No images? Click here HONEY, DID YOU SEE MY $400 MILLION? WPP, once the world's largest agency network and quickly becoming the world's stupidest, reported this week that they made a little accounting error and misplaced £300 million (about $400 million.) According to the Daily Mail "Advertising agency WPP has admitted to understating its losses by hundreds of millions of pounds after an embarrassing accounting debacle." The result of this little glitch is that instead of losing a mere $3.4 billion in the first half of 2020, WPP actually lost $3.8 billion. A billion here, a billion there... it starts to add up. Facebook to the Rescue Ya gotta laugh to keep from crying. This week Facebook began an ad campaign in major newspapers. The thrust of the campaign is that FB is the protector and defender of small businesses. Do you want to kill yourself? The first target of the campaign was Apple. Facebook, perhaps the world's most contemptible and irresponsible abuser of individual privacy, is accusing Apple of the unpardonable sin of allowing users to control who can track them. Writing in the NY Times about the Facebook campaign, Kara Swisher wrote, "The company declared in newspaper ads that it was 'standing up to Apple.' It’s a desperate ploy that’s unlikely to work." Google-Facebook Conspiracy Theory The Attorney General of Texas, along with Attorneys General of 10 other states, have sued Google claiming that Google used its market power to illegally squash competition. The suit also claims that Google and Facebook entered into a conspiracy to rig the online ad market and names Facebook as a co-conspirator. You can read the gory details here. Before you take this thing too seriously, the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is the same clown who got his ass thrown out of the Supreme Court recently for his idiotic lawsuit asking for the voting results of several states to be overturned. The 10 states that joined the Google lawsuit were also parties to that Supreme Court fiasco. According to the Wall Street Journal, Paxton has been under investigation by the FBI since "eight senior officials in the attorney general’s office reported him to the FBI for bribery, abuse of office and other offenses..." If that's not enough, Paxton is also under indictment for felony security fraud charges. On the other hand, the fact that this guy may be a creep doesn't mean Google and Facebook didn't make a dirty deal. EU Threatens Big Tech. Again. This week, the EU Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age (no shit, that's really their name) did the only thing it knows how to do. It threatened to do something. This is the same commission that developed the GDPR - a set of privacy regulations that also threatened to do something. This time around they're threatening to break up big tech companies and fine them all the money in the world if they don't behave nicely. The new proposed regulations call for the end to "self-preferencing" and gives consumers the ability to remove apps installed by the manufacturer in their devices. I'm sure the big tech people will be just as assiduous in adhering to these new regulations as they were to the GDPR. Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the EU Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age (sorry, it's so stupid I can't stop repeating it) had this to say: the regulations are part of a “global conversation about how to balance things.” I'd like to say we've all had our fill of f*cking empty threats and bullshit "conversations." It might be a good time to try actually doing something. The Most Uninteresting Advertising in the World As predicted here many months ago, the marketing geniuses at Heineken (parent company of Dos Equis) who fired "The Most Interesting Man in the World" a while back are still struggling to make up for their monumental stupidity. This week Dos Equis fired another agency (Droga5) as they struggle to equal "The Most Interesting Man..." and hired a new agency (Sid Lee) to try to inject some life back into the brand. It was just a few years ago that Dos Equis had one of the most successful campaigns in the world. But, as we know, incompetent marketing people have an irresistible compulsion to fuck with everything. Some marketing genius decided they needed to appeal to millennials by "contemporizing" the campaign -- code word for getting rid of the old guy. This dimwit contemporized a great campaign out of existence. There is one lesson that advertisers will never, ever learn: One good ad campaign is worth a million dumbass CMO opinions. Happy Holidays I'm taking a holiday break. This time I mean it. Stay safe. |