Let The Back-Pedaling Begin

In about 10 days I'll be speaking at Advertising Week in New York.

I can't wait.

Not because of anything I'll be doing. What I can't wait for is to hear the epic bullshit that will be emanating from the online advertising community.

With the alarming growth of ad blocking, with the revelations about fraud and corruption, and the scandalous disclosures of agency kickbacks over the past year, I expect Advertising Week to be a truly monumental festival of back-pedaling, excuse-making, and history re-writing by the arrogant aristocrats of online advertising.

All the digital bullshit artists who sold us a shady, sleazy bill of goods...

...who pompously lectured us on how consumers are turned off by traditional advertising and want the irresistible charm of precision targeted messages...

...who berated us about our outdated practices and pontificated about their superior "real time" marketing...

....who told us that their data driven advertising would be so much more engaging and effective...

are now going to have to explain to us why consumers are fleeing online advertising faster than Donald Trump at a Mexican road rally.

It's going to be great to watch them claim that they didn't really say this...and they didn't really mean that...

They'll be blaming the victims, "marketers need to understand..." and torturing the logic, "it doesn't mean that online advertising isn't..."

It's going to be fun to talk.  But it's going to be a lot more fun to listen.

We Can't Let Go Of The Delusion

The advertising and marketing industries are so caught up in their underwear, and so deeply possessed by delusion, that it is time for everyone to sit down, take a deep breath, and re-think what they're doing.

About twenty years ago we started to become exposed to a new and thrilling vision of advertising. The vision went something like this:

Technology is on the brink of allowing us to deliver programming to people on a customized basis. Soon they will be able to watch any tv program, listen to any song, view any movie, at will and on demand.

This presents us advertisers with an equally thrilling opportunity. We, too, can can deliver any message about any product or service individualized to the customer's need by following the trail of their entertainment and social behavior.

By analyzing consumer media behavior, we can be remarkably precise in our ability to send them the right message, at the right time, in the right place.

This was the promise of ad tech. There was only one problem. We were wrong.

While people love the ability to customize their entertainment and social behavior, they hate the customization and "precision targeting" of ad tech.

Online ad blocking is surging. In the U.S. it grew 50% last year. Worldwide it grew 70%

Marketers -- while knowing this intellectually -- still haven't accepted it emotionally. They are still in denial.

They have so much invested in the ad tech hypothesis that they can't let go of it no matter how much evidence there is that it is wrong.

It's Big. It's Dumb. It Must Be Branding.

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you took a creative team that had no idea and gave them all the money in the world?

Now you know: