George Parker: The 21 Immutable Secrets of BDA Bullshit?

Having been around the track quite a few times over my checkered career, I’m once again starting to pick up that rancid smell of fear which always permeates the Adverati when the economy begins its inexorable tightening of the marketing budget screws after the excesses of the “money grows on trees” cycle. You know, the one everyone unfailingly assumes will last for years… And guess what? It never fucking does. Remember the euphoria of the dot com explosion followed by the hand wringing that accompanied the inevitable implosion? Ah, those glorious, all too short years when starts ups promised insatiably greedy venture capitalists munificent returns on their widows and orphans pension fund money. All the Silicon Valley digerati pulling 80 hour benders on cold pizza and warm Jolt had to do was figure out a way to sell dog food on the Internet for triple the price the punters would pay if they just got off their fat asses and walked down to the corner convenience store.

But never forget… For ninety percent of these short lived start ups, the business model wasn’t about making an actual profit; it was about building a huge customer base of fanatics who would later shower you with money… Just like WebVan, Pets.com and boo.com then, and “rage du jour” Twitter now.

Pardon my glazed over eyes. In the immortal words of Yogi “It’s like deja vue all over again.”

Anyway, the point of this weeks rant is that the usual BDA scumbags are now coming out of the woodwork to promise that in these challenging times, they have the answer. Just four weeks ago, some big time Media honcho from Interpublic stood up at a same-old, same-old boiler plate ad conference in some exotic location and announced… “Hard times call for hard sell advertising.” Mmmm… No wonder these guys get the big bucks! Then last week, Ogilvy announced “In order to provide clients with solutions to the challenges they are facing in this recession, we are establishing a “Recession Marketing Practice,” which will bring together 100 top Ogilvy experts in marketing strategy, analytics, measurement, e-mail, technology and media. Apparently, these “top experts” (Isn’t that redundant?) will be working with a set of “21 Ogilvy Solutions” intended to help clients maximize the value and performance of their marketing budgets. Have you noticed how these douchenozzles just love to lard up their bullshit with numbers? That’s why they read business books with titles like “The 21 immutable marketing secrets of the Kalahari Nomads.”

So, here’s the psfk, 64 thousand dollar question of the week. Am I the only one around here who thinks this new ardor for cheap and effective solutions raises one rather obvious question. If they are so great and actually work better while saving the clients money…Why the hell are they only trotted out when times get tough? If I was a BDA client, I’d want to know what I’ve been blowing shitloads of money on during the good times. No doubt, there’s a Power Point presentation with lots of colored pie charts, circles, triangles and graphs that could explain it to me… But as I said at the beginning of this weeks tirade. Been there, done that!

George Parker is a guest columnist for psfk.com. He the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, which is without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. He is the author of MadScam and his new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, which is currently setting the ether ablaze (and which you can order now on Amazon). He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.