Media Dropouts

Three brave souls have volunteered for Dr.A's Get-Happy Diet. They are Dotcalm, The Professor, and Uncle Susie.They'll be dropping out of pop culture for two weeks and reporting to us on how it's affecting them. The hypothesis is that they'll be less stressed and less anxious. We'll see.SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

Dr. A's Get-Happy Diet

Last week, Dr. Adcontrarian explained (uh...declared, proclaimed, popped-off?) about how unprotected media exposure makes us unfortunate ad people unhappy.Today I unveil Dr. A's Get-Happy Diet. The good part is, you can eat all you want. The bad part is, you're going to drop out of pop culture for a few weeks. It will not only make you happier, it will make you realize how addicted you are to

How to Be Happy in Advertising

Dr. Adcontrarian is on duty today to help you be a happier ad person. Please have a seat.It's not easy being happy in advertising. It's a frustrating business. Modern life is filled with many horrors -- war, husbands, pizza with chicken on it. And we ad people are closely aligned with something uniquely anxiety-producing -- pop culture.Advertising used to be about discovering what consumers

Quickies, III

* Not sure it's the worst commercial of all time, but it's pretty damn close. Doc Pomus must be spinning. How come the Black guy is the only one who looks embarrassed? Your comments, please.* Nonetheless, TAC is not “media neutral”. TAC believes the :30 second spot is still the most powerful marketing tool ever invented. Yeah, I know. I don’t get it.* Please someone tell me one internet ad you

Amazing data from TiVo, II

Earlier this week, I presented data collected from TiVo (see Amazing Data from TiVo) that showed that the least-skipped commercials in June, as in previous months, were all either retail or direct response commercials. This will be shocking to almost everyone on Madison Avenue and not surprising at all to a small group of us who practice Performance Based Advertising (PBA). One of the three

Amazing data from TiVo

If TiVo is teaching us nothing else, it's teaching us that all the noise agencies make about "rewarding" viewers is just the same old baloney. Agencies secretly would rather be in the entertainment business (hey, so would I) and they are always looking for a reason to re-define advertising as entertainment, thus the talk about "rewarding" viewers. Data from TiVo-ers, however, is telling quite a

Bullsh*t

It is probably not a coincidence that the loss of confidence in advertising is concurrent with another trend in the advertising business – the unprecedented concentration of the ad industry into the hands of a few lawyers and accountants. A couple of decades ago Y&R had the largest share of the ad market in the US at a little over 1%. Today four global holding companies control about 75% of U.S

Quickies, II

- Hypocrite Hall of Fame: Brad Haley, exec. VP-marketing of CKE Restaurants in Ad Age, “Too often today ads appear that seem to have been developed almost exclusively with the goal of ‘breaking through the clutter’ ...viewers of attention-getting ideas with weak ’selling ideas’ are often left with a soulless thrill and no corresponding development of the brand-consumer relationship.” This from

Indirect Marketing

Some things can only be achieved indirectly.You can’t be happy by trying to be happy. If you want to be happy you have to go fishing, or eat a pizza, or clean out your closet.And when someone tells me she's "working" on her marriage, I’m pretty certain that within a few weeks her house will be crawling with attorneys and real estate agents. You want to have a good marriage? Stop trying so hard.

Barry Bonds

Before Barry Bonds ties Hank Aaron this week, he has a chance to redeem himself and his legacy in the eyes of baseball fans. When he hits his 755th home run, he should issue the following statement:"Today I had the great privilege of tying the most famous record in sports. Having done so, I am announcing my immediate retirement.While it would be a great honor to hold the all-time home run record

Quickies

- The consumer is becoming more resistant to marketing, right? Tell that to Apple and Toyota. Here’s what the consumer is becoming more resistant to: generic, undifferentiated products supported by smug, benefit-free advertising. - If I have to read one more quote from one more brain-dead agency boob with the word “engagement” in it, someone’s going to die. The engagement crowd is trying to

Precision Guessing

A close friend of mine is a psychiatrist and former medical director of a large behavioral health organization.In our frequent conversations about psychiatry and the human condition, he often makes the point that human behavior is often unfathomable.It occurred to me recently that his years at Harvard and Johns Hopkins may have been wasted. If he wanted a profound understanding of human behavior

Nailed

It has become an article of faith in the advertising and marketing world that traditional mass-market advertising is on the way out.From the New York Times, December 28, 2004:Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said, “You’re seeing the end of the era of mass marketing.”Well, it’s a few years later, and it seems to me I saw some Bud spots on the Super Bowl. Also, I seem to recall

Aiming Low

Of all the dumb things that advertisers do, one of the dumbest is aiming their message too young.

There seems to be an irresistible need for marketers to target young people despite monumental evidence that older people have far more money, are far easier to reach and all-in-all make better customers.

Of course, there are some products that rely on the youth market for their survival. But for

Puzzles & Mysteries

An article by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in The New Yorker leads me to believe that advertising people can learn something from spies. Not about stealing other peoples’ ideas, but about solving business problems.Gladwell tells us about a national security expert, Gregory Treverton who distinguished between two kinds of problems: puzzles and mysteries. His distinctions have

Wait A Minute

Former Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen once said, “The three most important words in the English language are ‘wait a minute.’ ”Advertising and marketing people would be wise to take heed. There is no doubt that we are in a period of great change in the advertising world. What’s not so certain is how it’s changing or where it’s going. There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bloviating but not

The End of the World

I have good news. We haven’t all died from bird flu. Or from SARS. Or from ebola virus. Oh, and we survived Y2K pretty much intact. And if you can’t sleep nights worrying about global warming, here are a few quotes that might help: In “The Cooling World," April 28, 1975 Newsweek informed us that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that “catastrophic famines might result from…global cooling” On