The Ad Contrarian

This post is adapted from my book " BadMen: How Advertising Went From A Minor Annoyance To A Major Menace. " Advertising used to be concerned with imparting information. Today it is concerned with collecting information. Online advertising, the predominant form of marketing communication, is largely reliant on "tracking" to accomplish this. Tracking is just a pleasanter word for surveillance. Our web browsers, our search engines, and the sites we visit use invisible software to keep track of everything we do and everywhere we go on line. Our emails and texts are read and archived by the providers we use. All this information is collected, stored, and sold to third parties. Usually without our knowledge or consent. It has proven to be easily accessible to hackers, foreign governments, and other malefactors. The preposterous rationale for all this abuse of our privacy is that it helps marketers provide us with more relevant advertising. As if the citizens of the world...

If you go to marketing or advertising conferences the first thing you notice is that every genius with a Powerpoint deck is an expert on the future. I attend way more conferences than is healthy.  I've been averaging about 12 of these a year, as speaking at these things is part of my business. I hear all kinds of hysterical and provocative predictions for the future. The one thing I don't hear is anything that turns out to be true. The history of these future-hustlers is pretty rotten. So here's a little exercise. Here are a dozen of the biggest advertising stories of the past couple of years. Go back and see if you can find any marketing geniuses who predicted any of the following: Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal ( here ) Martin Sorrell shown the door at WPP ( here ) Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress ( here ) Google fined over $5 billion by EU for illegal activities ( here ) ANA study finds "pervasive" corruption in media ( here ) Justice Department/...

Laughing@Advertising is my new book. Yes, this time I've gone too far. It's a collection of my most irresponsible and inappropriate blog posts, essays, and cave drawings. You might say it's 200 pages of insults, wise-cracks, cheap shots, and dirty words. In other words, fun for the whole family! I'm out to disrupt the disruptors -- those somber, imperious souls who have made marketing and advertising such an earnest and humorless endeavor. I am hoping this is the silliest, most injudicious book about our industry you've read. And in some unwholesome, subversive way, the truest and funniest. It is on sale now at Amazon. It is only available in paperback. There ain't gonna be no ebook. Why? Pixels aren't funny. At $6.99 the paperback is cheaper than most of the stupid-ass marketing ebooks you buy anyway. So quit whining and click here .   And don't say I didn't warn you. Update : Huge thanks to everyone. It launched yesterday and it immediately becam...

I was recently asked to explain what I do and why I do it. This always gets me mildly uncomfortable and sets me thinking. I know this sounds pompous, but the short answer is that I want to use whatever limited abilities I have to be a subversive force in the marketing and advertising world. I think we need subversive thinking. I am sure we don't really know all the things we pretend to know. I think this needs to be pointed out often and at high volume. The job of subversives is to undermine the dogma, conventional wisdom, and entrenched interests in our business by finding facts and espousing opinions that challenge our supposed experts. That's the only way well-articulated bullshit can be exposed. The marketing and advertising industries are in a very strange phase these days. Usually in culture and society it is the young people who challenge the tired legends and rituals to lay bare the flaws. But in our industry, it is the young who have become the guardians of the overwor...

The advertising industry prides itself on being brand builders. Building successful brands is supposed to be the essence of what we do. But in recent years the ad industry has been guilty of cheapening some of the most important brands it controls -- its own. I am going to be picking on WPP because it is the biggest offender. But to some degree the same can probably be said about each of the major holding companies. WPP is the owner of some of the most famous and worthy brands in the history of the ad business: JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. It has been systematically dismantling the value in these brands. Today they are splinters of what they were. The holding companies have undermined their agencies from the top down and from the bottom up. What a holding company usually does is buy successful brands and manage them at arms length to, presumably, add value to shareholders. Examples of successful holding companies are Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble. Nobody buys a Berkshir...

In my newsletter Sunday, I republished a blog piece I wrote last week called "The Good In Online Advertising." It was not (in my opinion) particularly provocative or much different from stuff I have been writing about for years. The thrust of the piece was pretty easy to understand -- online tracking is mostly bad and dangerous and we'd all be a lot better off without it. My main point was that the issue of personal privacy in a democracy is a far more important matter than the (real or imagined) benefits of online tracking to advertisers. Prof. Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) who has a huge Twitter following, picked up on a few points from the newsletter and tweeted them out. Suddenly a shitstorm of Twitter (twitstorm?) broke out. If you have any interest in this matter I suggest you go back and read some of the threads. Here were the parts that were of most interest to me. Almost without exception, those who disagreed with the post missed the point. Arguments were put f...