Friday, September 04, 2015

digital advertising. where did it all go wrong?

By 1971 Manchester United’s Irish star George Best's hectic off-field celebrity life style had began to take its toll on his effectiveness on the pitch.


This erratic behaviour was connected to Best's developing problem with alcoholism. He eventually parted company with United (and football) during the 1973/4 season, at the end of which Manchester United were relegated.

George Best was only 27 when he quit - an age when most players are usually regarded as being at or near their peak – and the ‘wasted genius who threw it all away’ narrative was never far from the tabloid headlines.



They won a silly amount of money, went back to their hotel room and ordered the hotel’s best champagne which was shortly delivered by an Irish room service waiter.


“So tell me now George…
 Where did it all go wrong?”






That’s a lot of money scattered over internet advertising’s bed.



Where did it all go wrong?



Adtech’s parents (Direct marketing) knew their role. They were there to make the phone ring after brand advertising had done it’s job.


But if - as adtech asserts - people are demanding and responding to more personalised and relevant ‘advertising’ , why isn’t ad-blocking adoption going down instead of up?

It turns out that people don't like the idea of being tracked and profiled.

They don't like being followed around the web by ads for stuff they have already bought (this has a knock-on effect in that it harms those brands that are doing the following. It looks desperate, it’s creepy and does nothing for ‘signal’)


So naturally they start installing adblocking software.

And everyone loses.


Even if a human user doesn’t see the small portion of ads served that are actually viewable (most of the page views and clicks reported are fraudulent anyway) they are still being tracked, for the most part, and the adblocker may have done a deal with ‘white-list’ adservers anyway to allow preferred ads through.

From an advertisers point of view, and also for agencies and publishers; the failure with ad tech (aside from fraud, data-leakage, invasion of privacy) is that it is simply not able to deliver the necessary brand advertising part of the equation.

The internet’s inability to deliver on brand advertising means it is (today) no place to be if you want to build a brand over the next 10 years, and no amount of adtech is going to fix that because we have set up the web to only deliver direct response marketing in advertising clothing in the form of impressions and clicks - coincidentally the easiest things to fake and to track - and an ecosystem that rewards crap.

Brand advertising creates demand, direct response fulfils it.


Publishers could restrict their premium inventory, creating scarcity and an opportunity for ‘signal’.
A bit of brand-building conspicuous waste.

(I pitched for work a couple of years ago and this was their exact model. There was no way they were going to sully their web presence with anything other than premium ads or premium native – same strategy as the print mag).

And us in agencies need to stop pushing adtech and data-driven as the answer to every digital advertising problem for fear of looking not-up-to-date.

A final thought...if account planners still cared about being representing the minds of consumers rather than the latest gizmo then we would never have got into this mess in the first place. 

Stanley Pollitt is turning in his grave.

George Best famously noted:


We've squandered a lot of advertising money on dubious adtech and direct response advertising that's created no value for publishers, advertisers or consumers.

Time to spend some on booze, birds and fast cars.

Friday, August 28, 2015

I see you baby...shakin' that ass

Lions have a couple of principal hunting methods.

The first is one in which the lion stalks, undercover, getting as close as possible to the target, saving vital energy for a final burst of speed at the end.

Lions can’t run very fast over distance.

The second method involves find a bush close to a water hole, for example, hiding in it and waiting for unsuspecting dinner to appear.

This second approach is double-good for the lion who can also have a snooze whilst technically ‘out hunting’.
A bit like ‘working from home’.

Our Lion wakes up and sees a young gazelle taking a break by the water.
Lion tentatively moves out of the bush, but the alert young gazelle clocks him straight away.

But gazelle doesn’t run.
Nor does he crouch or try to hide.
Instead he turns to face the Lion.

Standing up straight he barks and stamps the ground with his hooves, all the time staring-out his potential attacker.

The Lion comes a bit nearer.
Surely the gazelle should get off his mark now?

Nope. He stands his ground, then begins a series of repeated jumps, using all four legs, a kind of dance known as ‘stotting’.

After a number of these jumps he then begins a somewhat leisurely run, shakin’ his ass and short black tail at the Lion in a kind of gazelle version of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’

The Lion steps back into the bush for another nap.

Why would the gazelle waste time and energy jumping up and down in front of an extremely dangerous predator instead of legging it as fast as it can?

And why does the Lion not go for him?

Biologist Amotz Zahavi asked this same question, and published the findings in 1975 in a study called The Handicap Principle.

(I recommend this one to young planners when they ask for reading material.)

Zahavi suggests that the gazelle is 'signalling' to the predator that it has seen it; and that by 'wasting' time and by jumping high in the air rather than running away, it demonstrates in a reliable way that it is able to outrun the Lion.

