Marketing and The End Of The World

One of the unpleasant effects of the age of marketing is that politicians have learned the lessons of marketing all too well.

They have learned that it is important to reduce a message to its simplest possible form, e.g. "pro-life" or "change".

This is fine when you're selling peanut butter, but not such a good idea when critical issues of public policy are at stake.

In the debate concerning

The Midweek Philosopher

* Department of You Can't Make This Shit Up
In Piedmont, CA police found the dead, mummified body of Patricia Bostrom sitting in a comfy chair in her living room. Police say the last time Bostrom had been seen alive was 6 years ago when she was 82 years old. Bostrom's daughter, Sunny, regularly picked up mail at the house, planted flowers in the yard and paid the utility bills. She claims she

The Planning Controversy Continues

As I expected, I got a lot of push-back yesterday on my post about account planning. It seems to have come mostly from planners, which is also to be expected.

The comments seemed to fall into 5 primary areas. I'll sum up the crux of the criticism, then give a sample from a comment, then respond.

1. As a "creative chauvanist," how can I criticize account planning for being based on opinions...

5 Reasons Account Planning Needs To Die

As many regular readers of this blog know, I am a former science teacher turned copywriter, turned creative director, turned management bean counter.

Each of my incarnations has a little compartment in my brain. Consequently, I often look at ads like a science geek, or finances like a copywriter. It's very confusing, but it keeps me interested.

As a result of my background, I have a few

The Tweet Machine

If you have a Twitter account (yes, I am one of those wretched losers) you quickly learn how monumentally dull most people are.

I can't imagine that any sane person is pathetic enough to read all the Tweets he receives. But if you did, you would surely be driven to suicide.

So, I have an idea.

It's a way for the average brain-dead Twitterer to appear smart. Okay, maybe not smart, but at least

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on completing your first year in office.

I know you've had a tough week.  As your trusted advertising counselor, I feel obligated to write you this memo because I think you're getting bad advice.

I know nothing about politics or policy. But I know something about human behavior. It's kinda my job. I think I know what's going wrong, and how you can fix it.

I

I Don't Know and I Don't Care

Yesterday I wrote
"It is possible that all the front-end work we do to find a suitable brand strategy is terrifically valuable and leads us to brilliant insights that inform our marketing decisions and make our advertising far more effective.  And it is equally possible that it is all a bunch of crap.
As far as I know, there's no scientific evidence either way."
The motivation for writing this

Admitting What We Don't Know

A few years ago I wrote a post for this blog, and a chapter for my book (it's free here) called "Precision Guessing."  The thrust of the article was that, despite our pretensions, advertising and marketing people know almost nothing about human behavior.

Of course, we pretend we do and we have invented a whole lexicon and area of practice (account planning) built around our supposed knowledge.

Marketing In The New Decade. It's All Different Again.

If you'd like to see what brand babble is going to look like in the coming decade, you can't do much better than reading a recent piece of gobbledygook from Adweek called, "5 Marketing Principles Brands Should Embrace in 2010."

We learn that in the new decade...
"Marketing becomes the product and the product becomes the marketing."
Oh, good. For dinner tonight,  I'll start with a little Ketel

Surge In TV Viewing

According to Reuters, a study by Deloitte released last month shows that the percent of Americans who...
"...ranked watching TV... as their favorite media activity,  (took) a 26 percent jump over 2008..."
This trend was predicted here at TAC over a year ago by the brilliant Susan Bandura who, in a guest post entitled Will The Recession Help TV? wrote...
"Now that even The Wall Street Journal has

Thinking Inside The Box

Last week I spent several days in a drug-induced stupor as a result of a dental calamity.

During one period of semi-consciousness, I had a moment of perfect perspective about our lives and our universe. Of course, there is no such thing as perfect perspective, but with the aid of powerful pain-killers, the mind can do marvelous things.

It occurred to me that we have lost all perspective on who

Ducks Deluxe

Sometimes success in advertising is not pretty.

A perfect example of that is Aflac. Personally, I have always hated that duck campaign. It reminds me of some annoying, gimmicky throwback to the 50's or 60's.

Nonetheless, it was very successful. As a matter of fact, in a category that is replete with advertising that is invisible, lame and ineffectual, it was successful beyond any reasonable

Tech Breakthrough Of The Decade

The new decade is only in its second week, and already science has produced a technological breakthrough that will be a boon to mankind for years to come.

The Ford Motor Company announced today that it will introduce a new feature in some of its 2010 model cars that will read you your tweets while you're driving!

This may very well be the most important technological breakthrough since Coors

Are You Sick Of This Blog?

It's The Heavy User, Stupid
For years, we here at Ad Contrarian global headquarters have been preaching that the key to marketing success in most categories is to attract the category heavy user (if you haven't already read my semi-brilliant book, you can download it here free.) An interesting article on how this idea affects media strategy is available here. (Via George Parker)
Biggest "End of

Conversation With A Creative Director

Recently I had lunch with a head creative guy at a successful agency who works on some very successful brands. I am not going to reveal his identity as his clients may be listening.

He had some interesting things to say.  I will be paraphrasing throughout.

First he said, aside from the paycheck, there are only two good reasons to work in advertising. First, to hang around with funny people. And

10 for '10

Since it's the beginning of a new year, and I'm on vacation, and I'm feeling expansive, and everyone's always telling me how negative I am, and it's a beautiful day, and spring training is only 6 weeks away, and I had a cocktail with lunch, I thought I'd try something new.

So here are 10 ideas that most ad people have never considered that might help us all be more successful in the ad biz in