What The Hell Are They Teaching? Best of 2012

Our next "Best of 2012" is from October. It was about marketing professors and the Pepsi Refresh project.

There was a piece in Ad Age last week featuring the astoundingly clueless opinions of marketing and business professors on the subject of the Pepsi Refresh project.

The amazing thing is that these people weren't from Southwest Arkansas State. These guys were from Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn and Notre Dame.

It makes it clear why so many young people in advertising are confused about what they're supposed to be doing. And just how out of touch these experts are.

Before we take a look at their opinions, let's review the facts:

• In 2010, Pepsi diverted scores of millions of dollars from traditional advertising (including their Super Bowl sponsorship and their traditional TV advertising) into a massive social media project.

• After one year of this, they had lost 5% of their business.

• Their sales dropped by an estimated half a billion dollars.

• They fell from their traditional 2nd place in the soft drink category to 3rd place.

• Their sales erosion increased widely compared to the previous year

• Their beverage ceo was so upset he said he was going to "blow up the place."

• To this day, they are still suffering from this debacle

• Many of the key players are now gone from Pepsi

• After burning astronomical amounts of money on this, Pepsi finally killed it in March.

If that doesn't describe a complete marketing disaster, I don't know what does. So what do the academics have to say about Refresh?

"...we don't know whether it was effective or not." 

What?! We DON'T KNOW??? Maybe you need a few research assistants to do a thesis for you, then you'll know. What has to happen to convince you that it bombed? Do lab rats have to grow two heads?

"I have read that the project had over 60 million folks involved. That is a pretty impressive accomplishment."

No, the "pretty impressive" part was how they got hundreds of millions of people to buy 5% less Pepsi. Now that's impressive.

"...it has helped further the conversation about the role of purpose in brand marketing."

Oh, the f/ing conversation! That old thing still alive on campus? Here on planet Earth, professor, we buried that putrid monkey about 2 years ago. How about this -- the "role of purpose" is to sell shit. Any further questions?

"It shows the power of making a big commitment to these causes. People really responded and said Pepsi is a good company."

Yeah, everywhere I go people can't stop talking about what a good company Pepsi is. I can hardly get a conversation going about the election or football.

"It's something that will be more and more relevant and more mainstream."

Bullshit.

First of all, no company will ever again be stupid enough to listen to the delusional blather of "social media marketing experts" and do what Pepsi did.

Second, the "mainstream" doesn't need lessons from corporate America in good citizenship. We don't need lectures from white collar windbags who hide every dollar of profit they can from the tax system. We don't need holier-than-thou pronouncements from sugar-water peddlers about their high-minded principles. We don't need exhortations from overfed sharpies about our responsibilities as citizens.

You want to sell us stuff? Fine. Tell us what you got and why we need it.

Otherwise, we can do very well without your cynical gimmicks and corporate chest-pounding disguised as social virtue.

The Facebook Monster: Best of 2012

We continue our final week of "Best of 2012" posts with this one from September.

Once upon a time, there was a thing called traditional advertising. The purpose of traditional advertising was to create demand for things.

People did this with funny television and radio commercials and pretty newspaper and magazine ads and billboards and blimps and butt danglers and hooter wobblers.

Sometimes it was darn effective. And hundreds and hundreds of brands of soda pop and toys and toothpaste and cookies and cars and beer and paper towels and cake mixes and computers and sneakers and candy bars and... well, anyway, it grew and it grew.

Traditional advertising had a funny little cousin. It was called the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages was different. Its purpose was not to create demand. Its purpose was to fulfill demand.

So when Timmy had already decided he wanted a pair of sneakers, he went to the Yellow Pages to find out where to buy them.

It was a handy system -- traditional advertising to create demand, and its funny little cousin to fulfill demand.

And then one day the internet came along. Advertisers, who are very, very smart at understanding what used to be true, thought that the internet would be like traditional advertising. And they used it the same way. They used it to try to create demand. They put pretty ads just about everywhere you could put one.

On this kind of site and that kind of site.

In between things and on top of things.

Before things and after things. 

But there was a problem. After 15 years of doing this, not one of these online advertisers had created a single major brand of anything. No soda pop or toys or toothpaste or cookies or cars or beer or paper towels or cake mixes or computers or sneakers or candy bars or...

Then, one day, there came along a really smart monster. The really smart monster had a silly name -- Google. This monster realized that the internet wasn't really like traditional advertising. It was more like the funny little cousin. The monster thought that the internet wouldn't be so good for creating demand, but it would be really good for fulfilling demand.

So the monster built itself a home that was very much like the funny little cousin's -- where people could go to find things they already wanted. And the monster was right. And it grew and it grew and it grew.

Now the story gets spine-tingling. One day, another monster came along. Its name was Facebook. And everybody loved this new monster. He was way more fun and friendly than the Google monster.

Now there were two advertising monsters. And they were fighting. The winner would get lots and lots of money. The loser would get lots and lots of money, too. But not as much as the winner.

Each monster had a different weapon. The Google monster's weapon was fulfilling demand. The Facebook monster's weapon was... uh-oh, you guessed it... creating demand.

So even though everybody loved the Facebook monster, it turned out that the Google monster's weapon was 25 times more powerful!

Now here's the fun part. The people who spend lots and lots of money for advertising were so fucking stupid darn silly, that after 15 years they still didn't understand this. They still thought the internet was like television and radio and newspapers and magazines and billboards and blimps and butt danglers and hooter wobblers. They thought it was really good for creating demand. And they kept spending money trying to do this. Silly guys!

Well, believe it or not, this little misunderstanding gave the Facebook monster (known to everyone on his block as "that creepy Zuckerberg kid") the idea that maybe his weapon really was powerful after all, and that if he could just find a way to redesign it so it worked really well in a new carry-around container he could win.

But, uh-oh, the problem was not where the monster's weapon was used. The problem was, the monster had the wrong weapon.

But there's a happy ending. Even though the Facebook monster had the wrong weapon, advertising people were so fucking stupid kind and generous that he still made more money than you could ever imagine.

My Social Media Paradox - A Best of 2012

For my next "Best of 2012" selection, I chose this one called "My Social Media Paradox."

Back in August, I was invited to speak at a social media conference. The hen was in the fox house. My presentation was billed as a "fireside chat" between the organizer of the event (a guy I like and respect, Jason Falls) and myself.

The first question Jason asked me went something like this...

"You have been critical of the social media marketing world from the get-go, yet you use it… quite well I might say. What's your point of contention and how can you reconcile that with your prolific use of the medium?"

I thought it was a great question.

And I thought the answer would be worthy of a blog post. I don’t remember my exact words. And since then I have had further thoughts. So here’s a combination of how I think I answered the question and what my subsequent thoughts have been. 

Let's start with why you invited me here to address this conference. There are thousands of advertising and marketing people who are skeptical of social media marketing. I am not alone. But for some reason you chose me. Why? Let’s answer this question in marketing terms.

I would suggest that the reason you chose me is that I have created a pretty successful brand called The Ad Contrarian. The Ad Contrarian brand is clearly differentiated. When you needed a “product" in my category (someone to add controversy) you knew what brand to "buy."

In the small and silly world of advertising and marketing commentary, The Ad Contrarian is probably among the top brands. It was recently named one of the awesomest ad blogs in the universe or something by the Business Insider. When I went to bed last night my two books, The Ad Contrarian and 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising were both in Amazon's top five eBooks about advertising. I'm not saying this to brag, but to make a point.

