"Highly Creative, Annoyingly Successful And Sometimes Completely Mad"

As regular readers know, I've been traveling and speaking and haven't had much time for blogging in recent weeks. Today, to atone for my dereliction, I'm sending you to a site where you can find a podcast I did while in New Zealand a few days ago with Ben Fahy of StopPress. You can listen to the podcast or read a transcript of it. Here's the intro to it:

"In the first of an irregular series of podcasts where we interview an assortment of highly creative, annoyingly successful and sometimes completely mad humans from across the marketing, media and advertising industries, we've set the bar pretty high: Bob Hoffman, AKA The Ad Contrarian. 

As a long time fan of Bob Hoffman’s spiky musings on marketing, advertising and media, a little bit of wee came out when TVNZ announced it was bringing him over to speak as part of its Forecast series.

Hoffman, who has been the CEO of two independent advertising agencies and the US operation of Mojo, is the author of the popular Ad Contrarian blog and of several books, including 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising, which became Amazon’s #1 selling advertising book. Now he spends most of his time slaughtering sacred cows, questioning the conventional wisdom of the marketing industry and using the phrase ‘horseshit’.

And so, in the atrium of the newly renovated TVNZ building, the closest thing you could find to a marcomms whistleblower gave a presentation to a group of TVNZ staff, clients and friends of the family that focused on what he believes are three main fallacies: 1) digital advertising is not very effective, regularly fraudulent and it hasn’t killed traditional media as promised. 2) people don’t love brands and 3) targeting young people is stupid.

His goal was to make the audience uncomfortable through the power of facts, rather than through the biased expertise that regularly pushes a specific, often digital, agenda and prove that people who work in this industry are definitely not normal. Judging by some of the knowing glances as he spoke, he achieved his goal. And, not surprisingly, he got plenty of laughs along the way. StopPress was lucky enough to get a few minutes of his time the following day to explore some of his ideas. Here’s what we talked about:" 

Now, please go here for the podcast.

Waiting For Answers

I've been traveling and speaking in Australia and New Zealand and haven't had time to post to the blog. Here's a post reproduced from my newsletter from Sunday.

Two weeks ago Procter & Gamble shook up the world of advertising by announcing that because of disastrous sales results they were discontinuing their "precision targeted" display advertising on Facebook and putting that money into mass targeted advertising.

This created big headlines because:

- P&G is not just the world's largest advertiser, but is widely recognized as the world's most sophisticated advertiser

- P&G  has for years been shooting their mouths off about the remarkable effectiveness and efficiency of precision targeted online advertising, and has, in fact, moved more than 1/3 of their advertising dollars on line

- Precision targeting is the foundation on which online display advertising is sold

Having been traveling in recent days in Australia and New Zealand, I have been trying to follow the fallout of this announcement. I probably have missed some things, but it seems to me that there has been very little of a material nature that has come from this remarkable story. All I've seen are variations of the same story repeated over and over.

I'm waiting to hear what other major advertisers have to say, and, most of all, what the large agencies have to say.

While one company's experience is certainly not definitive evidence of anything, it seems that talk of other major marketers having second thoughts about their (ill-considered) headlong rush into the magic world of online display advertising are rife.

I am particularly anxious to hear what agencies have to say.

There is something about agency silence that is screaming at me. This year we've had a lot of very negative news about online display advertising:

Corruption 

Fraud 

Kickbacks

Ad blocking

And now, ineffectiveness

Not a single one of these stories has been broken by anyone in the advertising industry. The stories have come from outside the agency world -- from the trade media, or clients, or researchers.

You've got to ask yourself why?

If agencies are supposed to be the experts on the effective use of media dollars, how can it be that they knew nothing about all these problems? Is it possible? Does it even pass the smell test?

The answer is no. The most likely scenario is that they've known what's going on and have been playing a double game.

I believe agency leaders have been hiding the ugly details from their clients behind an impenetrable smokescreen of "big data" horseshit. In other words, blinding them with pseudo-science.

Online advertising has two very compelling attributes for agencies: it is lucrative. and largely incomprehensible. Most clients, even the most sophisticated, think they know what's going on. But they don't. Ask P&G.

Agencies have sold their clients a truck load of baloney. It is slowly coming unraveled. Sadly for clients, the only place for them to take their business is to another agency that's been peddling the same baloney.

If I Were A Client...

...here's what I'd be asking my agency:

1. Is P&G right?
2. If not, how do you know?
3. If yes, why haven't you told us?

That should be good for a few laughs.

Will The P&G Story Bring Down Ad Tech? Please?

The recent announcement by P&G that it is discontinuing "precision targeted" advertising on Facebook because it isn't working calls into question the entire strategy behind much online display advertising.

Online display advertising has been sold to us as superior to traditional advertising because it presumes that reaching the perfect individual is more economically advantageous than reaching a broad demographic type.

For the most part, offline advertising is sold on demographics while display advertising is sold on data-driven targeting.

While P&G's experience should not be taken as conclusive proof of anything, it suggests that for big brands the demographics model is more economically efficient than the data-driven model.

Their experience with Fabreze air freshener was cited by The Wall Street Journal as an example of how highly targeted advertising failed.

For Fabreze, P&G targeted people with pets and people with large families. The presumption was that these people would have a significantly higher likelihood to purchase an air freshener than the public at large. Sales stagnated.

Then P&G targeted all adults over 18 -- a very broad swath. And sales picked up.

Presumably P&G had the good sense to use the same creative so they knew what variable they were testing.

If P&G's experience turns out to be projectible -- and it has been reported that other marketers are having similar experiences -- the whole model of online advertising, based on data-driven "precision targeting" and tracking -- and enabled by ad tech -- needs to go right down the toilet. It's a sham.

What a wonderful thing it would be if this turns out to be true.

Imagine an internet without ad tech...

• where the current obnoxious practices are acknowledged to be wasteful and counterproductive
• where you are not being stalked 
• where you are not being inundated with ads for stuff you bought 3 months ago 
• where you are not slowed down waiting for someone's crappy ad to load
• where your data plan money is not being wasted loading some company's ads 
• where people are not opening files on you every time you take an action 
• where ads are bought directly from publishers and not run through the black box of unnecessary, creepy networks and middlemen inhaling half your ad budget.

Is this really possible? Can this really happen?

In a rational world? Yes.

In the contemporary world of advertising? Not a fucking chance.