The Ad Contrarian

I'm on my third morning at Advertising Week and I've yet to see an ad. I've seen absurd panel discussions about what marketing will be like in 2030. I've seen a disgraceful PR event disguised as information about the dreadful " McAgency. " I've heard solemn discussions of every mind-numbing cliché in the marketing lexicon: breaking down silos, and storytelling, and authenticity, and ecosystems and so many fucking consumer journeys that you can't swing a brain dead cmo without hitting one. But there's one thing I haven't seen -- an ad. It's like going to Music Week and not hearing a song. Or going to Photography Week and not seeing a picture. It's completely insane and perfectly indicative of our industry. The ads themselves are of no interest anymore. We are not in the advertising business. We are in the advertising business business. It is very dispiriting and not a little infuriating. There is no laughter. There is no joy. It's ...

Today I am reprinting parts of my talk from the IAPI/ADFX awards in Dublin, Ireland last week. For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out some sections and focusing solely on my comments about creativity. Hope you enjoy.  Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I’m not usually invited to speak at high class affairs like this. I usually get invited to horrifying events like the “The Programmatic Real-Time Digital Insider Summit” or some other majestically titled festival of horseshit. But, thankfully, tonight is different. Tonight you are recognizing the best of Irish advertising. And I am honored to help you do that. I love good advertising. I started my career as a copywriter. After a while I got myself promoted to creative director for a few agencies. And after proving myself to be an utter failure as a creative director, I was demoted to ceo. But the one thing I always really wanted to be was a great copywriter. Sadly, my copywriting career consisted mostly of holiday-weekend mat...

"Despite being one of the world’s most loved and talked about brands, McDonald’s weren’t connecting with 16-24 year olds." So began the story by The Drum about McDonald's UK launch of a new YouTube channel called "Channel Us" last September. The idea was to create a video channel... " ...for young people and in collaboration with the influencers they admire most. " (Ooh, influencers!) According to The Guardian , this was done by The Drum in cahoots with OMD . You see, according to The Drum , these darn Millennials are... " ...a generation getting out there and doing amazing things. (And Channel US) ... brings them together, gives them a leg up and helps make their ambitions a reality." Sounds like an Advertising 101 pitch at a bad junior college. But apparently, that's all you need these days. As long as your strategy is, "get younger, get more digital" you can't lose. According to OMD, "This exciting new YouTube cha...

I am traveling and speaking once again this week so blog posts will be thin on the ground. To atone for my negligence I am reprinting yesterday's Type A Group Newsletter here today. Alarmed by a tidal wave of consumer antipathy to the awfulness of online advertising, last week a group of big-time advertisers, publishers, agencies, and media announced a coalition to "rid the internet of annoying ads."
 Yeah, any minute. According to MarketingWeek ... "The ‘Coalition for Better Ads’ aims to take on the “Herculanean task” of bringing together advertisers, agencies, ad tech and publishers to come up with global standards on digital advertising to tackle the rise of ad blocking." I'm pretty sure they mean Herculean but, hey, who cares about language anymore? Published reports claim that over 400 million people worldwide currently use software to block online advertising, and the number is growing rapidly. Here are the self-proclaimed goals of this cruel joke of ...

You don't have to be a marketing genius to figure out how this works. McDonald's hires a new cmo, and then after the obligatory designated waiting period she names a new agency. Who's surprised by that? But there is some disturbing news in this story. What goes unsaid is that in addition to a new agency, the cmo gets the big prize every cmo secretly lusts after -- the opportunity to run her own ad agency. Of course, it will never be said out loud, but have no doubt about it -- the de facto ceo of McDonald's new  custom-made "agency of the future" (someone shoot me) is McDonald's cmo. As you've surely read by now, Omnicom is following the revolting new agency gimmick-du-jour and promising to create a new agency from scratch solely for McDonald's. After costs, the agency's compensation will totally rely on meeting key performance indicators created by McDonald's. Anyone who's ever worked in an agency in which the entire agency is in the ...

As regular readers know, I've been traveling and speaking and haven't had much time for blogging in recent weeks. Today, to atone for my dereliction, I'm sending you to a site where you can find a podcast I did while in New Zealand a few days ago with Ben Fahy of StopPress . You can listen to the podcast or read a transcript of it. Here's the intro to it: "In the first of an irregular series of podcasts where we interview an assortment of highly creative, annoyingly successful and sometimes completely mad humans from across the marketing, media and advertising industries, we've set the bar pretty high: Bob Hoffman, AKA The Ad Contrarian.  As a long time fan of Bob Hoffman’s spiky musings on marketing, advertising and media, a little bit of wee came out when TVNZ announced it was bringing him over to speak as part of its Forecast series. Hoffman, who has been the CEO of two independent advertising agencies and the US operation of Mojo, is the author of the popul...