Good At Counting

In the world of advertising, research is no different from creative work -- some of it is excellent and powerful, and some of it is worthless and dangerous.My experience has been that market researchers are good at counting, and very little else. So if you want to know "how many", you can hire a research firm and be pretty confident you'll get an accurate result. But if you want to know, "why"

Quantum Advertising

Quantum theory makes scientists crazy. It's the only area of science in which the idea of cause and effect (or, as they like to say, "deterministic causality") has to be suspended. One of the consequences of quantum theory is that in certain cases things just pop into and out of existence. In fact, there are physicists who believe our whole universe is a quantum event -- it just appeared out of

Terrestrial Locomotor Performance

What happened to the simple declarative sentence? Why can't people talk straight? Do they think they sound smarter by talking in dense, incomprehensible jargon?Not long ago I wrote "Everything You Need To Know About Branding On One Little Page." In doing so I came upon a book called Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of the Kellogg School of Business. In an excerpt from the book, I found

The Backlash Will Come

It's not going to take advertisers long to figure out that on-line display advertising has been a failure as an interactive medium (see Two In A Thousand.) It can't sustain its growth for long with a response rate under 2 in a thousand unless it's willing to take big cuts in cpm.Right now, we're still in the frenzy part of the adoption cycle in which every marketer thinks she has to be doing

Favorite Ad Of The Week

Check out the description for this used golf club on eBay. SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

Jersey Old Men

TAC has written previously about the remarkably under-utilized potential for marketing to people over 50 (see Aiming Low)It was reinforced recently when I went to see Jersey Boys, a stunningly mediocre exercise in pop nostalgia (full disclosure: I almost always hate Broadway musicals.)The writing was exactly what I expected -- that cloying high school sensibility that so often infuses Broadway

Account Planners Gone Wild

The same day I posted "Smelly Volvo Families" an article appeared in Ad Age about the new Volvo campaign.The article was about how Volvo's agency developed the idea for its new campaign. Apparently, the agency interviewed valet car parkers to find out what Volvo owners are like. I swear this is not a joke. Valet car parkers.I wonder what planning genius came up with this idea.They enjoyed many

How To Get Bad Advertising

Over the past few years, some large advertisers have decided that the best way to get good ads is to have a roster of agencies and make them compete for assignments. Now smaller advertisers are starting to do this.It's a perfectly brilliant way to get lousy advertising, but a lovely way for narcissistic marketing executives to get agencies to kiss their asses.Anyone who's spent 15 minutes in an

Smelly Volvo Families

I was at the movies last Saturday night and saw a remarkably ill-conceived theatrical spot for Volvo. It was a faux James Bond thing with yachts and helicopters and jet planes and very expensive looking people doing idiotic superhero things. The gag, you see, was that it was a couple trying to get somewhere for their anniversary. It ended with some inanity about life being better together. A

Two In A Thousand

In "Legends of Interactivity, Part 2" we saw that the click through rate on a typical banner ad is under 2 in a thousand.The question is, why is the level of interactivity so alarmingly low on display ads?We understand why response rates are low in traditional direct response media -- you have to cut out a coupon or tear out a card; fill in your name and address; take it to a mailbox, etc. It's

The Ad Contrarian Mantra

Just about everything you read on The Ad Contrarian blog derives from one unifying principle:We don’t get customers to try our product by convincing them to love our brand, we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.This seemingly innocuous sentence represents a radically different perspective from how most companies and most ad agencies practice advertising and marketing

Legends of Interactivity, Part 2

I really pissed off some net heads a few weeks ago with The Legend of Interactivity. As a matter of fact, they were so pissed off they actually interacted.It’s amazing how vehemently zealots react when their beliefs are challenged. The major objection to "The Legend of Interactivity" was that I based my observation that interactivity on the web has been grossly exaggerated on one data point --

Sky Not Falling, Update

In 2003, Forrester Research (see Nailed) estimated that DVR's would be in about 26% of homes by now.In fact, Nielsen reported earlier this year that DVR's were in 17% of homes. About 1/3 fewer than Forrester had predicted.Always remember that without change nobody needs research. Consequently, it is baked into the DNA of research companies to emphasize (and, unfortunately, sometimes exaggerate)

The Long Tail and The Fat Head

There is an interesting marketing hypothesis called The Long Tail. The Long Tail states that companies with low costs of inventory and distribution (like web powerhouses Amazon and Netflix) can derive substantial income, even a majority of income, by selling unpopular items to tiny market segments. There seems to be significant data to back up this idea.As usual, a whole lot of marketing people

