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This post is adopted from a podcast I did last year. One of the questions I’ve been wrestling with for years is why online advertising seems to be incapable of building major consumer-facing brands. We’ve had 20 years of phenomenal growth of online advertising and yet I have trouble coming up with one example of a major consumer-facing physical brand that was built by online advertising. I can think of no examples of major brands of beer, soda, cars, toothpaste, paper towels, candy bars, soap, fast food, peanut butter — you get the picture — that were built by online advertising. After 20 years of existence radio and TV had built hundreds - if not thousands - of consumer brands. There are some who would argue that there are very big web-native brands that have been built by online advertising - e.g., Amazon, Google, and Facebook. I’m not so sure that advertising played a major role in the building of any of those brands, but let’s leave that argument for another day and just focus on...

Over the years this blog has written a lot of nasty things about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. As the world is coming to realize what a toxic pile of crap Facebook is, I thought we'd collect some of our favorites in one place. Here you go: On responsibility ... "It's very simple. Facebook is way too powerful to be run by a jerk like Mark Zuckerberg. He has... shown himself to be utterly inadequate to handle the responsibilities of managing an organization with the power and influence of Facebook. Or even understanding what the responsibilities are." On leadership... "The absence of probity and maturity that Facebook has displayed has been baked into the company's DNA by Zuckerberg's arrogance, and will remain there as long as his vapid philosophies define their culture...    "Young people are just smarter"    "Move fast and break things" This is the credo of an infantile egotist. You can draw a straight line from this nonsense to...

This post is adapted from my book " BadMen: How Advertising Went From A Minor Annoyance To A Major Menace. " Advertising used to be concerned with imparting information. Today it is concerned with collecting information. Online advertising, the predominant form of marketing communication, is largely reliant on "tracking" to accomplish this. Tracking is just a pleasanter word for surveillance. Our web browsers, our search engines, and the sites we visit use invisible software to keep track of everything we do and everywhere we go on line. Our emails and texts are read and archived by the providers we use. All this information is collected, stored, and sold to third parties. Usually without our knowledge or consent. It has proven to be easily accessible to hackers, foreign governments, and other malefactors. The preposterous rationale for all this abuse of our privacy is that it helps marketers provide us with more relevant advertising. As if the citizens of the world...

If you go to marketing or advertising conferences the first thing you notice is that every genius with a Powerpoint deck is an expert on the future. I attend way more conferences than is healthy.  I've been averaging about 12 of these a year, as speaking at these things is part of my business. I hear all kinds of hysterical and provocative predictions for the future. The one thing I don't hear is anything that turns out to be true. The history of these future-hustlers is pretty rotten. So here's a little exercise. Here are a dozen of the biggest advertising stories of the past couple of years. Go back and see if you can find any marketing geniuses who predicted any of the following: Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal ( here ) Martin Sorrell shown the door at WPP ( here ) Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress ( here ) Google fined over $5 billion by EU for illegal activities ( here ) ANA study finds "pervasive" corruption in media ( here ) Justice Department/...

Laughing@Advertising is my new book. Yes, this time I've gone too far. It's a collection of my most irresponsible and inappropriate blog posts, essays, and cave drawings. You might say it's 200 pages of insults, wise-cracks, cheap shots, and dirty words. In other words, fun for the whole family! I'm out to disrupt the disruptors -- those somber, imperious souls who have made marketing and advertising such an earnest and humorless endeavor. I am hoping this is the silliest, most injudicious book about our industry you've read. And in some unwholesome, subversive way, the truest and funniest. It is on sale now at Amazon. It is only available in paperback. There ain't gonna be no ebook. Why? Pixels aren't funny. At $6.99 the paperback is cheaper than most of the stupid-ass marketing ebooks you buy anyway. So quit whining and click here .   And don't say I didn't warn you. Update : Huge thanks to everyone. It launched yesterday and it immediately becam...

I was recently asked to explain what I do and why I do it. This always gets me mildly uncomfortable and sets me thinking. I know this sounds pompous, but the short answer is that I want to use whatever limited abilities I have to be a subversive force in the marketing and advertising world. I think we need subversive thinking. I am sure we don't really know all the things we pretend to know. I think this needs to be pointed out often and at high volume. The job of subversives is to undermine the dogma, conventional wisdom, and entrenched interests in our business by finding facts and espousing opinions that challenge our supposed experts. That's the only way well-articulated bullshit can be exposed. The marketing and advertising industries are in a very strange phase these days. Usually in culture and society it is the young people who challenge the tired legends and rituals to lay bare the flaws. But in our industry, it is the young who have become the guardians of the overwor...