The Cluefree Manifesto

To many web maniacs, a pivotal moment occurred 10 years ago when something called "The Cluetrain Manifesto" was published.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was a foundational document in the "conversationalist" school of marketing. It included "95 Theses" in the style of Martin Luther, meant as a denunciation of contemporary marketing and a clarion call to a new, idealized age of marketing enabled by

Threat Level Purple

Here at TAC global headquarters, we try to stay as far away from politics and world events as possible. But since it's Christmas-New Years week and nobody's reading blogs anyway, what the hell...

The incompetence of our so-called "homeland security" system is breathtaking to behold.

The guy who almost blew up a plane over Detroit last week...
was reported to Nigerian authorities as a possible

How About the "Terrorist Differentness Ecosystem Dashboard?"

Regular readers know I like to divide the people of the ad world into two species: simplifiers and complicators.

This also applies to the non-advertising world.

I evaluate the potential efficacy of social and political activities by whether they are making things more simple or more complicated.  Generally, things that make the world simpler succeed, and things that make the world more

Hack Attack

Someone hacked my blog, posted stuff, erased all comments, and sent emails from my account. If you received anything you weren't expecting from me, delete it.

The Sky Is Falling. This Time We Mean It.

Since the dawn of civilization, it’s been pretty clear that you can make a nice living predicting the end of the world.

While "experts" have been predicting it with great regularity for thousands of years, so far we're still here drinking coffee and reading blogs.

One of the interesting things about this decade has been the impressive increase in the amount of media hysteria and the depressing

The Social Media Contradiction

If you are inclined to believe The World's Most Unscientific Social Media Survey, which we conducted here last week, then there is something very interesting going on.

What's happening is that all the hype about social media is working. 

Social media evangelists have been very successful at convincing marketers that they need to engage in social media despite the fact that those who have been

Decade of the Decade

Good news.

Only 10 more days until all the Bullshit of the Decade stuff goes away.

No more Man of the Decade, or Movie of the Decade, or Agency of the Decade, or Cheesecake of the Decade for another 10 years.

No more App of the Decade, or Spot of the Decade, or Widget of the Decade.

No more Golfer of the Decade, or Song of the Decade, or Woman of the Decade, or Story of the Decade.

All

World's Most Unscientific Social Media Survey

In our continuing efforts to provide our readers with the most up-to-date and technologically advanced opinions masquerading as facts, The Ad Contrarian is happy to announce our end-of-year World's Most Unscientific Social Media Survey.

This year our survey will be on the hottest marketing topic of the year -- social media. Please complete (anonymously) our brief 9 question survey and we'll

Working On A Marriage

So Tiger Woods has given up golf for a while to work on his marriage.

I've always wondered how you work on a marriage.

Do you take it out to the garage and change the spark plugs? Do you bring it down to the basement and sand it? What the hell do you do?

It's been my experience that there are some things that can't be improved by trying to improve them. They can only be improved indirectly.

The Malignant Cumulative Effect of Tiny Misdemeanors

Last week, the 2009 Bully Award for Outstanding Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit -- the Turd d'Or -- went to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

It's hard to understand how something like this comes into being, but I think I've figured it out.

I call it "the malignant cumulative effect of tiny misdemeanors."

Baseball provides us a good example. For years baseball

Tail Wagging Dog

Wendy's has been having lots of problems since its founder, Dave Thomas, died several years ago. They've been going through ad agencies faster than Tiger Woods goes through talcum powder.

Recently they had another agency review. If my count is right, that makes about fifty in four years.

It seems these days an agency can't win a new account without presenting a seriously demented social media

The Hypocrisy Machine

All the hand-wringing and hyperventilating about Tiger Woods gives me a big pain in the ass.

The truth is, the media is one big hypocrisy machine. They pretend they're shocked by this. But they know that every male movie star, athlete, politician, singer, tv star and media big shot who can, does.

The difference between Tiger Woods and your personal celebrity hero? Woods got caught.

Here are a

It's Friday. You Deserve A Good Laugh

Thanks to Sharon Krinsky for this.

Awards Of Merit

Earlier this week we awarded the Turd d'Or to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

In the course of evaluating all the entries for the 2009 Bully Awards there were a number of nominees worthy of merit.  I would like to review a few of them and add some commentary.

"It's About Understanding Conversations" 
This was our runner-up. One of the wonderful things about this entry was how the

The Death Watch Continues

 From TechCrunch, November 2006 "Let's Just Declare TV Dead And Move On"
"...the writing is on the wall...at the end of the day, people want to consume content without the friction of having to sit down in front of a television at an appointed time....People want to see the whole show on YouTube. There is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior going on..."
Here at Ad Contrarian global

Tiger's "Escalade Escapade": It's Our Fault

All bad behavior can be traced to advertising. If we just eliminated advertising there would be no more screwing, no more smoking, no more drinking, no more fat people, no more skinny people...

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the reason Tiger Woods couldn't keep Little Eldrick in his pants, is because of us:
"The simplest explanation of Tiger Woods' current predicament had nothing to

The 2009 Bully Award Winner Is...

The 2009 Bully Award for Outstanding Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit -- the Turd d'Or -- goes to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

Several months ago, when this document became public, I got a nice chuckle out of it, as did many advertising and marketing people.

Recently, in reviewing the nominees for the Bully Awards, I had the opportunity to take a closer look at it

I'm Still Shaking

Last Saturday I was in New York City. I was on the subway, on the "A" train, with my wife. She was exiting at 59th St. and I was continuing uptown.

There was a lunatic in our car belittling people and demanding money. I decided that when my wife exited at 59th, I would exit also and move to the next car. Then I hesitated and chastised myself for being a coward. Finally, I decided to change cars

Delusional Branding Campaigns and Me

Marketing people and companies go on and on about brands. Unfortunately, most have little to no clue about how powerful brands are actually built. They think you do it with "branding" campaigns.

At some point, every too-big company gets the irresistible urge to do one of these branding campaigns.

As far as I’m concerned, this is just fine.

The branding campaign will be a bit of innocuous

10 Ideas For Transforming Advertising

Yesterday, we received the following email from the head of the 4A's.
Are You A Transformer?
Dear Bob,
Like you, I’m tired of hearing from the same industry thought leaders talking about the same so-called thought-leading things at industry conferences. What I really want is to hear from you: If you had just five minutes in front of the entire advertising community, what would you say about

Tabulating The Results

I am happy to report that the preliminary voting for the 2009 Bully Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Advertising and Marketing Bullshit is nearly completed. Here's where the leading candidates stand at this time along with their percentage of the votes.

1. Pepsi "Breathtaking" logo document          38%
2, Understanding conversations                      25%
3. Windows 7 launch party