Cindy Gallop continues to wallop the industry with painfully necessary truisms. In a recent interview she said: Q. What is the biggest mistake companies – brands or the industry – are making in their attitude to age today?A. They don’t understand that experience and expertise are incredibly time and cost-efficient, and that they could be making huge amounts more money by hiring, promoting, valuing and retaining …
All Work And No Play Makes Johnnie and Joanie Witless Screen Zombies
Advertising like law, journalism, technology, engineering, medicine, and other professions demands countless hours from its workers. This, despite damning evidence that productivity and creativity fall flat after about six hours of concentrated work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 44 hours per week, or 8.8 hours per day. A 2014 national Gallup poll put the …
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Thanks To “Surveillance Capitalism,” The Googleplex Knows What You’ll Buy Next
Careful where and what you click. Every keystroke you make is evidence. If you're not comfortable with being spied on every time you open a window, I highly suggest you spend some time with this brilliant article by John Naughton in The Guardian. I would say that it is an eye-opening exploration of our lost privacy, but that would not provide the proper emphasis needed. Naughton dives into deep waters with …
Three Simple Rules to Guide Your Marketing Communications Spending
Teachers take complicated subjects and make them easy to understand. Before Bob Hoffman became an ad man, before he started, ran and sold Hoffman/Lewis in San Francisco, and before he was known as "The Ad Contrarian," Hoffman was a science teacher. Now that he's enjoying his retirement from the agency, he makes time to speak and write about a subject that he knows well. Two days ago, Hoffman kindly offered …
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When Everyone’s An Expert and Every Open Tab Is A Lectern
Coaching and online education is big business. I can hardly open my browser today without seeing another ad from another self-made business guru ready to provide the mysterious answers that I need to solve my mundane business problems. Here's what the machine served up today (via a sponsored post on Twitter): Master the Art of Copywriting for Less Than $11 Taught by marketing guru and entrepreneur Evan …
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Old Rhymes with Cold, Rolled and Spoiled
There are not many people over 50 left standing in the agency business. It's a stupid fact of agency life, but a fact nonetheless. According to an IPA Excellence paper, written by AMV BBDO’s Strategy Director Olivia Stubbings, people over 50 represent just 6% of adland’s workforce. To put that in perspective, 22% of those in finance, 28% in medicine, 30% in science and 35% in law are over 50. I wonder how …
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The Mediaverse Continues Its Sharp Decline; Adpulp Continues To Climb
For a century or more, advertising and journalism have been two separate but closely related industries. Advertising and journalism needed each other. Now that it's 2019, is this still true? Or have the two industries morphed into a grotesque new ad tech-dependent creature? Whatever the answer, both industries are losing so much ground so fast that neither seems capable of helping the other. Maybe this is the …
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Are You Hooked On Your Own Pixel Dust? You’re Not Alone.
Marketers love digital because they can track it, and then spend countless hours pouring over the data. Marketers love data because it makes for excellent graphs and great talking points in meetings. What marketers do not love is digital ad fraud, and sadly digital ad fraud is a problem with no solution in sight. Fraudulent, nonhuman traffic involvement in digital advertising in 2018 was estimated to incur losses …
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