We Have to End this Death Cult in Marketing

This is an excerpt from a longer column available, for free, at the ever awesome Marketing Week.

Before Will Smith got hold of it and turned it into total pants, I Am Legend was a remarkably disturbing novella from science fiction author Richard Matheson. In the book Matheson’s hero Robert Neville is the last man left alive after a zombie plague infects the rest of the human race. He spends years avoiding the undead and trying to make sense of the strange place the world has become.

I feel a lot like Robert Neville these days. Trying to be a marketer in 2017 is a frighteningly difficult existence with death apparently at every corner. In a few brief years the discipline of marketing has been turned into a fatalistic doom-fest in which every major brand, core feature and widely-held concept is portrayed as either dead, or near death. I challenge you to go a week without some marketing numpty turning up and making headlines by proclaiming the death of this or the imminent demise of that.

This week, for example, Alexis Ng of agency ReFUEL4 is at it over at The Drum pointing out that “the death of advertising as we know it” is under way. Apparently because technology allows companies to advertise in “smarter and more precise ways” the “slow death of traditional advertising” is upon us.

Can I humbly suggest Ng takes a look at just about every news story about Google’s highly stupid and imprecise advertising to see a slight flaw in her argument. While it’s true, as Ng points out, that digital advertising is indeed passing the 50% ad spend mark in many countries, the last time I looked “traditional” advertising forms like TV, radio and outdoor were about as far from death as you can imagine. There is a difference, you see, between being “dead” and simply being “a lot less powerful than you used to be”. But that distinction is lost in a hyperbolic death cult that sees anything more than 10 years old as ready for the knacker’s yard irrespective of what the actual data might say.

Why stop with advertising? We are repeatedly and reliably informed that the death of TV is not just imminent but has, in case you had not noticed, already happened. As the Ad Contrarian blog author Bob Hoffman drolly observed recently: “TV To Die Soon. Again”. The latest obituary was written last week in Ad Age by consultant Shelly Palmer, who used the “profound implications” of the newly announced deal in which the NFL will broadcast 10 games on Amazon Prime later this year to predict that “TV may actually die soon”.

We have become a doom-laden profession, applying imminent death to almost everything we see, feel and touch for too long and its getting kind of embarrassing.

What Palmer neglects to mention at any point in her article is that this is not the first time that the NFL has partnered with a tech giant. Last year it signed a similar deal with Twitter. That sparked a whole load of bullshit articles about the death of TV then too. Guess what share of the audience watched the games on Twitter? Just over 1%. So much for the death of TV.

You know the reason why Twitter failed with its NFL broadcasts? Come on, you know! Because Twitter is obviously going to D-I-E in 2017. That’s the argument over at Wired, where writer Davey Alba suggests that unless Twitter quickly adapts to the changing world of tech it will perish. Of course, the other alternative option, the one that will almost certainly transpire this year is the one that Alba completely rejects. That would be the scenario where Twitter sits back on its gigantic cash pile and stumbles about losing money for another five years while occasionally making bold but pointless announcements that have no long-term merit.

One of the reasons that Twitter is deemed to be in so much trouble is that it is being killed by Google. But that can’t be the case because – and you may have expected this news – Google is also massively dead too. Oh yeah. Over at Medium this week digital developer Daniel Colin James was eloquently, and entirely unconvincingly, arguing that “in a few short years, Google has gone from a fun, commonplace verb to a reminder of how quickly a giant can fall”. Yes, you read that right, Google – bigger than God, part of the ‘digital duopoly’, worth ￡470bn, eating up all the growth in digital marketing spend globally – that Google. Apparently, they’re fucked. So there you go. Dead by Christmas.

The main reason they are....continues at Marketing Week