Kenneth Williams was a brilliant comedic actor, best known for the ‘Carry On’ films. He died in 1988 aged 62. In 1987 he was interviewed on The Michael Aspel Show and said this about increasing specialisation in the medical profession: “Everyone’s becoming better and better at less and less, and eventually someone’s going to be superb… at nothing”.

Comparisons of different video channels are commonplace on social media. Whether based on ‘Reach’, ‘Attention’ or ‘Cost-per-Thousand’, they aim to satisfy a need for a ranking. They’re the listicles of the media world, and about as informative. As one commenter had it: ’Why are we comparing shoelaces to trees?’

We have become so obsessed with numbers that we’ve forgotten how to ask questions. We’ve misplaced our critical judgement.

Disclosure: BJ&A assisted Smithfield in the event described here

Marketers have greater access to more data than ever before, and yet it seems they are more confused than they’ve ever been. You can certainly have too much of a good thing.

A Comment on Richard Brant’s LinkedIn article, by Brian Jacobs, Founder BJ&A, Co-Founder, Advertising: Who Cares?

Richard Brant’s piece on LinkedIn raises a lot of important issues, issues that have been discussed in part in various settings and under various labels. Having them together in one piece, especially when you consider the contributions from both Jon Watts and Jonathan Waite is certainly helpful.

Really? Do we have to? Can’t we find something else to do? There’s hair to be washed, dogs to be walked, drying paint to be monitored. Anything rather than spend any time at all discussing a nerd and his algorithms.

But our friends at what rather wonderfully used to be 1 Hacker Drive (now 1 Meta Way) are again making headlines. They have been fined US$18 billion, an amount I rather naively thought was a lot. It isn’t, as we shall see. META’s share price promptly went up.

For the benefit of those Cog Blog readers younger than me (that will be about 99%) Spock is a fictional character from the Star Treck franchise memorably played by Leonard Nimoy. Spock is defined by his love of logic. He’s half human, half Vulcan; illogicality is a curious phenomenon that doesn’t exist in his world.

According to the Star Treck fan website, Warp Factor Treck, Spock ‘defines logic as the absolute rejection of emotion in decision-making, using cold reason, empirical data, and probability’.

Advertisers have a choice where to place their ads, even if in some instances they have little control over where they eventually end up.

I’ve only ever worked in the advertising industry, my experience in other professions is not just limited, it’s zero. Our industry seems to have the memory of a hamster. Our institutional capacity to learn is limited, I suspect it’s worse than most other industries.

This may explain why many self-declared experts, influencers and commentators on my feeds seem to believe that they invented advertising.

In the days when newspapers set the daily news agenda much was made of the ‘church and state’ argument. This made clear that advertisers had zero impact over the judgement of Editors, that Editors’ decisions were sacrosanct and not for sale.

The same rule applied to TV – advertisers had no right to pressurise those responsible for content.

Consumers bought, read, and believed the newspapers they chose not on the basis of who was advertising in them but on the editorial content.

Deep breath, it’s time to open up and share my media habits. Why? Sometimes a sample of one can bring a dose of real life to numbers on a page. Most of us aren’t particularly unusual, and it can be revealing to examine one’s own behaviours as an indicator of why a certain type of person does what he or she does.

These are not happy times for agencies, or indeed for the ad industry as a whole. Wherever you look you fall over issues: agencies not trusted, META et al offering to handle all activities, in-housing on the rise, creative slop, fraud (both consumer and advertiser), local CEOs being thrown in prison. It’s hardly a laugh a minute in adland at the moment.

It may be useful to look back at the mistakes of the past in the hope that at least we might avoid them in the future.

During her presentation to the Advertising: Who Cares? event last month, IPSOS’ Samira Brophy quoted Charles Vallance, Founder of VCCP in a piece he called The Tyranny of Targeting:

“Modern media analytics is in danger of reducing the medium back to being the medium alone. If we continue down this path, we may end up on a fool’s errand, mistaking accuracy for effectiveness and precision for persuasion.”

Last Thursday, Advertising: Who Cares? organised a 3-hour event called Who Cares Wins. The centrepiece was two long-form discussions, one on ‘content’, the other on ‘safety’, preceded by a review of research that concludes, over and over again that the context within which an ad appears impacts its performance.

The first Cog Blog post appeared on 2^nd July 2013. There have been over 450 posts since. I don’t think any have been on as important a topic as this one.

If you search for ‘Conferences on the Future of Media’ what you find are specialisms. Events on media technology, on programmatic advertising, on trading. Or on TV, influencers, podcasts.

I can’t find an event on the very future of the media, as in: does it have one?

The fifth chart in Caroline Johnson’s and Nick Manning’s opening presentation at last October’s Advertising: Who Cares? Summit contained four words.

As Nick and Caroline said (in their fourth chart) “50% of global ad spend goes to 5 companies”.

‘May you live in interesting times’ is often quoted as an ancient Chinese curse. Google’s AI facility questions that, claiming it is more likely British, and not a curse. Whatever, the word ‘interesting’ is in some interpretations seen as suggesting a time not only of instability but of creativity and growth.

We are at an ‘interesting’ moment in the story of advertising supported media channels.

Last week two court cases in the US went against the social media platforms. The first, in New Mexico found META guilty of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children. The second, in Los Angeles found META and YouTube guilty of building addictive social media platforms that harm children’s mental health.

It’s the oldest trick in the book. Threaten everyone with extinction; convince them that only you have the answer / ultimate weapon; deploy your weapon; save the world; lead your ecstatic followers into the land of plenty. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Except – it’s no threat, I don’t have the answer, there’s no land of plenty and it doesn’t all end happily.

There’s a group of individuals that’s grown both in numbers and influence across the industry over the last ten years or so. They have no trade body, no corporate structure, no common goal. They deal in ideas and opinions. We need them and their ideas more than ever, and yet they’re subject to rudeness, criticism, sneery little digs from those they dare to criticise.

“The circumstances of Molly’s death are far from unique. Technology plays a role in almost one-quarter (24%) of deaths by suicide among young people aged 10 to 19, equivalent to a lost young life every week.” ‘Pervasive by Design’: The Molly Rose Foundation.

Last Thursday Channel 4 screened the documentary film ‘Molly Vs The Machines’, the tragic story of Molly Russell who took her own life in 2017 aged 14. When the Coroner’s Court came to hear the case in 2022 (5 years of obfuscation from the platforms) the conclusion reached was: “Molly died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.”

Here’s a Cog Blog post from the time of that 2022 verdict.

I suppose this moment had to come eventually. This blog has steered away from the ‘Is YouTube TV or not’ debate on the basis that to me it makes as much sense as arguing whether or not a direct mail piece for my local pizza place is a newspaper, given that both are printed on paper.

But here we are. The debate rumbles on, an example of how the great debates of our industry have degenerated from things that matter to things that really don’t.