The Absurdity Of What We Do

This is a true story about the absurdity of advertising.

I was once creative director of an ad agency that had offices with a lovely view of San Francisco Bay.

One of our accounts was a shipping line. The shipping line was doing something amazing with one of its ships and they wanted us to create an ad about it.

They were going to take an enormous cargo ship and lengthen it. First an army of

10 Great, Smelly Candidates

Thanks to everyone who has nominated something for The Bully Awards. We've received lots of glorious, wonderful examples of marketing bullshit (and, honestly, what more could one ask for during the holiday season?)

I've selected 10 good-looking candidates (along with links, where appropriate.) If you'd like, you can vote for your favorite below. But remember, nominations are open until December

How Could They Not Be?

From the post above, item #1 about "Synergy-Related Headcount-Adjustment," we find that the name of the CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks is Simon Beresford-Wylie and the head of human resources is Bosco Novak.

Simon Beresford-Wylie and Bosco Novak.

How could they not be full of shit?

The Social Media Cesspool

It was such a lovely dream.

A transparent medium in which marketers and consumers were on an equal footing. Where consumer decisions would be driven not just by the propaganda that marketers paid the media to broadcast, but by the forthright opinions and experiences of other consumers.

And like most Utopians dreams, it is quickly becoming a nightmare.

Social media marketing is an incipient

Gag Me With A Chopstick

Celebrity culture makes me sick. Businesses, and particularly restaurants, that try to trade on it make me doubly sick.

My family is headed to New York for Thanksgiving. We wanted to have dinner at Tao one night.

I went to their website to make a reservation. Here's what I learned on their home page:
"Tao New York is frequented by celebrities on a regular basis from Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise,

What Reaches 92 Million More People In A Week Than Google Reaches In A Month?

Media knuckleheads, hysterics, and hustlers love to produce junk pieces about the "death" of this and the "end" of that.

On several occasions I have written about the fictional death of television.

Now it's time to pay some attention to another supposedly dead medium -- radio.

The first time radio died was 1952 when Billboard magazine declared, "Radio is dead..with The Lone Ranger and Jack

Is The Great Twitter Scare Waning?

Can it be that The Great Twitter Scare Of '09 is starting to wane? Comscore reports that Twitter usage in the U.S. dropped about 8% in October. That's a lot to drop in one month.

In fact, Twitter usage has dropped in two of the last three months. The only month of the last three in which it grew was September, in which it grew less than 1%. 

Digital Agency Guy Makes Sense

As you all know, I

Announcing The 2009 Bully Awards

The Ad Contrarian is proud announce the first annual Bully Awards for Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit.

In keeping with modern protocols, your job is to be "engaged" and "interact" with these awards by nominating your favorite piece of marketing or advertising bullshit of the past year.

It can be an article from a publication, a website, a PR release, an ad, a video clip -- any

3 Distinctions That Need To Be Drawn

People with little or no analytical abilities (e.g., account planners, CMOs, and, um, bloggers) often have a difficult time with facts. They frequently confuse things that sound the same but aren't.Here are 3 items that the analytically challenged often are confused about.1. Popularity As Evidence Of EffectivenessWhen you read social media propaganda you often come up against remarkable

Brought To You By Your Central New Mexico Chrysler-Jeep Dealers

Recently, in Creative For Carpetbaggers, I commented on the idiotic ways that big companies moving into new markets always try to associate themselves with the area, and usually get all caught up in their underwear.Today I would like to put another really dumb advertising tradition in the crosshairs -- superficial localization.Let's start at the beginning.The general purpose of advertising is to

Engineered By Illiterates

On the inside back cover of last week's (Nov. 2) New Yorker magazine, there's an ad by Land Rover.The ad is supposed to impress us with the technological wizardry of the new Range Rover.Only problem is, it's hard to convince us that people who can't write properly, can't hire competent proofreaders, and don't know the difference between its and it's can be very advanced at anything.The headline -

"Social Media" vs "I Don't Know": It's A Tie

Earlier this week, in The Enduring Power of Piffle and The Drivel Machine, we took a nice hard swing at the qualitative side of social media i.e., the baloney that social media hustlers are filling gullible marketers full of. Today we take a look at some quantitative data on social media and see what marketers have to say about its effectiveness.As we know, the answer to all problems is social

The Enduring Power Of Piffle

Just when you think the "conversation" crowd can't possibly devise any more preposterous nonsense about their precious conversations, up pops something so ridiculous that it restores your faith in the enduring power of piffle.A new record in jargon-hurling and language-torturing was reached last week when the writer of an Ad Age article entitled "How to Develop the Right Communications Strategy