Talentless Advertising

The advertising management's silence over the constantly emerging evidence

that advertising does not work speaks far too loudly.

Glaciers are melting more speedily than the ability of advertising to become

accountable. What is surprising is that a global commercial organization such

as advertising can operate like this. Advertising agencies act as if it has

no need to answer to their Clients! Advertising Management has been tested and

found wanting. What all this is showing is that the Senior Management, those at

the top of the Agencies, are not working. There is a communications and

management failure within advertising agencies.

Everyone is saying it (or, to be more accurate, whining about it). The

advertising business is in a state of upheaval. Everyone is blaming it on

technology and the rapid rate of change it is causing. Hello -- it isn't the

technology, folks. The technological change is simply making it easier to

diagnose the real challenge. The one that has been around since the dawn of our

industry but that, thankfully, we've been able to side step.

The decline of moral responsibility has damaged the advertising and marketing

industry, it is the real flaw behind the advertising crisis. There has to be a

complete change of thinking and regulation of the world's marketing industry.

Certainly Clients cannot risk again the degree of unaccountability as have be

practiced up to now. Advertising agencies need to change their behavior, they

need to re-establish relations with their Clients and gain a better

understanding of the communication process...by using Interactive Marketing Communication,

properly executed!

Go for an arresting Claim

Remember the Wizard of Oz? When the great curtains of the Emerald City

were finally pulled back, Dorothy and her friends found...nothing. Just a small

anxious figure who had until then been able to project a big confident illusion.

Well, advertising people have been hiding a dreadful secret, they have nothing

to hide, nothing to propose, and, worse still, nothing to support their

bombastic illusions! Listen to an ad man speak and you would not gain the

impression of a master strategist, towering intellect, communications colossus

and business titan whom we underestimate at our peril. Advertising

agencies have, for years, been past masters of making an arresting claim

whenever they are hazy about facts or logic, which happens to be most of the

time! The world, the media and our own country have for too long indulged

advertising by never responding to their abstractions that advertising works and

that has suited advertising beautifully. Now as more and more evidence of the

failure of advertising emerges one is forced to admit that advertising is a

total business disaster and has been so for many a year!

There is a niggling, small-scale dishonesty in the way they use words facts and

figures. There is, in advertising people, a paralyzing failure of intellectual

confidence together with a yawning absence of true creativity. Take for

example the intellectual nonsense of accountant turned ad man, Sir Martin

Sorrell. He recently said London and New York are

no longer the creative centers of the world. Absolute stuff and nonsense, if

he, accountant turned ad man Sorrell knew anything about the process of

communication he would appreciate the fact that creativity is no longer, if it

ever has been, the sole criterion for the success or otherwise of an advertising

campaign!He goes on to talk about the most financially efficient advertising

again, complete stuff and nonsense there is no such thing as accountability in

advertising so nobody knows a dam thing about financially efficient

advertising. See what I mean about niggling small-scale dishonesty in the

way they use words?

People Respect Bankers And Politicians More Than Marketers !


According to a study by Adobe and Edelman Berland, people think

both politicians and bankers are more respectable than marketers. Only 13 percent of

consumers think that marketing benefits society. In fact, only 35 percent of respondents who

work in marketing think that their profession is valuable.

But when asked if marketing benefits society, only 13% of consumers agreed.

And compared to other professions, the results were grim. Teachers -- despite

how little they are often compensated -- were valued at the top of the list,

followed by scientists and engineers. That's somewhat to be expected. But what

was more surprising was that advertising and marketing ranked below nearly every

other profession, including bankers (32%), lawyers (34%) and even politicians

(18%). Marketing and advertising was tied with the job of an actor or actress in

terms of its value.

There was only one profession that ranked lower in the survey, and even that

one is just a part of the marketing ecosystem: PR professionals. Only 11% said

PR is a valuable job. Meanwhile, the results weren't much better among

marketers; only 35% of people who were marketers themselves deemed it a valuable

profession in responding to the survey!

