THE SHORT SAD HISTORY OF THE CLICK

According to a piece in MediaPost last week, the ad industry may be about to "put another nail -- possibly a final one -- in the coffin of the click as a digital advertising metric."  MediaPost says, "the Media Rating Council (MRC) has been having discussions with major industry stakeholders...(about) letting the click founder as it shifts its focus to more meaningful 'engagement metrics.'"

More meaningful "engagement metrics?" ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?...ok, Bob, remain calm.... let's stay on topic here...

Who will mourn the passing of the poor betrayed and abandoned click? I will. The click did one invaluable thing for our business. It unambiguously taught us how totally full of shit the online ad industry Is.

At first the click was the symbol of a new age in which consumers wouldn't just see ads, they would "interact" with them. Then, as numbers started trickling in, it became obvious that no one was clicking and "interactivity" with advertising was an infantile delusion.

So the industry needed desperately to concoct a new story. The new story went like this: We were only kiddin' about clicks. They don't really matter. It's "engagement" that matters. Engagement was the perfect answer because no one knew what the hell it meant. Now we have come full circle and clicks are dead, and engagement -- the most vague and useless "metric" the con men could come up with -- is the new king.

As usual, I am in total disagreement with the marketing industry. I think clicks are, by far, the most telling measure of online advertising effectiveness. Or perhaps to be more precise, the most telling measure of online advertising ineffectiveness.

As far as I can tell, online advertising has been mostly useless as a brand building medium and much more effective as a direct response medium. And clicks are the only way to execute a direct response.

Analyzing clicks also reveals how poorly targeting works, and how immune most consumers are to online advertising. Analyzing the number and nature of clicks renders online advertising accountable. And if there's one thing the online ad industry will absolutely not tolerate, it's accountability. Which is why clicks must go.

If you have at any time viewed a Powerpoint presentation by one of these dimwits or listened to their idiotic recommendations, you may be a victim!

Hopefully, a study released this week by Deloitte will once and for all shut these imbeciles up. Here's what Deloitte found: Millennials ain't no different from anyone else. They're just poorer.

According to The Washington Post, the report..."debunk(s) many conventional wisdoms about the new-age consumer.... what matters to consumers today isn't much different than it was 50 years ago...Generally speaking, there have not been dramatic changes in how consumers spend their money." Well I'll be...

There has been one change, "The net worth of Americans aged 18 to 35 has dropped 34 percent since 1996...Millennials are doing far worse financially than generations before them..."

So it turns out that all the MHS about Millenials being a new species and requiring double-secret marketing and media strategies was just a lot of the usual research and marketing hot air. I hate to be the one to say "I told you so," but I'm too immature not to. Here's a partial bibliography on the subject:
Marketers And Millennials
Five Good Reasons To Ignore MIllennials
Everything You Need To Know About Millennials
10 Compelling Reasons To Target Millennials
Math And Millennials
The Millennial Hustle

More on this down at the bottom of the page.

First, the online economy is constructed almost entirely on advertising revenue. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Other media industries -- TV,  radio, and print -- were also structured on advertising revenue. But online is different. It's different because to a frightening degree it's a scam.

The real estate/banking crash of 2008 demonstrated that for an industry to crash it doesn't have to be entirely shady, just shady enough.

The online ad industry is more than shady enough. Dr. Augustine Fou said recently, "...billions of fake accounts, fake users, fake traffic, fake ad impressions...can be manufactured out of thin air to create the appearance of hyper growth. This is necessary to justify the sky-high, irrational valuations of private and public companies..."

Whereas real industries have to have something real to sell -- a hamburger, a car, a hammer -- online advertising is, to an unhealthy degree, an air industry. You can get very rich very quick selling air/nada/diddly/bupkis to suckers. And it sells tens of millions of air/nada/diddly/bupkis every day. 

If you have any doubt about the staggering amount of fraud on the web, between October 2018 and March 2019 Facebook had to delete 3.4 billion fake accounts. That's almost 4 times as many fake accounts as there are human beings in the western hemisphere.

Second problem is the online ad industry's abuse of public trust. The unauthorized gathering of "data" (just a fancy word for personal, private information) has outraged and energized a growing component of the public and policy makers. While government action to protect consumers is probably necessary and inevitable, it is also likely to create a cross-current of negative sentiment among investors.

Third is the coming slowdown in growth. An industry that can create fraudulent inventory out of thin air is not subject to the laws of supply and demand. But despite the constant PR efforts of clueless industry trade organizations to assure their members that "fraud is on the decline," savvy marketers are likely to catch on sooner or later.

Fourth is Facebook. They have engendered an astounding amount of bad will with no economic repercussions. When the reckoning comes, it is likely to be large.

Fifth is Google. The WSJournal claims the Justice Department is preparing an anti-trust investigation of Google.

Sixth, the trade wars with everyone on the planet aren't likely to do the tech industry, first cousin to the online media industry, any good at all.

And finally, the experts say everything's fine. When the experts say everything's fine, check for your wallet.

"Just one day before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a shareholder meeting that he wants to build a “privacy-focused social platform,” the company’s lawyer argued that privacy doesn’t actually exist on Facebook....At a hearing in a class-action lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica’s accessing of Facebook user data, company attorney Orin Snyder argued that ...“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy...”

Right, you can't make this shit up.

Being a born entrepreneur, Arii decided to parlay her online fame into some cold hard pesetas by launching her own line of t-shirts. While Arii is obviously very capable of filling a t-shirt, it seems she is not nearly as capable of filling an order for t-shirts. You see, in Spain apparently the minimum order for printing t-shirts is 3 dozen. Sadly, her business ambitions went unrewarded when among her 2.6 million Instagram followers she couldn't muster 36 people to order t-shirts.

What the hell is wrong with kids today? Don't they know that the whole purpose of influencers is to sell them shit? Ungrateful bastards.                   H/T Antonio Sanz

Just a note to that marketing trade organization that has been f-ing with me for months. Time's almost up.

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