Making It Up On Volume

There's a very old business gag about losing money on every sale but making it up on volume.

While the premise of losing on every transaction but making up for it with lots of transactions may be ridiculous, in our confused world of marketing it has become a foundational principle.

Essentially what most brands are doing when they flood the web with idiotic social media posts and self-serving nonsense masquerading as "content" is hoping that their lack of ability to derive a cogent, commanding concept for their brand can be disguised and tarted up with a torrent of moronic bullshit.

They even teach this nonsense in marketing programs with concepts like "always-on" marketing, and denigrate the essence of marketing effectiveness by claiming that "the big idea" is dead.

Of course, when you don't have the talent to create something worthwhile the next best strategy is to declare it dead.

McDonald's former CMO claimed that in 2016 they would create 5,000 pieces of online content. That's one piece of shit content every 24 minutes of the work year. Since starting a Twitter feed, McDonald's have posted over half a million tweets.

Nothing very useful, but making it up on volume.

Our Principal Problem Is Principles

In most fields of endeavor progress is achieved by the accretion of knowledge over time.

In medicine, for example, we learned of the germ theory of disease. Then we learned that there were not just bacteria causing diseases, but other agents like viruses. Then we learned that parasites and fungi could also cause disease. But it all started with the basic knowledge that diseases weren't caused by frogs or witch's spells, but by germs.

In aeronautics, the materials we use to make airplanes are completely different from the ones used 100 years ago. But we still use the fundamental design of a fuselage and a pair of wings. The principles of lift and acceleration are still basic to airplane design and function.

Copernicus taught us that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, but that the Earth revolved around the sun. Then we discovered that there were other bodies revolving around the sun, called planets. Then we discovered that that there were stars that didn't revolve around the sun. And then we found there were things that we thought were stars that turned out to be galaxies comprised of hundreds of billions of stars. One thing lead to another.

Advertising is different. We respect no history. We observe no principles. We have no connective tissue.

Every generation tosses out what was learned before and declares it dead. Marketing is dead. The Big Idea is dead. Positioning is dead. Brands are dead. Traditional media are dead.

Every generation invents its own clichés that mean nothing, but for a brief time pass for principles -- likeanomics, engagement, conversations, storytelling, empowerment.

The absence of principles is the dirty little secret behind why we engender so little respect in the business world. A field of endeavor without principles is not a discipline -- it's a free for all.

What are the principles that everyone in advertising agrees on? In most disciplines there are unifying principles. Some examples: Physics has the law of conservation of energy. Biology has natural selection. Medicine has the germ theory of disease. Economics has the law of supply and demand. These are fundamental to the nature of the field. In  advertising, what are the proven unifying fundamental principles that we all accept? If there are any, I don’t know what they are.

We used to believe that creativity was the essence of successful advertising. No longer.
We used to believe that big ideas were the backbone of outstanding advertising. No more.
We used to believe that an agency's primary job was the delivery of outstanding ads to its clients. Not today.

What do we believe in now? Likeanomics, engagement, conversations, storytelling, and empowerment? These aren't principles. These are the tired clichés of a struggling industry.

Advertising's Decade Of Delusion

The ten years we have just experienced were expected to be some of the most fruitful and productive in the history of advertising.  We had amazing new tools and stunning new media that we never had before. The whole thing was head-spinning and certain to engender all kinds of remarkable opportunities for advertisers.

Our ability to reach consumers one-to-one with web-based platforms was sure to make advertising more personalized, more relevant, and more timely.

Brands' abilities to listen to consumer conversations through social media and react quickly couldn’t help but connect us more closely with our customers.

Consumers themselves would be one of our biggest assets by engendering conversations about our brands and helping us understand and define what our brands should represent.

Further, the web would have a democratizing effect on society and particularly in the business sphere where new brands could flourish without spending lavishly on marketing.

And yet, the past decade has been the most disappointing and disheartening period that I’ve experienced in my long advertising career.

It is widely believed inside and outside the ad industry that on the whole the state of advertising has gotten worse, not better.

Consumer research shows that regard for our industry is at a new low. It's gotten so bad that we have half the trustworthiness of lawyers.

Marketers are disillusioned. They don’t trust us. Their trade organization, the ANA, has officially stated that they believe corruption in our industry is “pervasive.”

Brands are facing strong headwinds. A recent study by Nielsen reported that consumers say they are 46% more likely to change brands than they were just 5 years ago, and only 8% say they are strongly brand loyal.

Regulators and governments are after us with a passion. They want to know what we are doing with data and whether we are acting illegally in collecting, trading and selling personal private information about consumers.

By steadfastly defending the abusive and creepy surveillance practices of our adtech ecosystem, the "leaders" of our industry are clearly on the wrong side of history.

As for consumers, one study showed that of all forms of advertising, the eight types rated the lowest by consumers were all forms of online advertising. Ad blocking apps are reportedly present on somewhere between one and two billion devices.

Meanwhile tens of billions of dollars are being stolen annually from our clients by online ad fraud.

Marketers are taking their advertising duties in-house and hiring consulting firms to do what we used to do.

As for the democratizing effect, it has been just the opposite. The web has produced advertising and marketing monopolies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, etc) that would never be tolerated on dry land. Our industry has been right in the middle of scandals that have undermined our confidence in free and fair elections.

To say that the last decade has not lived up to expectations is like saying the Titanic was a boating mishap.

Our industry is in trouble. I believe we've had a lost decade. We have allowed ourselves to be bamboozled by the suspect assertions of articulate people -- and more than a few clowns -- masquerading as experts. We have lost any healthy degree of skepticism. It has cost us dearly.

Our industry needs to take a good hard look at our assumptions and where those assumptions have led us. It's time for the pretending to end.