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.