Badvertising

An Expose of Insipid, Insufferable, Ineffective Advertising

Jim Morris

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781632657510
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Jim Morris has been responsible for some of the most memorable ad campaigns in history. He knows best that bad ads don't just create themselves. Part indictment on the advertising industry, part cautionary tale on what not to do with your ads, Jim pulls no punches to better ad people everywhere.

"How many ads have you seen that made you question the intelligence of whomever designed it? Probably too many. If every ad person read Badvertising, the world would be a more intelligent and prosperous place." — Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst

"Incisive and daring, Badvertising is the only book you need to truly understand both the inner workings of America's ad agencies, and the minds of those who never cease to astound us with both their creative genius and profound stupidity. After just one reading, you'll never see advertising the same way again." — Drew Eric Whitman, bestselling author of Cashvertising

How can the ad industry even exist when almost all of the products that it produces fall on a continuum from flawed to failed? What is it about this industry and the process of creating, selling, and producing ads that causes so much advertising to be so bad?

These are the questions answered in Badvertising. A provocative, truth-to-power exposé of ad agencies' flaws, foibles, and failings—and why they matter to the consumer and to those in the business. Morris, an advertising legend known as "Tagline Jim, " surveys myriad advertising "agents of stupidity." Hilarious, horrifying, and insightful, each chapter is a grenade lobbed into America's ad bunkers.

Badvertising is a candid, never-seen-before accumulation of real-world don'ts and more don'ts, providing valuable cautionary tales of advertising's stupid side.

LEST WE FORGET
CONSUMERS

CHAIRMAN JIMMY SAYS:
k

Evo/lve or die.

HERE'S THE THING. At least in the realm of most consumer advertising, when those we in the industry call consumers experience an ad, it happens in a brief moment, as a tiny, fleeting drop in the stream of their consciousness. They notice an ad if we (the ad guys) are lucky. And if we're really lucky, they engage with the ad and maybe even file a positive impression of it in their heads. They may even click through to a web site or make a call as a result of the ad. But that's it. Then they move on.

Consumers don't think about ads except in the moment. They don't think back to an ad later in the day. They don't analyze it with a critical eye. They don't spend time with it. They don't start breaking it down and examining each element. They don't question the motive of the advertiser. They understand full well that advertisers always try to present their products or services in a positive light, and they understand that advertisers will not intentionally denigrate or diss their target audience. If an ad is insulting or patronizing, consumers understand that this is not the advertiser's intent. Common sense tells them that insulting the consumers you're trying to engage and persuade would be self-defeating.

It's safe to assume that the people who experience ads are smart about advertising. They get it. They know their role. They've had a lifetime of experience being on the receiving end of ads. They understand what advertisers are trying to do and why, and they view advertising, in general, as something ranging from a pesky irritant to a demeaning, infuriating, insidious plague on daily life. On the other hand—even if they won't admit it in public—in a small way, they appreciate being diverted, engaged, entertained, and/or informed by good ads.

Through social media, customer-generated advertising, videos, blogs, games, and other formats, the advertising industry is in the process of exploring the possibility of engaging consumers for more than just a brief moment, hoping that brands can engage them in ongoing, meaningful, or at least entertaining conversations and germinate relationships that go deeper than one-buy stands. Whether these ambitions will bear fruit is an open question. My guess is that certain kinds of brands may be able to do this with certain kinds of people, although I'm far from convinced that the net result will be increased sales. Or more accurately, I'm far from convinced that these brands will be able to determine whether these new formats have resulted in increased sales. We'll see. Or not.

Here's an example. Bud Light debuted its “Dilly Dilly!” campaign in August 2017. The phrase “Dilly Dilly!” went viral and, depending on whom you asked during the time the campaign ran, it had a positive effect on sales—or not. Many advertisers dream of creating an ad that goes viral. For many, this seems to be the Holy Grail. But does that goal make sense?

Faily Faily? In early 2020, the Bud Light folks pulled the plug on “Dilly! Dilly!” Apparently, overall, the campaign failed to stem the beer's continuing decline in sales. Yet this was a very popular and celebrated campaign. You could even argue that it was very successful because it was noticed and liked, which can be seen as a positive for the brand. It successfully seeded the phrase—and the brand it brought to mind—in popular culture.

