The Big 72 DPI Con

Every Sunday morning, with few exceptions (for vacations), my life as a professional communicator is brightened by the appearance in my inbox of The Ad Contrarian Newsletter.

This is the creation of one Bob Hoffman, who believes a lot of the same things I believe about advertising and marketing, especially when it comes to the digital side.

Bob used to and probably still does own a company called the Type-A Group and which is based in San Francisco. But for a good part of the year he is on the road giving lectures and keynote speeches to various advertising and marketing groups, basically shouting out a warning to all those who have fallen for The Big Con of digital marketing.

Bob does all this in the very blunt and highly entertaining way that ad guys who are actually real communicators do. He believes, like I do, that horrendous amounts of time, money, and intellectual capital are being squandered by ad agencies and marketing companies of all kinds in pursuit of effective branding in the digital world.

Like Bob, I have in the past, done several pieces on this issue and firmly believe that nobody but the chronically lonely out there really want to join the fucking conversation, or absorb the brand narrative of pretty much any brand on the market.

This is borne out in these three simple sentences published by Neilson, one of the world’s foremost brand rating entities:

1.  New Nielsen findings demonstrate that just 8% of consumers consider themselves to be firmly committed loyalists.

2. A whopping 46% of consumers tell us they are more likely to try new brands than they were five years ago.

3. Brands…continue to throw money against digital marketing efforts aimed at holding or growing loyalty.

The Truth Hurts

The biggest problem with facing the truth of all this, especially for advertising agencies who are doing the lion’s share of the squandering that goes on in the digital world, is that for the last decade or more they have been replacing most of the real creative people, who actually know how to build brands, with a mob of totally inexperienced but digitally savvy propellerheads who basically stare at code all day with a Viagra-style boner, and couldn’t care less about the actual consumer on the other end of whatever crap they are pumping out into the digital universe.

As a result, the advertising they create is not only ignored by consumers, it actually kind of repulses the ones who do pay attention.But what it doesn’t do is build brands.

Back In The Day, He Said Fondly

I wasn’t always skeptical about the power of digital advertising Back in the day, I was working for a guy named Andrew Keyes who actually taught me the first stuff I ever learned about email marketing, working specifically for Fidelity Investments.

This got me immersed in the so called digital marketing world, which, at that time wasn’t anywhere near the behemoth it has become today.

Back then, besides email marketing, the stuff we were doing was basically creating digital brochures. And that made sense to me.

It was only when social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn started to define mass digital advertising that the whole brand issue began to take on a new sense of importance, mostly because digital marketers were actually telling you it was important, basically without any real justification for doing so.

And so it came…the advent of a whole new age. Sold by hucksters of a different stripe, telling everyone that this is the place to be, and that it was going to be a marathon and not a sprint but that their digital brand profiles would all be bright and shiny and suck people in like the world’s biggest vortex.

You could tell your brand story, engage the customer who is dying to know about your product or service in real depth, and it was a lead pipe cinch that the people who told their stories the best would be the one who would thrive in this brave new world.

It was bullshit then. It’s even bigger bullshit now. It’s economy impacting bullshit. It’s culture dumbing and consumer mind numbing bullshit.

But, sadly, it’s the kind of bullshit that companies are willing to buy, and they buy big. And every year they deceive themselves in into believing that just haven’t run that far in the fucking marathon yet.

How Low Can Things Go?

It is a very sad world we live in. I left the ad agency business in the early 1990s before digital marketing really started to poison the industry with The Big Con.

But all through my freelance career I got exposed to it in one form or another. At first I thought I was just being reactionary by resisting it. I thought, let’s give it a chance, maybe it will turn into something.

Well here were are 25 years later and it has indeed turned into something. A black hole into which advertisers have tossed tens of billions of dollars, which, sadly, is money they will never really get back or be able to even say, well, at least it helped build our brand.

I’m a big believer in what goes around comes around, and sooner or later most marketer reach their peak level of frustration, cuts their losses and retreats.

But that’s OK, because despite tons of propaganda to the contrary, real, old school, benefit-oriented, brand building advertising is still alive and kicking. Maybe not quite as hard as it used to, but then again, anything is better the tossing dollars into a black hole.

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