EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE

The Times told the story of a typical 46-year-old math teacher.

"An app ... gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds...While (her) identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing....as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive."

It is just another horrifying example of how the advertising and marketing industries are irresponsibly and secretly using adtech and tracking spyware to undermine the privacy rights of citizens. And the bullshit that this "data" is anonymous is laughable.

When is there going to be someone with balls inside the ANA and the 4As to stand up and challenge our industry's dangerous addiction to this poisonous crap? How about you and I make a new year's resolution to do everything we can to get these supposed "industry leaders" off their fat asses and address these loathsome practices.

The number of Facebook users continues to grow at about 4% (a number I find hard to take seriously as Facebook has had to delete 2.8 billion phony accounts in the past 12 months. Hard to believe the 4% growth in subscribers doesn't include a fair number of fakes.) However, the time-spent with the platform per person here in the US has been dropping dramatically. Here's a summary of some of the estimates for the first 10 months of this year:

Just imagine the hysterical headlines about the "death of television" or radio if usage of those media were dropping at these rates.

Edison Research asked 300 advertising and agency professionals to estimate the relative audio listening time adults over 18 spent with Pandora and Spotify:

   - The experts estimated 21% of audio time was spent with Pandora. The actual number was 4%. The experts were off by 400%

   - The experts estimated 23% of audio time was spent with Spotify. The actual number was 2%. The experts were off by 900%

These are people making million dollar media decisions every day.

In fact, according to Edison, the audience for AM/FM radio is 8 times bigger than audiences for Pandora and Spotify combined.

"My view was make it ‘Y&R – VML’ make it 'JWT Wunderman’, that's always been my view...”

Apparently, I have to start re-thinking my entire life. When you find yourself in total agreement with Sir Marty, it's time to take stock...

- The agency CP+B has changed its "brand" to CPB+. Moving that plus sign should make all the difference.

- My all-time favorite dumbass brand -- "Oath" -- took another turn for the worse this week. First, as we reported a few weeks ago, Verizon (the Oafs who created Oath by buying and combining AOL and Yahoo) changed Oath's name to Verizon Media Group. This week they wrote down the value of Oath by about $4.6 billion. The moral of this story: Anyone who thinks he's going to compete seriously with Google, Facebook, and Amazon for digital ad dollars is nuts.

"We win and grow by...simplifying everyday through the aggregation of marginal gains in terms of our improvement...Fragmentation has an impact in terms of aggregate return on investment...The more (clients) slice and dice and carve bits off, the harder it gets to drive ROI through holistic planning and optimization."

Mr. CEO, here's a little tip. If you really want to holistically simplify things, a good start would be to speak like a human.

Click farms are a relatively low-tech method of ad fraud and a small part of the multi-billion dollar ad fraud industry. As you can see, hundreds or thousands of devices are synced up and programmed to click on links 24 hours a day. They run up millions of imaginary views or clicks for which advertisers are charged. The good news: It's never you or your team who are the suckers paying for this trash. Heck no. You and your agency are too smart -- and you have the data and reports to prove it! (Insert obnoxious eye-roll here.)

Oh, and if you would like to put a click farm to work for you, here you go.

We talked about: the world's worst marketing job...the cluelessness of the ANA...the most absurd idea in advertising...holiday gift non-giving...and the biggest business opportunity in the world. Listen here.                                                

It's vacation time. Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and I'll see ya in 2019. (Oh, and as a public service, here's a great gift idea for all the ad/marketing geeks on your holiday shopping list.)

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