I was always told that the most accomplished acrobats, the best ice skaters, were the clowns. You had to be really good at the basics to hurl yourself around without hurting yourself. You had to be smart to appear to be an idiot, in other words.

I am, shall we say, of a certain age. Depending on your perspective that either means I have some experience when it comes to what works and what doesn’t, or that I am by definition out-of-touch and know nothing of the modern media world.

The World Federation of Advertisers is 70. Founded in 1953, the WFA represents advertisers responsible for 90% of global adspend. If local advertiser associations, like ISBA in the UK and the ANA in the US provide a helicopter view of what’s important to their individual market’s members, the WFA hovers above the helicopters.

It is rare for our mainstream media to pay any attention to the advertising industry. Ads – yes; why advertisers should boycott various news channels – sometimes; the business – no. This week ‘The Guardian’ did exactly that, featuring a story on how the industry is suffering from, and I quote, “burnout and inequality”.

No serious advertiser ever runs a campaign on a single communications channel. This is as true today as it ever was – every campaign uses a combination, for very good reason.

‘We need to join the dots’ rings out the cry around the industry. Whether the dots in question are creative and media, research and modelling, planning and buying, procurement and marketing or any and every combination of the above, they have to be joined.

This is a little like Miss World contestants calling for World Peace. Or politicians calling for An End to Poverty.

Sometimes I think this blog is turning into a veritable grump-fest. Nothing’s as good as it used to be; ads suck; social media is destroying democracy; ad fraud is funding drug cartels; pitches are badly run and anyway are all about saving money. And on.

A week or two ago, Marc Pritchard, Procter and Gamble’s Chief Brand officer took to the ANA stage to give a keynote speech. He chose to call this ‘Resetting the Bar’; you can find the article he published to go alongside his remarks here.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to social media (and believe me I have a lot of them) is the deliberate confusion between opinions and facts. This usually takes the form of: ‘I know that many agree’ or ‘I speak for many when I say..’ when the reality is that the writer spoke to some bloke in the pub who shrugged and said something like: ‘Yeah, seems like a good idea.’

Television is the most effective advertising medium ever invented. No ifs, buts or maybes; ask anyone to recall their favourite ad and odds are it will be a TV ad. Ask the world’s biggest and best marketers to nominate the last medium they would ever remove from their plans, and it will be TV.

There are enough trite slogans around the advertising and media world to fuel a month’s worth of ChatGBT generated content. Indeed, many feature both ‘ChatGBT’ and ‘content’, so we’re off to a flyer.

Right up there near the top of the league table of vacuous statements is the mantra that we ‘need to move from outputs to outcomes’. I think I first heard it used (by the client) at a global Coca-Cola meeting in the mid 1990’s; I thought then it was profound.

Last week’s post ended rather elliptically with references to bells ringing and clocks ticking. I promised to continue this week; so here goes.

I think the ad business has a problem. Furthermore, it is in large part self-inflicted.

Last week I had the pleasure of having lunch with Bob Hoffman, aka the AdContrarian. Bob has decided to stop his weekly blog posts (although he will continue writing and speaking) – which is a loss for the industry as a whole and something of a disaster for me given the number of times the Cog Blog has been inspired by his work.

This week’s Ad Association report that the number of people working in advertising and marketing has fallen by 14% in 3 years is concerning.

As The Media Leader reports: “HR leaders across the industry have advised that skill shortages have been most acute at entry-level and at mid-level (people 3-5 years into their careers)”.

I often catch myself staring out of my office window. My garden shed is I admit dull, but when the option is to read still more on developments within the US TV audience measurement world, its permanence reassures.

For those not fully up-to-speed with this issue, this post is here to provide a cynical (and I suppose I should make clear not a literally accurate) point-of-view.

I’m an optimist; it is with hope that the Cog Blog returns for the New Year. I don’t make grandiose predictions for the year ahead, like everyone else I haven’t got a clue what will happen except that it will likely be unexpected

But I can offer hope. Here’s my 2022 list of eight. Are there still grounds for hope?

For the last few Christmases the Cog Blog has published, as our last effort of the year, a post based on a fairy story. Hope you enjoy it.

Once upon a time there were two children, a brother and sister called Pronsel and Gratel. They lived with their parents in a little village on the edge of a forest.

One hundred years ago McCann Erickson was founded on the positioning ‘Truth Well Told’; although when that line was first written I don’t suppose anybody labelled it as ‘a positioning statement’.

Everyone is an expert in two things – his or her own job, and advertising. This is hardly a new thought; nor is it particularly original. Everyone has an opinion. We might as well be politicians. Or football managers. 

Lord Northcliffe, the UK newspaper tycoon who owned ‘The Daily Mail’ famously said: “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.” An unknown consumer said: “It’s all advertising, isn’t it?”

One of my favourite quotes comes (of course) from Jeremy Bullmore: “People build brands the way birds build nests. Through the straw and scraps they chance upon.” Note, it is people who build brands.