Consumers are Fed Up with Corporate Advertising and Manipulation

Recently, the New York Times reported on a new poll showing that a majority

of Americans are fed up with the hailstorm of advertising we all

suffer through. According to theYankelovich Partners poll:

* 65 percent said they believed that they "are constantly bombarded with

too much" advertising; * 61 percent agreed that the amount of advertising

and marketing to which they are exposed "is out of control"; * 60 percent

said their opinion of advertising "is much more negative than just a few

years ago"; * 54 percent of the survey respondents said they "avoid buying

products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing";* 69 percent

said they "are interested in products and services that would help them skip

or block marketing;"





The Times story is below.

As the kingpins of Madison Avenue gather for a major annual meeting,

there is further evidence of the growing challenge they confront in seeking

to break through the cacophony of advertising that surrounds - and

increasingly annoys - consumers.

At the management conference of the American Association of

Advertising Agencies, which begins today in Miami, senior executives will

learn the results of a survey of consumers conducted on behalf of the

organization by Yankelovich Partners, the market research company. The

survey, to be presented tomorrow at the opening general session of the

conference, shows that the effectiveness of campaigns that agencies produce

for marketers is deteriorating, said J. Walker Smith, president at

Yankelovich, because:

The survey findings are significant because industry executives

are frantically searching for ways to forge more emotional connections

with fractious, and fractionated, consumers that differ from conventional

methods like running 30-second television commercials and print

advertisements.

The risk posed by some of the new approaches, like placing sponsored

brand messages or products in the entertainment content of programs

or publications, is that consumers will consider such selling strategies

even more obnoxious.

"People have a love-hate relationship with advertising," said Mr. Smith,

who offered a preview of the survey in an interview before the conference

began. "But a far greater percentage are saying they have concerns,

primarily related to its growing obtrusiveness."

For instance, Mr. Smith said, 54 percent of the survey respondents said

they "avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and

marketing"; 60 percent said their opinion of advertising "is much more

negative than just a few years ago"; 61 percent said they agreed that the

amount of advertising and marketing to which they are exposed "is out of

control."

Also, 65 percent said they believed that they "are constantly bombarded

with too much" advertising; and 69 percent said they "are interested in

products and services that would help them skip or block marketing."

How to market an antimarketing product to people surfeited with

marketing? Ah, there's the rub.

Even when fewer than a majority of the survey respondents agreed with

a statement, Mr. Smith said, the results offered little solace for

agencies. For example, what he called a "fairly significant" 45 percent of

respondents said the amount of advertising and marketing they were exposed to

"detracts from the experience of everyday life," while 33 percent said they

"would be willing to have a slightly lower standard of living to live in a

society without marketing and advertising."

The results also offer some suggestions, Mr. Smith said, to help narrow

what he described as "the growing gap between how consumers want to

be communicated with and the way advertisers communicate with them."

However if you use Interactive Marketing Communication, properly executed, all these problems

disappear, customers want to interact with your information, they do want to express opinions to

you. The trouble is, most people in advertising/marketing don't really understand communication,

and they certainly don't understand real interaction.

There is an old advertising joke which goes like this:

a man dies and while he stands at St. Peter's doors an angel takes him on a small

tour of both Heaven and Hell to help him decide where he'd choose to go. Heaven

was all peace and quiet while Hell was full of nightclubs, loud music, beautiful

women and alcohol. The man decides he'll spend eternity in Hell but once he

passed Lucifer's door he saw a completely different place; screaming, suffering,

mutilated bodies, pain and hellfire. He tells Lucifer that wasn't what he saw

and signed up for and Lucifer answers:

"Yesterday, you were a prospect. Today, you are a client"

It is not a good joke but it is very characteristic of where the advertising industry stands right now.

Advertising, in all its possible formats, is in the middle of a major identity crisis. Huge amounts of

money are being spent every day on TV ad slots, online banners, mobile push

notifications, search results but believe me, no one knows what they are doing.

Brands dedicate a big ad budget every year because this is what every competitor

is also doing, ad and media agencies are trying to deliver good results on this

budget but no one can really say what the ROI is and consumers are caught up in

the middle of this, having lost all trust in advertising.

