.
36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. And also where the damn stapler went.
37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market. Also, they shouldn’t end before the holiday season because that’s when all the fun starts.
38. Human communities are based on whining. Especially those “senior” communities.
39. The community of discourse is the market. Or haven’t we hit you over the head with this enough yet?
40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die. Or at least get a rotator cuff and need an MRI.
41. Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against those guys selling magazine subscriptions.
42. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines. Also about recipes, and those Viagra emails, and the Yankees. What’s up with them?
43. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the phone system is down.
44. Companies typically install intranets top-down, which is silly unless you don’t care about the wind messing up your hair.
45. Intranets naturally tend to route around bedrooms.
46. A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union. But you don’t get to meet guys named Vito.
47. While this scares companies witless, it doesn’t scare them as much as Vito does.
48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like this kind of pompous bullshit.
49. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and deli orders could be handed down from on high.
50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority. That’s why Steve Jobs has to take so much shit from software engineers.
51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping, an overall culture of paranoia, and incomprehensible writing.
52. Raid kills bugs fast.
53. There are two conversations going on. How am I supposed to read?
54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Especially the one about lending money to your sister.
55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets. And also in intrerior-networked networks and work nets.
56. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices. They sing the same songs. They dance in the moonlight. They fly on gossamer wings. They kiss and make up. They love, and love to be loved. They find meaning in meaning, and nothing in nothingness. They chant beneath the moon. They laugh and soar and fart and make big fat poopies and write pathetically infantile pseudo-poetic nonsense.
57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner. We, the conversationalists, will take a vacation and try to lose a few pounds.
58. If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of sperm count, then very few companies are having nocturnal emissions.
59. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting. Except when they want to buy something.
60. This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies. Please send them your phone numbers.
61. Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is the good looking babes who are stuck in some rotten cubicle doing spreadsheets.
62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want hot babes.
63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you. We are the world. We are the children.
64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge, your wives, your liquor cabinet, your stash. And could you lend us twenty till Friday?
65. We're also the workers who make your companies go. (How? We put Metamucil in the Crystal Geyser.)
66. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other? Why can’t we just get together over a drink and then, I don’t know, we could go to my place…?
67. As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. Is it because we’re so fucking annoying?
68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—it's kidstuff compared to this bullshit.
69. Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us. But if we could borrow your Beemer for just a few minutes, that would be awesome.
70. If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Which is something we ought to think about.
71. Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. And our noses run. And that yukky stuff to accumulate between our toes.
72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it. And you’re not invited. And if you tell mom, I’ll kill you.
73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel! Ooh, sorry. Didn’t realize it’s your husband.
74. We are immune to advertising. But can we have a little sip of your Coke?
75. If you want us to talk to you, please take those earbuds out.
76. We've got some ideas for you too: but we’re not going to tell because it's for us to know and you to find out!
77. You're too busy "doing your business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Remember to flush.
78. You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention. Look at me when I talk to you.
79. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party. And maybe you can bring some beer.
80. Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as you ignore every moronic thing in this idiotic screed.
81. Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about? How about that blouse you were wearing on Tuesday? Yeah, baby!
82. Your product broke. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I tried to stick my wife’s cat in it and he started screeching and biting.
83. We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal. And you know which one I mean. The one with the “big ones.”
84. We know some people from your company. They’re pathetic dicks, too.
85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. That’s why we’re so clueless.
86. When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. Actually, we’d rather be doing anything online because online is the only place we can criticize everything and everyone without people realizing what hopeless weasels we are.
87. We'd like it if you got what's going on here. You just don't get it, do you? Do you?.
88. We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get to the Halloween party. I’m going as Mr. Spock. Cool, huh?
89. We have real power and we know it. Don't let this pitiful whining fool you.
90. Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing. And it’s all your fault and I'm telling my dad.
91. Our allegiance is to ourselves—and to the flag of the United States of America.
92. Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they buy us a beer? Just one. Is that too much to ask? Oh, and maybe a sandwich. Nothing fancy. Tuna or something?
93. We're both inside companies and outside them. That’s why there’s that smell.
94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, nicer pencils cases, and watches that tell the hour in three different time zones.
95. We are waking up and linking to each other. Then we are having strawberry Toaster Strudel and going back to sleep. Please don’t slam the door.

