NEWSLETTER #144/ Jan. 6, 2019
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EVERYONE WILL BE WRONG AGAIN. AGAIN
Over the holidays I was engulfed by an avalanche of articles by geniuses and futurists explaining what 2019 has in store for the advertising and marketing industry. I'm sure you were, too.
As usual, all these experts will be wrong. For some perspective, let's have a look at 2018. According to AdAge, the three biggest stories in our industry last year were:
1. Martin Sorrell gets thrown out of WPP
2. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal
3. Big shots getting tossed from agencies and companies for allegations of sexual misconduct.
Now go back a year and see if you can find any experts who predicted even one of these three top stories. The answer: Zero.
My personal favorite prediction from a year ago by AdAge, "Blockchain will change everything." Bingo!
"Everything Is Fake"
New York magazine ran an article two weeks ago entitled, "How Much of the Internet Is Fake? The article confirmed just about everything we've been writing about the sleaze of online advertising for years.
One of the key elements of the piece was something the author called the "Inversion."
The "Inversion" goes like this: At one point at YouTube, the amount of fake traffic was "so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake."
Commenting on the article's claim of systemic online fraud and phony metrics, Ellen Pao, former ceo of Reddit tweeted, "It's all true. Everything is fake."
(Of course, this doesn't apply to you. Your advertising is 100% viewable and fraud-free. The reports say so!)
Worst Christmas Ad Ever?
We've all been subjected to some mighty gruesome holiday advertising in the past few weeks. This abomination from Starbucks gets my vote for the Annual Rock-Bottom-Piece-Of-Shit-Beyond-Horrible-Somebody-Shoot-Me Award.
"There's nothing like spending the holidays with people you caramel about."
Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have 11-years-olds writing your fucking ads? Are you crazy? What?
WhatsApp and Child Porn
According to an article in TechCrunch, WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, is "being used to spread illegal child pornography."
Facebook, which has promised us about a thousand times in the past year to be meticulous in its appraisal of what it will allow to appear on its platforms, has once again proven itself to be totally incompetent at policing its resources.
It's not like the pornographers were clever in disguising their activities. Even Facebook dimwits ought to be able to identify groups with names like “child porn only no adv” and “child porn xvideos.”
I can't wait for Facebook's PR hacks to come up with the latest explanation for their ineptitude. One thing you can be sure of, it will include their universal magical remedy for everything they screw up -- Artificial Intelligence!
Inexperience Is Not Enough
Despite the youth-worshiping bullshit we are constantly fed in the press and at marketing conferences, someone 50-years-old is almost three times as likely to be a successful entrepreneur as someone 25.
A study released by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University a few months ago contradicts all the usual horseshit about entrepreneurship, especially tech entrepreneurship
The authors of the study used US Census Bureau data for 2.7 million company founders. As one of the authors said, "the beauty of administrative data is that it’s not a sample...It’s the actual universe of data.”
Here are some of the findings:
- The average age of a successful company founder is 42.
- Among the fastest growing tech companies, the average age was even older -- 45.
- Among tech companies that had a successful financial "exit" (they either went public or were acquired) the age of the founder was even olderer -- about 47.
According to Kellogg..."a founder who is 50 years old is 1.8 times more likely to start a top company than a 30-year-old founder...a 20-year-old founder has the worst chance of all. The longer you’ve been around, the better your odds."
(Speaking of which... here's an interesting article about ageist bullshit in the ad industry.)
ANA Blows Smoke
In an effort to keep regulators from enacting meaningful standards for protecting personal data, the Association of National Advertisers has cynically called on the FTC to create federal standards for privacy.
While on the surface this looks like progress, it is exactly the opposite. The duplicitous ANA knows that the FTC is useless. If it adopts federal regulations they will have no teeth and will allow the ad industry to continue its abuse of privacy.
The ANA's real agenda is to block state regulation of online data abuse such as the regulations adopted by California. Their objective is to get weak federal regulations that supersede strong state regulations.
Next Year In Review
I have made my new year's resolutions for 2019:
- I will cut way back on travel and speaking. The indignity of air travel has finally gotten the best of me. I've had enough.
- I will finish my new book -- the theme of which is how marketers are throwing away tens of billions on fraud and fantasies. Should be a laugh riot.
- Through a strictly regulated regimen of diet, exercise, and mindfulness, I will get shorter, fatter, balder, and dumber.
- I will not spend time with people I caramel about.