The interesting thing, as you mentioned, is that whatever success I have had in building this brand has been done solely through the use of social media. Why then am I so vocal in my criticism of the social media industry?

The first part of the answer is that having accomplished the most difficult of marketing tasks – creating a successful brand – using social media as my medium, I know how difficult it is. I know how hard I have worked at it. And knowing this, I am outraged when I have to listen to or read the idiotic nonsense of fakers. Until they have created a successful brand using social media, they have no credibility with me.

Social media is very hard work. Very few social media programs break through. Virtually every company in the country now has some kind of social media program in place. A miniscule proportion of them are having significant impact. So when I hear social media "experts" promising the moon, I get infuriated.

For example, all the nonsense I read about “content” makes me sick. I know how difficult it is to create "content" that anyone gives a shit about. I have spent every day of my life for the past 5 years creating content. I know first hand how difficult it is to break through the billions (literally) of web pages and get anyone to pay attention to your content. When I hear idiots pop-off with their facile clichés about creating “compelling content” I know they have no idea what they’re talking about

I also know how many moribund blogs, and Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos there are out there in the digi-dumpster. I know how many millions of pages of “content” are lying around like a lox.

The idea that consumers want to interact with advertising is the grand delusion of the banner advertising crowd. The idea that consumers want to interact with content is the grand delusion of the social media set.

I do not come at this (as my critics contend) as some doddering old fool who does not understand social media and consequently does not believe in it. I come at it as someone who has had far more success at it than most of my "expert" critics. I have used it successfully and have accomplished more with it than most of them will ever accomplish. I have used social media to create a brand. The only thing most of these “experts” have created is a powerpoint presentation.

The second part to my answer is this. In addition to being a reasonably successful social media “entrepreneur,” I also have this little $100 million ad agency which I run.

I don’t think there are too many social media entrepreneurs who also run an ad agency. I don’t think there are too many agency CEOs who are also social media entrepreneurs. Consequently, I think it is fair to say that I have a reasonably unique perspective.

So when I hear digital hustlers and social media phonies shooting their mouths off about how advertising is dead, and television is dead, and marketing is dead, and everything else that isn’t online or social is dead, I want to expose them. That is, after I strangle them.

They are clowns and charlatans. They are undermining the credibility of the social media industry and they are causing damage to you and to their clients.

My experience has proven to me that social media can be a valuable marketing tool. But it is not magic, it is not a miracle, and it cannot and will not replace everything that came before it.

The people who are out there making outrageous and preposterous claims, who are deploying unreliable and misleading research, who use anecdotes to masquerade as facts, whose insularity renders them devoid of perspective, and who are disrespectful toward and ignorant of the power of traditional advertising, are undermining your credibility and are giving credence to those who refer to you as the snake oil salesmen of the marketing world.

So, yes, you are right. Despite the fact that I have used social media very successfully, and although I know there are lot of talented and hard-working people in social media, I have a healthy amount of disrespect for a certain element of the social media industry.

For your own good, you and the other responsible people in your industry need, once and for all, to shut these fools and con men up.


By the way, you can find a video of my talk with Jason online at his website here.

Best of 2012: How The Higgs Boson Can Help You Build Customer Engagement

In July, during the frenzy over the purported discovery of the Higgs Boson I wrote the following silly piece, among my choices for one of the Best of 2012.


Executive Summary: Start by creating a Boson-link (Blink). Then co-create by sharing Blinks about your brand with a million billion trillion zillion other Blinks and, like, then those Blinks will, like, totally connect and grow exponentially and before you know it you're delivering brand messages and branded content and branded branding to everyone online without having to give a penny to that creepy Zuckerberg kid. 

Yes, the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN changes everything for marketers.

First, it poses a huge challenge. How will you use the Higgs Boson to build stronger engagement between your brand and your customers?

Scientists tell us that without the Higgs Boson matter would have no mass. There would be no stars, no galaxies, and no cinnamon raisin bread. Without mass, we would have no mass media and no mass transit. Massachusetts would be called achusetts.

The calcified old-world thinking of Madison Avenue, with its TV commercials and display ads, relied on dreary, clunky electrons to deliver a one-way message to a passive viewer. But now, electrons are dead!  Today's particle-wave-connected consumer or, as we like to call him, the average schmuck, is just another bump in an ever-expanding Higgs Field.

Messages embedded in a Higgs Boson bounce right off the average schmuck and create an immediate channel connecting him to someone else -- in many cases, a below-average schmuck.

Here's an example of how Higgs Boson marketing works in a worldwide, inter-globulated ecosystem of engagement: Let's say a Higgs Boson  passes through my arm. In the next instant it may pass through your foot. Or it might pass through some super-hot nympho's tiny skirt and go bouncing around in her thong. How awesome would that be? (We'd finally get some data-driven insights we could really use, if you get my drift.)

Today, the consumer is dead! I mean, she's in total control (unless she's had wine at lunch, then look out!) Scientists now estimate that somewhere between 14 and 600 million billion trillion zillion Higgs Bosons penetrate a typical consumer's body every moment. Can you imagine how many would penetrate it if she was totally naked?

According to one theory proposed by physicists at the Very, Very Small Teflon Collider in Rhode Island, there are actually more bosons in the universe than social media experts in Brooklyn.

Three Ways To Incorporate The Higgs Boson Into Your Marketing Plan Right Now!

1. Remember, activating Higgs Boson technology is only one part of your 360 degree marketing mix. It's actually about 154 degrees. So you still have 206 degrees to play with. Don't neglect all your other important marketing activities like tweeting, podcasting, crank calling, and going to Cannes to snort coke with Swedish account planners.

2. Collecting "likes" on Facebook is still a great way to stay busy without actually accomplishing anything. But it's not too early to start accumulating "Bosos." A "Boso" is like a "like." It occurs when a Boson interacts with another particle and then something amazing happens and your score goes up and you can win a new dining room set.

3. Three words: Gamify your bosons!

One warning. If you haven't activated your Higgs Boson integrated worldwide artisanal strategy already, it's too late and you and your brand and all your colleagues and friends and their families and pets are dead!

Advertising's 5 Biggest Lies: Best of 2012

For today's "Best of 2012" selection we go back to June for this piece.

Among our fellow citizens, it is commonly believed that we ad hacks get paid to lie. While I am not prepared to stipulate, I do concede that sometimes we don't quite tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So when you set out to write a piece entitled Advertising's 5 Biggest Lies, you are begging for trouble. It's like writing Las Vegas's 5 Worst Buffet Dinners or Pepsi's 5 Dumbest Marketing Ideas. No matter what you pick, someone's got something to top you.

Nonetheless, trouble is my business. So here we go -- advertising's 5 biggest lies:

1. We're all creative.
We're not all tall. We're not all handsome. We don't all have nice complexions or charming personalities. But, according to the lore of advertising agencies, we're all creative.

A good idea can come from anywhere, is the mantra. Yet, remarkably, good ideas seem to come from the same people over and over again. And, similarly, so do bad ones.

If you believe that we're all creative, I'm afraid you also have to believe that it's just a coincidence that Shakespeare wrote dozens of brilliant plays and Whoopi Goldberg didn't.

Not only are we not all creative, even most of us who are paid to be creative aren't.

2. The big idea is dead
Among the many really dumb platitudes that the age of digital marketing has spawned, one of the dumbest is the claim that a lot of little ideas are better than a big one.