Conversation With A Web Maniac

This past weekend I had a web conversation with a guy named Felix Velarde who runs a company called Underwired in the UK. The conversation was conducted via comments on a blog post of mine from April entitled "The Thing That Will Change Everything."

Dave Trott, one of the UK's most respected admen, sent Felix over to TAC to read the post knowing Felix would disapprove. Here's the conversation between Felix and me. It's way, way too long and may be the dullest thing I've ever posted, but if I edited his stuff he'd rightly accuse me of being unfair. I've done a tiny bit of editing just for clarity.

Honestly, I don't know if you'll find this interesting or not.

@TAC

TAC ... I'm sure you've got a trillion years of understanding consumer behaviour, and I'm sure you're right about how venal, faddish and self-important the marketers you work with are.

But here's the thing. The internet did change everything, utterly and without mercy. We have a globally distributed notion of justice. We have a globally distributed set of cultural norms. We (finally) have a near-universal language. We have a US President accepted as a good replacement for the universally reviled previous global leader who everyone in the world knows intimately, and who has been elected based on a third of the world's cultural norms. We have a world of consumers who elect and buy, taken over from a locale of consumers you used to sell to.

Consumer behaviour may not have changed. But expectation, motivation, influence and conversion to buy have changed forever. The consumer, finally, is king. And TV, though still a powerful medium, hasn't caught up despite 12 years of interactive TV. The day TV advertising can be segmented not by programme but by the individual consumer's implicit or explicit at-that-moment requirements will be the day TV gets back on its feet. And yes, when we started an interactive TV agency for Lowe in 1998 it was arguably way too early. The fact it produced interactive TV ads for Tesco and Unilver, two of the most far-sighted marketers, doesn't take away from the fact that it couldn't make money - but it was necessary to help get the ball that may one day save the TV advertising industry's arse rolling.

My own view about what people might remember is that it takes two types of people for progress to happen - the innovators and visionaries who come at things too early but set up the parameters of the experiment, and the reactionaries that temper the enthusiasm but enforce rigour. I'm quite happy to be in one of the groups, and I'm glad of the existence of the other, because your maturity means I can borrow, say, the discipline of data planning and prove that what we do works better for the new world's consumers than what you used to do when it was the only way.

Glad this social media thing is here though, because previously the only way we could have an argument was down the pub or in the letters pages, so thanks Twitterverse and blogosphere, at least you've revolutionised how fast one man can flourish his own reactionary views, another can highlight them, a third can get it all wrong before correcting his mistake, and how fast presumably this will turn into pixels in the wind. Personally I'd much prefer to do this over a pint than in public, but hey, you know that when even the Iranians are using Twitter to complain about injustice, the world's all gone and changed while you were busy watching television ;)

Felix Velarde

@Felix,

To be honest, I would normally ignore your "visionary" comments as just the usual ravings of an online maniac.

But since Dave Trott sent you over here, and I admire Dave greatly, I'm going to take what you have to say seriously.

Extraordinary claims ("the internet did change everything, utterly") require extraordinary proof. You are very good at making the extraordinary claims, but a little weak on the evidence. Ten pounds of assertions do not equal one ounce of validation.

Let's take it point by point. First, we do not have a "globally distributed" notion of ANYTHING. The internet notwithstanding, there is just as much diversity of opinion about justice, and cultural norms and everything else political and cultural as there has ever been. Maybe you and your pals who read each others' blogs and tweets have reached a consensus, but the world is just as messy and full of conflict and discord as it has ever been. I would like to suggest that you try reading one of those old-fashioned things we "reactionaries" call newspapers.

