Now that the dust has settled from a mediocre game with very mediocre advertising, and we’ve been inundated with analysis of both, maybe we can see things for what they are.
Simply put: the Go Daddy spot and the analysis that followed, given by ‘advertising and marketing experts,’ together highlight the absurdity of advertising and agencies. Advertising is meant to be part art and part science... isn’t that what we tell ourselves and our clients? These past few days we’ve seen the man behind the curtain and he ain’t pretty or smart.
A few very clear observations we all should have made:
1. The Go Daddy kissing spot was weak by any measure: not very creative, not well done, average at best. Here’s one way you know this -- all the hype the agency put out about the ad prior to the game tells you that they knew it was ho-hum. They built up the ‘45 minutes of kissing’ with a supermodel in hopes of getting the audience to ‘understand’ the coolness of the concept.
Even more telling, a spokesperson for Go Daddy reported the highest level of phone calls ever during the 24-hours after the ad ran. But s/he wouldn't release any numbers (telling those of us in the industry that this is a little white PR lie).
2. The audacity of some ‘experts’ to claim that, “since we’re still talking about the ad it was successful” is damn nonsense. This is the excuse that advertising losers use to keep their jobs and validate their salaries. If, as an industry, we can’t universally ‘condemn’ the ad for being boring, trite and unimaginative (or better yet, a waste of money) -- then we have no standards by which to judge our work. Rather, we are shysters hiding behind a concept of ‘creativity’ that’s as simplistic as saying, “anything that stands out is good.” If that’s the case, then any 10-year-old can be an ad executive or run an agency.
3. Look, it’s essential to stand out, but that alone is nothing more than being a carnival barker. And for any agency to claim success based on this lowest common denominator is ludicrous. You know, you can ‘stand out’ for being exceptionally stupid or exceptionally crass or exceptionally uninformed. In claiming the lowest ground you are as special as another well-endowed pole dancer in Las Vegas.
4. We either have standards or we’re hacks. Either Picasso is a great artist or his work is no better than any first grader. Either “The Sun Also Rises” is great literature or Barbara Cartland and Ernest Hemingway are just two more pulp fiction writers.
5. Anyone who plays devil’s advocate and claims that “the ad might not have been to your taste but it was successful because we’re still talking about it,” is a fool.
C’mon -- successful executives will tell you that in any meeting you should do something to make your presence known. You don’t want to be anonymous in a room. How, then, to accomplish this? Well, one way would be to prepare for the meeting and ask an intelligent question. Fine. You’ve been remembered. Or you could stand on the table and pull down your pants. That would be very unforgettable. And you’d be a Go Daddy advertising jackass or a partner in Deutsch New York. (The agency is still tap dancing about the ad... rule #1 of PR, never admit you might be wrong.)
NOTE: On one agency site (PPBH) I found this sentence about the Go Daddy ad: “This is the commercial that we all love to hate, but of course can’t help but talk about.” On another site, one ad executive asked if the ad was meant to be 'purposely bad,' and a paradigm of a new style of advertising with built in errors to engage the public.
Do you see what's wrong with agencies?
“Consumers want a new story... authenticity, not spin... participation, not propaganda.”
Showing posts with label death of marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death of marketing. Show all posts
Digital Catch-22 Has Stolen Marketing… Right from Under Our Noses
Let’s be honest -- marketing as most of us know it no longer exists.
There are several reasons for this and many of them lie at the feet of marketers themselves: poorly conceived campaigns, slow delivery of the creative, the attitude that we are ‘ar-teests,’ the derivative nature of most of our work these past two decades and agency billing procedures that are a micrometer short of highway robbery.
Marketers have been replaced by IT and software guys who have redefined our art/craft so that they can claim to be marketing experts. They define the job so they are the job. And that job is numbers, numbers, numbers.
Better still, here’s the new marketing task in a nutshell:
Trick consumers into seeing ads for products they don’t want and don’t believe in.
Sure, larger, more sophisticated companies still understand the need for marketing in the sense of defining a market, positioning a product and telling an emotional narrative that drives sales. Please look at the Samsung Galaxy III spot… the story it tells, the images it uses and how it’s positioned Samsung as superior to the iPhone. That’s marketing.
