Behavior Blindness

For years I've been writing about the weakness of the web as an advertising medium.

Throughout this period there have been intelligent, successful people who have disagreed with me vehemently. In fact, almost the entire advertising and marketing industry seems to disagree.*

It has been very confusing for me trying to understand why otherwise intelligent, perceptive people don't see what I see.

• They know they never click on banner ads.
• They know that 95% of their purchases -- the peanut butter and gasoline and milk and socks and cereal and tires -- have never been influenced by a web ad.
• They know they ignore the invisible ads on Facebook.
• They know they pay no attention to "branded content."

So if they know all this, why do they still believe?

Then it struck me. They don't know. They are unaware of their own behavior.

The "aha" moment came when I was re-reading a quote from The Economist that I used here a few weeks ago in a piece about the supposed death of television. Here's what the Economist had to say...

"....one of the oddest and most consistent findings of television research: that people seem unaware of their own behaviour. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form."

I think this is what is going on in the advertising and marketing industry regarding online ads.

The data are irrefutable. We do not click on display ads. We do not notice banners. The only ad medium on the web we use consistently is Google.

But we are so swamped with hype about online advertising that we seem to have become blind to our own behavior.

We spend a crazy amount of time on the web reading all about our pet interests -- computers and travel and cars and restaurants. But we are seemingly unaware of the fact that web advertising has virtually no influence on the vast majority of things we buy every day.

As in so many aspects of life, we think we know what we're doing, but we don't.

*Although since I wrote this post, Sir Martin Sorrell has come out and said he thinks Facebook is a lousy advertising medium. Maybe I'm not the only idiot.

So You Wanna Run An Ad Agency

If you're the typical wildly demented ad professional, you probably think that some day you'd like to run your own agency. Since I've been doing that for several centuries I thought I'd give you a few tips.

Managing an ad agency is like delivering a baby. It seems pleasant enough in theory. But until you've actually done it you have no idea how messy it is.

Forget everything you've ever seen on Mad Men. Running an ad agency will not make you beautiful, handsome, or sexy. I suggest you Google me.

There are only two types of people who work at ad agencies -- crazy people and people training to be crazy.

From where you sit now, your colleagues seem good-natured and sensible. When you're their employer, you will soon find that all the good-natured and sensible people are over at Subway making pastrami melts.

One day someone you have worked with happily for 10 years will come into your office and close the door. She will tell you that she has left her husband and two children. She has fallen in love with your biggest client and is now living in the back of his 4-Runner. As soon as he tells his wife about this (which will happen "any day now") they will be moving to Oregon to make leather candles.

One afternoon you will be on a conference call between several of your staff and a film production company. The production company's director will be going on and on about how much he loves the storyboard they're bidding on. While he's doing this, your agency producer will be entertaining the troops by using his right hand to make the universal gesture for "whack-off." Two weeks later a letter will arrive by messenger informing you that a legal action has been instituted against you for enabling a hostile work environment.

One morning at 3:30 am your home phone will ring. It will be the the nice young Stanford graduate you hired in your billing department. He has been arrested for shooting off a gun at a strip club. It's all a terrible mistake, but can you come downtown and bail him out?

You will think of your agency as "your team." And, like all teams, they will have a remarkable capacity for petty grievances and will go out of their way to undermine each other.

Running an ad agency has nothing to do with making ads, working with clients, or managing accounts .

Your only real job is to keep crazy people from killing each other.

Advertising's 5 Biggest Lies

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.