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2017 will go down as the year the world woke up to the sleaze of the online ad industry. In May, I wrote this piece ridiculing the absurd play-acting of marketers and agencies pretending to be shocked at the squalid nature of the beast. 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 ex...

To point out what pathetic unfocused imbeciles we have become, I wrote this piece in April about the faded hysteria over Pokémon Go. 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.

If we had access to the internal financials of WPP, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis and Dentsu, here's what I think we would find. We would find that in the past decade they have invested heavily in technology, data and analytics and not at all in creativity. In fact, I would bet the farm that in each of these holding companies the proportion of salary devoted to the creative area has dropped in the past decade. The financiers, accountants, investors, and Wall Street wise guys who now control the ad business are betting on the wrong horse. There is only one element of marketing at which agencies have an advantage over other suppliers -- creativity. Consultants can provide clients with better strategy; data and analytics companies can provide clients with better numbers; "martech" companies can provide better technology services. But no one can provide better creative ideas. And yet agencies -- who are always telling clients that they need to differentiate -- are de-emphas...

In March we turned our attention to the one thing marketers love above all else - miracles. Here is Best of 2017 #5. This is one of those blog posts you write when you’re on a transatlantic overnight flight and you haven't slept a fucking wink and you’re groggy from taking way too many drugs that aren't doing shit. But you have to be alert when you land because you have all kinds of obligations that you foolishly agreed to when you imagined a pleasant flight with kindly air hostesses pouring champagne, and a gentle few hours of nocturnal reverie, instead of a smelly dark cabin with the faint aroma of fresh-squeezed urine emanating from every closed door. Yeah, one of those posts. So if I get a few details wrong, like what decade I’m talking about, I don’t want any shit from you people. Please click this button if you agree to our terms. So while I was not sleeping, I was thinking that every decade I worked in the ad business there was always a miracle that was going ...

Here's the fourth in our series of so-called "Best of 2017." A reminder: just because these are the best of 2017 doesn't mean they're any good. 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 the 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...

Continuing our stroll down memory lane, here's a piece from May. 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 f...

The great thing about the future is that it can't be fact-checked. In our second "Best of 2017" post, we take a look at why the future is so popular among the keynote speaking set.   When I'm shooting my mouth off at some conference the question I get most frequently is this, "What's the future of advertising?" I have no fucking idea what's going to happen 10 minutes from now, how the hell am I supposed to know what's going to happen "in the future," whenever the hell that is? For all I know, someday someone might click on a banner ad. Who knows? But conference goers and press reporters can't help asking that question. They've been trained to do this by marketing yappers. You see, marketing gurus are usually so confused by all the horseshit generated by their industry that they can't even figure out what's happening now . So they've learned to hide in the future. The great thing about talking about the future i...

Since it's December and I'm a lazy-ass bastard, it's a good time to re-publish a series of "best ofs." One of these years I'm going to do a "worst of" but I'm afraid it would go on for months. Anyhow, here's the first of this year's "best ofs" from last January. It's about BBDO winning "Social Media Agency Of The Year." 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 mar...