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