The Mindless Herd

Advertising has always been a trendy business. But the internet has driven the trendiness to new heights. It has turned ad agencies into a mindless herd, desperate to be on the cutting edge regardless of how much of their clients' money they are pissing away.

For some time now TAC has been screaming that most advertising on "social media" is a monumental waste of money (see my guest blog on Copyblogger.)

Apparently, at least a few in the ad industry are catching on. Here's an excerpt from a piece in last week's ADWEEK.

...a Facebook user looks at a page filled with dozens of links and snippets of information, mostly about friends' activities. Such environments yield terrible ad-click rates....

"Advertisers are finding that the inventory being packaged for them and the spend they're being asked for isn't justified by the results," said Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a New York digital agency. "The low-hanging fruit of results is click-throughs and it's frankly minimal, no matter how much targeting is applied.

"Last week, eMarketer lowered its forecast for social-media ad spending by 12 percent...it tempered its enthusiasm for meshing ads with social environments. It estimates MySpace will miss its $1 billion U.S. sales goal by 11 percent and Facebook will take in 13 percent less than the $305 million forecast."

I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you!

Remember...
Perspective is called cluelessness by those who don't have it.