George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every Tuesday he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every Tuesday he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

Living in Boise. Idaho, one of the things I really look forward to is my daily New York Times. Yes, I can get it online, but I’m enough of an old fart that I like to relax with a hard copy over my morning coffee. The problem is, it has to be flown in from Seattle and doesn’t get here until almost midday, sometimes not even then as it is delivered by a notorious local family of drug addicts!

“Simply because it will be impossible for online advertising and social media to deliver everything that is expected of it. The stark reality is that advertising on the Internet is not going to grow; it’s actually going to decrease.”

As I’m sure many of you know, I hosted two panels at the PSFK “Good Ideas” conference at the Soho House in New York last Thursday. The subject of the meeting was “Advertising.” Which, surprisingly, had never been dealt with as a stand-alone subject at any of the previous “Good Ideas” shindigs. The format was that there would be two panels, the first a bunch of old geezers, who had come up through the traditional BDA structure, and the second being more representative of the newer kinds of communications companies who are not wedded to the traditional way of doing [...]

I’ve been accused of Twitter bashing on both my blogs and columns. To which I have to admit, there is some truth to that, but as I’ve tried to explain many times, it isn’t because I have anything against it as a communications platform, or that I don’t think, as a business, it will ever make anything close to the astronomical numbers people are punting around. No, what I don’t like about it personally is that it is yet one more brick in the wall being erected to block human communication. To which you answer, it’s a great communication tool. [...]

I’ve just spent the last three days in bed with swine flu or something. Well whatever it was, I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for four days, so you know it was bad. But throughout my ordeal, I did manage to catch on to the fact that due to a massive denial-of-service attack by the NKVD, millions of Twitterati were close to despair, if not suicide as they were unable to get their daily fix of every minute, on the minute, tweets. Apparently this also had a minor effect on Facebook, but not many people cared, as Zuckernozzle’s empire [...]

I sometimes have to laugh at how we in the communications industry, whether it be advertising, media, marketing, music, films, pop culture, whatever, actually have the temerity and chutzpa to think we have any kind of influence over what the great unwashed masses out there think about, spend their money on and do with their miserable lives. Listen up guys. We don’t.
In spite of all the grandiose claims made by BDA’s and the increasingly “reality TV” driven, and hopelessly irrelevant cable networks, not to mention the oompaloompa, “blob” like growth of social media… The “Adverati” and their deep pockets clients [...]

In the last week, the bad news about the current state of BDA’s (Big Dumb Agencies,) keeps getting worse. Publicis announced Q2 2009 earnings, saying that the recession, which started in 2007, was “unexpectedly steep,” and the company was facing “increasingly extreme” market corrections. Net income was down nearly 14%, and they are also in the bag to General Motors for $15 million. Over at Omnicom net income was down nearly 25% and they are talking about a further round of layoffs on top of the 3,500 people they’ve axed in the last few months. It’s the same dismal picture [...]