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Publicis ceo Arthur Sadoun made big headlines last week with his announcement that he's taking the $20 million they piss away at Cannes every year and sinking it into an artificial intelligence gimmick called Marcel. The goal of this AI system is to connect all 80,000 of Publicis' employees for the purpose of universal access to information and collaboration. You can learn about it on this video cliché-fest . According to Chip Register, co-CEO of Publicis.Sapient... "In a group of 80,000 people ... how can we assemble that team and allow that team to work and collaborate virtually to bring the best ideas and values we can to a client at a moment's notice?... The use of technology enables great creative work. It enables the connectivity of people... It enables teams to work and it enables ideas to generate, be shared globally and virtually, through the use of better insight in culture and the journey of human beings." Let's forget the "human journey...

Apple and Google both know there's a big problem. The problem is that online advertising is a shit show of unprecedented proportions. In recent days, both Apple and Google have announced initiatives to deal with the problem. Google's solution is timid. Apple's solution is much better. First let's define the problem. Essentially everyone who uses the web is fully fed-up with the horrifying state of online advertising. It is beyond annoying, beyond stupid, and beyond insufferable. People have always viewed advertising as a minor annoyance. But online advertising and the imbeciles who create and propagate it are so far removed from reality that human beings are in revolt. Over 600 million web-enabled devices are currently running ad blockers. The hidden hand behind the horror of online advertising is tracking. Tracking, and the collection of personal information, is in large part responsible for many of the worst aspects of online ads. Let's put aside for a moment the ...

The Golden State Warriors have been the best team in basketball for the past 3 years. Two years ago they won the NBA championship. Last year they had the best win-loss record in the history of the league but lost the championship in the final game (their best player, Steph Curry, had 3 injuries; their center, Andrew Bogut, was hurt and not able to play; and their heartbeat, Draymond Green, was suspended for a critical game.) This year they had the best record in the league and last night they won the Championship again. As a result, there are people who are proclaiming them one of the best basketball teams of all time. But there are also a bunch of old players from years back -- some of them great, some of them mediocre -- who are mouthing-off saying their teams could have beaten the Warriors. They claim the Warriors are not really that good because the league is weaker, or the players aren't as talented, or the game isn't as competitive as it was in the old days. This is a fam...

The world does not move in straight lines. We expect things to go one way, but they unexpectedly go another. In 2000, when the Prius was introduced, most commentators saw a big future for hybrid vehicles. In 2009, a study by JPMorgan confidently asserted " 20% of all vehicles sold in U.S. to be hybrids by 2020. " In 2010, Consumer Reports said " 39 percent are considering buying a hybrid or plug-in for their next car. " And yet, as of April 2016, hybrid cars represented less than 2% of car sales in the US. Their share of market has dropped by 50% since 2013. A car dealer I know told me "we can't give 'em away." If you think the reason for this is the popularity of electric vehicles, think again. Electric vehicles represent less than 1% of car sales in the US. In the early 1990's the Soviet Union collapsed. We thought "liberal democracy" had become triumphant and would be the model for world governance. Today "liberal democracy...

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...