CLOWNS IN SUITS

Professor Cavazo participated in a study conducted by cybersecurity firm Cheq called ‘The Economic Cost of Bad Actors on the Internet, Ad Fraud 2019” which was released last week. According to The Drum, the report states that the "Cost of Global Ad Fraud Could Top $30bn" this year.

This report repudiates the nonsense promulgated a few weeks ago by the clowns of the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) which claimed that the "War On Ad Fraud Is Succeeding" and fraud would fall to about $5 billion this year from $7.2 billion a few years ago.

According to The Drum, "...studies, which pin the cost of ad fraud at about $7.2bn per year, fail to capture the full extent of the damage...These studies often extrapolate from limited samples...Such studies also restrict the scope of their research to botnets, which are just one source of ad fraud..."

The feckless ANA continues to cover its ass and mislead its members, the industry and the public about the extent of criminal activity that is polluting online advertising and costing advertisers tens of billions.

The digital advertising director of the Financial Times, Anthony Hitchings, had this to say, “The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping. The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organized crime." 

Seven months ago, in November of 2018, I received a LinkedIn message from someone responsible for the ANA's podcast about 'marketing futures and innovations', "I'd love to have you on as a guest... I subscribe to your blog and I think you bring a fresh and correct perspective."

I replied, "Thanks for the invite. I know nothing about 'marketing futures and innovation' but I'm happy to do your podcast."

"We are all in agreement at the ANA and would like to have you on our show," came the response... "we’ll do a 30 minute recording ...Shall we book for post Thanksgiving?"

I agreed, but not wanting to ambush them or do the podcast with false expectations, I issued a caveat, "I hope you’re aware that I’m likely to be critical of the ANA...."

The reply came..."I just ping'd the powers that be... I am not overly optimistic...But I am hopeful they see it is important to share all ideas (that are insightful) despite opposition or criticism..."

Not surprisingly, Thanksgiving came and went and I heard nothing. So did Christmas, New Years, and my mother's birthday. Then suddenly in February I received an email asking for dates that I might be available to do the podcast. After some back and forth we decided on a date. We scheduled the recording via telephone hook-up for March 4th at 9:00 am.

On March 4th at 8:37 am I got an email telling me that the podcast had been cancelled. You see, they couldn't do the podcast because it had snowed in New York the night before!

But, they said, they'd be back in touch to re-schedule. "Yeah, right," I thought.

Two months later, on May 4th I sent them an email.. "...are we really going to do a podcast or have you been warned off me? Please, no BS."

I received a reply 2 days later, "Let me ask the leaders again. I will get you a definite yes or no by mid week..." It is now over a month later and I still haven't heard anything. It must be snowing again in NY.

This week AdAge ran a piece entitled, "Why Targeting Millennial Consumers Might Not Be Such a Hot Idea After All." There's a duh! if I ever saw one.

Don't worry, I'm not going to go through the whole litany again of how stupid this whole millennial obsession has been (for those who need a quick course, go here.)

Between online ad fraud and millennial lunacy, the advertising industry has pissed away so many billions of its clients' dollars, I'm starting to wonder why I didn't wise up. Instead of howling about the idiocy of it all for the past 10 years, I should have jumped on the gravy train and bilked these rubes out of some of the easy money they're so eager to throw around.

And the dumbest? The auto industry -- who fall for every marketing gag in the book and every halfwit "expert" the ad industry can throw at them.

As the great Claudia Caplan said this week, "...sometimes I think we don't deserve to call ourselves a business."

I can insult CMOs, consultants, agency management, holding companies, creatives, clients, trade organizations, researchers, media planners and buyers and they all seem to be able to take a punch.

But there are two groups of people who cannot take a punch and always howl like cats in heat when criticized: Social media "experts" and planners.

I don't know why this should be. These people are no more incompetent than the rest of the knuckleheads in our industry. But maybe they take themselves a little too seriously or maybe they have proven to be so unreliable that they have grown inordinately sensitive.

In any event, lighten up social media and planning. Nobody takes what you say seriously anyway.

"It enables teams to work and it enables ideas to generate, be shared globally and virtually, through the use of better insight in culture and the journey of human beings" ...oy. Whenever you hear the word "journey" grab your children and run for the exits.

And now the news...Marcel looks like a pig's breakfast. It is already a year behind schedule and they still haven't figured out what the hell to do with it. According to The Drum, after a year of tests... "The UK has been chosen as the place to hold a country-specific trial next, and after only a few weeks early word has been mixed. Skepticism persists internally about whether it will really be adopted throughout the ranks."

Two years ago, I rudely called Marcel "an 80,000 person circle jerk." Today Publicis has achieved the profligate Daily Double -- a week of waste at Cannes, and a generation of waste in Marcel.

This week, The New York Times published a piece entitled "We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster."

After doing an analysis of the difficulty of understanding these privacy policies, the Times went on to say, "Only Immanuel Kant’s famously difficult 'Critique of Pure Reason' registers a more challenging readability score than Facebook’s privacy policy....a significant chunk of the data collection economy is based on consenting to complicated documents that many Americans can’t understand."

BTW, Google's privacy policy is now 15 times longer than it was originally.

As we know, Facebook arrogance knows no bounds. Their history has been to lie about everything while believing they can get away with it. Someday someone will get inside their servers and the full extent of their lying, fraudulent "metrics", and criminal behavior will be revealed. If the Z-man hasn't already destroyed it all.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported this week that "Facebook Worries Emails Could Show Zuckerberg Knew of Questionable Privacy Practices."

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has the FTC probing Facebook's flouting of the consent decree they agreed to in 2012. According to a Journal source, "Facebook has vigorously opposed any efforts to hold Mr. Zuckerberg personally liable...."

There is only one hope that the tech giants will take privacy seriously -- if their execs are held personally responsible for their actions. Otherwise paying fines for breaking laws and thumbing their noses at regulators just become another business expense.

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