But to know whether the ad was successful from a sales perspective, we have to determine whether the Bud Light folks can actually quantify what effect it had on sales. Just because their sales continued to decline while this campaign was running doesn't prove the ads had no effect. It could well be that sales would have declined more dramatically in that time had the campaign not been running. This is very often the problem when trying to measure the success of an ad campaign, as we will discuss in chapter 17. With no “control” campaigns to measure them against, how can companies know what effects their ad campaigns are having?

In fact, we would all be well served to remind ourselves and our clients every day just how unimportant ads are to our target audiences in the larger scheme of things. And we must always be aware of how advertising-sophisticated these audiences are. Clients generally hate to be told that their ads are unimportant to the people with whom they're trying to connect. After all, their ads are very important to them. But as much as they may not like to hear it, or have a hard time accepting it, clients need to take consumers' lack of interest seriously in order to think intelligently about their ads. What is their message? And how is that message best delivered to have the most impact, or at least some impact, on their target audience?

Maybe if we all took this issue seriously we'd be more inclined to think beyond, and sell beyond, the obvious, the superficial, the easy, and the vacuous. Maybe we'd learn not to indulge in silly, unfounded, unreasonable fears about how consumers may react to an ad, as justification for killing our most interesting, engaging ideas. Ads are generally such an unimportant aspect of consumers' lives that we in advertising already have our work cut out for us just getting their attention, never mind conveying a message that means something to them. To make matters worse, many of the Agents of Stupidity we'll be talking about further undercut our attempts to affect our target audiences. And this makes the task of creating meaningful and engaging advertising much, much harder.

Because many Agents of Stupidity can overlap, the battle for an ad concept must often be fought on several fronts. As we will learn, an ad can be rendered impotent due to Negaphobia (chapter 11), Lost Time (chapter 12), Fear (chapter 20), Overthink (chapter 5), and on and on. In fact, Overthink becomes an extra-stupid Agent of Stupidity when you factor in the relative unimportance of any one ad to consumers. It's bad enough to overthink really important things. To overthink something as inconsequential to the big picture as an ad makes this Agent especially absurd. On the other hand, God is usually in the details when creating an ad. Thinking hard about those details without succumbing to Over-think requires walking a razor-thin tightrope.

In the end, we would be well advised to keep front-and-center the fact that “the consumer” is a person—a human being, not an equation or algorithm, not a statistical set, not a data point or an automaton, not a type. Each person is different from every other person, and at the same time similar to many other people. And each person is a dynamic, fluid system or process that is constantly changing, adapting, and growing. To complicate things, all of this applies to each of us in the advertising industry as well. As I will remind you more than once in this book, every human being is uniquely idiosyncratic.

SELLING BY TELLING STORIES

CHAIRMAN JIMMY SAYS:

Selling advertising to clients is largely dressing
guesses up as gospel.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM TELLS us that much of the best advertising consists of short stories, well told. If ads are often stories, then copywriters and art directors can be seen as modern-day storytellers of a sort. Moreover, ad agencies themselves, like most businesses, are storytellers as well. The ads they create are stories about their clients' products and services, about the benefits attached to these products and services, and often, indirectly, about the people toward whom the advertising is aimed. Many of the Agents of Stupidity I'll talk about in this book interfere with or diminish the ability of ad agencies and their clients to tell effective stories, or to tell stories effectively.

The stories that ad agencies tell aren't limited to those that take place within an advertisement, however. In order to tell those stories, the agency must first tell its clients—the advertisers themselves—stories in order to sell the advertising they've created. Ad agencies don't simply present work and then plead with clients to buy the recommended campaign. They sell their work by telling a series of interrelated stories that are often largely conjecture. The effectiveness of these stories ultimately comes down to how coherent, credible, and compelling they are, and how passionately they're presented—not necessarily how true they are.

