Finish This Quickly.

I read this essay by Ben Rhodes just moments ago in The New York Times. Here's the bit that tilted my internal pinball machine: "In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives." [The underlining is mine--not the original essay's.]

Though it's probably stupid and myopic on my part, many things I read--even big items like the essay above--I bring down to my world and the industry I work in: advertising.

Let's start with the title of the essay, rewriting a word or two so I can make my point. Let's change it to "How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying Advertising."

Today it seems like short-term advertising, aka "performance marketing" is destroying brands that took decades to build. Sure, we can use promotions to gin up short-term sales, but while we do that, we often see long-term value deteriorate. 

While we're putzing around with fads and technologies and bowing to the great god data, we're forgetting basic stuff like saying what brands do, why they matter and what makes them different. We're chasing after ephemera and ignoring fundamental.

So, there are whole categories of goods and services that people won't buy unless they're 40%-70% off. If 90% of the time a $10 product can be bought for $7--eventually that product will never be sold ever again for full price. It will only be bought when it's on sale. If you planned to sell 100 units at $10 and you have to lower the price to $7, what you've done is marked down your company 30%.

Worse, your brand, no matter what you say it is becomes nothing more than "30% Off."

Here's a dopey for instance. When I was a kid, Listerine used to spend millions advertising. I probably haven't seen an ad for Listerine for 25 years. If I go to one of the two remaining drug stores in America, CVS or Walgreens, they have a store brand that looks identical in every way to Listerine, yet it costs probably 40% less. All those millions Listerine used to spend justified spending more for Listerine. Now, I have no reason to. So I buy whatever's cheapest. Lack of advertising, short-term thinking, took Listerine (and hundreds of other brands) from a leader to a too-expensive parity.

Short-term thinking, like performance marketing,
stopped telling people why one brand cost more than another and why it
was worth that extra dollar. That costs $Billions in brand equity.

The agency business has short-termed its own brands to-death, too. Look at what WPP has done to Y&R, JWT and dozens of others. 

As bad, I've heard of holding companies that win a giant account and staff it with nothing but freelance. They save money that way, and they can expand and contract with client needs. Others hire people for a maximum of one-thousand hours per annum, so they can avoid paying for benefits. In the short-term money is saved. In the long-term, the quality of work, relationship and the agency's brand itself decay.

Someone will likely say that the pressures today for sales and profit are greater than ever. As if there were a time when the pressure to succeed in business wasn't greater than ever.

Growing up in the business, I remember a small agency, I think Earle Palmer Brown, that specialized in retail advertising. They had a mantra, "build sales over-night, build brands over-time."

In other words, it ain't one or the other. It ain't either or. It ain't performance or brand. It ain't people or profit.

It's both.

It's tough love.

The best kind of love there is.