Opening Day 2011

The economy is still in the toilet. Somewhere, asteroids are heading toward Earth. Web pornography is warping the minds of our children. Grown men and women are relentlessly Tweeting each other. Yes, my friend, the end is near.

But who gives a damn?

It's Opening Day. I'm going to have a hot dog and a beer. I'm going to sit in the sunshine till the back of my neck is red and raw and my ass stings like a shot of tequila on a bad patch of strep throat.

What the hell, I'm having two hot dogs.

Once a year, every aspect of life should have an Opening Day. Every business should have one. Every friendship should have one. Every family should have one.

A day when everything starts over. When all of last year's successes and failures go into the record book, no longer a matter of life and death, just a matter of history. A day when the slate is clean and the possibilities are unlimited. A day when you call in sick-and-tired; when you leave the iPhone in the glove compartment; when you go somewhere where the grass is perfect and the people are unaccountably cheerful.

It's Opening Day. Let's play some ball.

Advertising's Cranky Senior Citizens

I generally read two kinds of advertising blogs -- those written by young people who are enthusiastic about the business, and those by old people who are fed up.

I am very happy that there are young people who are excited by the prospects for the ad industry. I salute their spirit and their optimism. I hope they are right.

But this post isn't about them. It's about advertising's cranky senior citizens.

The question is this: Are these old farts correct that something has gone terribly wrong in adworld or are they just typical whiners, past their sell-by, who are nostalgic for an imagined yesteryear that never existed?

Being one of the prime perpetrators of crankiness and disillusionment, I'm pretty sure you can guess where I come down on this question. I think the ad industry has become a stinky heap of group-think and acquiescence.

Here are some of the things that have gone wrong.

There is way too much money and power in the hands of the wrong people.
The ad industry is now run by horrifyingly dull men in grey suits. Advertising used to be an entrepreneurial business lead by (sometimes crazy) people who actually practiced the art. You can't tell the ad guys from the bankers any more. The new oligarchs have added almost nothing of value, other than a relentless drive to eliminate costs. In the not-so-distant past, no agency had more than a 2% share of the U.S. advertising market. Today, four global monstrosities control over 70% of the advertising dollars.

The waiters are doing the cooking.
Remember when Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple (1985-1997) and it was run by a series management geniuses? They immediately turned it into a piece of crap. The same is happening in advertising. It is no longer run by ad people. There has been a massive transfer of power away from creatives toward managers and technocrats. Yes, there are still some wonderful creatively-driven agencies. But they are becoming a tiny minority.

The tactical is driving out the strategic.
Tactics always drive out strategy. But there has never been a time when I've seen so much lip service given to strategy and so much money spent on tactics. There are two important advertising words I almost never see or hear anymore -- campaign and concept. Nobody has the patience for a campaign, and a concept has no "metrics." The internet has turned us all into a bunch of math majors.

As Socrates might have put it, just because we're old and cranky doesn't mean we're not right.

We Were Only Kidding

MEMO
To:          The Ad Industry
From:     Phi Theta Gamma
Subject:  Only Kidding
Date:       March 28, 2011

Okay. We're sorry. We were just kidding.

We know we may have confused some people. And some of you may have actually blown some money, but we really didn't mean any harm. We just thought of it as a stupid joke.

Honestly, we really didn't imagine anyone would take this stuff seriously. It was just, like, one night we were sitting around the fraternity house studying for a dumb-ass marketing final and smoking a j and Larry said, dude, this stuff is such bullshit, let's just, like, invent our own marketing bullshit.

And so we start riffing, like "marketing is a dance contest"...no..."marketing is a cheese slicer"...no..."marketing is a conversation"...and we all kinda cracked up. It sounded like the kind of crap marketers would say. I mean, a conversation? With marketers? Who would do that? Ever talk to a marketer?  Fucking morons.

So now we're thinking we're on a roll and Vic says, let's do some bs about "brands" because, you know, they're always going on and on about brand this and brand that.... So how do we get brands into this bullshit deal? So Chris says -- this one killed us -- what if we say "consumers want to have a relationship with brands?" Now we're peeing our pants.

Yeah, says, Vic, I want to have a relationship with my mayonnaise, and Chris says, I want to have a relationship with my clock radio, and I say, I want to have a relationship with my toilet paper.

Now we're on the floor.

So then Jimmy says, dude, all these marketing guys are totally queer for tech. Let's invent some tech bullshit thing that's going to replace TV ads. So we blazed another spliff. Okay, says Ian, how about podcasts...no, that's dead...how about widgets...no, dead....Eddie says, you know that pathetic Twitter thing that all the old geezers do? What if we say nobody needs to do TV ads anymore because all you have to do is send out tweeters, or whatever they call that shit. So now Vic can't breathe he's laughing so hard.

So here's where it gets weird. The next thing you know, all these companies are having interns sitting around tweetering to their customers and thinking that this is going to save them millions because they won't have to pay Tiger Woods or some other dipshit to be in their stupid TV spots. Then they're having, like, webinars and conferences and people are writing books and guys who couldn't deliver pizzas are making speeches and writing blogs...

Anyway, you know the rest of the story... we were too stoned to realize that Jake the jack-off was recording the whole thing, and his ugly-ass ex-girlfriend Wendy found it on his iPhone and uploaded it to YouTube. So now everyone in the frickin universe knows that all this new age marketing shit we invented was just a big goof, and the Dean is all up our ass and my father is super-pissed and...

Well, anyway, we're sorry. But it was kinda fun.