new

Today's post first appeared in my newsletter this week. There is only one essential job for marketing - to acquire customers. Everything else marketing does is a footnote. This is why the current obsession with social media is largely misguided. People are far more likely to use social media to follow a brand they currently use than a brand they don't. It is very reasonable to assume that the vast majority of people following your brand on social media are already customers. And usually they are a tiny component of your user base - well under 1/10 of one percent. Consequently, most of the money you spend on social media is spent talking to a tiny group of people who are probably already using your brand. Every hour and dollar spent talking to these people is a dollar and hour not spent on acquiring new customers. The justification for this is usually some fuzzy nonsense about "brand love." It comes from that infantile school of marketing that believes if you...

As a former ceo of a few ad agencies I think I know something about how agencies work. One of the core principles of the agency business is to develop a philosophy about the advertising process that differentiates you from your competitors. Then you give it a name -- you "brand" it -- and you speak to your clients and prospects in the language of this brand credo. There's nothing evil about this. I did it when I ran an agency, and almost every agency does it. The only problem is that it is inevitably wrong. The reason it is wrong is that advertising success is about likelihoods and probabilities, not certainties. But there is no agency in the world that is brave enough to say out loud that their philosophy is contingent and uncertain. For brand marketers, there are no straight lines in advertising. You cannot assume that if you do this , that will happen. The best you can do is infer likelihoods. I believe in the power of probability (by the way, I wrote a curious and hi...

4:50 AM - Wife’s Alarm Goes Off First decision of the day: Divorce or hit man? 5:15 AM - Roscoe The Dog Starts Barking Second decision of the day: What to throw at him? Shoe or iPad? 7:00 AM - Wake Up, Get Out Of Bed, Drag A Comb Across My Head Oops. No hair. Drag a wash cloth across my head 7:30 AM - Meet My Breakfast Boys At Coffee Shop Discussion: Ailments, Medications, Basketball, Trump 8:15 AM - Return Home Read nasty emails from people who hate me 8:30 AM - At Home Office Write nasty emails to people who hate me 9:00 AM - Decide Not To Do Much Today It’s a great habit to develop 9:30 AM - Check Bank Account To See If Nigerian Prince Has Deposited The $22 Million Not yet. 10:00 AM - Rummage Through Old Unpublished Blog Posts To See If There’s Anything I Can Use For Tomorrow Not a fucking chance 10:15 AM - Start Writing Blog Post For Tomorrow Realize I've written this same post 20 times before 10:20 AM - Decide I Need To Think A Little Before Writing Blog Post Maybe checking Fa...

This week marks the 10th anniversary of The Ad Contrarian blog. I can't think of a more interesting time to have been writing about the ad industry. I've had a few favorite story lines -- marketers' detachment from reality; brand babble; the devaluation of creativity; the unhealthy consolidation of the agency industry; the foolish disregard for the most valuable consumer group in history. But the biggest ad story of this decade is undoubtedly the story of online advertising. It has gone from infancy to pimply-faced adolescence in the last decade. And like all adolescents it is annoying, stupid, and stinky. One can't help but marvel at how our industry was presented with such an extraordinary opportunity and has managed to fuck it up it so thoroughly. The marketing industry has hijacked the web. It has become a relentless 24-hour marketing machine. Online advertising has been an integral factor in many of today's most dispiriting realities -- the degradation of jo...