In the next paragraph you got one thing right: consumer behavior has not changed. Everything else in that paragraph is wrong. All that baloney about "expectation, motivation...", do you just make that shit up? Do your clients believe it? Here are some facts: 1)People now watch more tv than ever before. 2)Every test ever done on interactive tv has been a failure.

You are obviously an intelligent person. When you make assertions like "the internet did change everything" there are only two possibilities: either you mean what you say, or you are playing with words. If you are just playing with words, it's not worth commenting on. If you mean what you say, it is very disturbing.

There is a lot to life beyond the computer screen. There is food and music and art and friendship and talking and laughing and flowers and sports and, as you say, an argument down at the pub. To say that the internet changed everything is simply an alarming assertion for an intelligent person to make. You are spending way too much time in front of a computer screen.

PS: Just because I'm right, doesn't make me a "reactionary." Just because you're wrong, doesn't make you a "visionary."

TAC

@Dave, you were right - he's both intelligent and acerbic. But he's also a little pompous no? (Note: I'm not clear why Felix addresses this to Dave Trott and then later to me. -TAC)

So this is me. I probably have just as much of a non-screen life as he does. I fly gliders, ride horses, have friends all over the world, throw parties, eat at nice restaurants, drive sports cars, same stuff as he. I have a reasonable online life as well, though very little outside of work hours. I keep in touch with the 200 or so people of every social, religious and political hue that I cherish in my personal life, and the 200 or so I value in my professional life, using my social media. But I'm no geek, I went to a school with no computers - unlike the current generation in the West and the new generation in the East that relies on bandwidth like air.

I was lucky to have been involved in starting one of the world's first web agencies, one of the first SEO agencies, the first iTV agency, and one of the leading eCRM agencies. I'm still learning all the time because our world is constantly changing, and still very often wrong (there, an easy one for you to quote me on later).

But the world has indeed changed. You've commented yourself on Tehran's new Twittering classes. That's a fine example of real-time, unfiltered interactive news, something that could not have happened before the net. In fact, where there remains no bandwidth TV still rules; but those are the same places where they launch missiles to mock independence day or misguided foreigners swim to meet housebound leaders. Iran's real-time-shared protestations are not iconic like Tianenmen Square, but then what's an icon but a fixation on the object and not the consumer of it. The new world has changed. This world is one where what a brand is is defined by what it lets its consumers say about it - not what it tells its consumers to think about it. And if you can't tell the difference between the two, then that's symptomatic of why the advertising industry has had its day in the sun.

You come from a world where the marketer defined the brand, and substantiated it with product. The world we now live in is one in which consumers commune, and brands that listen are defined by their listening, and their products get defined by what its consumers say - or show - they want un-prompted. This is how Unilever and Dell and P&G now work. On their rapid way out, thank goodness, are the days of the guided focus group, where ad folk with middling geography degrees divine market desires from "representative" samples of ten.

Advertising was first undermined by Direct Marketing, when the three letter lie in econometrics was exposed, and finally replaced with statistical certainty and relevance, something that TV panders but does not provide. Interactive TV was born of advertising people desperate to cling onto a world they could no longer control - of course it hasn't worked, except in hotels - where it's interactive but ad-free - and in the UK, where it forms the backbone to Domino Pizza's revenue stream and where finally the BBC has learned to serve multiple options to millions of viewers in news, Glastonbury (where your Boss played last weekend) and travel sales. Perhaps after all there too you're wrong.

Customers in their collective can make the decisions now, because brands that understand the way the world has changed listen to them, build their new products around them, and acquire brand equity by association. The brand onion is now more of a soup, a broth at best. 150 years ago you too changed the world. But today we know exactly which fifty percent does what, why, how and when.