A vivid example of how people act towards advertising nowadays is the emergence of software

technologies, which enable users to block not only online display banners but all

TV advertising as well. The industry, instead of decoding the clear signs that consumers are sending,

condemns these kinds of technologies. But when you use Interactive Communication, properly

executed, things change, substantially. for the better!

Consumers attitudes to digital advertising - a decline in response rates!

A new YouGov survey into the attitudes of consumers to digital advertising

has revealed some alarming trends around how the explosion of digital marketing

has jaded many consumers, and hinted that a shift in approach may be required by

digital marketers.

Marketing Tech contributor Marco Veremis is president at

UpStream, the digital response specialist that commissioned

the research, and a front runner in mobile and digital advertising for over a

decade. Speaking to him at the Mobile World Congress recently, we questioned him about the

interesting and alarming shift that's taken place over the last five years as

the numbers of digital ads being served every year rocketed from 150bn in 1996,

to a staggering five trillion today.

The effect, as one might expect, has been general desensitisation and a

decline in response rates. This is the worrying part,says Veremis.

Response used to be a healthy 7%, but today it's below 0.1%. And the

reaction of advertisers over the last five years has been, "well, my response

rates are declining, let's do more, more, more"

But more, more, more can be a risky strategy; not just because of the general

apathy and ad-blindness it lays on the average consumer. As fast as response

rates are declining, the number of consumers staying with a brand and not

actively opting out of communications is on the decline also.

Perhaps more worryingly, disgruntled consumers have the power to wreak havoc

and brand damage like never before. "If you asked asked people 40 years ago whether

they were getting too much advertising, the answer may well have been the same

as today, says Veremis. ,But today they have the ability to go online and be

vocally negative about that brand. So the negative impact is there, there is

such a thing as negative brand awareness.

On the face of it, running less advertising in a more targeted way would seem

the logical solution. A lot of companies have caught wind of this, but many

have fallen into another pitfall, personal data, says Veremis. How are you

targeting?

It's a pitfall elegantly demonstrated by the oft-cited case of the US teenage

girl, secretly searching Google for abortion information, whose family then

learns of her pregnancy through targeted pregnancy ads.

On the one hand you've got invasion of privacy, trying to be more targeted

and advertising less, says Veremis. On the other hand you've got massive

volume. Whereas the middle ground?

The interesting thing here is that none of these are traditional marketing

segmentation metrics that companies use.

Privacy has become more of an issue as people become more protective and

more vocal when it is violated, concludes Veremis. Targeting criteria should

change; one should look for the types of data that are perceived to be

non-intrusive.

However when you use interactive communication, properly executed, all your marketing becomes

totally unobtrusive and, at the same time, totally effective and accountable.

The biggest piece of empirical research ever conducted on consumers’

The biggest piece of empirical research ever conducted on consumers’ digital behaviour and their attitudes to social media from the world’s biggest market research company, you would have thought, would create quite a lot of buzz. After all, 72,000 consumers interviewed across 60 countries is quite a sample. Yet coverage of the report and its key findings was almost non-existent. Blink and you missed it.

One look inside the Digital Life report, however, explains the lack of attention. Unlike the overly optimistic and wildly out of touch proclamations of the social media industry and those that cover it, the TNS study was based on empirical data. And as a result, it presented a much more even-handed and objective view of the digital landscape than most marketers are comfortable accepting or forwarding to their peers.

For example, the report concludes that the majority of consumers in developed markets do not want to engage with brands via social media. In the UK, that proportion was at its highest with 61% of consumers stating they do not see social media as a place they want to interact with brands. That’s a bummer for every brand manager who spouts the usual crap about "having a conversation with the consumer", because almost two-thirds of their consumers aren’t interested in talking to them.

But these facts were probably not communicated to you because they do not fit the ideology that the marketing industry is attempting to propagate when it comes to social media. - the hegemonic forces of marketing prefer to tell a story of new apps and bold Facebook strategies rather than a more fair approach. But what also emerged from the data was clear evidence of the lack of credibility or engagement that most brands can expect from their forays into social media. A spokesman for TNS said "Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however, they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified."

Wise is the marketer who uses data to assess the situation. In all the hullabaloo, has anyone considered that the term social media has no place for brands within its definition? ’Social media’ literally means the communication channels that exist between people. Not between brands.