Of course, agencies would like to think that what they do is construct well-reasoned and well-supported arguments in favor of whatever they're selling. And sometimes that's true. But very often, their arguments are built on loads of speculation, guess-timation, and best-case scenario-building. The guesswork may be grounded in some combination of data, intuition, judgment, probability, and experience, but it's still guesswork.

I call this persuasive speculation—the ability of agencies to tell their clients stories that effectively sell ads and then, once the ads are running, tell stories that credibly attribute success in the marketplace to that advertising. There's nothing wrong with this per se. But there is something wrong when agencies feel compelled to characterize their stories as more true than they actually are. (And yes, I see the philosophy student in the back of the room raising his hand urgently—ooh, ooh—to point out that truth doesn't admit of degrees.) They feel compelled to do this simply because their clients need—or the agencies think their clients need—this illusion of certainty to convince them to buy what the agencies are selling.

And, in fact, it isn't just clients who seem to need this reassurance. Agencies sometimes lie to themselves, just as they lie to their clients and their clients' customers. Faris Yakob describes this phenomenon in a devastating comment received from a friend:

If you're a cynic, you might say that marketing involves a great deal of lying, but in my experience in the field, we marketers lie to ourselves the most. We are able to tell ourselves that things are successful when the evidence says they are not. We tell ourselves that things are breakthrough and game-changing when they are the same shit but this time in VR. We tell ourselves that we are saving the world when we are selling sugar water.¹

So what kinds of stories do agencies tell clients? Stories about how their customers think and feel and behave; stories about what they do and don't care about; stories about how target audiences break out into nice, neat, discrete geo-demo-psycho-graphic segments; stories about cluttered environments and about which words and pictures, presented via which media, will cut through that clutter and affect their customers—and in what ways. They tell tales about brand equities and how to leverage them, arguing that “look at” or “glimpse” equates to “engage with” or “pay attention to.” They spin yarns about the dynamics of surfing, clicking, zapping, tweeting, friending, liking, and sharing, and about how people who tend to do such-and-such are also likely to do so-and-so.

Many of the fables that ad agencies weave involve process or methodology dressed up as science and correlation parading as causation (see chapter 21). They are forever scanning the horizon for new tools to leverage, new stories to tell—neuromarketing, big data, brand activation and engagement, contextual advertising, customer-experiential-this, and social-media-that. And they don't just tell their clients stories; they also tell themselves stories. One of the most pervasive of these stories is about taking creative risks. I call this story the Risk Myth.

The Risk Myth

Throughout my forty years as a copywriter and creative director, I've been either encouraging others or being encouraged myself to “take risks” when coming up with ad ideas—Not taking a risk is the biggest risk, and all that kind of blah blah. But the truth is that, honestly, I can't come up with even one instance in which any ad agency for which I've worked actually took this kind of risk. In fact, I suggest amending the aforementioned bit of conventional wisdom to say: not taking a risk isn't only the biggest risk, it's pretty much the only risk you're likely to take.

When considering this question, the first thing we need to ask is: What do we even mean by “risk” in the advertising world? In one sense, of course, everything that an ad agency does could be characterized as risky, from coming up with an overall strategy to help grow a client's business, to choosing the right media to convey a message, to determining the nature of the message itself. All of these things—in fact, almost everything that ad agencies do—are based on some more or less informed guesses. Who is the target audience? What message will resonate with that audience? Which media will deliver that message most effectively? If they guess right, the advertising may be effective. If not, the advertising fails. That's the risk—the unavoidable risk—every time out.

But this is not the type of risk that advertising gurus constantly extoll. What these presumed experts promote usually boils down to this: Do something different when you create an ad. The parade of synonyms they use to convey “different” is endless—”fresh,” “breakthrough,” “out-of-the-whatever,” “new-to-the-world,” “cutting edge.” But what they are really saying is simply this: To do something different is to take a risk.

When Crispin Porter Bogusky famously put up the Burger King Subservient Chicken web site long ago, that was something different—different from an eblast or a TV spot or an online ad or a free-standing insert i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PRE-RAMBLES ON THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
• PART II: AGENTS OF STUPIDITY
• PART III: TRUTH FROM ADVERTISING
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR