new

Procter & Gamble, the world's largest ad spender, apparently came out with guns blazing at agencies and media on Sunday at the Inactive , oops, Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual "leadership" conference. Bravo to P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard for giving the corrupt, fraud-laden, sneaky creeps running the online media world a nice healthy ass-whooping. According to a story in Ad Age , Pritchard told the group... "The days of giving digital a pass are over... It's time to grow up. It's time for action." Pritchard laid out 3 criteria for publishers and agencies before they'll get any of his money. 1. A standard "viewability" metric. 2. Fraud protection 3. Third party verification of metrics. "Mr. Pritchard said the company has vowed to no longer pay for any digital media, ad tech companies, agencies or other suppliers for services that don't comply with its new rules." According to Ad Age. This is...

Is it possible that after 15 years of pissing away billions of dollars on idiotic fantasies, advertisers and agencies are finally waking up to the horseshit they've been sold by the online advertising industry? Let's have a look at some charts. This first chart shows us that according to Standard Media Index , growth in online advertising spending in 2016 was about half what it was in 2015. This second chart shows us that while over the past 4 years, year-over-year growth in online spending has averaged about 19%, in 2016 these numbers dropped a whole lot. Year-to-year growth averaged only 6.8%, quarter-to-quarter in the 4th quarter it average 4.3%, and month-to-month in December it was just .7%. As time goes on spending growth seems to be dropping dramatically. The third chart may be the most revealing. What it shows is that all the growth in online spending went to Google and Facebook. The rest of the online industry actually lost ad revenue. The amount of the loss depen...

The more I speak to groups and conferences, the more I am convinced that either marketers are blinded by thoughtless habits or that I have no logical thought process. In particular I am talking about how marketers ignore people over 50. I have stated the facts here before, but just for the record, let me repeat them before I get to my argument: Americans over 50... are responsible for over half of all consumer spending dominate 94% of consumer packaged goods categories outspend other adults online 2:1 on a per-capita basis buy about 50% of all new cars control about 70% of the wealth in the U.S. would be the 3rd largest economy in the world, if they were a country (larger than Japan, Germany and India) will grow at almost 3 times the rate of adults under 50 between now and 2030 are the target for 10% of marketing activity According to the chief economist for the National Automobile Dealers Association, one baby boomer is economically worth four millennials . When I review these facts a...

There was a time about a century ago when magicians were very popular. Harry Houdini was a rock star. Houdini did tricks that were, and still are, astounding. One hundred years later the world's leading magicians still can't figure out how he did many of his tricks. At the time, and since then, there have been two schools of magic. One school - often part of the séance and spirituality crowd - claimed they had supernatural powers and were able to do their magic because of their occult abilities. The other group said, horseshit. It's just tricks. Houdini was one of these. They have become known as the "skeptical movement " (or if you're not a Yank, the sceptical movement) and apply their principle of skepticism to many areas of life, not just magic. You could include scientists like Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye as well as more contemporary magicians like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller among the skeptical movement. Steven Novella of the Yale School of M...

Six years ago, I wrote a good post (yeah, there've been a couple) called " Social Media's Massive Failure ." I was denounced as an idiot and a Luddite dinosaur. Of course I was and still am. Notwithstanding that, my post was correct. Since then I've squealed and whined extensively about the infantile delusion that social media marketing is based on -- the silly idea that consumers want to have conversations with and about brands and share their brand enthusiasms with the world. I've also written a lot about Facebook cleverly giving up on the fantasy of social media marketing and becoming a traditional media company, selling as many paid ads as they can stuff on a page. Well, now things have come full circle. A few weeks ago MediaPost named BBDO as its "Social Media Agency Of The Year." For what? For not doing social media. "The solution: Utilize Facebook not as a social network, but a 'media channel.'" Apparently BBDO woke up thi...

If you want a good laugh, go to a major website and read the boilerplate about security. Or read their public statements... “At Yahoo, we have a deep understanding of the threats facing our users and continuously strive to stay ahead of these threats to keep our users and our platforms secure,” said a Yahoo company spokesman a few months ago. Bullshit. This was before they announced that a billion accounts were hacked. The Yahoo story may not be representative of all online companies, but it is certainly eye-opening. Here's how Yahoo "continuously strives" to keep your information secure. According to The New York Times , in 2014 Yahoo's chief of security recommended some changes that would make their platform a lot more secure by employing "end-to-end" encryption. This initiative was thwarted by the guy who runs their email and messaging services because "...it would have hurt Yahoo’s ability to index and search message data..." You know what th...

Let's face it. Most of what we ad people do is really dopey. I wasn't much of a creative person, but I've had the good fortune to know some great ones. There is one thing about them that I love. They work hard and have high standards, but they also have an enduring sense of how silly the whole thing is. It takes a special kind of intelligence to be diligent about what you do and yet keep that part of your brain alive that realizes it's largely ridiculous. There is a great deal of nonsense in the advertising business and I think it's very healthy to appreciate the absurdity. All the somber imbeciles who think that what they're doing is terribly important need a good solid whack in the golden globes. I think I blame it all on conferences. There are way too many fucking conferences. I go to a lot of these conferences because I'm one of the speakers and I get paid. But if I didn't, I wouldn't (I think this is what's called "biting the hand......

If you're like me, you probably wonder how ad fraud can be so pervasive and harmful while the ad industry -- with billions of dollars at stake -- sits on its fat ass and does nothing. The aha! moment came to me a while back when I came across and posted the chart below (which I've been using a lot lately.) It comes from the World Federation of Advertisers and if you think about it, it explains why the ad industry doesn't give a flying shit about online ad fraud. What this chart shows is that the flow of money within the advertising "ecosystem" (everything in grey) is exactly the same whether agencies are buying real traffic and real clicks or fraudulent traffic and fraudulent clicks. The fraud doesn't enter the money stream until we get to the green area, by which time everyone in the agency/adtech world has already cashed their checks and is halfway to the Hamptons. There are two groups of people getting royally screwed by ad fraud. One is too stupid to unde...

My New Years day Type A Group Newsletter drew some attention. Being a lazy-ass bum, I thought I'd kick-off the blog year with it. Check out the numbers -- as you know, copywriter math is always suspect, but I used sources that are usually reliable. Here we go...   Turning Ad Dollars Into Pennies   First let me wish you a Happy New Year. If you're any fun at all, you probably have a massive headache right now. But if you don't, don't worry, I'm about to give you one. Today we're going to "follow the money" and watch as a dollar of your online display advertising budget magically evaporates into 3¢ of value. I'm going to provide a shitload of links to all the sources of this information so you can stuff 'em down your cmo or your agency's throat... not that you're that kind of person. Kindly step into my lab... First we start with a dollar. We give it to our media agency to buy some display advertising for us. According to the World Fed...