Brilliant Idea Goes Bad

An article in Ad Age last week, entitled "Do You Watch Way More TV Than You Even Realize?" tells us about a wonderful experiment.

Someone at Hill Holiday had a brilliant idea...Let's do an experiment. Let's show all the "television is dead" morons how wrong they are. We'll do something that proves how much people love TV, and how they watch much more than they think. We'll rig a gizmo in their homes in which they'll have to use tokens to watch TV. And as they run out of tokens we'll video their reactions.

It's a great idea and it's well-executed.

But then it all goes to shit. Instead of being clear about what this video proves, the Chief Insight Misinterpreter, or whatever her title is, steps in and confuses the shit out of the whole thing.

You see, it's not enough to state succinctly and clearly exactly what the point of the exercise was.
Instead she has to go off into cliché-land and give it "context" within the prevailing marketing narrative. In other words, misinterpret, misrepresent, and misunderstand what the video proves. So we get this nonsense:

"The context of television has changed. It’s really not about watching television anymore, it’s about essentially being continuously connected almost in a way that is through osmosis."

Give me a fucking break. Only in the crackpot world of agency strategists is watching television "not about watching television anymore." In their bubble of relentless confusion, nothing about consumer behavior can ever be what it seems. It must have a mysterious meaning that only experts -- ya know, them -- can interpret.

Then we get the all-purpose strategist's banality, "control"...

"...consumers nowadays, they want to have that control over their viewing experiences, whether it’s 2 minutes on their way to the subway looking at CNN, whether it’s looking at a game with their family on the weekend, or whether it’s multi-screening when they’re doing the ironing in their home. It almost doesn't matter. They want to have control."

This has absolutely nothing to do with the experiment they performed. And, by the way, it's not just "nowadays" that consumers decided they wanted to "control" their "viewing experiences." Control is why, in 1956, God gave us remotes.

Finally, fearing she might not be sufficiently au courant, she has to drag us into the dreary sociology lesson that's been forced down our throats for over a decade...

"...we have to understand that consumers nowadays want access to video content whenever they want it, wherever they want it, on any device that they want, and most important they’ve got to have it on demand."

Which, once again, has absolutely nothing to do with the test they were conducting.

What the experiment proved is simply that people don't understand how much TV they watch, and how important it is to them.

And neither, I might add, does the advertising industry.

The Ad Contrarian blog will soon reach 5 million views. If you are number 5,000,000 take a screen shot, send it to me, and you will win a fun prize. Don't know what it is yet, but I'll come up with something.

The Glorious Revolution Continues

A spirited debate sprung up last week in Campaign magazine between Dave Trott, a great creative mind, and Richard Cable, of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a great creative agency.

The debate was essentially about this: What the fuck is "content?"

I've done enough yapping about content (e.g., here and here) so I'll leave you to read the pieces and draw your own conclusions.

But there was something about Mr. Cable's piece that really irritated me.
 
It was this line about content:

"It’s the stuff that used to be over the wall that we’d built between Church and State until the digital revolution came along, kicked down that wall and told us we could do whatever the hell we liked."

So what we really have going on here is not a serious case for the value of content but another rhapsody to the glorious digital revolution -- the ongoing infantile fantasy of the heroic "digital revolution" that "kicked down" walls and saved us poor fools from ourselves.

I've had enough of this bullshit to last a lifetime. I'm tired of listening to these digital gurus bluffing their way through every argument with overblown self-regard and smug tributes to their glorious revolution.

Mostly what the digital revolution has contributed to the advertising industry is enough hot air to melt the fucking South Pole. Not since Vladimir Lenin took to the streets has there been a revolution that promised more and delivered less.

Here's an accounting of some of the marvelous things their wonderful revolution has given us:

• The unfettered ability of governments to spy on their constituents through the relentless information gathering of marketers (including this lovely new wrinkle)

• Monopolistic power in the hands of corporate entities that would never be tolerated "off line." (Amazon is larger than its next 12 competitors combined; Google gets about 45% of all ad online ad dollars; Facebook wields near-monopolistic power in its category))

• Unlimited pornography at the fingertips of every 10-year-old

• Huge criminal enterprises anonymously stealing billions from businesses and consumers with impunity.

• Young people stalking, harassing, and humiliating each other with disturbing regularity.

• Marketers bamboozled by a never-ending series of digital marvels that never turn out to be quite as miraculous as promised.

If "content" is a valuable marketing activity, great -- show me the facts. But, please, spare me the glorious revolution bullshit.

ON A MORE PLEASANT NOTE...
...next Thursday I'm speaking in Chicago at The Escape Pod. Here's your invitation.

Why I Lied

Several years ago I was in a client meeting. We were presenting a Powerpoint deck with the results of an online ad campaign.

Midway through the meeting we got to the slide with the click-through rate -- which we had buried nicely in a very complex table.

We quickly went through the table and moved on to the next slide.

The client interrupted, "Excuse me, can you go back one slide." We held our breath and went back to the slide with the click rate, which was .02%

"Two percent," the client said, "that's not bad."

Nobody said a word. Nobody said, ".02% is not two percent. It's two hundredths of one percent. It's not two clicks in a hundred. It's two clicks in ten thousand."

And we quickly moved on to the next slide.

Two and a half years ago I did two things: I left the agency business, and I stopped lying.

Anyone in the agency business with a functioning brain has known for years that display advertising is, to a disturbing extent, a corrupt flimflam and that social media marketing is substantially an infantile fantasy.

But we've been afraid to say so. We may not have been lying by commission, but we told little white lies by omission.

We neglected to mention the problems of "viewability."

We forgot to bring up traffic fraud, and click fraud.

We didn't discuss that virtually no one was interacting with "interactive" advertising.

We didn't talk much about bots, or "volume-based incentives."

We didn't spend much time on engagement rates for social media.

We were afraid of the truth for two reasons.

First was self-preservation. Anyone in an agency who questioned the orthodoxy of digital supremacy was immediately labeled a Luddite dinosaur, and was marked for extinction. Try telling ISIS you don't believe in their God. You'll soon be ten inches shorter.

Second was client relations. Clients wanted to believe in the miracle. Agencies who told the truth soon found themselves competing for their long-held accounts against uber-trendy agencies with fast-talking hustlers equipped with a sackful of digital miracles.

The astounding part of all this is that the dissembling continues. It's still very perilous to say out loud that the emperor's wardrobe is...um...insufficient.

We used to be able to pretend we didn't know. We could throw out sociology numbers and pretend they were marketing numbers.

But these days we can't pretend we don't know. We know the facts about display, and we know the facts about social.

It's easy for me. I don't have anything to protect any more. But it's not so easy for many in agencies.

Our learning has evolved, but the perils of acknowledging what we've learned remain the same.

So the truth remains dangerous, and the consequences remain daunting.