Be brutally honest, do you have any idea how advertising works?

How advertising got itself into its present mess. No? Perhaps you console yourself

with the thought that it doesn't matter that you dont have a clue because there

are plenty of smart marketing people out there who do. Well, here's the tricky

part. Yes, those smart marketing people do indeed have a shrewd prescription on

how to steer the world out of marketing chaos. The bad news is, they're not

all the same prescription. In fact they are different prescriptions. Very

different.

We snigger at fortune-tellers yet continue to take seriously the word of

advertising and marketing people, professions definable as people who have

found a way to retain professorial tenure even when their predictions turn out

to be entirely wrong.Read the rival pronouncements of the world's top

advertising people and you soon find yourself agreeing that their guess is as

good as anybody elses. Because in Marketing and advertising nobody knows

anything! Even more disturbing, the arguments about Social Media and how to

fix advertising that we hear today are but a queasy echo of those we heard years

ago regarding the introduction of Commercial TV...and didn't that work out

well? Similar arguments about involvement, The Internet, Social Media et al

are today being regurgitated over the current crisis. So what should we be

doing? I really don't know except that we should really study the meaning of

the word "communication" a little more urgently. My only excuse is that the

people we rely on to know don't have a common view either. The rarest phrase

in the English language is: "Marketing people agree that..."