This is what's known in the trade as making a virtue of necessity. You see, agencies have been so lousy at coming up with big, successful online advertising ideas that the only defense is to claim that big ideas are no longer necessary -- or even desirable.

It tries to sneak by us the preposterous notion that a weakness is actually a strength -- that web advertising (specifically content marketing and social media) are more effective because of their low impact.

Of course, the question is -- where are they hiding all these brands that have been built with little ideas? I'm having a hard time finding them.

As I've said previously, we are a culture that is hooked on stimulation. We like our stimulation loud and we like it in hi def.

In this environment, little ideas have little chance.

3. The consumer is now in charge
The people who keep hitting us over the head with this cliche tend to be callow digi-crusaders who know very little about the history of marketing, and have a skewed perspective on the current state of things.

There are two parts to this lie. The first is the assumption that sometime in the dim past -- say, way back before Twitter -- the consumer wasn't in charge. Somewhere these people got the idea that there was a time when consumers were helpless zombies who did whatever we told them. I must have been sick that week.

The quickest way to disabuse yourself of this notion is to look at the failure rate of new products. As long as I've been around advertising (which is hundreds of years) the failure rate of new products has been in the 90+% range. Not exactly a monument to us crafty marketers leading submissive consumers around by the nose.

The second dumb part of this lie is the startling blindness to the dangers of digital marketing . Businesses are now collecting shockingly large quantities of information about us. Unprecedented amounts of personal data are in their hands.

To believe the consumer is in charge you also have to believe that knowledge is not power.

Fanboys often tell us that Facebook is worth $100 billion because of the enormous amount of powerful data at their fingertips. Then, in the next breath, they tell us the consumer is in charge. Sorry, fellas, you can't have it both ways.

4. Online advertising is interactive
The thinking went like this: People like to interact with the web, therefore they'll want to interact with advertising on the web.

This has turned out to be a massively toxic delusion. No one, and I mean no one, wants to interact with web ads. Banner ads have a click-through rate under one in a thousand. And if the average web user is like me, that one click is the exasperating result of faulty eye-cursor coordination.

But this hasn't stopped advertisers from pouring money into display advertising. This year in the US, advertisers are poised to spend about 9 billion on banner ads.

This lie has legs.

5. It's all about the work
It's not just the digital crowd that's delusional. Traditional agencies are just as susceptible to silly nonsense.

If you hang around agencies for about 15 minutes you're sure to hear that "it's all about the work." It's a pleasant little fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.

Advertising is like baseball, and "the work" is like pitching. It's the most important element, but it's far from "all." Advertising is a very complicated and unpredictable business. In order to be successful you have to be able to pitch, hit, play defense, sell hot dogs and give away bobbleheads. 

The fact that some of our most famous creative agencies also seem to have the highest turnover of clients has not penetrated the consciousness of the people who believe this simple notion.

If you could get inside the heads of our clients, I'm pretty sure you'd find that as far as they're concerned, it's not all about the work. It's mostly about the money.

The Restaurant For People Who Don't Like Food: Best of 2012

We continue my selection of the 10 best posts from 2012 with this piece from April called "The Restaurant For People Who Don't Like Food"

In my hometown of Oakland, California, there’s a restaurant I hate.

It’s very chic, and popular with a certain type of person – a person who likes restaurants, but doesn’t like food.

Everything about it is unappetizing. It has a cheerless austerity that appeals to the guilty wealthy. The food is very artfully arranged twigs and pebbles. It’s as if the chef learned his craft working with Tinker Toys.

They are afraid to use any ingredient that might add flavor to one of their precious concoctions as it might also taint its virtue.

Today we have agencies like this. They are agencies for people who don’t like advertising.

They are post-advertising agencies. They have no interest in the art, no passion for the craft.

They have no zeal for selling. They tell us that today's human does not want to be sold to. As if any human ever did.

They want to co-create, and have conversations, and share values.

Everything about them is unappetizing. They, too, have a cheerless austerity. They believe that persuasion is an insult to their relationship with the consumer. They believe that selling will taint their virtue.

They are bloodless, timid, and unenthusiastic.

Not me. I like selling. I like persuasion. I like advertising. I like food.

Best of 2012: Realism vs Nihilism

Continuing with our Best of 2012 lazinessfest, here's a piece from May in which the "everything is dead" crowd is taken to task. 

By the way, as of yesterday "101 Contrarian Ideas..." was #2 on Amazon's ad book chart. Only you can get me the big foam finger for Christmas. 

I like to think of myself as a realist.

I put little faith in the pronouncements of people with fancy titles or a shirtful of medals. I like to see proof.

Having spent some time on the outskirts of science (I taught science to middle-schoolers for a few years and served one year as Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences) I try to practice rational analysis to the degree possible in advertising. I try to have a healthy regard for the difference between a fact and an opinion.

This leads me to some unorthodox beliefs.

• While I believe social media has been a remarkable worldwide phenomenon, I have seen little evidence that social media marketing is the magic it is purported to be.

• While I believe in the power of brands, I believe strong brands are best built on product advertising, not branding.

• While I believe there are times that online advertising can be effective, I believe it has been vastly over-hyped; most of it is invisible; and "interactivity" with online advertising is overwhelmingly a delusion.

• While I believe in the importance of marketing strategy, I believe most people who call themselves marketing strategists are dead weight or flat tires.

Having these and other unpopular opinions, it is no surprise that there are people who find it off-putting and difficult to work with me. I understand this.

But I am not a nihilist. I believe in advertising. I believe in the importance of marketing strategy. And I believe in the primacy of ideas.

What I can't understand is how people in advertising can work for someone who does not believe in these things.

There is an ultra-hip, nihilistic point of view* circulating in the agency world these days that asserts that because of the web -- and particularly, social media -- strategy is dead, ideas are dead, and marketing is dead. This point of view has been expressed most recently by the ceo of a very large global ad agency.

I don't understand how you can  be working in a creative department, busting your ass every day to come up with ideas to excite and satisfy your clients, and read in the trades that the ceo of your agency believes that big ideas are worthless.

I have a hard time understanding how you can be spending hours every day searching for  marketing leverage or strategic insight for your clients and hear your boss say that these no longer have relevance.

At best, someone making comments like this is guilty of poseur bullshit to grab some headlines. At worst, he is undermining the efforts that his employees put forth on his behalf every day.

Anyone with an open mind can see that the fantasy of the internet killing everything in its path has turned out to be fatuous nonsense. That idea is two years past its sell-by date.

The buffoonery of the "everything is dead" nihilists has to come to an end. It has become tiresome and destructive. It makes our whole industry look even sillier than it already is. It's time for these people to shut the hell up.

* Roll Call Of The Dead
Strategy, Ideas, Marketing, and Management Are Dead: Here 
Television Is Dead: Here
Advertising Is Dead: Here
Ad Campaigns Are Dead: Here
Broadcasting Is Dead: Here
Copywriters Are Dead: Here
Marketing Is Dead: Here

The Reviews Are In

Tis the season of shameless self-promotion. I've been thinking that a book makes a great holiday gift, and if it doesn't, it makes wonderful kindling for the fireplace.

Anyway, in order to convince you that you really should be buying my book this season, I thought I'd take one line from each of the 17 reviews on Amazon and make myself feel really good by posting them. These are real excerpts and you can read the full reviews here.

