Happy Holidays!

The entire Ad Contrarian global staff is off for the holidays. Have a wonderful week and we'll see you after the New Year.

Remarkable Rudeness

Recently my agency was asked to pitch an account.We were given little time and no money to do so. Our assignment was to develop full-blown plans -- including creative and media -- for three different markets.We spent tens of thousands of dollars on the pitch. We had people working nights and weekends -- including Thanksgiving weekend.When we gave the presentation the head marketing person from

How To Select An Ad Agency

The process by which companies select ad agencies continues to get more arcane and bewildering.It is fed by search committees who don't know what they're searching for and consultants who need to justify their fees by creating monumental RFPs filled with grotesque irrelevancies.As someone who has participated in a thousand agency searches, here's how I would do it.Dear XYZ Agency,We are looking

The Complicators Have Won

There are two kinds of people -- simplifiers and complicators.Simplifiers have the ability to distinguish between the essential and the irrelevant. Complicators cannot.In advertising, simplifiers are indispensible. Complicators are disastrous.The advertising business is now in the hands of complicators.From The New York Times, December 2, 2008:...a new breed of companies is...creating hundreds of

Bad Days For Brand Babblers

Times of economic hardship are especially tough on ad people who make their living bullshitting about "brand relevance," "brand integrity," " brand saliency," and other forms of brand baloney.In these times, clients expect their advertising to actually sell something. When it doesn't, they get cranky.Some years ago the ad industry decided that it no longer had to bother itself with the mundane

Social Media Fantasies

From TechDigest, July 2007"Facebook applications are the best thing since...sliced bread...they're mushrooming by the day, as companies and individual developers alike catch on to the potential of having their content splashed over (potentially) millions of Facebook profiles."Yeah, right.Along with so many other social media fantasies, marketers have found Facebook apps to be a pretty good way of

A Civilization Of The Mind

From A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. John Perry Barlow. Davos, Switzerland. February 8, 1996. "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." Yeah, right.Here were the top ten search items on Yahoo for 2008:1. Britney Spears2. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)3. Barack Obama4. Miley

Hobbies & Businesses

On the web, there are two kinds of entities -- hobbies and businesses. There are a zillion hobbies and a few businesses. And a lot of hobbies pretending to be businesses.This blog is a hobby. iTunes is a business.The difference? Businesses make money.Facebook is a hugely successful hobby, and a dismal failure as a business. That goes for virtually all social media schemes (more on this later in

Guns N' Roses N' Pepper

In its brief life, the web may have spawned more idiotic, wasteful, and non-productive marketing schemes than perhaps any other medium on earth.The latest was an attempt by Dr Pepper to hitchhike on the 17-year saga of Guns N' Roses releasing an album called Chinese Democracy.Apparently without authorization from the band, Dr Pepper claimed it would give away a free can of soda to everyone in

You Read It Here First

Over a year ago, we predicted that online display advertising was headed for trouble. From The Ad Contrarian, September 21, 2007:"The Backlash Will ComeIt's not going to take advertisers long to figure out that online 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...Right now

Great New Use For Internet

Just when you think turgid claims about the internet can't get any more foolish, along comes a Noble prize winner to prove you wrong. STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - The spread of information on the Internet has given the world a new tool to forestall conflicts, Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio said Sunday. In his Nobel lecture to the Swedish Academy, the 68-year-old Frenchman

The Results Are In

The final results of ad spending during the recent political cycle are rolling in.Politicians spent about 50% more on advertising in the 2008 elections than they did in 2004. In 2004 they spent $1.7 billion. In 2008 they spent between $2.5 and 2.7 billion.And the big winner in all this added spending had to be the web, right? Wrong.Television got a huge share, with about 85% of all ad dollars ($

Schizobranding

I know two guys named "Tommy."One is funny, cheerful, and charming. One is sullen, negative, and unpleasant.The name "Tommy" has no singular meaning for me. It denotes two different people who are completely unrelated.I know two companies named "Taco Bell."One is on television. It is clean, cheerful, and makes nice looking food.One is in my neighborhood. It is dirty, disgusting, and I would never

6 Things A Creative Director Needs To Know

TAC has been making presentations and missing airplanes all week. Here's an oldie.Six things you need to know if you're going to be a happy, healthy creative director.1. Hiring is everything.If you have terrific people, the advertising business isn’t that difficult. If you have mediocrities, advertising is impossible. For your own self-preservation you must get rid of bad people and hire good

Joy Of Eavesdropping In San Francisco

An overheard conversation between two 9-year olds:Gabe: Dude, I saw the coolest video... this 5-year old dribbling, and like real low and between the legs...Leo: Dude, I can do that.Gabe: Dude, you're nine.Leo: Dude, I could do it when I was 5.Gabe: Dude, this was girl.Leo: Dude, that's sexist.Gabe: No it's not.Leo: Yes it is. Girls can dribble just as good as boys.Gabe: Dude, that doesn't mean

Ad Agencies Still Don't Get It

The Ad Contrarian mantra goes like this:"We don't get them 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."However, most agencies and most marketing mavens still believe that "branding" is something separate from selling.A perfect example of the tortured logic of branding can be found in this video of a big agency

2009: Best Year Ever For Alibi Advertising

Yesterday we described alibi advertising, and predicted 2009 would be its shining moment.Here's why:1. When business goes bad, companies go crazy. Activity passes for progress; delusions pass for ideas.It's so much easier to be reactive than to develop a strategy. There is not a company in America today that isn't considering throwing away/canceling/radically reducing its ad program. However,

Alibi Advertising

Alibi Advertising: a bogus advertising program created on the cheap with the intent of fooling the gullible into believing something useful is being done.

There are two kinds of alibi advertising.

I discovered the first kind when I was working on wine accounts.

Each year, wine marketers would have us create storyboards. Then they would have us create extensive media plans. They would take