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Here in the War Room at The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, we are uncomfortable with the idea of ad blockers. As unrepentant ad people, we don't like the idea. And yet, we use ad blockers. According to PageFair there are now over 600 million connected devices in the world sporting ad blockers. In the US, it is estimated that about 25% of desktop computers are now using ad blockers. And according to published reports , Google is thinking about adding an ad blocking option to its Chrome browser, which is the most used browser in the world. For now, the most popular defense against obnoxious online advertising is ad blocking. But ad blocking is a blunt instrument that has the potential to do serious damage to aspects of the web that we all enjoy. Like it or not, advertising funds just about everything on the web we like. Without advertising, no YouTube, no Facebook... You'd be stuck with nothing but The Ad Contrarian. It would be nice to believe that people would be willi...

If you wonder why so many big brands are obsessed with media, the answer is simple. It's the only thing they have left to argue about. Their determination to demonstrate "globularity" has had an unintended consequence -- the trivialization of strategy and creativity. Globularity leads marketers to bland, non-specific strategies and bland, non-specific advertising. It's really quite simple. The grander the "brand purpose," the less specific the strategy. The less specific the strategy, the blander the advertising. My favorite example of the power of specificity was Apple's introduction of the iPod. They didn't give it the vanilla, global " World Class MP3 Player " treatment. They said "1,000 Songs In Your Pocket. " They were specific. They talked about the virtues of the product, not woolly melodramatic horseshit My direction to the creative teams who worked for me was always the same - be specific. Today the objective is to ignore...

Here at The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, we try to be fact-driven rather than ideology-driven. And it's time to say that the recent declines in live TV viewing are a becoming a worry. For years we have argued against the ignorant hysterics who said TV was dead. While TV remains by far the most popular form of video viewing and by far the most popular entertainment medium, the past three months have not been pretty. Here are some data from the Pivotal Research Group... In April, total daily TV use was down 5.3% for adults and 2.1% for households versus 2016. Among adults 18-49 day time and prime time viewing of traditional TV programming fell by double digits for the third month in a row. A bright spot for video in general was internet delivered viewing which rose by more than 50% versus 2016, but which is mainly not advertising supported. As Pivotal suggests, the recent declines are likely to invigorate " efforts to explore and encourage the use of alternative media...

If you are a young person working in marketing or advertising, let's say you're 28, you probably think the world of advertising is changing at warp speed. You would say that every day new technological breakthroughs in communication and media are changing how the advertising and marketing industry reaches and influences people. You would point to smart phones and say that in just the past decade smart phone usage has soared and is now the second most popular electronic device we spend time with. This is something that didn't even exist 10 years ago. You would point to Facebook and say that here we have something that barely existed 10 years ago but is now the biggest media entity on the planet. And you would be right to say those things. If you were an old fuck like me, however, you would say that advertising and marketing are evolving  more slowly than you think. You would point to the fact that only about 8% of retail activity happens online, and that people still buy an ...

This week The Worldwide Bullshit Insider Summit is being held here at the Ketel One Conference Center on the campus of The Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters. The question being hotly debated is this: Who’s more full of shit? The marketing honchos who are pretending they just discovered there’s no transparency in online media, or the agency hustlers who are pretending they’re shocked that ads running in the bowels of the web are creating brand safety issues? Let’s examine the evidence. First, the marketers. They have insisted for years on getting the lowest possible online CPMs — which everyone with a functioning cortex knows means buying a heavy dose of the cheapest crap you can find, aka “non-human traffic,” aka “bots,” aka standing in the executive wash room flushing million dollar bills down the toilet (by the way, do they have million dollar bills? If so, can I have one? Please?) Did it bother them? Hell no! They had amazing KPIs, aka "Kockamamie Performance Indicators,"...