Advertising Is Becoming Fast Food.

In the beginning, there was the hamburger.

Then God created McDonald's. And the people said, "this is good."

They liked the idea of paying 15¢ for a burger.

But over time, as the fast food hamburger became the norm, the quality of the average hamburger dropped dramatically. It was not economically feasible to offer both a high quality hamburger and a very low price.

We are experiencing the same thing in advertising.

Advertising used to be expensive. Magazines, newspapers, outdoor, TV and radio used to charge advertisers a lot of money for the privilege of annoying their audiences. Now there is an alternative.

The web has made advertising cheap. You can buy ads on websites, on Facebook, on Twitter for fractions of pennies. Okay, maybe handfuls of pennies. But the point is, there is now a low-price alternative to traditional media.

This has not had a positive effect on the quality of advertising.

Agencies once competed for high-priced, talented people to meet the expectations of clients who were spending a lot of money for media. Clients spending fractions of pennies for media don't seem to have the same expectations.

Of course, there has always been a lot of crappy advertising, but I don't think any serious student of advertising would argue with the assertion that the level of creativity in advertising has taken a deep dive in recent years.

The economics of inexpensive online advertising has meant that only a foolish agency would hire high-priced, talented people to write and design banner ads, website copy, and tweets.

As agency work became more trivial, agency talent became more inconsequential.

So agencies started hiring not-so-high-priced, not-so-talented people to do this stuff. And, in the fullness of time, it was inevitable that these people would rise in the ranks in agencies. Those who were hired to write tweets and banners are now writing big brand campaigns.

Happily, we still have some very talented people working in some excellent agencies. But they are the exceptions. For the most part, our industry has seriously diminished its talent pool and our creative work is showing the stress.

Advertising is becoming fast food.

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Apple And The Interruption Factory

The mobile web should be renamed The Interruption Factory.

There is no more frustrating or infuriating experience than trying to accomplish something on a mobile device. We are constantly interrupted, misdirected, and hijacked.

It has become almost impossible to read a simple news article on a mobile device without winding up somewhere you have no interest in visiting and no way to get back from.

Clicking on a mobile link has become a form of Russian roulette brought to you by your friends in the advertising industry.

We have taken the promise of mobile advertising and turned into a cesspool of stupidity and annoyance. There is no form of intrusion too grotesque.

But there may be hope.

According to published reports, Apple's iOS9 -- due to be released next month -- will allow certain plug-ins that can block ads and other unwanted mobile content.

Of course, nothing in techland is this simple. The vagaries of Apple's new system are way too technically daunting for a dumb-ass blogger to understand. And it seems like Apple has a lot to gain while filtering out advertising platforms other than their own.

Nonetheless, enabling the ability to use mobile devices without the constant interruptions and annoyances may turn out to be a big win for Apple and its aging iPhone.

Big losers may be agencies and publishers. By their relentless stupidity, they've earned it.