Math. Not New.

Years ago I was the co-head of a mediocre independent agency that had a financially-savvy CEO. He was there to gin things up in preparation of selling the agency to one of (it didn't matter which one) the giant advertising holding companies. When I worked there, the place was valued at one-billion dollars. The CEO was hoping to get it to five-billion bucks so he and the other shareholders would be so rich they never again had to pay taxes.

Around that time, or a few moons later, the world was wholesale switching from Blackberries to iPhones. Talk of a game called Angry Birds was dominating my social feeds. There would be ten, twenty, fifty LinkedIn posts a day, "Lessons You Can Learn About Customer Relationship Management from Angry Birds." Or "What Angry Birds (and my teenager) Taught Me About Business Continuity." Hollywood, never one to miss an intelligence-insulting trend made an Angry Birds movie. 

One day, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I read two different articles in whatever paper I was reading. 

Rovio, the parent company behind Angry Birds, one article said, had a market cap of $70 billion. (Again, if my memory is right.) While the New York Times, another article said, had a market cap of just $2 billion.

Even if my Rovio numbers are off by a magnitude of 10 and Rovio peaked at a $7B cap, I wondered. How can Angry Birds be worth between 350% and 3,500% of what's arguably the world's most-important newspaper, a paper read by millions of political and business leaders and high net worth people?

It seems to me two things are coming into play here, neither of them good. 

One: We're confusing momentary attention and intrinsic value. One is like a smack across the cheek. The other is a deep, long-lasting effect. One is a bruise. They other is trauma. 

Many in the ad industry are doing the same. They're creating some sensation (usually propagated via unpaid channels) of brief notoriety. While neglecting the more valuable, and more difficult long, tedious slog of brand-building.

The latest Burger King bushwa is a great example of this. As far as I know, their same store sales have been down year over year decade after decade. They've burnt through agencies like trump burns through cranial merkins. For many people, the brand has fallen into complete irrelevance and it's dropped off people's consideration list. 

Pay no attention to that.

Look! A new mother eating a burger. 

Two: As a culture and an industry, we've become card-carrying believers--adherents, even--of the Greater Fool Theory. As long as someone will buy something, it's worth selling it, no matter the long-term effects of the something you're offering. In so many ways, the Greater Fool Theory is peak "something for nothing-ism." Peak short-term thinking.

Ginning up a company's share price to profit from a sale or doing fake ads and getting a gullible company to buy them for the buzz they'll get are two faces of the same coin.

Neither helps bolster or create enduring value.

They're both packaging. 

Wrapping shit in gold leaf and hoping you're out of town by the time the buyer is hit with the stench.

More and more of what I see in our industry is like a politician's promise of a tax break. It might win some votes. 

While bankrupting all of us.