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#262/ October 3, 2021
ZUCKERBERG AND SANDBERG MIA
This week, Washington legislators, the press, and public figures were screaming about the irresponsibility of Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg, and coo Sheryl Sandberg as recent FB scandals have been exposed. But the Douchebergs were nowhere to be seen.
While Facebook may have been facing the most perilous week of its life Zuckerberg and Sandberg did what all chickenshit weaklings do: they hid and let their underlings take the hits for them. Then they threw other Facebook executives under the bus.
Some of the week’s highlights:
- Facebook issued a statement early in the week claiming that the disastrous series by The Wall Street Journal was misleading and inaccurate. This infuriated Facebook executives who did the research the Journal had quoted. According to the NY Times, “Facebook data scientists and researchers discussed how they were being ‘embarrassed’ by their own employer.” Some of the Facebook executives who worked on the reports “have privately threatened to quit.”
- Facebook sent their "Global Head of Safety" to face two hours of grilling from Washington lawmakers about the damage they are doing to the mental health of teens. Facebook having a "Global Head of Safety" is like North Korea having a "Global Head of Hairstyling"
- Amid howls of indignation, Facebook stopped development on its "Instagram for Kids" atrocity which is aimed at children 13 and under. Also BTW, according to researchers, by the time an average American child is 13 years old, the adtech industry has collected 72 million data points on that poor bastard.
- Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, a mentor to Zuckerberg, and the man who introduced Zuckerbag to Sandbag, said this week in regard to the recent revelations about Facebook's lies and duplicity, "What we need are criminal investigations."
- Tonight in the US, the woman who leaked the Facebook documents to the Journal will be talking to 60 Minutes. This could turn out to be the week that the whole Facebook shit show starts to crumble.
You're probably wondering what the Douchebergs were doing while all this was going on? According to the NY Times all we heard from the fun couple last week was this..."Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video last week of himself fencing with Olympic gold medalists...On Wednesday, Ms. Sandberg posted a story about small businesses in the United Arab Emirates on her Facebook page."
The integrity is thrilling to behold.
More Scandals In Ad World
The fraud and corruption in adland, and the willful negligence and irresponsibility of agencies, is getting hard to exaggerate -- even for a hysterical blogweasel.
This week, after one of the most bizarre stories in recent advertising history, Ozy Media, a darling of the ad world suddenly shut its doors.
Agencies and brands, whose commitment to social causes run about as deep as their next PR release, viewed Ozy as a quick way to get their political correctness creds in order. According to Ad Age "Ozy Media became the darling of Madison Avenue in recent months, with advertisers seeing the media company...as a way to reach not only younger, socially-conscious consumers, but also diverse audiences often underrepresented in their media budgets."
But Ozy Media turned out to be giant scam perpetrated on the industry
Things came apart this week. On a conference call in July with potential investor Goldman Sachs, a YouTube exec named Alex Piper sang the praises of Ozy to Goldman Sachs who were considering a $40 million investment. He told of the tremendous success the two companies were enjoying. The only problem was the guy on the call sounded funny as he was complimenting Ozy. When Goldman Sachs checked with Piper he had no idea what they were talking about. In fact, the person pretending to be Piper was an impostor. But not just any impostor, he was Samir Rao, the co-founder of Oxy, and its COO.
It later turned out that a large component of Oxy's lovely looking audience metrics were bullshit. Within a week they closed their doors.
The lesson here is that the ad and marketing industry have gotten so used to utter horseshit emanating from media companies -- particular online media companies - that they have lost all skepticism and accept any bullshit they are sold.
I can't wait for the day that someone hacks Facebook and we get a real look at what their audiences looks like and what their ad metrics really say. Remember in 2019 CNN reported that Facebook was on track to remove over 7 billion fake accounts for the year. The ad industry's reaction: Not a fucking peep.
Speaking of Horseshit
The great George Tannenbaum posted this crock of shit from the landing page of the Ogilvy website on his blog this week. While it attracted a healthy and well-deserved avalanche of ridicule, the question that keeps buzzing around my brain is this...
Do these people actually believe this bullshit? Or is it just the kind of meaningless brand babble and double-talk that agencies are required to produce these days?
David Ogilvy was one of the most clear-headed and direct fellows this industry ever had. I can only imagine his horror at coming back and having to see his name attached to this horseshit.
In my career I've had my name attached to a couple of agencies. I dare not imagine what atrocities are being committed in my name.
Funding The Morons
The programmatic ad system is so bizarrely absurd that after years of reports of brand danger, and dozens of companies created to protect brands from online squalor, the same problems still exist.
It was reported this week by The Guardian that ads from brands like Nike, Amazon, Honda, Walgreens, eBay and other substantial advertisers were popping up all over anti-vax sites. Spots for Amazon Pharmacy were found on over 30 health misinformation sites.
TV Still Not Dead
Despite years of hysterical headlines about the death of tv, we all seem to be enjoying sitting on our asses and watching the monkey box as much as ever. Uber-brilliant media strategists say that there's a “dramatic shift in momentum” resulting in online brands needing to build “mental real estate”.
This is just the way these knuckleheads talk. Don't let it confuse you. All it really means is that you can't get famous in private. If you want to have a really successful brand, all this bullshit about online one-to-one personalized messages is a crock of shit, and you have to talk to lots of people and do it loudly.
Consequently we have a very large new crop of tv advertisers. Who are they? Online brands who find the online advertising they sell to their clients doesn't work so well for themselves. According to MarketingWeek, brands born online have increased their TV spending by 37% since 2019. Some have done much more. In the UK, Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime have increased their collective TV spend by 137%
Additionally, radio spend has increased about 64% among online brands in the UK.
My Big Fat Mouth
Two video interviews I did recently were released this week. The first sponsored by Mediatel and Crater Lake on the subject of "Making Sense Of It All" can be found here. It answers the question: "Does the Ad Industry Ever Learn Anything?"
The second one, with the Social Media Club of St. Louis, answers the question "Did Adtech Kill Creativity?" and a few other interesting questions. You can find it here.