But like every medium before it, brands try to invade that space anyway. And social media, like every other medium before it, is already suffering from clutter as a result. As more brands attempt to grab attention and start social media conversations with disinterested consumers, more of them will switch off.

What is the biggest mistake brands make when it comes to social media?

Well, there's Dell, which has flat out lied to people about its social media success, and that's pretty serious especially when you're a publicly traded company, and Pepsi is guilty of this, too. Since it's made its big social media push, its brand status has sagged (it's now the No. 3 beverage in America), but it tries to hide that by having the CEO talk about how many likes it has on Facebook. Well, if you have so many likes that you're so proud of, how come those likes aren't translating to an increase in sales?

How can you claim success with something as shallow as likes when your sales are down? Can you honestly tell someone with a straight face that likes, coming from people who mostly already buy your stuff, is better than sales?The biggest mistake is what goes on in marketing departments when the end of the fourth quarter rolls around.

Large corporations give their marketing departments X amount of money, and if they don't spend X, they'll get less of it the following year. And so in order to not lose that money, and I've had multiple people tell me this who have been in these meetings, that money gets given to friends of friends or to things like social media,regardless of whether or not the stuff they're selling actually works. You have a lot of big brands out there that spend money on this stuff not because they think it works, but because they had to spend their money on something to keep it for next year.

That puts Ford's social media guru, Scott Monty, in a whole new light,

Failure Of Web Advertising

Failure Of Web Advertising

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon

and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every

aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of

powerful consumer-facing brands.The only truly powerful brands I can

think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google,

Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at

creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.After 15 years, can anyone name even

ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created

primarily by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread,

chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips,

life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has

been built primarily by web advertising? Display advertising is a joke.

Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the

promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than

traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2

people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.Now they're making the same

lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against

traditional print ads. However armed with the proper understanding of the meaning of interaction,

properly executed, the web can be made to achieve everthing you have ever wanted!

The Worst Possible Cure!

Every day you're exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is

optimized to interrupt what you're doing. And it's getting increasingly harder

and harder to find a little peace and quiet. The ironic thing is that marketers

have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with

the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're

interrupting us even more!

Few Companies have a larger or more loyal audience than...

...Facebook, with more than 900 million users and reams of
the personal information that marketers covet. Many analysts expect that
Facebook will continue to find ways to make money from that vast global reach;
it already brings in $3.7 billion a year.
Yet Wall Street's evident frustration with the stock price reflects growing
concerns about the long-term prospects for companies that are popular but do not
charge users for services.
Solve the problem? Yes we can but first of all make all marketing and Advertising people understand the true meaning of Communication!

Chaotic, Evasive, Bungling - That's Marketing and Advertising for you!

Torrents of criticism for Marketing Leaders exist.
Most Advertising Agency leaders are unforthcoming and highly selective in their accountability.
Their accountability falls well short of the standards expected by Clients. Marketing and Advertising providers aren't necessarily the slick, smooth operators they can seem when they bid for work. What we also have discovered by now is having shareholders, a whizzy logo and a global footprint is no guarantee of competence. Add to that the fact that Public Trust of Advertising and Marketing is at an all time low. Urgent improvements, both the the way advertising agencies are run and the way they are accountable is needed if public and market confidence is restored.
The fraud on the internet will add to the distrust!
Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme. Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due . The problem?....tomorrow never comes!!
Our legacy to our successors should not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the scale of the challange.
All this would mean an attitude in both Marketing and Advertising strongly focused on performance and accountability.
We are all but guaranteed overspending and slow growth if we cannot hold both both Marketing and Advertising to account. Our economic crisis is not the moment to delay reform but to accelerate it by questioning the received wisdom in every aspect of our economy, especially Marketing and Advertising.
Our Financial, political,business and media elites are under attack as never before.After a perfect storm of venality, we are experiencing a great reckoning. Morality, personal integrity, which used to seem antique or quaint values, are back on the agenda.
After it emerged that big banks were selling dodgy derivatives and lying about their balance sheets in 2008, trust in all institutions, not just financial houses, began to unravel. If bankers, the people we trust with our money, could lie, steal and cheat, and expect to get away with it because their institutions were too big to fail, what was going on in the other citadels of power?
We must hasten to properly develop interactive opportunities already proven

THE NEXT BIG THING...

