I Should Have Gone To Harvard

I just read a piece in the Harvard Business Review that leads me to believe that my education at Brooklyn College was way below my station.

Let's compare stuff that a semi-literate Brooklyn graduate has written to stuff that appeared in the Harvard Business Review last week.

Brooklyn: (From 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising)

"... I'll bet you $10 that the primary reason people become "friends" or "followers" of brands on Facebook and Twitter is not to have a conversation with the marketer, but to get a discount..."

Harvard:

"What consumers really want when they interact with brands online is to get discounts..."

Brooklyn:

"... the marketing and advertising industries have been obsessed with the idea that marketing is a "conversation" and that consumers want a "relationship" with brands and companies. Of course, being the dick that I am, I've gone out of my way to ridicule this obsession. "

Harvard:

"In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have dangerously wrong ideas about how best to engage with customers."  

Brooklyn:

"Here's what people want. They want products that work well, look nice, taste good and are reasonably priced from companies that treat them fairly... All this conversation/relationship bullshit is just a distraction."

Harvard:

"Myth #1: Most customers want to have a relationship with your brand. Actually, they don't."

Is it too late to apply?

What The Web Has Taught Us About TV

The advertising and marketing industries are in such a profound state of confusion that we no longer believe the evidence of our own eyes.

• We have never seen a single human being activate a QR code, yet we tell our clients that it is a "powerful new marketing tool."

• We cannot remember a single ad we've ever seen on a Facebook page, yet we are blithely ready to accept Facebook as a fabulous ad venue -- worth 100 billion dollars.

• After hearing the same nonsense for the past 5 years, we nod our heads hypnotically when we're told "this will be the year of mobile."

Not only do we maintain delusional beliefs in things that aren't there, we are blind to things that are there.

The Internet has had an incalculable effect on worldwide culture. It is a powerful medium of communication, information, and entertainment. It has affected so many areas of contemporary life that it is difficult for us to re-imagine 15 short years ago when it was just an interesting novelty. But it's been a lousy ad medium.

If there is one lesson we should have learned from the Internet's first 15 years it is this: the astounding marketing power of television.

Until now, we couldn't truly appreciate the advertising potency of television because we had nothing to compare it to. Now we do.

Although the web's cultural impact may be equal to that of television (I'll leave that to the sociologists to argue over) its marketing impact isn't even close.

Certainly there have been a few huge web entities that have transformed categories of marketing. Google has essentially replaced the yellow pages. iTunes has redefined the music industry. Amazon has had an enormous effect on the publishing industry and certain other retail activities.

Yet despite all the hype, most levelheaded marketers are struggling mightily to convince themselves that the web is a worthwhile advertising medium.

After 15 years as a mainstream consumer medium, television had been instrumental in creating hundreds of consumer-facing brands in dozens of categories.

But after 15 years of web advertising, I can't come up with a single major consumer-facing non-web-native brand that online advertising has been responsible for building. Not one major brand of beer, or shampoo, or cereal, or soda, or tires, or...

We're not even sure what web advertising is. Is it display ads? Or YouTube videos? Or Google listings? Or emails? Or Tweets? Or "content?" Is it whatever next week's emperor's-new-podcast turns out to be? Or is it just lemmings throwing a lot of different stuff at the medium and hoping something sticks? Because if it is, the only thing sticking right now is Google.

Our online creatives still can't figure out how to motivate a click. Our online media gurus spend half their time torturing the numbers to make them appear palatable.

Fifteen years after advertisers first jumped onto the web, the medium still hasn't convinced me of its purported magic. And if the Facebook face plant is any indication, I am not alone.

Meanwhile, television has proven to be amazingly resilient. Despite the web's popularity, TV viewership is higher than ever. Ad skipping has not been the disaster all the marketing geniuses said it would be. 98% of all video is still viewed on a television.

It is time for the advertising and marketing industries to call a time out, take a deep breath, turn off the online hype machine, and take a look around.

We knew TV was a powerful advertising medium, but it's taken the web to teach us just how powerful it really is.

Good Cholesterol And Advertising

For decades, people with high cholesterol levels have been urged to change their eating and exercise habits, and to take certain medications.

One of the goals of the treatment has been to raise the level of HDL -- good cholesterol.

You see, good cholesterol is kind of like Liquid Plumr. It comes along and cleans out the bad cholesterol that clogs up the pipes. This makes you healthier and at lower risk of heart disease.

Except it doesn't.

After decades of yelling at people to raise their levels of "good cholesterol" researchers have changed their minds. Now they claim "good cholesterol" -- as we used to say in Brooklyn -- don't do shit.

According to The New York Times...

...a new study that makes use of powerful databases of genetic information has found that raising HDL levels may not make any difference to heart disease risk. People who inherit genes that give them naturally higher HDL levels throughout life have no less heart disease than those who inherit genes that give them slightly lower levels.

Dr. Michael Lauer, director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, agreed. “The current study tells us that when it comes to HDL we should seriously consider going back to the drawing board..."

So here's something to think about. Some marketing researchers and digi-gurus have been trying to convince us that their esoteric measurements of consumer online behavior correlate with ad effectiveness.

They are trying to sell us on the idea that the power of display advertising is not in its ability to generate clicks, but on crackpot measurements like "dwelling" and "lingering" and "mouse hovering." It's all very fascinating to people who were blown away by freshman psychology.

If it's taken real scientists with real test tubes and real peer review decades to figure out that HDL don't do shit, do you really think these marketing meatballs with their "mouse hovering" know anything about the effectiveness of display ads?

Please, don't make me laugh.