7 things we learned from Bob Hoffman this week
Earlier this week, Mumbrella made its way into the ThinkTV offices to interview San Francisco-based adland cynic Bob Hoffman. Here’s seven of the most important things we learned during our chat with the infamous Ad Contrarian.
Good people make great things
How can we make advertising less annoying? Bob told us: “The first thing we have to do is to get better people working on it. You’re not going to get great advertising from mediocre people.”
Clickthrough rates are about as close to zero as you can get
“We have click rates for online advertising that are reported to be about six in 10,000, which is about as close to zero as you can get.”
Fake news is still a big problem
“We have teenagers putting up websites with fake news and attracting ad tech money and earning money just by using the system in bad ways. If we’re ever going to get back to the point at which we trust what the news media is telling us, we have to realise and appreciate that the advertising industry plays an important role in that and we need to start acting responsibly.”
Creativity is being devalued in the ad industry
“Wherever I go I hear the same two things. One, that advertising is not as effective as it used to be, and two, that advertising is not as creative as it used to be. It’s very hard for me to believe that these two things are not related.”
Customers don’t want to talk to brands online
The social media fantasy was that we were going to take this amazing worldwide thing called social media … We were going to turn that to our advantage by doing social media marketing. Consumers were going to want to go online and have ‘conversations’ with us about ‘brands’. They were going to ‘join the conversation’.
“And it was all a fantasy. It doesn’t exist.”
Online advertising has become about collecting information from consumers
“What online advertising has become is a hacking contest, and whoever can collect the most information wins, regardless of who knows what information is being collected.”
TV is having babies
“The narrative that has developed over 15 years about TV dying is so ridiculous and we keep hearing it regardless of the fact that TV isn’t dying, it’s having babies.”
I’ve been following Bob for about a year now and working in IT and Marketing for over 20 years.
I’ve seen the decline in Marketing and Advertising in regards to great content and engaging advertising.
It seems Marketers are trying to be Omni-Omnipotent, in that there’s a desire to won all channels but the investment is not there … no one really owns a channel anymore the tail is too long.
I agree with Bob, we need to get back to what Marketing and Advertising do well and leverage new technologies that delight and end engage our prospects, support our customers and win back lost customers.
We should leave the ‘Surveillance’ to the spy agencies (whom at this point probably have a high trust ratio than online advertisers!) and we should use technology to build trusting relationships via enabling technologies that support the delivery of our products and services … not focus on shadowing every consumer to eventually pick them off …. mind you at 6 clicks per ten thousand – good luck with that!
Is that the new normal we want as Marketers and Advertisers?
(And people used to call TV and Junk mail “carpet bombing” – digital advertising has become a continuous 24/7/365 WW1 style bombardment … we [Marketing and Advertisers just don’t want to admit it!).
Thank you, Bob, for sharing and being prepared to be honest … truths and facts are better than falsehoods.
#digitalwindmills
“I really believe that there are massive growth opportunities”
Really, dude? In publishing? In magazines? At Bauer?
Who are you kidding? As an ex-Bauer employee, I can say I worked with lots of great, talented people, but that’s kind of irrelevant. It’s just beating a dead horse. The morale was so low when I left and I can’t see that every being turned around.
Is it time to ditch most magazines and just go much harder on digital publishing? Why is OK and NW still around? Not to mention Cosmo?
I’m so baffled.
How does this marry up with the industry’s own currency which shows that virtually nobody under the age of 50 watches it any more?
Firstly, ‘the industry’s own currency’ shows no such thing. For example, Nielsen in the US very recently reports that Americans 18-24 still watch over 2 hours of traditional TV per day: http://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817
And secondly, Bob’s point re ‘TV having babies’ is that TV-like media usage (e.g. SVOD) is huge. See Deloitte’s Media Consumer Survey for a summary: https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/media-consumer-survey-2017.html
The click rate somewhat misses the point. If it’s that low then it’s likely a programmatic prospecting buy, for which 10,000 impressions would cost approx $50 based on a $5 CPM. Literally, a gold note. Six clicks demonstrates six “people” (about 1% of the time they’re bots by our IAS counts) with potential interest in your product for $8 each. Is that worth while? Depends on your product, but if it’s plane tickets to London, or a car, then, yeah?
@Clinton Marketing is about a mix. Some strategies on TV will work and very well too, whilst others will be a costly failure. To just sit in one camp is quite frankly embarrassing and out of touch. (Some would say delusional.)
If you are a CMO and you are not engaging companies like Google and tapping into their data and ‘facts’ about consumers and your business, then you are missing out. (Don’t do this via a ad agency, engage them directly.) If a digital media company can come into your office and tell you, as an example: how many Android users came into your stores within a given month. What their search habits are like, relating to your products and your brand and how to leverage this. Then over the next few months, actually see the sales go up, as a result of adoptive strategies, well this data and agile approach can actually be applied to traditional to drive efficiency into campaigns as a whole.
Now, if Bob is simply referring to the bad publishers and bad ad agencies (and there are many), then I agree. However, if you work with the good guys, you cannot lose. As for Fake News. Has Bob read any of Murdoch’s papers recently? Fake, or white lie? Jay Wetherill was getting a serve by The Australian today. Of course he was, he wants clean energy for the state – disgusting and advertisers should not fund this hatred.
I was hoping for real data, but instead I just saw Nielson stats which are laughable in both their methodology, and their dependance on the broadcast media fmcg complex.
“Imagine a world where the only news we get from television.” Is this guy for real?! There’s another major way we all get our news it’s called THE INTERNET.
Jeez wouldn’t want to be working at Bauer right now with this fossil making “future-proofing” decisions. No wonder the head of digital went back to Germany if this guy’s running the show.