...FLOGS

　

Be careful what you believe on the internet: there’s a growing chance that you re being hoaxed by a cynical PR firm. Just as the blogging explosion was teaching us about "vlogs" (video bloggs) and "moblogs" (mobile blogs), along comes yet another trend that is far more pernicious.

A "flog" is a fake weblog that purports to chronicle an ordinary consumer’s passion for a business or a product, typcally without the company behind it declaring an interest. It is a scandalously dishonest practice.

Take Laura and Jim, an ordinary couple who recently drove a camper van across America and stopped over for free each night at their nearest Wal-Mart car park. Their likeably amateurish travel journal, Wal-Marting across America, chronicled all the decent, hard working Wal-Mart employees they encountered during their stopovers, all of whom seemed to have been stories about the company.

Lo and behold, the couple turned out to be a professional paid by Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, and folksy Jim was revealed to be a professional Washington Post photographer. Last month, Laura used the blog to come clean, admitting that she "should have done a better job" telling her story.

Since then, Edelman’s fingerprints have been found all over other related flogs. Working Families For Wal-Mart claims to be a grassroots advocacy group focusing on "the positive contribution of Wal-Mart to working families"; the PaidCritics.com blog sets out to "expose" union employees paid to "smear" the retail chain. Typical postings attack activists for denying "working families" cheap Wal-Mart prescriptions of half-price baby food.

Use Interactive Marketing Communication and know exactly what your getting!

Facebook Unconcerned That Advertisers pay for Thousands of Fake "Likes"

Facebook has previously admitted that 5-6% of its 90 million accounts are fake. But this is the first time evidence has emerged that spam accounts are rooking advertisers who pay for campaigns on Facebook that reach no one "real."

The BBC reports:

Michael Tinmouth, a social media marketing consultant, ran Facebook advertising campaigns for a number of small businesses, including a luxury goods firm and an executive coach, they became concerned after looking at who had clicked on the adverts.

While they had been targeting Facebook users around the world, all their "likes" appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt." Mr Tinmouth asked Facebook to investigate the issue of questionable profiles after one of his clients refused to pay for his adverts on the basis they had not reached "real people".

Tinmouth then created a fake business, "Virtual Bagel," And found that it too gathered Likes from fake accounts. Facebook told the BBC it was not a big deal: We've not seen evidence of a significant problem," said a spokesman.All of these companies have access to Facebook's analytics which allow them to see the identities of people who have liked their pages, yet this has not been flagged as an issue.

Use Interactive Communication, properly executed, and overcome all these problems immediately...and for ever!

Failure Of Web Advertising...

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon

and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every

aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of

powerful consumer-facing brands.The only truly powerful brands I can

think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google,

Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at

creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.After 15 years, can anyone name even

ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created

primarily by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread,

chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips,

life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has

been built primarily by web advertising? Display advertising is a joke.

Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the

promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than

traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2

people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.Now they're making the same

lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against

traditional print ads. However armed with the proper understanding of the meaning of interaction,

properly executed, the web can be made to achieve everthing you have ever wanted

Understanding why we shouldn't be advertising on the Web!

The Internet is part of a revolution that is causing business a lot of headaches. With its networked communities, based on trust and candour together with a huge contempt for corporate smugness.

Initially marketing ignored the net, then they had an awakening, and are now rushing headlong onto the Web thinking that this is the New Medium.

As a result Corporations, ably aided by their minions, the Advertising Agencies, are treating the Internet as a source of a mass market – which it isn't!

We must never forget that Mass Media existed to serve the marketing needs of Corporations – the Net was never created for that purpose.

Sadly however, marketing and advertising executives regard us as fools! For years they have become used to preparing ads, and sponsoring programmes that fit all their pie charts.

But their simplistic formulae's will not replicate on the Web, how do you, after all, sell advertising to billions of sources each with a handful of viewers?

Interested? Please visit:http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com

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