June 22, 2015

The Investment Idiots Of Advertising


In the world of financial investing, there are plenty of ways to be an idiot and lose boxcars full of money.

Perhaps the most obvious way is to listen to the arguments of headline grabbing financial writers. They will write very convincing articles about how you should put all your money in gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

Or you should take all your money out of gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

In a world of media overload, the only way for them to attract attention is to advocate sensational measures.

We have the same thing in the advertising and marketing world. We are deluged with books, articles, and conferences in which the most extreme assertions are the ones that grab the headlines.

We have had over a decade of extreme nonsense about the death of advertising; the death of television; the death of radio; the miracle of interactivity; the magic of social media marketing. It has all been a bunch of melodramatic bullshit.

We have been subjected to a non-stop barrage of bad marketing investment advice by people who are not smart enough to gain attention by giving sound guidance, but are just smart enough to gain attention by promulgating hysterical nonsense.

In many ways, investing in advertising is more difficult than personal investing. You can follow your personal investments on a day-to-day basis and see how they're doing.

But advertising and marketing investments are much more difficult to track. First of all, there are so many variables. Then there is the lag time.

When Pepsi launched the biggest social media marketing experiment in history -- the Pepsi Refresh Project -- it took them over a year and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue to realize what a disaster it had been.

But that's what you get when you follow the overblown rhetoric of advertising investment idiots. They trade on fear of missing out (FOMO) and they stampede naive marketers into believing their turgid narratives.

Sadly, if you're going to be an advertising or marketing "expert" you have to have something radical or extreme to say or nobody pays attention.

As we've said here many times, no one ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same.

6 comments:

Cecil B. DeMille said...

I know I'm not the only one who wonders how the fuck some of these people get these severn-figure jobs without knowing a goddamn thing, right? We are an industry that is enamored with form and uninterested in function. Until we insist on more gin than fizz, we're going to be in decline.

Jeffrey Summers said...

"We have been subjected to a non-stop barrage of bad marketing investment advice by people who are not smart enough to gain attention by giving sound guidance, but are just smart enough to gain attention by promulgating hysterical nonsense."


Lesson over, class dismissed!

Valentine said...

Maybe we shouldn't look at advertising as speculation.

The Financial Standards Accounting Board and the IRS don't. To them, "The costs of advertising should be expensed either as incurred or the first time the advertising takes place."



Perhaps when advertising is viewed as fixed costs of business rather than as investments, smarter expenditures on tried and true media are more likely to be made.

Cecil B. DeMille said...

And perhaps when we start tying advertising to sales results, we can stop wearing waders to work.

Jim said...

In marketing you rarely lose it all. Marketing (despite what 'they' say) isn't the be all and end all. You always get something for your money maybe not much but something. Because marketing is part of the company that own a product. LIfe goes on. Whereas bad investments you can blow the lot. Or more likely your pension provider can blow the lot. Many companies produce shit ads and they still get stocked and sell product.

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