Skip to main content

Everyone Disgusted With Ad Industry


In a story this morning, Campaign US is reporting that morale in the U.S. ad industry is dropping faster than panties on prom night.

Here are some stats from the report:
  • In 2015, the percent of people working in advertising who rated their morale as "low" or "dangerously low" was 34%. This year it has fallen to 47%
  • This is a drop in morale of 36% in just one year
  • 63% of the people with low morale said they are actively looking for a new job.
  • By far the number one reason for low morale -- at 73% -- was "company leadership."
Couple that with these facts... 
  • The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) says that unscrupulous financial practices among agencies is "pervasive."
  • Almost 3/4 of marketers say they are dissatisfied with the state of online advertising
The only honest conclusion you can draw is that there is a depressing level of unhappiness awaiting anyone who has to deal with the contemporary advertising business.

While alarming, I'm afraid it's not surprising.

Under the "leadership" of the financial sharpies, lawyers, and accountants who now control the agency holding companies, the advertising business has become a confused and chaotic mess.

A business that valued ideas and creativity above all else is now a pig's breakfast of insufferable bullshit, dreadful jargon, stupid gimmicks, and amateur bumblers producing horrific crap.

Morale has dropped because standards have dropped. Standards have dropped because the "leaders" of our industry don't know what business they're in.

In a recent talk I said that wherever I go in the world I hear the same two things:
"Advertising isn't as effective as it once was, and advertising isn't as creative as it once was. It's hard for me to believe that these two things aren't related."
It's also hard for me to believe that the precipitous drop in morale isn't also related.

The holding company model has been a disaster for our industry. Their obsession with data and metrics is simply a misdirection strategy by bewildered awkward behemoths that can't produce good work.

We have reached such a level of effete absurdity that maintaining that the central business of ad agencies is to produce good ads is now controversial.

There is only one hope. It is for marketers to wake up and remind the agency aristocrats what they're getting paid for - great advertising, and nothing less. All the rest is footnotes.

Until marketers insist that their agency's first, second and third priorities are to create great ads, the level of satisfaction across the ad industry will continue to plummet, and the advertising business will continue to degenerate.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Simple-Minded Guide To Marketing Communication

We marketing people have a dreadful habit of taking the obvious and making it incomprehensible. So today I would like to go against the grain and take the obvious and make it more obvious. If you are someone who has to make decisions about how to spend marketing dollars, here are some principles I believe in for simplifying and clarifying your thinking. The first thing we have to understand about marketing communication is that there are no absolutes. There are just likelihoods and probabilities. When making communication decisions, our job is to assess likelihoods and probabilities. In other words, precision guessing . We need to reckon which of the many alternatives we are faced with has the highest probability of producing the result we are looking for with the budget we have. A second principle is to understand the limits of what we do. We don't have as much power to create business greatness as we think we do. There are too many important aspects of business success that a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Technology, Progress, And Irresponsible Stupidity

The world does not move in straight lines. We expect things to go one way, but they unexpectedly go another. In 2000, when the Prius was introduced, most commentators saw a big future for hybrid vehicles. In 2009, a study by JPMorgan confidently asserted " 20% of all vehicles sold in U.S. to be hybrids by 2020. " In 2010, Consumer Reports said " 39 percent are considering buying a hybrid or plug-in for their next car. " And yet, as of April 2016, hybrid cars represented less than 2% of car sales in the US. Their share of market has dropped by 50% since 2013. A car dealer I know told me "we can't give 'em away." If you think the reason for this is the popularity of electric vehicles, think again. Electric vehicles represent less than 1% of car sales in the US. In the early 1990's the Soviet Union collapsed. We thought "liberal democracy" had become triumphant and would be the model for world governance. Today "liberal democracy...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Ad Industry Destroys Brand Value

The advertising industry prides itself on being brand builders. Building successful brands is supposed to be the essence of what we do. But in recent years the ad industry has been guilty of cheapening some of the most important brands it controls -- its own. I am going to be picking on WPP because it is the biggest offender. But to some degree the same can probably be said about each of the major holding companies. WPP is the owner of some of the most famous and worthy brands in the history of the ad business: JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. It has been systematically dismantling the value in these brands. Today they are splinters of what they were. The holding companies have undermined their agencies from the top down and from the bottom up. What a holding company usually does is buy successful brands and manage them at arms length to, presumably, add value to shareholders. Examples of successful holding companies are Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble. Nobody buys a Berkshir...
Post a Comment
Read more