We're now sitting at #3 on the Amazon advertising paperback chart, and I'm hoping to get one of those big foam fingers for Christmas.

From Amazon...

"Funniest thing I have read all year"

 "Bob Hoffman's perspective is terrific because he continually digs into various heaping piles of advertising hype to discover nuggets of truth."

"The world's second best book on advertising!"

"I loved this book."

"A handbook for smart marketers. Did I mention he is funny as hell?" 

"I've been a fan of Bob's blog for a long time. His wit and insight into the business of advertising is spot on"

"Pleasantly didactic and cheerfully challenging of the fables and fantasies that pass for advertising principles"

"As an advertising professional who has been in this business for some 30 years, I found this one of the most refreshing reads on advertising in many years."

"Order more than one copy - you'll want to hand these out as a "gift" because it is just that." 

"Every boss I have ever had would be better off for reading this."

"Bob Hoffman may call himself the Ad Contrarian, but in reality he's a font of common sense."

"Bob is one of the smartest guys in the business. His thoughts are not obscured by fads, what's au courant or quotidian bs."

"...real truths about marketing and advertising. I would describe the book as "engaging" but not in a dirty social media way." 

"Bob Hoffman's take on the advertising industry is refreshing, insightful, amusing and discerning."

"This book is an insightful, hilarious look at what's wrong with advertising agencies, with marketing in general, and maybe even the world overall".

"This is a great book. I am going to read it again and again."

"Buy it, read it. If you are like me it will make you laugh, make you cry and shake your head in wonder."

Buy it in either Paperback or eBook format here. (Paper burns so much more nicely.)

Best of 2012 - Interactivity: Get Over It

Here's my 3rd post in The Ad Contrarian Best of 2012 collection. This is getting to be fun. Instead of having to write every night, I just copy and paste. So much less troublesome. It's called "Interactivivty: Get Over It" and it's from March 12, 2012

From CNNMoney, last week...

"Imagine if Joe Smith, in need of a new car... presses a button on his remote and instantly receives more information about a Ford F150, including where he can buy one. Meanwhile, Joe's wife, Sally, watches a later ad for a Sony phone. The product on the screen is sleek and modern, and Sally wants it. She can turn her emotion into ownership, purchasing the phone with the click of a button."

Yeah. Imagine if monkeys flew out of my butt.

A decade ago, paragraphs like the one above were appearing all over, promising us that interactive TV (ITV) would be the latest thing that would change everything. People would be watching a TV spot, and they'd see something they liked and they'd click and be taken to some long-form info-something. Then they'd click again and buy right from their screen.

Also, interactive web ads would be so much more appealing. engaging and enticing than traditional advertising. People would see our banners on the web and be fascinated by them and then click to learn amazing new things about our products and then order right from the page.

And our adoring customers would come to our Facebook page and engage with our brand and comment about how much they love us and share it with all their friends.

Only one problem: It's all bullshit.

• Every experiment with interactive TV (ITV) has been a disaster.
• Click-through rates on banner ads are below 1 in a thousand.
• Engagement rates on Facebook are below 1/2 of 1%.

It turns out that people on line react to ads the same way people off line react to them -- mostly they ignore them. And when they do bother to read them, they overwhelmingly do not interact with them.

Characterizing these ads as "interactive" isn't a description of consumer behavior, it's an  illustration of advertiser delusion.

Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.

While people are interactivatin' like crazy with each other, interactivity with ads is miniscule. Unappreciative bastards. Don't they realize we built all this shit just to sell them something?

The latest group to fall victim to the siren song of interactivity is Canoe Ventures, a consortium of  Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and four other cable companies that tried to resurrect ITV. Last week they shut their doors and laid off 120 people.

This is the last time I'm going to say this, so pay attention. In the digital world, people are passionate about interacting with each other -- not brands, not ads, not you, not me.

Get over it.

Best of 2012: What Makes An Ad Person Exceptional?

Today we continue my pseudo-intellectual quest to avoid work by publishing my second selection among my 10 favorite posts of 2012. It's from February 13, 2012 and it's called "What Makes An Ad Person Exceptional?"

I went out to dinner the other night and got food poisoning. Consequently, I spent the remainder of the night in a cold sweat crawling between my bed and my bathroom.

Fortunately there were some lucid moments that were free of both gastric distress and prayers for a quick death. During one of these moments I had a flash of insight.

For years I have been trying to figure out what makes some ad people so much better than  average ad people. There are some people who are just so superior at it than others.

They seem to have an intuitive understanding of what's going to work and what's not going to work. They are not deluded by marketing banalities or expert opinions. They draw their conclusions from a kind of mysterious personal understanding rather than conventional wisdom. I've spent a lot of hours trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes them exceptional.

My previous theories about this have been too intellectual. I have hypothesized that they have a deeper psychological understanding of human motivation. But I've never really been happy with this explanation. It seems very much like a tautology.

Then the other night, slithering on hands and knees across the bedroom floor, it struck me. There's a much simpler and more satisfying explanation. The attribute that makes some people exceptional at advertising is that they're extraordinary at noticing things. They're prodigious noticers.

They notice what people really do. They notice what people have in their refrigerators. They notice the little lies that people tell themselves and each other. They notice the contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They notice the small, seemingly irrelevant things that most people don't notice.

Average advertising people are good listeners. Exceptional advertising people are good noticers.

Good musicians have an intuitive quality that is hard to explain. To an average person, a song is a pattern of rhythm and a series of notes. But a good musician can hear and understand the hidden structure of a song. She intuitively understands how the music is built. She can listen to it once and play it.

Good ad people can do the same. They can hear people talk about their buying habits and intuitively understand the hidden structure of their behavior.

I believe this is the result of a remarkable ability to notice things.

Also, I now understand the origin of deep insights -- food poisoning. Next time I get a poop smoothie I'm going to direct my focus toward figuring out where the hell the universe came from and win myself a Nobel Prize.

Best of 2012: Conscience Of A Contrarian

Since we are approaching the time of year when everyone does top 10 lists; and since I am way too busy right now to be writing blogs posts; and since I am a lazy-ass bastard, I have decided to select 10 of my favorite posts from the past year and re-post them between now and the end of the year. I know, it's a totally bullshit idea, but my brain needs a rest. So here's the first one I've selected. It's from January 18, 2012 and it's called: Conscience Of A Contrarian

I have mentioned on many occasions that my first job was to teach science in middle school.

The one thing that science imbues you with is a high regard for the difference between a fact and an opinion.

In science, establishing something as a fact is a daunting process. First you need convincing experimental data. Then you need to establish the reliability of your data by repeating the experiment several times and getting the same results. Then other scientists will "peer review" your experiment by trying to duplicate the results. Or, more likely, by trying to disprove your results.

Science doesn't just accept something as a fact because someone with a big name, a chest full of medals, or a fancy title says so. Even after a hundred years, scientists are still questioning and testing Einstein's ideas about gravity and the speed of light.

The world of advertising and marketing couldn't be more different. If enough loudmouths say the same thing enough times at industry conferences or in trade magazines, facts are born. These "facts" are rarely if ever validated and they are often repeated ad nauseum in meetings and conference rooms.

While in most fields there is a great gap between an opinion and a fact, in advertising and marketing a "fact" is usually just the elongated shadow of some blowhard's opinion.

