If there’s one thing that pisses me off more than anything else, it’s when I read in the mainstream media, a piece about advertising or marketing and it’s obvious within a couple of paragraphs that it’s been written by some junior hack who’s never worked in the business. A perfect example was in last Sunday’s New York Times Business section titled… “Put an ad on the Web. Count clicks. Revise.” The basic premise of this travesty was that thanks to the wonders of the internet, advertisers can now find out whether or not their ads are working. Using as an example some douchenozzle who sits in his SoHo office, but doesn’t actually create anything, he combs through graphs and Excel spreadsheets ‘til his eyes bleed. That’s analytics baby! Oh yeah… And I’ll bet he’s got an MBA as well! Seems like he tested a few ads for his Vespa client: One said, “Smart looks. Smarter purchase,” and displayed a zero dollar down, zero percent interest offer. Another read, “Pure fun. And function,” and offered a free T-shirt.
And guess which won… Damn if it wasn’t the zero down, zero interest one. Who the fuck would have guessed that? After all, wouldn’t you just kill for another cheesy tee shirt you can use to wipe up that vomit from last night’s tequila thrash? Thank God for the graphs and Excel spreadsheets, otherwise we’d be looking at a Vespa tee shirt glut.
Of course, in classic ad biz snake oil style, the effectiveness of the ads is measured by the number of clicks generated, not by something as esoteric as sales achieved. After all, that might leave the agency accountable.
What’s really pathetic is when you read… “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.” Hello, did you ever hear of something called Direct Marketing? Long before the advent of the Internet, companies like Dell, Sears, Readers Digest and a ton of others could tell which ads where generating inquiries, making the 800 numbers ring, and actually selling shit. They could also change the ads overnight to fine tune them for the best results.
I’m not saying that you can’t do this quicker and with more variations digitally… But, there’s nothing new here in the basic premise, it’s only the vehicle of delivery that’s changed. The zero down, zero interest message worked better than the free tee shirt, because of the value of the offer. It could have been a fucking message in a bottle that gets washed up in your front yard, rather than being delivered digitally… Content is King.
What’s particularly funny is that the guy responsible for all the Vespa graphs and Excel spreadsheets has gone on record as saying he is trying to hire people from Citigroup and BofA, and he hopes that the layoffs in the financial industry will help him do it on the cheap. Ha, good move, you bozo. Hire the fucktards responsible for the current financial meltdown and turn them loose on Madison Avenue… ‘Cos we don’t have enough bean counters there already!
George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.
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