TV may indeed be watched by more people, but there are also more cars, more polluters, more superpowers - and yet they are the last call of a newly redundant paradigm. TV is trusted by just 38% of viewers, compared with 77% who trust emails from friends. Read Don Tapscutt, who told you fifteen years ago at the same time as all those people - including me - started experimenting with how to make it so, that the world was irrevocably changing. You enjoy a platform that's not confined to a printed, out of date before it's proofed, ad rag. Your assertions and (witty, deeply acerbic) web logs reach, stimulate, annoy and amuse people you'll never meet (though as I said before, love to do this over a pint one day). Tens if not hundreds of millions of people now have a voice that can genuinely be heard. You too have been changed by the internet.

Enjoy your advertising. Enjoy the banners and viral films your world insisted on but which our new world thinks at best ephemerally amusing, at worst intrusive. Party hard while it lasts, because marketing changed while you were being funny. Enjoy the holiday weekend, perhaps upload something to Flickr.

Felix Velarde

@Felix:

As usual, when confronted with a logical argument, a web maniac goes off into the stratosphere with every possible spurious irrelevancy.

I thought our conversation was about your assertion that the internet changed "everything, utterly." I understand why you would want to change the subject rather than defend such a preposterous position, but at least pretend to stay on subject.

Your argument is not an argument -- it is merely another grab bag of unsubstantiated assertions, just like your first comment. There is only one fact in your comment: TV is trusted by 38% of viewers. What you neglect to say, however, is that the LEAST trusted of all major media is your precious internet.

I'm afraid your latest comment is quite typical of a new class of people who... "fly gliders, ride horses, have friends all over the world, throw parties, eat at nice restaurants, drive sports cars" and have no fucking idea how real people in the real world have to wash floors, change diapers, struggle to make payments on their refrigerators and don't spend all day having fucking conversations about fucking brands with their fucking "followers" on fucking Twitter.

And one more thing. I may have a float in the pomposity parade but, dude, you're the grand marshall.

TAC

@TAC

Very funny, I laughed out loud.

I grew up with my share of challenges, and my first job was as a washer-upper, but I've clearly matured into a passionate, pompous man - I should be in advertising. Oh, that's your gig remember?

The internet isn't a single medium, like TV, it's a venue. 60% of people trust online peer recommendation - but unlike Oprah's book reviews this is actually peer to peer. That's the change. TV offers no peer communication, unless you'd like to cite Big Brother or Jerry Springer.

You and I may be gaudy cheerleaders in the grand pomposity parade (nice pompoms brother), but we're just at different ends of a spectrum that's both necessary and interesting. I happen to think one-way shouting is old, tired and in need of merciful release, and you may think the internet and its attendant democratisation of thought is just so much white noise (like, probably, this little debate), but there's no escaping the fact that it even changed you.

The existence of the net means that valid or invalid opinions can be aired and repeated, no matter if they come from a disenfranchised untouchable or a total ignoramus or a prince or an advertising guru. It means people can find common ground with others in a way never before possible. It means that no longer is that common ground office politics or the television soap or political propaganda everyone saw last night - it means the common ground is whatever anyone wants it to be. Opinion can be aired and can mobilise itself on a vast scale, evolving the views of hundreds of millions. TV only did that in 1963 or 1969 (and, to be fair, when Neighbours went global). You talk scathingly of my lack of appreciation for the man on the Clapham omnibus. To go back to the very beginning, bollocks man.

The internet is truly democratic in its reach; the UK has even recently asserted bandwidth for all as a right. This kind of universal access to global conversation is as revolutionary as universal suffrage, for the same reasons: it gives everyone a voice. Television, on the other hand, gives everyone entertainment. My esteemed sparring partner, the two are not equivalent, there is no competition between the two. One is new, one is old. If you had to get rid of one, even you know you'd choose to consign television to history.

Felix Velarde

@Felix:

Somehow you have turned this conversation into a debate over tv versus the internet. I am not an ideologue for tv. I've made no claims for tv. You're arguing with yourself.

I don't give a shit about tv. I am just interested in facts.

When you claim that the internet has changed "everything, utterly" you have a responsibility to your readers (and to yourself) to be clear about how this is so. Just re-hashing assertions is the argument of a 10-year-old.

Here's the deal, Felix.

You seem like a nice, intelligent fellow whose brain has been addled by paying far too much attention to trendy nonsense.

You need to reconcile all the bullshit you read on line with the facts on the ground.

I want you to spend one hour in front of your local supermarket today and ask shoppers the following question:

"Before you came here today, did you consult the internet or have an online conversation with a friend about any of the brands you bought?"

Then maybe you can get your head out of your ass and see how the real world works.

TAC

@TAC:

Yes dear. If you ask them while standing outside Tesco, they'll say no. But a million of them in the UK will be buying the stuff Tesco offered them as a special via email the day before, based on what their Clubcard recorded in their basket the previous week.

If you stand outside Boots they'll also say no, but they'll nonetheless have some Dove products in their basket because listening to the net built that brand.

You're being disingenuous, Bob. We're talking about marketing. The net changed marketing, because it's now about listening not asking, serving not telling.

And if you stand outside Amazon, or Dell, you'll fall off.

Felix Velarde

@Felix

So now spam email is your glorious "revolutionary global conversation." It's just fucking electronic coupons.

You gotta be fucking kidding.

Anyway, I'm tired of this so I'm going to give you the last word, go ahead...

TAC

@TAC

Yep, sorry mate, world changed while you were in broadcast mode.

Seriously and now that's all over, you might like 'Groundswell', pretty robust thinking from Forrester Research, though you might take issue with some of their rather unrefined segmentation.

Felix Velarde

Addendum:
It's midday and I'm reading the comments, and I have two observations.

First, it's startling to me the lack of reading comprehension on the part of some people. They seem to think that if I question the absurd claim that "everything has changed" that I believe nothing has changed. This is crazy. Of course things have changed. Things always change. But the assertion that "everything has changed" is just the drivel of ideologues who have no sense of perspective.

Second, I'm really tired of hearing that everyone who disagrees with these people is a "dinosaur" or "out of touch." If you can't argue the subject on its merits, take it somewhere else.

The Dumb-Ass Blogger's Presidential Platform

One of the dumbest things anyone can do is waste his time with politics. It is almost always a no-win situation and no matter what you say half the people think you're an idiot.

In other words, it's perfect for this blog.

Since this past weekend was President's Day, and I've never had the pleasure of running a country, I thought I would publish my presidential platform so you can see how a dumb-ass blogger would govern this mess of a nation.

First, let's take a look at what's wrong with all our politicians. The answer here is simple. They are all ideologues. Not one of them has any practical new ideas about fixing the mess we're in other than "spend less money" or "spend more money" or "God wants us to do this or that."

I don't care about ideology. Ideology never fixed a damn thing. Ideology is for suckers. I am only interested in practical solutions to clearly defined problems.

So, next we need to define the problems. Here is my interpretation of what the core problems are:

1. Our economy sucks and there are too many people out of work.

2. We have a particularly bad problem with unemployed young men. Some are bright, responsible and just can't find work. Some have no skills, no education, and no reasonable hope for a productive future. They commit most of the crime and have been and will continue to be a drain on our society for decades.

3. As all the God botherers are quick to point out, we have a changing social fabric with over half of babies born to women under 30 born out of wedlock. I'm not in the business of making moral judgments, but there is a practical issue here. Kids born out of wedlock have a distinct disadvantage. According to the NY Times..."Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." According to a study by Bowling Green University kids born into a married household “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Next we need to derive a set of principles to deal with these problems. Being a dumb-ass ad guy as well as a dumb-ass blogger, the principles I will apply are the ones that my agency applies to advertising problems. We call it Performance-Based Advertising (you can find it here) but for the purpose of my dumb-ass presidential platform I am going to call it Performance-Based Politics. The principles are the same, just re-purposed for a different set of problems.

