Fame: Brands wanna live forever
THE AD CONTRARIAN: While most brands are preoccupied with differentiation, positioning and purpose, their real aim ought to become famous in their category.
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The programmatic poop funnel
THE AD CONTRARIAN: I know 97% of my programmatic ad budget is wasted, I just don't know which 97%.
GDPR: It's all illegal
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.
Billions of ads misdirected, and no one noticed
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?
Integrity, Facebook style
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.
Wall Street Journal eviscerates Facebook
The words of the company's own executives reveal an organisation that is rotten to the core, writes The Ad Contrarian.
Question everything, including this
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.
Enough with the brand babble about meaning and purpose
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.
A perfect brief is one sentence long
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".
Tiffany tarnishes itself with a vapid, unoriginal, insulting campaign
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.
ANA's 'Rip van Winkle' moment
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.
Clueless and out of touch
THE AD CONTRARIAN: How can professional people who work in an industry that is largely constructed on media behaviour be so astoundingly misinformed?
Ad fraud: The other pandemic
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.
Gen Z: The next generation of misguided twaddle
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.
How adtech helped to radicalise the US
The digital advertising ecosystem has played a role in promoting hate and division, the author of the Ad Contrarian blog writes.
Top 27 Facebook outrages of 2020
THE AD CONTRARIAN: What indecency starts with an "F" and ends with a "K"? Right, Facebook.
The road to reality: A treatise about marketing delusions
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.
Creativity, bananas, and mouldy Whoppers
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 mystery of modern media: Mass reach in the age of fragmentation
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.
Advertising and logic
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.
Mondelēz and the self-delusion of brand purpose
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."
Facebook boycott: Principles or politics?
THE AD CONTRARIAN: If the current incipient rejection of Facebook is going to have legs it has to be based on principles, not politics.
Marketing's stupidest religion
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.
Our invincible ignorance: Report on adtech waste will lead to nothing
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".
Trash media and trash tech
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: Looking for problems
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.
The Ad Contrarian: Sugar and technology
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.
Carnival of hypocrisy: Brands, BLM and taxes
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: Storytelling or personalization (pick one)
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.
Publicis goes fishing
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".
Branding and grandstanding
THE AD CONTRARIAN: Brand babblers seem to think that every business problem is a branding problem.