The Emperor's New Medium

Sometime in the future, business schools are going to offer a course about the first 20 years of online advertising. It is going make a wonderful story of delusion on a scale unprecedented in the history of business.

Everyone knows that online advertising is great. We just don't know what the hell it's great for.

Last week the Interactive Advertising Bureau in the US and the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK finally admitted that banner advertising is a disaster and useless. A study in the UK confirmed what other research has revealed -- social media is mostly a waste of time.

It's just a matter of time till we get confirmation that the magical power of our other online miracles like "content" and "native" are sprung whole from the same fantasy factory as display and social.

We are living in a unique era in advertising history. What we have experienced is a truly amazing and singular series of events.

How did a form of advertising so unpopular with consumers, so ineffectual, and so corrupt become so big so fast?

If you're of a mind to write a book about marketing, culture, or mass delusion, I suggest you get started writing this story.

Call it The Emperor's New Medium.

Disruption: The Magical Answer

When political pollsters ask people to choose their favorite candidate, the winner is very often "none of the above."

The reason for this is obvious. Real candidates have flaws, imaginary candidates are perfect.

Today, a favorite answer of clueless marketers is "none of the above."

This was driven home to me last week in an article in Ad Age about a presentation made at the ANA conference by a guy named Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo's global beverage group.

Jakeman seems to think the answer to everything is "disruption" -- the cliche of the decade, and the marketing equivalent of "none of the above."

Disruption is an outcome, not a strategy.

But people who have no strategy throw the "d" word around like the knuckleheads who want a "viral" video. Bring me some disruption!

Of course, as always, the only path to disruption is creativity.

In the world of marketing, creative thinking is the one and only engine of excellence. All the rest is chit chat.

The media landscape today is absolutely mind-blowing. Twenty-five years ago marketers would have given an arm and a leg to have these kinds of media options. But our obsession with media has blinded us to the real problem -- creative talent.

What's missing today is the application of creative thinking to the new media types. We have traded in our creative people for a bunch of data analysts, media mavens, software gurus, and jive-talking digi-maniacs.

What we are left with is an amazing array of delivery systems and nothing worth delivering.

Remarkably, Jakeman believes the "agency model" (whatever that means) hasn't changed in 25 years.

"The agency model that I grew up with largely has not changed today," 

Really? I wonder where he's been the past 25 years? Has he heard of Martin Sorrell? Or the consolidation of the agency industry into a a handful of horrible monstrosities? Or the bifurcation of the business into media agencies and creative agencies? Or the appearance of digital agencies? Has anyone told him about the Internet? I suspect that someone who fell asleep in an agency in 1990 and woke up there today wouldn't even understand the language.

On the plus side, Jakeman seems to have made some very good points about the idiocy of most digital advertising, the awfulness of consolidated, global agencies, and the cluelessness of corporate agency management.

But he struck out on the big issue.

What we need is not disruption. What we need is talent.

Where talent goes, disruption follows.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Steps In It Again

Over a year ago I wrote a piece about Yahoo ceo Marissa Mayer's clueless comments at the Cannes carnival of narcissism, which included this gem...

"Art is advertising and advertising is art."

Yeah, right. Poetry is limericks and limericks are poetry.

A couple of weeks ago at the Advertising Week jerkoff jamboree (which I am proud to say I contributed generously to) she took a nice shot at equaling the lunacy of her Cannes statement with the following nonsense about online advertising...

"I just think it makes the Internet better... The experience on the Web [without ads] becomes a lot less rich in my experience."

Yeah, that's why people are running for the exits.

They're downloading ad blockers by the bucketful because online advertising provides such a wonderfully rich experience.

You really have to wonder if these people actually believe this bullshit or if they are so contemptuous of the rest of us that they think they can say anything and not be held accountable.

I understand that Ms. Mayer has to make a buck. We all do. But, please, use a little common sense. You're a smart person, don't go making statements that make you look like an idiot.

Online advertising, fueled by "ad tech", is a blight and a disgrace. It desperately needs help. It desperately needs people like Mayer to take the lead in reforming it, not adding to the festival of denial and whining that the industry is currently engaged in.