Here are the 3 principles:

1. Politics is most effective when it is focused on changing behavior, not attitudes.

2. Politics should be centered on influencing the high-yield target (the group who will make the most difference.)

3. Politics should be practiced "bottom-up," with practical solutions not ideological fairy tales.

Applying these principles, we can start to see a clearer definition of what needs to be done. In one simple sentence, the best strategy for dealing with our problems is to focus our attention on creating a way to provide young people (especially young men) with marketable skills.

It is pretty obvious that everything we have tried along these lines is failing: the education system is a disaster, and providing social services makes us feel better but has little practical effect.

My presidential platform is based on a simple solution to this problem. It will not solve all the problems of the country, and there are a million little details that need to be hammered out. But it will make a huge difference and it will be the most effective single thing we can do to bring the country back around. 

We should immediately institute mandatory military service for all males over 18 years old. No exceptions, no excuses.

The first thing it will do is get millions of young men off the streets and out of trouble

The second thing it will do is give us a framework for teaching skills to young men whether they want it or not. Unlike civilian life, in the army you do what you're told.

The third thing it will do is give us a platform for teaching civic and personal responsibility to those who don't have it.

Finally, it will give them less time to get teenage girls pregnant.

It meets our 3 criteria.

• It's about changing behavior.
• It focuses on the high-yield target (young men)
• It is a practical solution, not an ideological one.

It will cost a lot of money, but will also provide zillions of jobs. People will be needed to build infra-structure and a support system for this new army. They'll need housing, clothing, food, equipment, transportation. It will stimulate spending, and therefore economic activity, in dozens of industries.

Hopefully, we have finally learned not to get ourselves involved in any more unnecessary wars. With Iraq and Afghanistan drawing to a close these young men will not be sent off to fight, and can be doing productive work.

Strangely, young men coming out of the armed forces now have a higher unemployment rate than those who don't. This makes no sense to me and I'm counting on the fact that the economic stimulus that my dumb-ass platform will create will reverse this. When our young men come out of the army they will have been taught a skill; they will know how to get their ass out of bed in the morning and do something; they will have bypassed some of the most dangerous years of their lives; they will have hope for a productive life.

This is my story and I'm sticking to it. Vote the dumb-ass party!

The Devaluation Of Creativity

Today I am reprinting parts of my talk from the IAPI/ADFX awards in Dublin, Ireland last week. For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out some sections and focusing solely on my comments about creativity. Hope you enjoy. 

Thank you for inviting me here tonight.

I’m not usually invited to speak at high class affairs like this. I usually get invited to horrifying events like the “The Programmatic Real-Time Digital Insider Summit” or some other majestically titled festival of horseshit.

But, thankfully, tonight is different. Tonight you are recognizing the best of Irish advertising. And I am honored to help you do that.

I love good advertising. I started my career as a copywriter. After a while I got myself promoted to creative director for a few agencies. And after proving myself to be an utter failure as a creative director, I was demoted to ceo.

But the one thing I always really wanted to be was a great copywriter. Sadly, my copywriting career consisted mostly of holiday-weekend mattress sales and low, low financing on every Corolla in stock.

Despite my mediocrity, doing creative work was the only thing that really interested me about advertising. The rest was torture.

As far as I was concerned, the agency business worked like this: the creative people made the ads and everyone else made the arrangements.

What I could never understand was why it took 5 times as many people to make the arrangements.

I guess you could say I was a creative department chauvinist. And to be honest, I still am.

We are here tonight to celebrate effectiveness in advertising.

I know how had hard you clients, and you account people, and planners, and data analysts, and media strategists worked for the awards you’re getting tonight, and I congratulate you.

But I want you to know in advance, that I’m not going to be speaking about you. I am going to be focusing on the contribution that our creative people make to advertising effectiveness. And the peril they, and we, are facing.

Regardless of how brilliant the briefs we write are, and the strategies we develop are, and plans we implement are, at the end of the line are the people who will take our plans and strategies and briefs and turn them into magic or turn them into trash. They’re our creatives.

For better or worse, the consumer never sees the briefing documents or the strategic rationale. All she ever sees are the ads. And if the ads stink, the whole thing stinks.

