The Golden Age Of Advertising.

Monday I posted a piece called Opinions About Everything, Knowledge About Nothing.

It was about the shockingly low level of knowledge that many ad people have regarding the facts of life in our business today.

One of the most troubling aspects of our business is not just the absence of knowledge about contemporary advertising but also about the history of our business.

It would be unthinkable for a lawyer not have knowledge of the Magna Carta or the Code of Hammurabi, or for a doctor not to know about Hippocrates. Some of this history is thousands of years old.

But it is quite possible for today's advertising practitioners to know nothing about advertising 30 years ago.

This is in part responsible for the astonishing lack of perspective one can find in much of the contemporary writing about advertising.

Which leads me to a particularly appalling piece of drivel I found in Fast Company last week. Over the years, Fast Company has been one of the leading sources of nonsense about advertising. It's nice to see they haven't lost their touch.

The piece I am referring to is entitled Forget "Mad Men"--Now Is The Golden Era For Advertising. This piece of clueless hokum has the alarming gall to suggest that "We are living in the golden era right now..."

Of course, this baloney is written by a social media expert so what can you expect? In the course of writing this pap, the guy drags out every cliche in the new age marketing handbook:

"We are witnessing a complete social transformation..."

Really? A complete social transformation? Funny, I haven't witnessed that. Seems to me people still go shopping, and drive cars, and live in houses, and go to work, and eat pizza, and watch football. Just shows you how out of it I am.

"Today, consumers are in control..."

It's not like the evil past when WE were in control and stupid, passive consumers would mindlessly do everything we told them to do, like drive Edsels and fly TED airlines. Gosh I miss those days when we were in control.

"...intrusive advertising and brand messages simply no longer works."

Yeah, right. Better tell that to Apple and McDonald's and Toyota and Coke and Budweiser and Southwest and Geico and...

"In the post-digital age, everyone’s roles are blurred..."

Are we in the post-digital age already? What the fuck happened to the digital age? I was just starting to get used to it.

"At Tribal DDB, every member of our team is creative and we believe a good idea can come from anywhere..."

Well, aren't you special! Gosh, if only we could ALL be creative, like you. Wait a minute... we ARE all creative. What a wonderful world!

I can't go on. The rest of the article is such a festival of worn-out cliches and infantile prattle that it drains me just to read it.

The golden age of advertising? This piece is a monument to what this era really is -- the golden age of bullshit.

Opinions About Everything, Knowledge About Nothing

I had a disconcerting, but not unexpected, experience last week. I taught a workshop on advertising creativity to a group of 30 advertising people.

These people were all employed at agencies. They were mostly working in account service and media departments. They were a very bright, young, engaged, and attentive group.

Unfortunately, for the most part, they were very much like the current crop of veteran advertising people -- they had opinions about everything and knowledge about nothing.

In the course of the 1 1/2 hour discussion I was shocked by how little they knew about the realities of the ad business.

• Not one of them knew the average click-through rate for display advertising. The consensus of the group over-estimated the CTR by a factor of ten.

• Not one knew a single critical fact about DVR usage -- what percent of the population owns a DVR; what percent of viewing among DVR owners is live versus recorded; what percent of ads are being missed by ad skipping. 

• Not one had any idea of the ratio between video viewed on a tv and video viewed on line.

It is a sad fact of life that many of the people working in advertising today are not even interested enough to find these things out.

They read the nonsense that is published in trade magazines and blogs, they hear the baloney that is spouted by pundits and "experts," they listen to the ignorant chit chat that goes on at their agencies, and they accept it. They don't have the curiosity or resourcefulness to find out what's true and what's not.

Advertising people are always whining about not being treated like "partners" or "professionals" by their clients. To a large degree they don't deserve to be. Imagine if your doctor didn't know the latest facts about his specialty, or if your accountant wasn't up to date on the tax codes.

In this era, how in the world could 30 professional advertising people not know the click-through rate for display ads?

Author, Blogger, Pimp

I think you have to agree that I have been very circumspect, or circumscribed, or circumcised, or whatever the hell that word is, about pimping my book here recently.

Well, there's a limit to everything.

So today, we're going to do two things. First, we're going to remind you that 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising is on sale for a mere $2.99 at Amazon.

You can read the reviews there, and if after reading the reviews the reviewers have not convinced  you to buy the book, I am going to demand that all the money I paid to those sons of bitches be returned.

Second I am going to send you over to AdPulp for a very nice interview that the great David Burn did with me about the book.

Then I promise, no more pimping for the rest of the week.