‘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?