It wasn't all that long ago--a decade and a half, really, that I was toiling at the self-proclaimed "digital agency of the decade."
It was a place much better known for winning awards than for helping brands. But it was stuffed to its crumbling rafters with all order of pundits, prognosticators, pomposticators and proclaimers who, like Wilde's definition of a Cynic could "tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing."
While at this agency, I heard from a dozen people a day that the new calculus of marketing success was gathering Facebook likes. That a million likes would translate into marketshare, somehow.
This is before people were hep to the notion that Facebook should more accurately be called "Democracy-Destruction-Book," or "Child-Sex-Trafficking-Book," or "Perpetrating Anti-Semitism-Book."
These dozen people a day were so cool, they spent good portions of their day telling the world where they were via Four Square or Heptagonal Rhombus or whatever, often boasting how they were mayor of one over-priced coffee bar or another, as if that mattered as much as a bucket of warm spit.
While at that agency--trying to bring it a degree of marketing gravitas to it (or gravlox, whichever is better on toast) I connived a sin as bold and egregious as that of any heretic from Jan Hus to Martin Luther.
When someone was going on about the viability of this or that new technology that would undo in an MBA's quarter 200,000 years of human behavior, I had the "brass," to say, "show me one example."
Show me one example where Facebook likes turned into share points. I did the same at Ogilvy, too. A media person tried to brow-beat me into opening a spot with a logo. It would, she assured me "perform better." I said, "I would think it would perform worse. Who cares about a logo except a client or a media person tracking these things." She said, "No it will perform better." I said, "I'm not asking for a lot. Just one piece of data that proves it to me." For whatever reason, she left the fluorescent conference room in tears.
These days being reality-based is heretical. Any abeyance of the orthodoxy of the theory class will get you sent to binary Siberia. You'll be one of those who "harkens back," or who "doesn't get it."
The passage below was just published in The Economist and sent to me by a friend. Yes. I have friends who read The Economist. They're not 42-year-old management trainees.
OOTUPs (one of the usual pundits) made one of the usual predictions, that AI will eat creative. By application, there's no need for creative.
I was thinking about pontificatory impunity and then it hit me.
The reasons pundits get away with pontification it is simple. From their daises at Davos or Austin or CES, or wherever, their words give followers the permission they need to do what they wanted to do all along which is cut costs and act less human because it saves money.
Pundits are today's equivalent to the lackeys that complimented the emperor's missing haberdashery. They're marketing court jesters. Their existence depends making anodyne statements that soothe and support (and never challenge) the dominant complacency.
Yes. I’d quote someone wildly if they spoke at every forum worth its lanyard that there's a direct correlation between hot-fudge-sundaes and washboard abs. I'd even pay them. Especially if I could get my cardiologist to agree.
There's a lot of purpose-washing in advertising or green-washing. Like Chevron saying they'll spend $100 million on clean air, when they earn $20 billion in profits from dirty air. Or agencies going full-force on DEI in 2019 only to abandon it by 2024. Or a chain like Starbucks banging on about how they'll get rid of plastic straws by 2070 or some such. As if going strawless should take longer than building the great wall of China.
A lot of what we read from quotations like the above is Pundit-Washing. The same sort of "pseudo-science" that under-pinned eugenics, forced sterilizations and the idea that humans don't have a single origin, and therefore race is a bonafide construct.
Pundits say things. They make us feel good and in the know, so we self-fulfilling-prophecy-ize them. We repeat what makes us feel good. Especially if we have investors to please.
Above is a chart of Intel's market cap. You can see (if you can read a chart) that the company has lost two-thirds of its value over the last five years. With the rise of Nvidia--a company currently valued at $3.3 trillion (45x Intel) Intel probably ain't going to come roaring back.
Of course advertising won't solve Intel's technology and innovation lacunae. But good advertising, where they show what they're doing, how they're inventing, how they're planning to return to viability, if not prominence, is important. You know, why should anyone care? What's in it for them?
Instead, Mr. Tobaccowala, Intel runs AI-generated ads beckoning us to elevate our success with AI at the edge. When it comes to tech, I'm a pretty brainy guy. I have no idea what those words mean or why I should care to find out. Especially find out from a company that's seen it's market-cap tumble by over $200 billion over five years.
If I lived near Intel headquarters, I'd love to visit one of their mens' rooms and stand close by the urinals. I'd hear the sound of money (and their future) being pissed away in a stream of urinary AI.
For about 30 years, I've heard about technology that will deliver to me the right message at the right time. I've yet to experience one instance of the same. Usually, I get ads for endless seafood buffets while I'm on my way to a colon screening.
Someone, please, show me one example of AI helping a business' marketing succeed. (Outside of a business that sells AI.)
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