{"id":718,"date":"2016-02-17T12:11:40","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T12:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/?p=718"},"modified":"2016-02-17T12:11:40","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T12:11:40","slug":"advertising-dies-a-little","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/advertising-dies-a-little\/","title":{"rendered":"Advertising Dies a Little"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I lived and worked in the USA I promised myself that I would never start a sentence in any professional meeting with the four words: \u2018In the UK we\u2026\u2019. When I started this blog I made myself\u00a0a similar promise \u2013 never start a post with the words: \u2018There used to be\u2026\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

There used to be a TV show in the UK called Monday\u2019s Newcomers. I would be amazed if more than one or two people reading this remember it; it was a showcase for new ads. Every Monday morning the nation\u2019s creative departments would sit down, turn on their TV and view all the new ads that had aired the previous week.<\/span><\/p>\n

The practice came to an end not long after some enterprising guy looking for a job made an ad about himself which he aired once on our smallest commercial TV station. He thus managed to get his video CV in front of every creative director for an airtime cost equivalent to a couple of pints.<\/span><\/p>\n

The only ads reviewed like this were TV. TV ruled. I must have been in hundreds of meetings when I knew full well that the budget wasn\u2019t sufficient to buy any sort of effective campaign, and consequently hardly anyone would ever see the ad. I and many like me argued internally and with the client, but it rarely did any good.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many clients were convinced that the world was waiting expectantly for their masterpiece; which they just knew only had to be seen once for there to be a riot as people rushed to the stores demanding the product.<\/span><\/p>\n

It often didn\u2019t work. Of course there were exceptions but by definition, low impact campaigns were rarely noticed. We are talking about an era when creative excess was commonplace, and most advertisers understood little and cared less for media arguments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now we have the exact opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite a great deal of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, many in the client community are obsessed with online advertising. \u2018Think of how many millions of people we\u2019ll be reaching\u2019 they say. \u2018Even if we only convert 0.01% think of how much product we\u2019ll shift.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

They forget that they may not have the appropriate creative execution for the medium being proposed. \u2018The numbers are so huge the work doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s a numbers game\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear \u2013 I\u2019m not suggesting that digital advertising never works. But the way to improve the odds on it working is to plan it just as the planner plans any campaign on anything else. Not to buy blind, or hand everything over to a real-time bidding system, or to abdicate all responsibility to an algorithm and someone at a trading desk who wouldn\u2019t know the ad they\u2019re placing if it came up to them and said good morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

But still the obsession with huge numbers and what seem on paper to be cheap-as-chips media prices continues. <\/span><\/p>\n

Digital sales guys whose advertising knowledge can be summed up as \u2018never mind the quality, feel the width\u2019, cheered on by agency buyers with an eye to their margins and their agency deals, working for CMO\u2019s not sufficiently confident to follow the facts over the fads, and whose CEO\u2019s and CFO\u2019s know how to spot a trend (especially one that\u2019s backed by billions of dollars\u2019 worth of VC cash). All of these people look at the numbers and swoon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Much advertising placed like this doesn\u2019t deliver results, not surprisingly. The agency traders blame the creative work, the creatives shrug and point out that no-one asked for their opinion in the first place, the digital sales guys adjust the algorithms, the CMO blames fraud, bots, adblockers and everything else he\u2019s read about, but remains too invested in the process to jump ship. <\/span><\/p>\n

The CEO and the CFO smile sadly and say they always knew advertising didn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p>\n

And we all die a little.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I lived and worked in the USA I promised myself that I would never start a sentence in any professional meeting with the four words: \u2018In the UK we\u2026\u2019. When I started this blog I made myself\u00a0a similar promise \u2013 never start a post with the words: \u2018There used to be\u2026\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}