Emotional attachments

One of the most wasteful uses of advertising dollars is to try to create emotional attachments to your brand. First of all, most ads that try to use emotion are transparently pandering, usually generic, and rarely hit the mark.Second, contrary to all the bull you hear, most consumers have little or no emotional attachment to most of the brands they use (see "Salesmen & Sociologists.") When they

The Entertainment Age

Several years ago, observers more optimistic than TAC hailed the ascendancy of the internet as the dawn of “The Information Age”. It’s a lovely idea. Unfortunately it’s a fantasy.The internet certainly has wonderful applications for people interested in gathering information. And there are a lot of people who use the internet in that way. But, by far, the internet is quickly evolving into an

Business Week Needs Our Help

Business Week is having a hard time figuring out the TiVo data we've been talking about all week (see Which Ads Don't Get Skipped). Apparently, they need to subscribe to The Ad Contrarian blog (see Myths Exploding, Mysteries Unraveling.)SUBSCRIBE TO THE AD CONTRARIAN

The Legend of Interactivity

Someday I'm going to write an advertising book called "Legends and Rituals". It will be about how advertising and marketing people are blind to the evidence of their own eyes but keep saying and doing the same fictitious things over and over.One chapter will be about interactivity. Pick up any article, book or blog about marketing and you'll read that there's a new species of human being

Blind to the facts

Advertising and marketing people want to believe that everyone is young, urban, and hip -- just like them. That's why so much advertising is misguided and irrelevant to the people who actually buy things.The idea that every product must be marketed to a young audience is so baked into the DNA of the marketing community that they can't see beyond this counterproductive, crippling prejudice. Two

Myths Exploding, Mysteries Unraveling

For the first time ever, the advertising industry is getting data about things that up until now were the province of speculation and ideology.We’re starting to get a glimpse of how consumers actually behave when confronted with advertising. Not how they say they behave; not how we think they behave; not how they behave under controlled conditions, but what they actually do at home in front of

The Sky Is Not Falling

The popular press and the ad trades would have you believe that tv viewing is in steep decline, and that this steep decline is exacerbated by heavy DVR usage (TiVo, etc.) disrupting the traditional effectiveness of tv advertising.The facts tell a different story.If you read Nailed you saw how TAC used Nielsen data from November, 2006 to report that about 1.6% of total tv commercials are skipped