Bob Hoffman

THE AD CONTRARIAN: While most brands are preoccupied with differentiation, positioning and purpose, their real aim ought to become famous in their category.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Revelation about billions of misdirected ads—that no one noticed for nine months—exposes the elephant in the programmatic-advertising room. But which elephant is it?

THE AD CONTRARIAN: What will happen now? My guess, the IAB will come up with some new horseshit that will take years to litigate while the adtech industry goes merrily along screwing the public.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: I know 97% of my programmatic ad budget is wasted, I just don't know which 97%.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Assumptions must always be challenged if we are to have confidence that we actually know anything, but an evidence-based approach is all too rare in marketing.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: There is perhaps no bigger waste of time, energy, and resources in the client-agency relationship than what is laughingly called "the briefing process".

THE AD CONTRARIAN: People are mostly too busy, too lazy, or too indifferent to give two-fifths of a flying shit about "brand meaning”. And recent positive press for purpose-based advertising is woefully off-base.

The words of the company's own executives reveal an organisation that is rotten to the core, writes The Ad Contrarian.

The Ad Contrarian lambasts the social-media giant for 'burying' a report about misinformation. Plus, he comments on Coca-Cola's unwise pause in marketing spend, Google hiding some bad news, chill winds blowing for CMOs, another bad Tiffany campaign, and a new low for winning work at Cannes.

RANT OF THE WEEK: If you'd asked a high school advertising class to come up with a campaign to "youthify" the Tiffany brand, this is exactly the shit they'd come up with, writes The Ad Contrarian.

The US-based Association of National Advertisers awoke from a decade-long coma and decided to find out how its members have been getting screwed out of billions of dollars by the programmatic ad ecosystem. Too little, too late, according to The Ad Contrarian.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: We spend 100% of our marketing energy and dollars on the largely ineffectual exercise of trying to control consumer behaviour, and 0% of our resources trying to cope with the realities of consumer behaviour.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Being creative in advertising is essential. But it's also undeniably a dangerous game, especially when the creativity veers too far from the realities of why people buy things.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: You'd think that after 10 plus years of hysterical 'millennial' horseshit that went nowhere, the advertising industry would have learned something. But, of course, the ad industry never learns anything. So here we are again.

The digital advertising ecosystem has played a role in promoting hate and division, the author of the Ad Contrarian blog writes.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: What indecency starts with an "F" and ends with a "K"? Right, Facebook.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Despite predictions that we're turning the corner on ad fraud, the problem keeps getting worse, to the point where even experts who have studied fraud across industries for decades are stunned by the scale of waste.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: How can professional people who work in an industry that is largely constructed on media behaviour be so astoundingly misinformed?

The Ad Contrarian minces no words reacting to Mondelēz's new 'Humaning' approach to marketing: "In any sober industry the perpetrators of this nonsense would be taken out back by grown-ups and beaten to a pulp."

THE AD CONTRARIAN: The only function in business in which logic is not essential is the creative component of advertising. This is distressing to a great many very smart people.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: The fact that mass reach is harder to achieve than it used to be doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It just requires a more sophisticated strategy—and more sophisticated strategists—to execute properly.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Every 20 years or so the research industry has to come up with new fresh and mysterious "generational" horseshit to sell to marketing dimwits.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: If the current incipient rejection of Facebook is going to have legs it has to be based on principles, not politics.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: If brands really believe that Black Lives Matter, they must stop hiding their taxable profits in offshore tax havens.

The Ad Contrarian describes the stink created by the combination of trash websites and adtech that's incapable of distinguishing between those sites and the good kind.

THE AD CONTRARIAN: A report on the "absurd wastefulness of the hideous adtech ecosystem" will change nothing because the industry is "far too invested" to do anything about "the black hole of adtech".

Publicis Groupe got a lot of notice last week for guaranteeing clients their money back if its agencies fail to meet certain KPIs. The Ad Contrarian asserts that one thing is certain: "Publicis will be torturing the shit out of the KPIs".

THE AD CONTRARIAN: Brand babblers seem to think that every business problem is a branding problem.

One of the biggest dangers successful brands face is falling into the hands of dumbass marketers. An analogy to the game of baseball helps explain why.

Data, measurement and mathematics are important aspects of advertising when consumed in reasonable quantities. But when the craving for numbers becomes a mania, there are sure to be unintended consequences.

The same people who babble on about 'personalization' also won't shut up about 'storytelling. They don't understand that storytelling and personalization are enemies.