Losing Our Contrarian Status?

One of the great joys of being an Ad Contra is thumbing your nose at the smug experts of the marketing world. But there’s always the danger that the mainstream will start accepting your ideas -- and then all the fun evaporates.

There is a disturbing trend developing. We Ad Contras are in danger of having our annoying opinions co-opted by the mainstream.

In the past few weeks there have been a number of shocking incidents that lead me to believe that our truculent points of view about online advertising and social media marketing are gaining traction in the "real" world.

• A few weeks ago an article from Reuters laid out the dysfunctional state of the display advertising industry.

• Then Digiday published a flattering interview that was sympathetic to our point of view. Worse, it was one of their top 5 stories last week.

• I spoke at a social media conference last week and I was not escorted out by security.

• Then the Huffington Post also ran a sympathetic piece.

• ComScore released a study which pretty much verified everything we've been saying about online advertising delusions.

• Yesterday, The San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece called Big Investors Rethinking Social Media which describes the disaster that is the social media business and "the pricking of the social media bubble."
  

This is very dismaying. If there's one thing that annoys us Ad Contras it's suspension of hostilities.

Hopefully, there are still plenty of deluded marketing digiholics who will continue to dream on. Unfortunately, their assertions and arguments are usually so lame as to hardly  require rebuttal. They have no facts, only opinions and assertions.

Let's hope the "everything is dead" crowd and the "digital changes everything" maniacs don't go all soft on us. We still need a good fight.

Which reminds me... don't miss Wednesday's upcoming post, "The 6 Stages Of Digital Delusion."