Report From the Real World

A few brave souls volunteered to drop out of pop culture for two weeks (see Media Droputs) and tell us how it feels. Here are two reports after the first week:From "Dotcalm"I have realized this is not easy to do! I'm used to either waking up to Whoopi or NPR - so there's news in my face one way or the other - so set it to buzz...Then, my e-mail login page has "Bad News" and "Celebrity Idiots of

Help wanted

I need your help:1. Does anyone have an ounce of data that indicates that campaigns created with the benefit of account planning are any more successful than those done without it?2. Now that the “upfront” is concluded for 2008 and the tv networks increased their take by almost 5%, where are all the geniuses who were predicting its demise a few months ago?3. Can anyone remember an ad they saw on

How to Watch TV Commercials

Now that fall is approaching, the new tv season is almost upon us. There used to be just one new tv season every year. But now there’s a new season every, well, season.We can all get more out of the commercials we’ll be seeing if we know a little more about advertising. The first thing you need to know is that there are basically two types of tv commercials: those with talking animals and those

Today's News Tomorrow

Reports from media drop-outs tomorrow. Apparently, they've become so mellow they've stopped consulting their calendars. But don't worry, TAC is on their ass.SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

Brand Babble

I read an article by the creative director of a large international ad agency. He said his advertising is not intended to sell products. The objective is to "build brands".There was something alarming about this statement, but I had heard it expressed so many times before that I'd begun to take it for granted that I was crazy and everybody else was right.A few days later, however, a thought

Salesmen & Sociologists

Has anyone else noticed that the increase in client dissatisfaction with advertising has coincided almost perfectly with the ascendancy of account planning? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But, then again, how can it be that we have added the science and knowledge of these consumer insight experts into our repertoire and yet -- according to our clients -- our efforts are less effective than ever?I

Research or Baloney?

For a brief period I was a science teacher. I didn’t actually have a license to teach science but because of a teacher shortage you could say I was drafted.My three years in the classroom taught me a lot about science and the scientific method. Most of all, it gave me a healthy respect for the difference between a fact and an opinion.Scientists are constantly struggling to establish factual

Emotional attachments

One of the most wasteful uses of advertising dollars is to try to create emotional attachments to your brand. First of all, most ads that try to use emotion are transparently pandering, usually generic, and rarely hit the mark.Second, contrary to all the bull you hear, most consumers have little or no emotional attachment to most of the brands they use (see "Salesmen & Sociologists.") When they

The Entertainment Age

Several years ago, observers more optimistic than TAC hailed the ascendancy of the internet as the dawn of “The Information Age”. It’s a lovely idea. Unfortunately it’s a fantasy.The internet certainly has wonderful applications for people interested in gathering information. And there are a lot of people who use the internet in that way. But, by far, the internet is quickly evolving into an

Business Week Needs Our Help

Business Week is having a hard time figuring out the TiVo data we've been talking about all week (see Which Ads Don't Get Skipped). Apparently, they need to subscribe to The Ad Contrarian blog (see Myths Exploding, Mysteries Unraveling.)SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

The Legend of Interactivity

Someday I'm going to write an advertising book called "Legends and Rituals". It will be about how advertising and marketing people are blind to the evidence of their own eyes but keep saying and doing the same fictitious things over and over.One chapter will be about interactivity. Pick up any article, book or blog about marketing and you'll read that there's a new species of human being

Blind to the facts

Advertising and marketing people want to believe that everyone is young, urban, and hip -- just like them. That's why so much advertising is misguided and irrelevant to the people who actually buy things.The idea that every product must be marketed to a young audience is so baked into the DNA of the marketing community that they can't see beyond this counterproductive, crippling prejudice. Two

Myths Exploding, Mysteries Unraveling

For the first time ever, the advertising industry is getting data about things that up until now were the province of speculation and ideology.We’re starting to get a glimpse of how consumers actually behave when confronted with advertising. Not how they say they behave; not how we think they behave; not how they behave under controlled conditions, but what they actually do at home in front of

The Sky Is Not Falling

The popular press and the ad trades would have you believe that tv viewing is in steep decline, and that this steep decline is exacerbated by heavy DVR usage (TiVo, etc.) disrupting the traditional effectiveness of tv advertising.The facts tell a different story.If you read Nailed you saw how TAC used Nielsen data from November, 2006 to report that about 1.6% of total tv commercials are skipped