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When I am finished speaking at a conference or advertising event people often ask me how I can be so sure I'm right and other people people are wrong. The answer is, I'm not. I spent 41 years in the agency business. I worked on some very big brands including McDonald's, Toyota, Bank of America, AT&T and others. And I had a pretty successful career and did some reasonably successful work. But that doesn't make me sure of anything. One thing I learned about advertising is that when you're trying to anticipate human behavior -- which is what marketers and advertisers do -- there are no sure things. All there are are likelihoods and probabilities. This is why I am highly skeptical about what I hear and read from advertising and marketing experts these days. Particularly those of the digital stripe. They tend to be awfully sure of themselves and very dismissive of those who disagree with them. They also tend to have a lot more opinions than experience. It is certainl...

Okay, this time they really mean it. TV is about to die. Don't believe me? It's right here in Ad Age in black and white, another fucking article entitled " TV May Actually Die Soon. " Can you believe this? I'm just wondering how many Ad Age stories there have been over the past 15 years about TV dying? Will  they ever figure out that regardless of what the marketing and media geniuses have to say, people like television. How fucking difficult is that to understand? As we all know, online viewing of video is "killing" traditional TV. "Nobody" watches live TV anymore. Everybody is watching video online. That's what we've all learned from going to conferences and listening to media, marketing and digital geniuses speak. It's what we read in the trades and in the press every day. Only problem is, it's all bullshit. A new study released by comScore shows that of households with both traditional TV and OTT (video delivered over ...

If you've ever doubted that most marketers are clueless, fad-jumping nitwits who drool at any shiny object, I have two words for you -- Pokémon Go. A reminder, this was just a few months ago...   _____  _   ______     ______  ______     ______   ______     ______   Every stupid fucking fad that comes along is now "disruptive," "game-changing," and "the future of marketing." What a clown show the marketing industry has become.

The Great Pepsi Bloodbath of last week had one salutary effect -- it helped divert our attention from the YouTube "brand safety" scandal. We could all pretend how shocked we were at Pepsi's stupidity instead of pretending how shocked we were at adtech sleaziness. Six weeks ago, if you had said that online advertising was a corrupt and dangerous pile of shit, all the  experts would have looked at you like you had three heads and called you an ignorant dinosaur (believe me, I know.) Today, these same geniuses are suddenly shocked and outraged by the problems of adtech and are calling for big changes. All it took were a few headlines and promptly everyone who had been working the online ad hustle for the past 10 years was shocked...shocked, I tell you. As Andy Ball said in Ad Age recently... "The same folks that took their clients off-roading into digital land in the first place -- initially bouncing through the well-documented shortcomings of display, and now crashi...

In light of the cacophony of yakking about this week's Pepsi debacle, I thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone that Pepsi cluelessness is nothing new.  Here is a piece I wrote back in 2013 that did a pretty good job of  presaging the hijinks of the past week. Pepsi stupidity is something you can always count on... January 10, 2013 One of the great things about the marketing world is that if things get really bad, if everything is caving in around you, if your whole world is crumbling and you desperately need a laugh, you can always Google " Pepsi marketing " and have yourself a hearty chuckle. Just spend a few minutes rooting around in their amazing alternate universe and you're sure to find a treasure trove of fun, guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Here at Ad Contrarian Labs , we have been chronicling the wonderfully entertaining , yet seriously preposterous, goings-on at Pepsi for years. And every time we think it can't get any more silly...

A few weeks ago, the executive committee here at The Ad Contrarian Global Center for Horseshit Detection coined a term - virtue hustling . We defined it as the practice by marketers of attempting to convince us barbarians of how wise and virtuous they are. You see, these corporations are full of love for all of global humanity and treat us all with respect and reverence. Especially in their advertising. Especially if you're young and beautiful. Pepsi, who you can always count on to jump with both feet into whatever the idiotic marketing or cultural obsession of the week is, has taken this unpleasant new gimmick to its logical absurdity. If you haven't seen this thing yet, you're in for a treat. It is, perhaps, the worst piece of inauthentic crap I've seen in a long time. Try not to barf. Our story so far... ...a zillionaire supermodel, responding to an entreaty by an Asian musician, fosters world peace and general elation among cheerful and beautiful young protestors o...

"A new study of media and attention by Nielsen Co. confirms what has now become conventional wisdom: Smartphones are winning and traditional television is losing..." Fortune, 2015 Not exactly. Nielsen's Total Audience Report for the 4th quarter of 2016 just arrived and it has some interesting stuff in it. First have a  look at this chart. A quick glance shows that the quickly expanding amount of time we are spending with our smart phones (light orange) does not seem to be impacting the amount of time we are spending with broadcast media. While time spent with Smart Phones has more than doubled in 2 years, time spent with TV, DVR's and Radio is remarkably stable. (You'd never know it if you read horseshit like this 2 years ago.) Observation tells us that a lot of time spent on cell phones is done during commutes, in restaurants, or standing around waiting for the fat guy to finish up in the men's room. It is not replacing other media occasions, it is inventi...

Today is Opening Day for most of the baseball world. Here is my customary Opening Day post. The world is a complete fucking mess. Somewhere, an asteroid is heading toward Earth. Web pornography is warping the minds of our children. Grown men and women are relentlessly tweeting each other. Yes, my friend, the end is near. But who gives a damn? It's Opening Day. I'm going to have a hot dog and a beer. I'm going to sit in the sunshine till the back of my neck is red and raw and my ass stings like a shot of tequila on a bad patch of strep throat. What the hell, I'm having two hot dogs. Once a year, every aspect of life should have an Opening Day. Every business should have one. Every friendship should have one. Every family should have one. A day when everything starts over. When all of last year's successes and failures go into the record book, no longer a matter of life and death, just a matter of history. A day when the slate is clean and the poss...