Sidewalk Psychology And The Z-Man

There was an interesting piece in Ad Age the other day about people exhausting their ability to pay attention to all the nonsense on Facebook.

Zuckerberg predicted a few years ago that each year the amount of stuff each of us would post on line would double. Apparently this is called Zuckerberg's Law. The writer believes that in this prediction lies the downfall of the Facebook empire. He believes that we can't handle a doubling of useless information and at some point the signal-to-noise ratio will become unsustainable.

Whether this is true or not, I have no idea. I would like to think that the author is correct. But I have to say I have been powerfully impressed by the average person's capacity to consume moronic crap.

The author says...

"How is it that Mark Zuckerberg, obviously a smart fellow, cannot... be aware of the limits of consumer cognition and human attention spans? How could a guy so brilliant not understand that his increasingly overshare-y Facebook is diminishing our collective capacity to focus on the stuff we really might care about in social media, let alone advertising messages?"

The part about advertising messages is the part I'm interested in. Here's the thing. I don't think Zuckerberg gives a shit about advertising messages.

I think he has people around him who do; I know he has shareholders who do; and I'm positive he has clients who do. But I think he could care less.

I don't think he gives a moment's thought to the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook, except insofar as it might interfere with the user experience.

The idea that somehow Zuckerberg sees Facebook as an advertising medium, and that he factors the needs of advertisers into his decisions seems delusional to me. I have never met the man and I am certainly no expert on his personality, but everything I've seen tells me that on his list of top 10 things he wants Facebook to be good for, advertising is number 11.

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.