Why Won't Broadcasters Fight?

The great Dave Trott has distilled the essence of effective marketing strategy into two words -- predatory thinking.

"Predatory thinking is ruthless and aggressively focused on beating the competition."

Predatory thinking is not for the timid or the fearful. It is not for the fat and happy. Is not for those who have forgotten how to defend themselves.

It is not for the U.S. broadcasting industry. Our broadcasting industry refuses to fight.

In the past few years, I have had the opportunity to speak to several broadcaster groups. They are good, well-meaning people. But they don't get it.

They know they are getting their asses handed to them by the online ad industry. They know the online ad industry is very vulnerable on many fronts. But as I wrote a while back...

"(The online ad industry) have the press in their back pocket; they have ad agencies pimping for them. But broadcast(ers)... are pathetically unprepared for this fight. They haven't learned that if they don't tell their story, no one else will."

The broadcast industry is so used to printing money (in their heyday some had margins of 60% and higher!) that they seem to have decided that a permanent posture of aggrievement is a substitute for a fight. 

They are being taken to the cleaners by hyper-motivated digital evangelists who understand what predatory thinking means.

It's not as if the broadcast industry doesn't have a good story to tell, they just don't seem to know how to tell it.

It's not like they don't have the resources to tell their story, they just refuse to use them.

It's not that they don't have a killer weapon, they just don't recognize it.

It's not that the broadcast industry isn't doing a good job of implementing their strategy, they don't even have a strategy. 

The longer they allow the online ad industry to convince impressionable marketers and clueless agencies that broadcasting is dead or dying, the closer they are to enabling those fictions to become facts.

I have no dog in the fight between traditional and digital advertising. I don't care who wins or who loses.

But I bought a ticket and I want to see a good fight. All I'm seeing is one lean and hungry fighter and one overweight punching bag.

Thank God For Marketing Experts

Here at the Ketel One Conference Center of The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, we have finally realized that there are two kinds of marketing and advertising people in the world.

There are Experts, and there are Schmucks Like Us (SLUs).

The Experts are much more important than SLUs because Experts are not only smarter than us, they're smarter than the facts.

You see, we SLUs see a fact and we assume it means something. But the Experts see a fact and they know it means exactly the opposite.

Here's an example.

Nielsen just released its Total Audience Report for the first quarter of 2015. It shows that 96% of video viewing in the US is done on a television and 4% is done on a PC.

To Schmucks Like Us this might suggest that television is kicking the living shit out of PC viewing.

But not to Experts. Experts and their Expert friends don't need to read reports. They go to  conferences and write books and articles and they explain to each other -- and lecture to us -- that TV is dead. They're smarter than the facts.

Here's another example:

Schmucks Like Us would look at this chart and assume that because radio reaches a higher percent of Americans every week than any other medium, it must be pretty popular. Ha! Thank goodness we have experts to explain to us that radio, too, is dead.

I think it's time that Schmucks Like Us stop reading reports and relying on facts. Not if we ever expect to become experts.


(And don't forget, there's a lot more for Schmucks Like Us here.)

The Investment Idiots Of Advertising

In the world of financial investing, there are plenty of ways to be an idiot and lose boxcars full of money.

Perhaps the most obvious way is to listen to the arguments of headline grabbing financial writers. They will write very convincing articles about how you should put all your money in gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

Or you should take all your money out of gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

In a world of media overload, the only way for them to attract attention is to advocate sensational measures.

We have the same thing in the advertising and marketing world. We are deluged with books, articles, and conferences in which the most extreme assertions are the ones that grab the headlines.

We have had over a decade of extreme nonsense about the death of advertising; the death of television; the death of radio; the miracle of interactivity; the magic of social media marketing. It has all been a bunch of melodramatic bullshit.

We have been subjected to a non-stop barrage of bad marketing investment advice by people who are not smart enough to gain attention by giving sound guidance, but are just smart enough to gain attention by promulgating hysterical nonsense.

In many ways, investing in advertising is more difficult than personal investing. You can follow your personal investments on a day-to-day basis and see how they're doing.

But advertising and marketing investments are much more difficult to track. First of all, there are so many variables. Then there is the lag time.

When Pepsi launched the biggest social media marketing experiment in history -- the Pepsi Refresh Project -- it took them over a year and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue to realize what a disaster it had been.

But that's what you get when you follow the overblown rhetoric of advertising investment idiots. They trade on fear of missing out (FOMO) and they stampede naive marketers into believing their turgid narratives.

Sadly, if you're going to be an advertising or marketing "expert" you have to have something radical or extreme to say or nobody pays attention.

As we've said here many times, no one ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same.