George Parker: still missing the beef!
A few extra thoughts regarding my post of last week about director Joe Sedelmaier, I feel it is important to recognize that the agencies that were smart enough to employ him, and the management of the brands that were astute enough to trust these agencies, are mostly long since gone. Hence we are no longer in an age when advertising respects and rewards its audiences for their intelligence and attention.
Now the ad biz is primarily controlled by the BDHC’s and their respective BDA’s who’s sole interest is the bottom line and the implementation of the ever increasing number of tools for tracking, targeting, and the fabrication of numbers which primarily show audience hits, rather than the sales effectiveness of the pathetic ads they continue to piss away their clients millions on.
Marketing guru, Orlando Wood of System1 Group, argues that the industry’s fixation on efficiency and hyper-targeting has hollowed out its creative core. “We’ve traded creativity for clicks,” he says. “Advertising has become salesmanship instead of showmanship.” The result: short-term sales, long-term erosion, and an audience that’s learned to block or ignore most of what brands purport to offer.
Another nice summation of the current state of the ad biz is by Nicole Greene an analyst at Gartner. “Budgets keep shifting toward digital, people are increasingly skilled at avoiding ads, and marketing teams are trapped in their own AI-driven doom loops that consistently over-prioritize digital performance metrics and starve high-impact offline channels.”
It shouldn’t need a three martini lunch (although I’m always up for one) to convince clients that advertising doesn’t need more performance metrics, it needs better performances. In my humble and somewhat jaded opinion, the ad biz’s future depends on brands rediscovering their capacity to entertain, connect and inspire. Creativity should be the goal, not bloody clicks. I’ll drink to that. Cheers! (And don’t forget, my new blog address is..adscam.blog.)
