Outliving My Usefulness

Okay, I think it's time to pack it in.

When super-puffed-up industry titans start agreeing with me, I have to believe my days as a contrarian are numbered.

I thought I had a nice safe little niche as a Luddite dinosaur, when all of a sudden I have the ceo of one of the world's largest advertising monstrosities and the editor-in-chief of a big publishing enterprise sounding like me. It's alarming.

Sir Martin Sorrell (but you can call him Marty) ceo of WPP and Supreme Ruler of the Ad Universe recently said he had "fundamental doubts" about the efficacy of social media as an advertising life form. Here's how he put it.

“Facebook, Google+, Twitter are advanced forms of social interaction. We used to write letters to each other and now we correspond through Facebook and Twitter. If you interrupt that with a message you may run into trouble...I have some fundamental doubts about the ability to monetize social platforms… it is dangerous territory"

Not meaning to be competitive here, but don't you think I said it better when I wrote..."in the digital world people are passionate about interacting with each other. Not ads. Not brands. Not you. Not me."?

Then, just to really piss me off, Michael Wolff, editorial director of Adweek, had this to say in a piece about Sorrell's "fundamental doubts"...

"The Web itself, once expected to be the ne plus ultra of advertising, has returned much more equivocal results....the big digital kahunas have come up with a way to make money for themselves, at the expense of everybody else. Worse yet, the forms of advertising they’ve created don’t even work very well..."

Once again, an impartial observer might say that this proposition was more aptly put in a post entitled Who's Making Money On Social Media? which appeared over a year and a half ago and stated..."It's pretty clear that someone's making money from social media. But I'm not sure it's the people who are paying for it."

So what I want to know is, what the hell's going on here? Can't a guy be a disagreeable pain in the ass anymore without everyone trying to horn in on the action?

Marty and Mikey -- let me be clear about this. You work your territory and I'll work mine. I'm going to let you slide this time, but I don't want to see any more of this "thinking for yourself" bullshit. That's just not how it's done in the ad business, okay?

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.

The Evidence Of Our Own Eyes

One thing we have in the ad business today that we didn't have when I started 100 years ago is experts.

We had "creative geniuses," "stars" and "gurus." But we didn't have "experts."

In those days, advertising was believed to be the art of persuasion. Today it is believed to be the science of engagement.

We didn't have nearly the amount of data. The only "metric" that really mattered was sales.

The continuing evolution of advertising from a qualitative to a quantitative endeavor has resulted in the growing belief in experts and expertise. We now have social media experts, and digital advertising experts, and consumer engagement experts, and...well, you know.

One of unsettling aspects of this is that in some ways we have been convinced that the opinions of experts are more real than the evidence of our own eyes. Every day we experience behaviors that contradict what our experts are telling us. Yet, for some strange reason we don't perceive the disjunction.

• We know that we have never clicked on a banner ad, yet we continue to accept the proposition that banner ads are "interactive."

• We know that we have never looked at an ad on our Facebook page, yet we continue to accept the argument that Facebook is a powerful advertising medium.

• We know that advertising is more pervasive than ever, yet we continue to accept the thesis that advertising is a dying industry.

We're strange this way. We experience the specific but have a hard time connecting it to the general.

In the fullness of time, I believe we will find that our first generation of "experts" turned out to be about as dependable as experts in most other social sciences -- the equivalent of monkeys throwing darts.