The result of this is that we have an industry without reliable principles. We have trendy "solutions" that blow with the wind. We have charlatans successfully masquerading as experts. We have a vocabulary of dreadful jargon that passes for insight. We have a class of leaders called "CMOs" who can't seem to hold a job. We have ad industry titans who have never actually created an ad.

Our industry has reached such a level of effete confusion that making a self-evident statement like "the purpose of advertising is to sell something" is now controversial, and can get you into a heated argument.

Frankly, in the current environment, I don't know how anyone in our industry who can think straight can be anything but a contrarian.

U Is The Dirtiest Letter

Overheard In A Berkeley Diner
"What is the granola sweetened with?"

World's Record For Bad Acting In A Single Commercial
Peyton Manning and Papa John


Gen. David Petraeus
Why is anyone still surprised about the stupid things guys do with their weenies?

The Real Poop On Holiday Shopping
Have you ever wondered why so many of your Christmas gifts are so crappy? According to The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch, one in six smart phone users buy holiday gifts while in the toilet.

U Is The Dirtiest Letter
It occurred to me recently that u is the dirtiest letter in the English alphabet.

It appears in perhaps 5-10% of all our words, but in a significantly higher percent of our most powerful dirty words:  fu**, su**, cu**, pu***.

Not only does it appear in these words, but it's the only vowel in them.

This seems a highly unlikely coincidence. I think there's just something dirty about that letter.

Picture the word masturbate. I think it would be a lot less naughty with an e instead of a u.

And Speaking Of That
Guy goes to the doctor for a check-up.
Doctor tells him, "You have to stop masturbating."
Guy says, "Really? Why?"
Doctor says, "So I can take your blood pressure."

How Much BS Can You Write About BS?

It's Christmas time. So in the great American spiritual tradition, it's time to start selling.

My latest book, 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising, which you can see right over here -------------------------------------------------------------------> peaked at #2 and has been hanging around the top 10 on Amazon's list of advertising paperbacks since its publication back last April.

Can you believe there are 19,856 paperbacks about advertising at Amazon? 19,856! How much silly nonsense can you possibly make up about advertising? Or, to put it another way, how much bullshit can you produce about bullshit?

Come to think of it, I do that just about every day, don't I?

Anyway, here are 4 good reasons you should buy this book:

1. It's semi-hilarious
2. It's quasi-informative
3. It's way too cheap
4. I have this weird thing on my nose and I think I'm gonna die

Order it now and it will arrive long before the stockings are hung. I will exercise great restraint at this point and not make puerile jokes about things being hung.

And if you're looking for something useful for yourself, it's a great way to look busy while you're lying around in a drunken stupor. You hear that, George?

Happy holidays and buy my damn book. 

Truth Is Stranger Than Satire

I have watched this thing three times and I am convinced that these people are serious.

I'm a peaceful man, but I have to be honest here and say I had disturbing fantasies of violence.

The marketing industry has gone completely bat-shit, pants-down, weenie-waving crazy.


I quit. No, I mean it. I quit.

Big thanks to Matt Jay for pointing me to this

Unsolicited Advice For Large Corporations

It is not enough these days for the overfed fat cats of large corporations to make billions of dollars. Now they want to be loved and admired. Here's some advice for them and for the poor fools who have to implement their delusional PR and social media plans.

1. When will you be loved? Um…never. I know, people just don’t understand how much good you do and what a wonderful company you are. Oh, and your people are the best! Well, guess what? Nobody gives a shit. There are going to be a substantial number of people who think you are a criminal enterprise and that the world would be better off without you. Stop whining and get used to it. It’s the price you pay for being big and successful.

2. Do good things and shut up. It’s fine to speak modestly about the generous things you do, but don’t pound your chest and don’t rub our noses in it. You are expected to do good things. Generosity and community-mindedness are not extra-credit projects, they are your responsibility. Be charitable and generous because they are the right things to do, not because you want bouquets.

3. Put your money where your mouth is. There is a fashion among large corporations and pandering politicians to glorify small business -- while they're stomping all over it. If you really believe in small business, hire them as suppliers. Have an officer whose job it is to identify small companies that can do a better job for you than the big dumb oafs you are currently using. You’ll do a lot more for small businesses by employing them than by your patronizing lip service.

4. Refrain from social media egocentrism. You’d be amazed at how little consumers care about your “philosophy.” I know, your agency has shown you research that proves that consumers want to do business with companies that share their values. This is, to a large degree, a bunch of hooey. Consumers do business with companies that provide them with good products, good service, and good value. End of story. Sure, when you survey them they'll tell you they prefer companies that are “good, like me.” What do you expect them to say? That they want to do business with creeps and perverts? And whatever you do, don’t talk yourself into the Pepsi narcissism trap.

5. Results by indirection. While you will always be resented and disliked by a certain component of the population, there is a group of people who can be influenced by reason. The best way to influence these people is indirectly. Let them hear about your good works from third parties. Don’t try to force feed your righteousness to them. By not pushing too hard on the virtue button, but by having a strategy that employs discretion and unpretentiousness you may actually get some people to like and appreciate you.

The Wonderful Things We Used To Know

One of the ongoing qualities of mankind that you have to admire has been our ability to delude ourselves into thinking we know things that we don't know.

There are so many wonderful things we used to know that we don't know anymore.

We used to know what the universe was made of. It was made of protons and electrons and neutrons which were made of quarks and a whole bunch of funny little subatomic particles. And then a few years ago we found that about 94% of the universe is made of stuff that is a complete mystery to us. We call it dark energy and dark matter because we have no idea what it is. It's not the stuff that stars or people or protons are made of. It's... we don't know what the hell it is. We're not even sure how to look for it.

It was less than 40 years ago that our experts warned us about disastrous climate change. In 1975, Newsweek informed us that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that “catastrophic famines might result from…global cooling.” That's right, cooling. On Sept. 14, 1975 The New York Times told us that this global cooling "may mark the return to another ice age." And on May 21, 1975 the Times said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" because it has been "well established" that the climate in the Northern Hemisphere "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

And then, to our dismay, we found out a few years ago that the Earth is actually warming at an alarming rate.

For hundreds of years we knew that diseases were caused by witches, or frogs, or bad vapors, or angry gods. It is only in our very recent past that we've learned about microbes and genetics.

You'd think that after thousands of years of being wrong about just about everything we'd have learned a little humility. But, of course, we never do.

Which brings me to the very mundane subject of advertising.

We used to know how interactive advertising worked. But then the more we studied it, the more we found that consumers have no interest whatsoever in interacting with advertising.

We used to know how social media worked. But the farther along we get, the more we find that our assumptions about the impact of social media on consumers' buying habits are way out of line with reality.

We used to know what was happening in media. And then TV didn't die. And TiVo didn't take over. And the computer and television didn't converge.

But being wrong doesn't stop us.

We still have people making a nice living going from conference to conference, from boardroom to boardroom, who know how it all works and how it will work in the future. They know what we need to do and how we need to do it. They know.

The only problem is this -- they know nothing. They are fools at best, and liars at worst. Anyone who takes them seriously is an idiot.

It's such a shame. We used to know so much.

Social Media Bombs On Black Friday

Despite all the hyperventilating over social media, people with open minds and judicious temperaments are still unconvinced that it has significant impact on commerce.

We know that display advertising on social media sites, notably Facebook, has delivered a whole lot less than promised.

But defenders of social media marketing tell us that it is not the advertising value of social media networks that makes them so magical. It's the content value.

