Is The Pendulum Swinging?

I'm sure web maniacs must be having a hysterectomy over a piece in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called Small Change.

Gladwell challenges some of the nonsense of social media zealots about the web's power to affect important social changes.

I am not going to waste your time by writing a crappy abbreviated version of it. Instead you should read it.

Also, I suggest you read "The Rise of

Take Me To Your Head Of The Office For Outer Space Affairs

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is head of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs. According to published reports, Ms. Othman is going to be responsible for co-ordinating mankind's response when extraterrestrials land.

Now, if you ask me, when the little green men come calling, they're going to talk to whomever the hell they want.

While the naive plans of the bureaucrats at the

The Results Are In

Here are the results from the poll we did last week. The results are listed in descending order from most surprising to least.

Question: Which of the "Top 10 Double Secret Facts" surprised you most?

1. (17.35%) TV viewers are no more likely to leave the room during a commercial break than they are before or after the break.

2. (16.69%) Baby boomers dominate 94% of all consumer packaged goods

The Religion Of Marketing

Societies go through cycles of tolerance and intolerance. We see this phenomenon most clearly in the areas of politics and religion.

The cycle is often magnified in highly stressed systems, like the old Soviet Union. There would be periods of Stalinism followed by periods of glasnost.

One of the interesting aspects of the phenomenon is that the most severe forms of intolerant orthodoxy are

Good News Friday

It's Friday and I have good news!

Good News For Gals
In case of emergency, just take your bra off!

This week a great new product was introduced called the Emergency Bra. It's a bra that turns into a gas mask.

That's right, you can't make this shit up.

"You have to be prepared all the time, at any place, at any moment, and practically every woman wears a bra," said the inventor of the

Analyzing Everything And Understanding Nothing

Sometime in the near future, advertising pundits will look back at the current era and reach the conclusion that we blew it.

They'll say we were focused on everything but the problem.

We had dashboards and metrics and click-throughs and webisodes and branded entertainment and a whole galaxy of new and used media outlets...but what we didn't have was very good advertising.

It seems silly to

I Heart NY

My favorite New York City joke goes like this:

A visitor to NYC is lost and walking down Broadway. He stops a New Yorker. "Excuse me," he says, "can you tell me where the Plaza Hotel is or should I go fuck myself?"

Last week, two of my partners and I were in New York for some meetings.

One evening, about midnight, on the way back to our hotel after a lovely dinner, one of my partners slipped

Just The Facts

Some digital genius in New York is trying to hitchhike his way to glory on the back of my Top 10 Double-Secret Unknown Facts About Advertising. He claims to refute "every one" of my 10 points.

What he is actually doing is not refuting the facts at all, but creating the usual excuses and explanations and digressions to account for the facts.

First he spammed my blog with a link to his brilliant

What Surprised You Most?

Last week, we ran a post called Top 10 Double-Secret Unknown Facts About Advertising. It was quite popular and was tweeted and re-tweeted a lot.

I am curious to know which of the facts surprised you most?

Please take a minute to click on the facts you found most surprising. You can select up to three.

You can also send this poll to others by clicking on the "Share This" button near the "Vote"

Wankfest 3000

If you're like me, you get about 5 emails a day imploring you to go to some horrifying conference about The History of Search Engine Optimization or some equally terrifying subject.

Usually, these conferences are produced by amateur bullshit artists like the 4As, and feature speakers who are also amateur bullshit artists -- like agency CEOs and digital masters of the universe.

But what if

Top 10 Double-Secret Unknown Facts About Advertising

As all AdContras know, the marketing and advertising industries have been hijacked by web-addled digi-maniacs who don't know a fact from a fart.

Those of us who like to operate our businesses on the basis of facts, not "buzz"' and baloney, are in an ongoing state of war with web marketing hustlers and their endless feedback loop of misleading information.

So, as a service to my loyal,

Advertising In The Age Of Hysteria

Today's post, Advertising In The Age Of Hysteria, can be found here.

Ad Contrarian Sells Out

The other day I did a little calculation of the benefits I have accrued from writing this blog.  Here's how it turned out:
Dollars earned...........................................................0
Clients won................................................................0
Fabulous tables at elegant restaurants.....................0
Invitations to be on "expert panels".........................0

The Amazing, Invisible TiVo Effect

 "...advertisers and television programmers must devise new strategies for combating the potentially disastrous effects of ad skipping." Jupiter Media
No technological development has created more hysteria and hand-wringing in the ad industry than the adoption of the DVR.

Over the past few years, the science department here at Ad Contrarian World Heaqdquarters has tried to counterbalance the

Friday Is My Day

Okay, But What Will The Fourth Half Be?
At some big Google supergeek festival yesterday, Master of the Universe Sergey Brin said he wants Google to become the "third half of your brain."

More Eco-Scammers
Last week we wrote a post called The Eco-Marketing Scam about the hypocrisy of "green" corporations. Well, they're not alone. Our civic leaders are apparently equally capable of eco-hypocrisy

Yet Another Crank Theory

If you've been alive more than 45 minutes you've probably noticed something -- people do really stupid shit.

I don't mean stupid like misspelling February. I mean stupid like shooting meth, or piercing their eyelids, or watching Entertainment Tonight. The kind of stupid that can kill you or turn you into a zombie.

If you look deeply enough into any one person's life, I'm pretty sure you can

Same Clowns, Different Circus

First I need to say that I don't know a thing about the break-up of Carmichael Lynch and Harley-Davidson.

Next, I'm going to pretend that I do.

Carmichael Lynch resigned the Harley-Davidson account last week. They had done terrific work for them for decades.

While the client didn't say, "the world is changing and these guys can't give us anything new," and the agency didn't come out and say,

Everything Is Backwards

The Value of Education
A study by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the state of Indiana revealed that drivers under the age of 18 who took a driver's education course had nearly four times the number of car crashes as those who didn't.

Good Thing Obama Didn't Run For Middle School President
According to ABC News...the Nettleton (Mississippi) Middle School has a policy in which...
"... only white

The Eco-Marketing Scam

Here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters, we bow to no man in our appreciation of ducks and trees and beavers and lilacs and swamps and mud and bunnies and oxygen.

However, we also harbor deep suspicions about people who make a public spectacle of their supposed dedication to environmental purity. As far as we're concerned, the philosophical underpinnings of a virtuous life can be summed up very