But most medium to smaller companies have been convinced by the plethora of Internet/SEO/automated sales people that they have no need for this type of marketing and storytelling. Instead they willingly spend on software and analytics and email lists and multiple landing pages. Numbers, numbers, metric, metrics.
Here’s the cool part: the metrics are meaningless. They were created by digital guys to match the capabilities of the software. It’s a shell game: we measure those measurements that we can measure. Catch-22 if there ever was one.
Do these metrics equate to sales or profits? Rarely, if ever. But by God they can show their clients digitally-generated numbers, so they must be true.
They toss a bone to ‘content,’ but don’t care, really. Had Google not mentioned that new algorithms would be driven by content, these Net people wouldn’t give marketing narratives the time of day.
You know that old line about ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’? These guys sell neither.
Again, they have one goal: To trick consumers into seeing ads for products that consumers don’t want and don’t believe in.
That’s Marketing 101 in 2013. Live with it.
Amazingly, these guys preach the need for a personalized message but then send unwanted and totally impersonal junk to any name they can get their hands on. Personalized? They can’t spell it.
Now here’s the real Catch-22. Because these automated mavens have the numbers and count the numbers, they never fail.(Remember what Stalin said about elections? He didn’t care who voted as long as he got to count the votes.) If a product doesn’t sell it’s because of a weak story -- fire the $20 an hour copywriter. But, if the product does sell, it’s all in the software and programming.
And gullible CEOs are lining up for the privilege.
Did I just read that 83% of company execs think that marketing has ZERO effect on sales and/or profits? Ask these same men and women about the value of automated, integrated, digital, analytic programs and they’ll virtually wet their pants with glee.
At a time when smart marketing is desperately needed, it’s been co-opted, vilified, scorned and ignored in favor of software, metrics and meaningless numbers.
There are several reasons for this and many of them lie at the feet of marketers themselves: poorly conceived campaigns, slow delivery of the creative, the attitude that we are ‘ar-teests,’ the derivative nature of most of our work these past two decades and agency billing procedures that are a micrometer short of highway robbery.
Marketers have been replaced by IT and software guys who have redefined our art/craft so that they can claim to be marketing experts. They define the job so they are the job. And that job is numbers, numbers, numbers.
Better still, here’s the new marketing task in a nutshell:
Trick consumers into seeing ads for products they don’t want and don’t believe in.
Sure, larger, more sophisticated companies still understand the need for marketing in the sense of defining a market, positioning a product and telling an emotional narrative that drives sales. Please look at the Samsung Galaxy III spot… the story it tells, the images it uses and how it’s positioned Samsung as superior to the iPhone. That’s marketing.
But most medium to smaller companies have been convinced by the plethora of Internet/SEO/automated sales people that they have no need for this type of marketing and storytelling. Instead they willingly spend on software and analytics and email lists and multiple landing pages. Numbers, numbers, metric, metrics.
Here’s the cool part: the metrics are meaningless. They were created by digital guys to match the capabilities of the software. It’s a shell game: we measure those measurements that we can measure. Catch-22 if there ever was one.
Do these metrics equate to sales or profits? Rarely, if ever. But by God they can show their clients digitally-generated numbers, so they must be true.
They toss a bone to ‘content,’ but don’t care, really. Had Google not mentioned that new algorithms would be driven by content, these Net people wouldn’t give marketing narratives the time of day.
You know that old line about ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’? These guys sell neither.
Again, they have one goal: To trick consumers into seeing ads for products that consumers don’t want and don’t believe in.
That’s Marketing 101 in 2013. Live with it.
Amazingly, these guys preach the need for a personalized message but then send unwanted and totally impersonal junk to any name they can get their hands on. Personalized? They can’t spell it.
Now here’s the real Catch-22. Because these automated mavens have the numbers and count the numbers, they never fail.(Remember what Stalin said about elections? He didn’t care who voted as long as he got to count the votes.) If a product doesn’t sell it’s because of a weak story -- fire the $20 an hour copywriter. But, if the product does sell, it’s all in the software and programming.
And gullible CEOs are lining up for the privilege.
Did I just read that 83% of company execs think that marketing has ZERO effect on sales and/or profits? Ask these same men and women about the value of automated, integrated, digital, analytic programs and they’ll virtually wet their pants with glee.
At a time when smart marketing is desperately needed, it’s been co-opted, vilified, scorned and ignored in favor of software, metrics and meaningless numbers.
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