Over the past few years I have been doing a lot of traveling and speaking about advertising. Wherever I go in the world, I invariably hear the same two themes.

First is that advertising has become less effective.

And second is that advertising is less creative.

It is hard for me to believe that these two things are not related…

…The problem we are facing today, I’m afraid, is that the creative side of our business is being devalued. Creativity is quickly and quietly becoming a support service.

The alarming thing about this is that I believe creativity is the agency business’s only unique value to clients. Everything else agencies do clients can get somewhere else.

They can get business strategy from about a million different consulting firms. They can find media planners and buyers on every street corner. They can buy data by the truckload with two clicks of a mouse.

The one thing every successful marketer needs — and the one thing agencies can provide better than anyone else — is imaginative ideas about brands.

But apparently, the advertising industry has decided it can no longer support itself by focusing on creativity.

If you remember the aborted marriage between Omnicom and Publicis last year, the rationale for creating the biggest agency in the world had nothing at all to do with creativity. The primary reason given for the merger was their presumed ability to compete with Google and Facebook in the collection and utilization of data.

It seems to me that the agency business is betting its future on playing the other guy’s game. I think this is a mistake.

Over 25 years ago I left the agency business for the first time. Two years earlier we had sold our independent agency to a publicly traded  "global" network. And after the two worst years of my life, I decided it was not the life for me.

For three years thereafter I did creative services on my own directly for clients. In that three-year period being outside of the agency business I learned a very important lesson. Clients, I want you to cover your ears and not listen to this -- Okay, agency people, here’s what I learned. Secretly, clients don’t like agencies.

They put no value on "account service” — or as one client told me "all it does is keep the agency from fucking up, it doesn't do a thing for me."

Behind our backs, they chuckled about our "strategic abilities."

The value they saw in agencies was in creativity. They believed the only place they could get good ads was from an agency.

But creativity is in trouble.

There’s a mantra I hear in agencies back in the States. I don’t know if you hear it here, too. But it goes like this. “We’re all creative” or “Creative ideas can come from anywhere.” In my opinion this is bullshit.

True creative talent is a rare and precious thing.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many shitty songs, and shitty TV shows, and shitty movies? I’ll tell you why. Because it is really fucking hard to do a good one. 

The same is true with advertising. No one sits down to write a crappy ad. Mostly they just turn out crappy. Why? Because it’s really fucking hard to do a good one — and there are very few people who can do it.

If you really believe that we are all creative, then you have to believe that it’s just a coincidence that Shakespeare wrote dozens of brilliant plays and Donald Trump didn’t.

Now, I stipulate that when we talk about creativity, the word is confusing. It has two very different meanings. And the new bigwigs of advertising are trying their best to muddy the issue by confusing the meanings.

In the first meaning, creativity is seen as a method for accomplishing a practical goal. So you can approach any task in a creative manner. In this meaning creativity is a way of thinking. So you can fry an egg the traditional way, or you can be “creative” and fry it in alligator oil or something.

In the second case, there is a special meaning for the word “creativity" that is specific to the communication arts. This is the kind of creativity that makes music and art and literature and, yes, sometimes even advertising, extraordinary and delightful.

Sure, the guy who printed the tickets to Hamlet, or made the popcorn, or counted the proceeds, may have found creative ways to do so. But he didn't write the fucking play.

That’s a whole different kind of creativity. And a whole different meaning of the word.

But the current generation of ad industry kingpins are trying very hard to dilute it into meaninglessness by asserting that we’re all creative and that creativity can come from anywhere.

If you think I am overstating my point, let me read you a recent quote from Martin Sorrell, the ceo of WPP and the most powerful man in the history of the agency business. And, by the way, an accountant by trade.

”The snottiness of believing that creativity just resides in the creative department of traditional agencies, that media people can't be creative, or data people can't be or people who do healthcare or promotion or CRM can't be creative – it's a nonsense and it's insulting to the people who are in those areas.”

