Research Company Crashes Into Planet Earth

Here at the Ketel One Conference Center on the campus of The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, there's nothing we like better than a good chuckle at the comic antics of the  research industry.

These buffoons are wrong so often that we've asked our stock broker if he can find a way for us to short their press releases.

Now Forrester Research, the geniuses who ten years ago declared "the end of mass marketing" (but apparently forgot to tell Apple and Amazon and Walmart and Nike and Toyota and... you get the idea) have discovered something that everyone with just a little grey left in their matter have known for years -- social media marketing is a cruel joke.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, "Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says." Well, who'd-a-fuckin'-thunk-it?

You see, Forrester recently discovered that Facebook and Twitter have fuck-all to do with social media marketing (I admit it, I've been spending too much time in the U.K.) As we have been writing here since about forever, Facebook and Twitter have become the toxic breeding grounds for the seemingly unlimited propagation of display ads.

According to a Vice President and Senior Analyst at Forreester... 

Facebook “will become nothing but a repository for display ads”

Well I'll be darned. It seems like over a year and a half ago I wrote in these pages that..

(Facebook) has mutated into a channel for delivering traditional banner advertising.

And then back in January...

Facebook calls itself a social medium, but its advertising model is good old-fashioned paid advertising plastered all over the page. 

Now that an internationally expensive research company has stumbled upon the truth, I guess maybe the truth is double extra true.

The really remarkable thing about this report from Forrester is that they had to write it at all.

The fact that so many demented people in the marketing and advertising industry are still living in a dream world of "conversations" on Facebook and Twitter -- a dream world that was DOA years ago -- is a sad and disheartening commentary on how far our industry has wandered from reality, and how thoroughly it has been hijacked by an ever-expanding species of jabbering baboons.


Thanks to Atomic Tango for the link to this story.