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I know you're worried about KPIs and journeys and data-driven everything and dashboards but, honestly, there are bigger things to worry about. Stephen Hawking says Earth is about over and we're going to need to leave here within a hundred years and find a new planet. And he's even smarter than a blogger. So I thought it would be good to start a conversation about the kind of place we want. This way when we send out the interplanetary real estate agents to look for a new home they don't come back with some piece of shit planet for us. Here are the things I think we should be looking for in a new planet:    - Plenty of free parking    - TVs that automatically turn off when you start snoring    - Lots of pretty flowers    - Super-hot nymphos who dig old bald guys    - Coffee shops with good cinnamon twists, not the crap they sell at Starbucks    - Dogs that don't shit    - And while we're at it, babies that don't shit ...

Say what you want about Facebook, they have proven to be amazing salespeople. When they started out they convinced gullible marketers that advertising was dying and that social media, in the form of conversations, was the future. Mark Zuckerberg said... “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation .                                                                                                         ...

Monday in North America we will be experiencing a total eclipse of the sun. A total eclipse occurs when God turns out the lights for few minutes because he has to do scheduled  maintenance. It is further proof (as if any were needed) that everything revolves around the earth. Otherwise how could airplanes get anywhere? Answer me that, Mr. Smart Guy! A total eclipse is different from a total ellipse. A total ellipse is a curve that is the locus of all points in the plane the sum of whose distances r_1 and r_2 from two fixed points F_1 and F_2 (the foci) separated by a distance of 2c is a given positive constant 2a.  This results in the two-center bipolar coordinate equation r_1 + r_2 = 2a, where "a" is the semimajor axis and the origin of the coordinate system is at one of the foci. The corresponding parameter "b" is known as the semiminor axis. But let's not dwell on the obvious. The question for marketers is how will they leverage the eclipse to create experien...

First the disclaimers: I'm not a researcher, I'm a copywriter. When I print research results I try to use only 3rd party sources I trust. There are often no perfectly dispassionate sources and you have to use some discretion. But unlike idiot agencies, you shouldn't rely on Facebook to tell you what Facebook's metrics are. Nevertheless, all research is modeling and interpretation so you always have to look at the source, the methodology and the credentials of the researchers before you take it too seriously. Having said that, a report issued last week by Marketing Science is pretty astounding. It claims that overall, 43% of mobile ad impressions they studied were fraudulent. This remarkable result is based on a study of 1 billion ad impressions from nearly 1,000 mobile apps. Marketing Science is the consulting company of Dr. Augustine Fou, whose credentials are pretty impressive . Here's a summary of what they found. Click to enlarge. Second, here's a summary o...

Before we get to today's indisputable proof that I am a complete idiot we have a long way to go, so stay focused. First we start with Oath. As you may know, Oath is the new name of Yahoo's parent company. Yahoo's parent company used to be called Yahoo, but when Yahoo sold off everything it owned that was worth anything the remaining dregs were branded "Oath." Only marketing people could come up with a name as alarmingly dumb, but we'll save that for another day. Oath now owns Yahoo, AOL, and a bunch of other rotting media carcasses. Working at Oath is a guy named David Shing. Shing is known as "Shingy" in certain circles. Shingy's title at Oath is "Digital Prophet" the same modest title he held at AOL for many years. I love Shingy. He is so monumentally full of shit that he makes bozos like me seem sensible in comparison. He also has amazing balls. Not just the little dimpled Titleist kind of balls, but big inflatable multi-colored beac...

Earlier this week, The Drum had a piece by Samuel Scott about marketing and millennials.  As an add-on to the piece, Scott interviewed me about my thoughts on the subject. The following is a reprint of that interview. Samuel Scott: One rule in marketing is to 'hook ​ them while they're young', so marketers have usually devoted some of their budgets to that. After all, no one would want to purchase luxury cars in middle age unless they had seen ads for those cars their entire lives. How useful has this approach been in general over the decades? Has the usefulness of this practice changed in recent years? Bob Hoffman: It depends on the category. People buy luxury cars in middle age that didn’t even exist when they were young (Tesla). But some products (Coke) are bought not because we saw an ad yesterday, but because of the ads we’ve seen for 20 (or 30 or 40) years. For the most part, advertising now because you think somebody’s going to buy your product in 20 years...