The story goes that the real strength of social media is manifest in the feeds and updates on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Linked In. Here people see marketers' posts and they also see the endorsements and referrals from members of their "community" and are powerfully influenced by them.

It's a lovely little story. Unfortunately, it's all bullshit.

We recently wrote about a report from Forrester Research that stated, "Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers" and that the effect of social media on online sales was "barely negligible."

Now, a report from IBM that measured the effect of social media on online sales for Black Friday have produced some startling data.

The highlights are these:

• While online sales on Black Friday increased over 20% from last year, everything IBM measured relating to the effect of social media on these sales dropped.

• Traffic to online shopping sites from social networks dropped 12% from last year and accounted for eight-tenths of 1% of traffic.

• Sales at online shopping sites that came as a result of referrals from social media networks dropped by over 35% and accounted for one-third of 1% of sales.

• Referrals from Facebook to online shopping sites accounted for two-thirds of 1% of traffic. Remarkably, during this same period, Facebook's user base increased 25%. If there's ever been a clear demonstration of the difference between the popularity of social media and the effectiveness of social media marketing, this is it.

• And get this -- last year referrals from Twitter accounted for two one-hundredths of 1% of online shopping traffic. This year they accounted for 0% of traffic. That's right, zero.

While online media propeller-heads argue about the nuances of these "metrics," to the rest of the world the numbers are so ridiculously small they barely even qualify as rounding error.

The idea that "conversations about brands" on social media networks are a major influence on consumers is one of the great pillars that social media marketing theory is built on. But as we often say here at Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, nobody's smarter than the facts.

The results from this IBM report should be another nail in the social media marketing coffin.

But, fortunately for the social media lobby, the marketing lemmingocracy has bought very deeply into the social media hype machine. It's too late for them to back out now.

• Only 0.68% of Black Friday online sales came from Facebook referrals--two-thirds of one percent. That was a decline of 1% from last year.

And how about Twitter?
A couple of years ago, people were excited about Twitter's potential as a commerce platform, too.
But Twitter's impact on ecommerce, it seems, is zero.
Not "basically zero."
Zero.

• Commerce site traffic from Twitter accounted for exactly 0.00% of Black Friday traffic. That was down from 0.02% last year.
  

So much for the idea that Twitter or Facebook's business models are going to have much to do with commerce.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/black-friday-online-sales-from-twitter-referrals-2012-11#ixzz2DONO8g3V

Facebook Trying To Commit Suicide?

Facebook may be about to cut their own throats.

According to Business Insider, they will soon be launching a product that will...

prove to marketers that there is a type of online advertising besides Google search ads that is worth spending large amounts of money on.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-quietly-ramping-up-a-product-that-kills-us-says-yahoo-source-2012-11#ixzz2CbZ4Ed5t

It has come up with a way to prove to marketers that there is a type of online advertising besides Google search ads that is worth spending large amounts of money on.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-quietly-ramping-up-a-product-that-kills-us-says-yahoo-source-2012-11#ixzz2CbYx0Ttr

It has come up with a way to prove to marketers that there is a type of online advertising besides Google search ads that is worth spending large amounts of money on.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-quietly-ramping-up-a-product-that-kills-us-says-yahoo-source-2012-11#ixzz2CbYx0Ttr

prove to marketers that there is a type of online advertising besides Google search ads that is worth spending large amounts of money on.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-quietly-ramping-up-a-product-that-kills-us-says-yahoo-source-2012-11#ixzz2CbZ4Ed5t

"...prove to marketers that there is a type of online advertising besides Google search ads that is worth spending large amounts of money on."

(By the way, that bold "prove" is not from me, it's from the gee-whiz article at Business Insider.)

Facebook better be careful. If their methodology is any good, the only thing they're likely to prove is how ineffectual display ads on their site are.

According to the article, the basis for Facebook's new product is a research tool from a company called Datalogix that allows them to correlate the delivery of ads on Facebook with the purchase of products. So, for example, they can tell Coke that of the 1 million people who had a Coke ad delivered on Facebook, 300,000 bought a can of Coke in the next 3 days.

Sounds pretty good, huh? Except there's a little problem. There's a big difference between correlation and causality. Correlations can be very misleading. For example, of the 1 million people who get a flat tire today 300,000 will probably also buy a can of Coke in the next 3 days. Does this mean getting a flat tire causes the purchase of Coke? I don't think so.

Most ad agencies and advertisers are so dumb and so addled by impenetrable "metrics" that they'll probably buy a correlation scam, if that's what Facebook has in mind. But if some smart people start asking the right questions, Facebook could find itself in deep snow. If they think they can prove substantial causality between the crappy little ads on their site and substantial purchase increases of major brands they're delusional.

Right now, small scale advertisers who don't need significant reach (dentists, weight-loss scammers, rehab clinics, and other crappy direct marketers) are willing to buy Facebook ads because they only pay for clicks, and on a cost-per-click basis they can project a positive ROI. But if Facebook thinks they can prove a positive ROI to brand marketers who aren't buying clicks and need massive reach they're asking for trouble.

The problem for Facebook here is that if this new methodology cannot prove a positive ROI to brand marketers as it promises to do, they will seriously damage their push for a reach-and-frequency based revenue model. And they will remain in the thrall of crappy little direct marketers.

They better be pretty certain they can prove what they think they can prove before they launch this thing.

A Great Start

Here's a great start to the Thanksgiving weekend

The Remarkable Dominance Of Live TV

Here in the science wing of The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters our never-ending battle against the forces of ignorance and trendiness sometimes forces us to publish some actual facts. You remember those, right? Those were the things we used to rely on before the online crowd introduced us to "metrics."

For the benefit of the few who are still interesting in understanding what's really happening in the world -- and because no one loves you like I do -- I have taken the trouble of producing some graphs or charts (I can never figure out the difference) that demonstrate how live television continues to  dominate the media landscape.

The following have been produced from Nielsen's 2012 Q2 Cross-Platform Report which was released within the past few days and, to a substantial degree, discredit just about everything our chattering media geniuses have been predicting for the past 10 years.

Just imagine for a moment that the internet had been invented before television. Then look at these charts in that context. Can you envision how intensely the "shiny new object" crowd would be telling us to dump the web and be all over TV?

And whatever you do, don't show these graphs to Bill Gates...

From FoxNews.com, January 2007

Bill Gates: Internet Will Revolutionize Television

DAVOS, Switzerland —  The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had"

We're laughing, Bill, we're laughing.

Ciao, Baby

Heading to Italy today.
See you in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, buy my book.

Either Facebook Is Nuts Or I Am

In our last exciting episode, we decided that Facebook's business strategy is a pig's breakfast. They reach a billion people but all they can do is sell crappy little ads to divorce lawyers for $1.50.

We described this problem in esoteric marketing terms (well, esoteric for a dumb-ass blogger, anyway) as one of confusing the "demand creation" model with the "demand fulfillment" model (please don't make me explain that again. Just read this.)

So where does this lead us? It leads us to the conclusion that Facebook is in the wrong business.

First, let's start with a little media theory. Of all the overblown ideas being hustled by the online ad industry the biggest, by far, is "targeting."

Media science baloney notwithstanding, reach is way more important to big marketers than targeting. To paraphrase a former colleague of mine when asked by a cola maker who their target should be, he replied, "Any asshole with a mouth."

Big brands need big reach, not the diminishing returns of finer and finer targeting.