‘Even parties in the most adversarial relationships, such as prey and predator, may communicate, provided that they have a common interest: in this case, both want to avoid a pointless chase.’

The gazelle is communicating – implicitly - to the Lion as if to say:
‘Look at the amount of energy I can waste, and still get away from you.
Let’s not waste each other’s time.
Go and find something to eat that you might have a chance of catching.’

The Handicap Principal in a nutshell states that - to be effective - signals have to be

1. Reliable

It’s an elegant idea: waste makes sense.
‘Conspicuous’ waste in particular.


The waste itself is just what makes the ‘advertisement’ reliable.

Researchers Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier wondered if the same thing applied in brand advertising and published their findings in The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works.

The pair devised a number of signalling tests including showing respondents showing ‘expensive-looking’ and ‘degraded’ versions of the same TV commercials to experimental subjects, and found that the perceived expense was influential in reported perceptions of brand quality.

 ‘The perceived extravagance of an advertisement contributes to advertising effectiveness by increasing credibility. It draws especially on the Handicap Principle in biology: animals use wasteful characteristics to signal their exceptional biological fitness. It hypothesises that excesses in advertising work in a similar way by signalling brand fitness…


The most important fact about a signal is that both senders and receivers benefit from its use.

At the core of signalling is the idea that businesses are constantly communicating through their actions, even when they are not intentionally communicating.

Over time, we implicitly learn that heavily advertised brands are of a high quality, and because advertising causes salience of the brand name, most times we can infer high quality from recognition alone.

It is the increasing absence of such signal that is becoming one of the core problems we have with digital advertising today.

Faris has spoken of it in terms of a Malthusian trap

‘Every time some new space opens up in culture, we rush to fill it, create an arms race, destroy the space in our self created Malthusian Trap.’

Bob Hoffman adds this, in his inimitable fashion.

‘I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the internet than adtech.

Also Don Marti (who has been on the case about signal longer than most)

‘But when advertisers try to target users individually, signalling breaks down. Targeting turns an ad into the digital version of a cold call. Targeted ads tend to “burn out” the medium in which they appear, through a Peak Advertising effect. Each new targetable medium falls in value and popularity as users figure it out, filter it, or get their governments to restrict it.

The question remains.

At some point soon we are going to have to figure out how the hell to build brands on the internet, because we haven’t done much of a job so far.

But more on that later...

'I know you all know what I'm talkin' about,
Don't be lookin' at me like that now,
I see you baby shakin' that ass'

Monday, June 08, 2015

aim for fame

James Norrington: 'You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of'.

Capt. Jack Sparrow: 'But you have heard of me'.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

how to win at 'chicken'

Two cars head toward each other. 



What to do? 



Friday, May 22, 2015

aberrant salience meets rosser reeves uptown





This is where ad people often get slightly confused.

















Compare scores for yay vs nay and there’s your effect.



As Les Binet and Sarah Carter explain in their Mythbuster series:


Just this week the annual Sensis SocialMedia Report asserts:


All good so far.





Aberrant Salience Meets Rosser Reeves Uptown.

A problem with the mind’s regulation of salience.
States of psychosis in which the wrong things appear important.

Like the focus on heavy buyers,
The flawed emphasis on loyalty over penetration,
Tight targeting over broad reach,
And price promotion over brand building.

All strategies proven to be less profitable.
And yet still widely practiced and recommended.

Friday, May 15, 2015

catenaccio, totaalvoetbal, tiki-taka


Phil Rosenzweig ‘Left Brain, Right Stuff’ 2015 



This game is often said to be totaalvoetbal’s finest moment.








The Grande Inter team were captained by libero Armando Picchi.
The irony of this fact shall become apparent.


‘Class + Preparation + Intelligence + Athleticism = Championships’ 




For a start, totaalvoetbal is an attack-oriented strategy.


The genius of total football was its agile approach.








Cruyff summed up his (total football) philosophy:







Perhaps totaalvoetbal could be countered?
Perhaps defensive football was not destroyed?




Just like how ‘performance’ based short digital marketing that looks to capture demand and convert will not deliver on it’s own, without brand building work, conducted consistently over time to create demand.







During this time Cruyff introduced a new theory.



Not this OR that, but this AND that.






To the same token, combining short term effectiveness with long tem brand-building is not easy either. In fact it’s the most difficult form of marketing possible.

Further in Martin Wiegel’s article he points out:




Wednesday, May 06, 2015















The Melako league now consists of 16 teams.





According to our zookeeper friend, the numbers are improving.
