ANOTHER NAIL IN AD INDUSTRY COFFIN

The agency business is facing a triple threat from forces it can no longer control:
     - Consultancies
     - In-housing
     - Distrust among clients

While Droga's reputation in the creative community may have dimmed somewhat recently, it is still considered a creative powerhouse in the wider marketing community. In adland perception often lags reality by a year or two.

In normal times this acquisition might set off a buying spree among other consulting companies for creative agencies. But there are so few famous independent creative agencies left in the U.S., it's hard to see that happening.

Why do consultancies feel they can grow agencies faster than the agencies could grow on their own? Simple. Agencies are connected to clients at the imitation
decision-maker level (CMO.) Consultancies are connected at the real decision-maker level (CEO.)

The consultancies have shown they are much better strategists than agencies. Agencies have only one unique product to sell clients - creativity. Everything else marketers can get elsewhere. When agency holding companies decided on a strategy to de-fund creativity and instead invest their money in technology and data, they opened the door for consultancies to beat them at their own game.

According to the nonsense that people tell researchers, Americans overwhelmingly believe that social media divides us, wastes our time, spreads lies and falsehoods, trades in unfair attacks and rumors...

Of course, their behavior tells a whole different story. Over 70% of Americans say they access social media at least once a day.

Another finding of the survey was that Americans have almost no trust in tech companies or the government to protect their personal, private information.

In no case do more than about 20% of people surveyed have any level of trust in these institutions to protect them. And yet, every day we knowingly and unknowingly hand them ridiculous amounts of information.

Perhaps you recall that after the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook pledged that it would hunt down the other developers it had secretly shared supposedly secure information with and have them get rid of it. Well, here's a surprise. The sloppy, irresponsible, lying bastards didn't. Shocked I tell you!

Last week it was reported that a Mexican company had stored over 500 million Facebook records in plain site on the Amazon cloud for anyone to access. According to the Director of Cyber Security Risk at Upguard, the company that discovered this mess, "we have just scraped the surface..."

Or maybe it's this...

Almost 400,000 crooks have been using Facebook for as long as eight years as a marketplace to buy and sell criminal materials.

According to Bloomberg, "Facebook housed dozens of cybercriminal groups that set up shop on the platform as online marketplaces to sell a variety of illegal services, such as stolen credit card information, account theft and spamming tools..." And here's my favorite part... "once a person joined one such group, Facebook’s own algorithms would often suggest similar groups, making criminal hangouts easy to find..." You see, who said they aren't helpful?

Or maybe it's this...

No jokes about this because this ain't fucking funny. According to the Daily Beast, "Child Brides in Africa Are Advertised on Facebook and Sold to Old Men."  Enough said.

And while we're kicking Facebook around, Zuckerberg's op ed piece in the Washington Post last week advocating for government regulation of his industry, was essentially an admission that he is incapable of managing his company and that he and his cronies in the dangerous business of monetizing online surveillance need adult supervision.

Can we please have one big, fat, giant "duh."

Why? Two reasons:
     1. Why go through a Google product search first when it often just leads you to Amazon?
     2. Since Amazon actually sells the stuff you're advertising on their site, they have a way more credible attribution machine.

But don't worry about Google. They seem to be doing okay. BTW, my opinion: Amazon is getting way too vertically integrated and is asking for trouble.

And one reminder to those of you not in our lovely business: Both the Google and Amazon advertising platforms make their money from misdirection. When you do a "product search" on either platform the first few results you get are not search results. They're ads disguised as search results.

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