The "precision targeting" of online advertising is supposed to make it far more efficient and effective. Not even close. Not even close to close.

In fact, online advertising's record of motivating consumers is alarmingly terrible. With all their clouds full of data, Facebook ads attract 5 clicks for every 10,000 views. This is mindblowingly ineffective.

In fact, in a recent experiment a blank display ad -- blank! --with no copy, no art, no nothing, just empty space -- had a higher click rate than the average "precisely targeted" Facebook ad. The whole online targeting/effectiveness thing has so far proven to be a complete and utter joke.

Of course advertisers -- being dumber than stumps -- don't realize that "targeting" means absolutely nothing without impact. Who cares how many left-handed Episcopalian cheese-makers you can reach if they don't notice the ad? As a certain Mr. Bernbach once said, "If no one notices your advertising everything else is academic."

Secondly, why would a company that can reach a billion people even want to sell targeting? They should be selling anti-targeting. They should be selling reach. They are the only media property in the solar system that reaches a billion people and they are trading on their ability to reach falafel lovers in Yonkers.

Facebook has taken precision targeting bullshit to its logical absurdity. They're sitting on a gold mine, but they're throwing away the gold and selling the dirt.

So, you might ask, why is Facebook pursuing this strategy?

The answer is that they have to. They refuse to allow advertisers to use Facebook to create ads with any degree of impact. Consequently, they have nothing of value to sell to substantial advertisers. All they have is negligible little junk space for weight-loss hustlers.

Now we get to the speculative part of this exposition. Demurrals notwithstanding, I think the creepy Zuckerberg kid doesn't really want to be in the ad business. Like all these rich web phonies, he sees himself as some kind of high-minded visionary. Advertising just doesn't fit his smug idea of who he is and what he stands for. Just look at this ridiculous spot he produced to celebrate himself.

To him, advertising is a crass affair, unbecoming his noble purpose. Which is why it is relegated to invisible little postage stamps on a part of the page no one looks at.

In short, he's embarrassed about being in the ad business. To be honest here, so am I. But I don't have investors.

Here's what Facebook needs to do:

• They need to forget about "precision targeting." It's bullshit and it's not working. And it's not the business they should be in anyway.

• They need to sell reach. They have tried. But as currently configured it is a pathetic joke. Reach and frequency are irrelevant if the ad units have no impact. See Mr. B above.

•  The platform doesn't matter. Mobile or immobile, advertising that is invisible is worthless. Period. Exclamation point. All this hyperventilating about Facebook's mobile strategy is a red herring.

• They need to offer big-time advertisers something of real value, not the crap they are currently selling.

There are only two ways this is going to happen. First, the Z-man has to get used to the idea that he's in the ad business. Second, he has to get rid of all the Global Chief  Engagement Content Relationship Jargonators. He has to get some ad sales people who know what the f/k they're selling, and then give them something worthwhile to sell.

View From The Ivory Tower

The Wall Street crowd got all lightheaded last week because Facebook posted some better than expected numbers. Pardon me if I don't join in the champagne shower.

Here in the Ivory Tower wing at The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, we're starting to think that Facebook may turn out to be one of the all-time dumbest companies on the planet. And remember, to be the all-time dumbest you have to be dumber than Pepsi. That ain't easy.

I'm the farthest thing from a digital strategist, but I have this feeling that Facebook's business strategy is all wrong.

Facebook is the only media company in the universe that reaches a billion people on a regular basis but seems determined to sell cheesy $2 ads to dentists.

To understand the problem with this we have to go back to first principles. We have a couple of axioms about advertising that are relevant to this issue.

The first is that interactivity is the enemy of advertising. Whether the interactivity takes the form of clicking a tv remote, pushing a radio push-button, clicking a mouse or swiping a page, we believe that people are far more likely to interact with a medium to avoid advertising than to engage with it. You can read more about that here.

Second, we believe that online advertising has turned out to be far better at fulfilling demand than at creating demand. This accounts for the success of advertising on sites like Google and Craig's List, where people are searching for something. It also accounts for the failure of most display advertising. You can read more about that here.

The exception to the first axiom is found in the second axiom. People will purposefully interact when they are looking for something -- when they are in "demand fulfillment" mode.

In this mode, people will engage with advertising. When they are not in this mode, they  will avoid. Somehow Facebook seems to have gotten the idea that they are like Google.

They are using a "demand fulfillment" business model -- crappy little listing ads that only "searchers" would find appealing -- to monetize "demand creation" advertising -- which requires big, impactful, and atttractive ideas.

Anyone following me here?

Maybe this brilliant graph will help.

The way you make big ad money in the "demand creation" model is in the upper right quadrant. You sell big, impactful ads to broadly targeted advertisers. The way you make money in the "demand fulfillment" model is in the lower left quadrant. You sell a million crappy little ads to dentists. This is how the yellow pages and the classifieds used to do it, and how Google now does it. Facebook is a "demand creation" medium stuck in a "demand fulfillment" quadrant. 

According to Facebook's coo, they have so many users, it's like three times the Super Bowl audience every day. But do you see the Super Bowl crowd there? Do you see Coke and Budweiser and Doritos? No, you see pet groomers and divorce lawyers.

This is because they are selling the wrong stuff to the wrong people for the wrong reasons at the wrong price. Other than that, they're doing fine.

In our next exciting episode, we'll talk about why Facebook's focus on mobile does not solve this problem; why their emphasis on precision targeting is all wrong; and why they need to do something different and radical.

Maybe we'll also find out why if I'm so f/ing smart, how come they're all billionaires and I'm a schmuck with a blog?

Triumph Of The Anti-Language

There is a talk I give to groups from time to time called "The Golden Age Of Bullshit."

The talk has a few basic themes. One of which is that we are living in an age in which business bullshit artists have invented an anti-language. Its objective is to confuse rather than clarify. This is the opposite of what language is supposed to do.

Yesterday I received an email from from Oracle. The headline said:

Architecting Business Continuity Essentials for Enterprise Applications

Eager to find out how my enterprise applications could be architected for business continuity I read on.

I learned that I could...

Facilitate capacity planning and performance tuning. And effectively consolidate and virtualize enterprise application environments.

All I can say is, if you've never virtualized your enterprise application environment, dude it's awesome.

But that's not all. By subscribing to their "techcast" I could also...

• Deploy mission-critical services with maximum resiliency

• Architect effective site failover and disaster recovery processes

Cancel my trip to Hawaii.

And speaking of bullshit, I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day. There were two flat tires sitting at the next table.  I actually heard one of them use the words "mission-critical." I didn't know people really said it. I thought it was just a term whose use was legally restricted to bad radio spots and idiotic emails.

All this bullshit used to be funny. Now it's just depressing. We have a whole generation of business people whose brains have been corrupted and debased by a vocabulary of jargon and obfuscation.

They think they are hiding their ignorance behind a curtain of tarted up language. In fact, they are exposing it.

Online Advertising Through The Wrong Lens

It seems to me that advertisers and marketers still don’t understand a basic concept about using the web.

After 15 years they are still committed to plopping their thought template for traditional advertising over the web and expecting it to fit.

It doesn't.

The models they have in their minds are wrong, and to a large degree account for the dismal performance of most online advertising.

The key to understanding online ad success is to forget about the distinctions between marketing and advertising and sales promotion and PR. These distinctions may be relevant in traditional advertising but are red herrings on the web. The important thing to understand is the difference between creating demand and fulfilling demand. If you don’t understand the distinction, please read this.