He’s equating doing a practical job in a creative manner, with creating something unique from scratch. He’s saying they are the same thing.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against account people, or planners, or data people or CRM people or anyone else who thinks smartly and does a job in an imaginative way.

But I resent that the talents of our great creative people are being dismissed as the same thing.

This is not healthy for the ad business nor is it healthy for the people who work in it.

Our industry has been hijacked by aristocrats with private jets. They have made the agency business leaner and meaner.

They have made it more efficient. They have made it more productive. They have squeezed all the fat out of it. And in the process, they are also squeezing the life out of it.

They are money managers, and investors and financial wise guys. The one thing they are not is advertising people.

Advertising evolved as an industry of craftsmen and craftswomen. Account people, art directors, researchers, copywriters. People who actually worked on accounts would start their own agencies. There were hundreds of independent, entrepreneurial agencies in every country. When I started in the ad business 300 years ago, the largest agency in the U.S., Y&R,  had about a 1.5% share of market. Today four global giants control over 70% of U.S. advertising spending.

A while back, Mr Sorrell gave a talk in London.  According to press reports, he told the conference…

...‘media, has become "more important" than the message…’

This is unacceptable. Someone who believes media is more important than the message, believes the instruments are more important than the music; the canvas is more important than the painting; the bottle is more important than the beer.

It’s unacceptable.

I’m worried.

Call me crazy, but I think ad agencies should be run by advertising people. I don’t see airlines run by green grocers. I don’t see hospitals run by folk singers. I am curious why the agency business is being run by bookkeepers.

In an industry led by people who now think delivery systems are more important than what they are delivering, creativity is floundering

We need to convince marketers once again that the most effective way to build brands is through the unique and unmatched power of great advertising ideas.

This summer the IPA released a report called “Selling Creativity Short.” In it they reported that creativity by itself can make a marketing dollar ten times more effective.

We also have to stop deluding ourselves about what we are doing. You know, we talk a lot about our “target audience.” As a former adman and recent Harvard faculty member, Doc Searls says, there is no audience for advertising.

An audience is created by demand.

There is demand for music, so there’s an audience for it. There is demand for movies, so there’s an audience for them. There is demand for theater, so there’s an audience for it.

The demand for advertising is precisely zero. Nobody is demanding advertising. There is no audience for advertising.

Similarly, the idea that anyone wants to engage with advertising is equally delusional. We engage with people and things we enjoy.

We find books engaging. And music engaging, and dance engaging. And people engaging.

Who in their right mind wants to engage with advertising? On a rainy Sunday afternoon have you ever heard someone say, I’m going back to my flat to engage with some advertising?

Advertising is at best, a minor annoyance. Sadly, our obsession with online advertising has turned it into a major annoyance, in fact, a scourge.

It has been reported that over 400 million people worldwide - 400 million - now have ad blockers on their devices. This is the opposite of engagement. This is dis-engagement on a monumental scale. This is the largest boycott of anything in the history of humanity.

We’ve got to stop bullshitting ourselves and come to terms with reality.

If we want there to be an audience for advertising, if we want people to be engaged with what we do, we have to do a lot better. We have to make advertising beautiful, and interesting, and entertaining. And I have bad news… algorithms, and data, and metrics can’t do that. Only people can do that.

Let’s not allow the devaluation of creativity to continue. I’m tired of hearing that advertising isn’t as effective as it used to be, or as creative as it used to be. We have so many more amazing tools and amazing media options than we’ve ever had before for making wonderful advertising. We have much better data. We have much better ways to measure. We have no more excuses.

Let’s stand up for what we are celebrating tonight.

Let’s appreciate the unique gift of talent and creativity. And make it, once again, the centerpiece of the advertising industry.

Congratulations to tonight’s winners. I know how difficult it is to create something really good. I know how hard you worked for what you’re about to receive.

Down at the pub you may just be Jimmy or Mary. But to me, you’re a hero.

Congratulations and thank you all very much.