Thus far, the web has been shown to be good at fulfilling demand and weak at creating demand.

The most obvious evidence that the web is lousy at creating demand has been the startling inability of web advertising to build brands. As we’ve asked here many times, after 15 years what mainstream consumer-facing brands have been built by display advertising, or social media, or YouTube, or “content”? You can count them on one hand. Or one finger.

On the other hand, the reason Google and Amazon are so successful is that they are utilities for fulfilling demand. Whether you call them advertising or not is largely irrelevant. Google is an ad supported site. Amazon is a store. But they are both in the business of fulfilling demand. When people already have some idea of what they want, they go to the web. And largely to Google and Amazon.

Facebook, on the other hand, is not where people go to fulfill demand. They go there to screw off with their friends. Which is why advertising on Facebook has been so remarkably ineffective.

If you are a marketer, you are far more likely to be successful if you use the web for fulfilling demand rather than creating it. When people are already interested in you, the web is where they go.

Stop thinking about the web the way you think about your advertising. It ain't like that. Think of it as a store. Think of it as the yellow pages. Think of it as a brochure. But don't think of it as television.

Social Media Effect: "Barely Negligible"

If you're in the business of selling stuff, according to one big-time research firm social media marketing is a waste of your time and money.

Forrester Research has released a report recently that concludes...

"Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers. In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions for both new and repeat shoppers could be traced back to trackable social links." 

Now think about this for a minute. This study is about the influence of online social media on online sales. If the influence on online sales is "barely negligible" can you imagine the influence on traditional retail sales (which account for about 94% of everything sold?) What's below barely negligible? Strongly negligible?

The study goes on to say...

 “The reality is that even the most popular social image-sharing sites (like Pinterest) have failed to move the needle with respect to sales for most retail sites.” 

To tell you the truth, even I was a little shocked reading about this study. There aren't too many people in the ad world who are more skeptical about the magical power of social media marketing than I am. But I thought the truth probably fell somewhere between "magic" and "barely negligible."

According to a piece about this study in Marketing...

As a direct source of sales, web marketing mainstays of search and email continue to be the most fruitful... 

Hmmm...seems to me I've read something like this somewhere before. Oh yeah, it was in The Ad Contrarian over two years ago...

"It is true that there's data to support the effectiveness of two types of online advertising: search and email. But is that it?"

It's starting to look more and more like the answer is... yes. That's about it.

Of Geeks And Sneaks

I don't like sneaky people.

And one of the things that bothers me about online advertising is the unprecedented degree of sneakiness.

In traditional advertising, there is usually no question about what an ad is or what it is intended to do. We are out to sell you something and there is rarely any doubt about our motives.

You may not like the idea that we are trying to sell you something, but there is no confusion about our purpose.

You know what an ad looks like, sounds like and smells like. You can choose to pay attention to it or not.

But online advertising is different.

• Is a tweet really from a satisfied customer or is from an intern being paid to impersonate a customer?

• Is an update really from a friend or is it "sponsored?"

• Is a review from a real person? Or a real jerk trying to either pump up his own ratings or kill a competitor's?

• Is a Google search result a true reflection of the best response or is it the result of someone having paid for a keyword? (Unsurprisingly, without the right hand column, almost 50% of people can not differentiate paid ads from organic search.)

• Is "content" real or is it product propaganda?

• What kind of "black ops" are online ad hustlers up to that we don't even know about?

The world of online advertising is replete with advertising disguised as something else, and media practices bordering on infringement of privacy.

Yes, traditional advertising is often annoying and witless. But it comes by its imperfections honestly. It does not pretend to be anything other than what it is.

Online advertising may not seem to be as tiresome or irritating. But, on the whole, it is considerably more insidious and disingenuous.

What The Hell Are They Teaching?

There was a piece in Ad Age last week featuring the astoundingly clueless opinions of marketing and business professors on the subject of the Pepsi Refresh project.

The amazing thing is that these people weren't from Southwest Arkansas State. These guys were from Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn and Notre Dame.

It makes it clear why so many young people in advertising are confused about what they're supposed to be doing. And just how out of touch these experts are.

Before we take a look at the comments, let's review the facts:

• In 2010, Pepsi diverted scores of millions of dollars from traditional advertising (including their Super Bowl sponsorship and their traditional TV advertising) into a massive social media project.

• After one year of this, they had lost 5% of their business.

• Their sales dropped by an estimated half a billion dollars.

• They fell from their traditional 2nd place in the soft drink category to 3rd place.

• Their sales erosion increased widely compared to the previous year

• Their beverage ceo was so upset he said he was going to "blow up the place."

• To this day, they are still suffering from this debacle

• Many of the key players are now gone from Pepsi

• After burning astronomical amounts of money on this, Pepsi finally killed it in March.

If that doesn't describe a complete marketing disaster, I don't know what does. So what do the academics have to say about Refresh?

"...we don't know whether it was effective or not." 

What?! We DON'T KNOW??? Maybe you need a few research assistants to do a thesis for you, then you'll know. What has to happen to convince you that it bombed? Do lab rats have to grow two heads?

"I have read that the project had over 60 million folks involved. That is a pretty impressive accomplishment."

No, the "pretty impressive" part was how they got hundreds of millions of people to buy 5% less Pepsi. Now that's impressive.

"...it has helped further the conversation about the role of purpose in brand marketing."

Oh, the f/ing conversation! That old thing still alive on campus? Here on planet Earth, professor, we buried that putrid monkey about 2 years ago. How about this -- the "role of purpose" is to sell shit. Any further questions?

"It shows the power of making a big commitment to these causes. People really responded and said Pepsi is a good company."

Yeah, everywhere I go people can't stop talking about what a good company Pepsi is. I can hardly get a conversation going about the election or football.

"It's something that will be more and more relevant and more mainstream."

Bullshit.

First of all, no company will ever again be stupid enough to listen to the delusional blather of "social media marketing experts" and do what Pepsi did.

Second, the "mainstream" doesn't need lessons from corporate America in good citizenship. We don't need lectures from white collar windbags who hide every dollar of profit they can from the tax system. We don't need holier-than-thou pronouncements from sugar-water peddlers about their high-minded principles. We don't need exhortations from overfed sharpies about our responsibilities as citizens.

You want to sell us stuff? Fine. Tell us what you got and why we need it.

Otherwise, we can do very well without your cynical gimmicks and corporate chest-pounding disguised as social virtue.

Google Math

My opinion piece about Google yesterday drew some skepticism.

It feels like much of it came from Googlemeisters whose deep involvement with search may be making them sensitive to every tree but barely aware of the forest.

Yesterday's piece was all opinion.  Here are some facts*:

• For searches involving people looking to buy something, almost 2/3 of clicks go to paid results, not natural (organic) results. 

•  85% of above-the-fold real estate in Google for high commercial intent keywords is given to paid ads. 15% goes to organic results.  

• On average, the top "organic" listing gets fewer than 9% of clicks. Meanwhile, the top 3 spots get over 40% of clicks. 

• If an advertiser buys keywords for which he would already rank naturally, 89% of his traffic will be generated by the paid ads, not the organic results.

• According to a recent survey, without the right hand column, over 45% of respondents could not differentiate paid ads from organic search. 

* Source: The War On Free Clicks, WordStream