Digital ads are absolutely fucking awful. Our industry needs a MAGA movement

Ask them their favorite digital ad, and their face will screw up in confusion.

Why such different reactions?

Last week, I attended Possible in Miami, perhaps the largest advertising show on the planet that doesn’t focus on any ads in any of its sessions. Why not? Are we too ashamed of the output, or have we just forgotten what it is that we actually do?

Let me be clear here, on any device, at any moment in time, in any premium or dodgy part of the internet (with one painful exception):

Digital!

Ads!

Are!

Absolutely!

Fucking!

Awful!

They are terrible in a sublime myriad of ways. We’ve got broken links, bad copy, poor resolution, and horrible photography. We’ve got absolutely no frequency capping, and generally speaking, we’ve got incredibly bad targeting.

To be advertised at today is to be insulted, the promise of adtech is a lie, we don’t offer one on one conversations at scale, we offer random precise guesses as to who you are, that result in it thinking you’re an old, pregnant male suffering from poor health. It will engage you in conversational Cantonese to stoke your passions for luxury handbags and industrial rivets.

Take a few seconds to unblock those ads, and then take a look and see what you get. Did a human see this? Did anyone care? Did anyone expect me, a human, to click?

I don’t think we realize how deeply nasty it all is; between the lies, the fraud, the scams, the bots, the targeting, the following, the harassment, the automated ways to spank budgets on fake clicks, faster than ever. It all makes pig butchering or 419 scams look rather sophisticated and above board.

The only industry to go backwards?

In the last 25 years, almost every industry on the planet has seen leaps and bounds. Why hasn’t our industry progressed?

In 2000, when buying a car, you had to navigate a crap new car. Now, that has broken down; now it seems like ALL cars are spectacularly good.

In the last 25 years, we’ve seen TV shows become amazing, TV sets from our dreams become attainable, smartphones, rockets, space, the insurance claims process, solar panels, and even British Airways now has a semi-functional app on a couple of good days.

I would argue that the only industry on the planet to get worse is advertising. An industry forged from brilliant minds, dedication, imagination, empathy, and ideas seems bereft of any resemblance to passion or craft in the digital domain.

We got here because we gave up. We let advertising split into performance and brand, and we let one half of the industry live in denial, turn their backs on commerce, data, and basic maths and focus on each other, on awards, on art, and on films.

Meanwhile, the others became obsessed with every metric they could get their hands on, anything that could be tracked, anything that could be proven, anything that happened immediately they could take credit for. They became obsessed with acronyms, dashboards, and numbers. They had no idea how advertising actually worked. They moved ever more money closer and closer to the point of sale because it was harder for any grains of proof to elude their gaze.

We’ve got everything we need already

If you had to dream of the ideal scenario to make really good advertising, you’d want the following:

You’d want screens, screens that we look at all the time, screens with sound, with music, with great resolution.

You’d want attention, you’d want people transfixed like moths to a bright light, for HOURS AND HOURS a day, mesmerized, lost, lonely, empty, grasping for any form of stimulus to ensure they avoided any thought or even the briefest nanosecond of boredom.

You’d want a bit of contextual data. You’d want to know where people are, what they are doing, what they are looking at, what they are interested in, and whether they are rich or super young.

You’d want to be able to get people to do something there and then, perhaps buy the stuff you are selling, find out a bit more, call you, book an appointment, or see where your thing is on the map.

You’d want a little bit of data, perhaps to check to make sure you’re not smashing frequency caps, to use to serve ads sequentially to tell an evolving, complex and mesmerizingly enticing story, to move people from awareness to preference.

You’d want technology that makes it easier to create something that looks beautiful. From using Photoshop to great photography to finding brilliant people, you’d want it to be easy for people to make something that is spectacularly good.

We have all of this. We have the best canvas for advertising you could ever possibly imagine.

It is hard to imagine a single part of this magical mixture of parameters that could make advertising more exciting, more valuable, more wonderful, more seductive.

And somehow, we managed to completely screw it up.

If we are to change it, we need to reconsider many parts of everything in advertising.

We have to fight against short-termism and make the case that most of the wonderful and almost miraculous benefits of advertising happen over a wonderfully long period of time, but in a painfully weak way. And that’s fine.

We have to explain the idea that powerful ads do more than persuade people to buy now; they bring a massive array of benefits, from being able to withstand price rises to launching new products to gaining distribution to retaining employees to allowing a price premium or securing PR.

We have to accept the wonderful idea that commerce and advertising are now as one, and ads should be able to offer more.

In fact, almost all the principles of modern marketing are wrong, and the very principles that built brands for centuries remain true.

We have to convince people that almost all the data we can capture isn’t that helpful, and almost all the great things that result from advertising aren’t possible to measure easily. We must also convince them that judgment and taste are our guiding principles.

Dear reader, you may think I’m miserable about advertising, or even life in general.

I promise, I’m not remotely miserable, I’m extremely optimistic and enthusiastic, I think advertising is fantastic, I think marketing is essential, I think brands stand for something unique in the world, they help us make decisions, they make us feel better about the stuff that we own, and in a slightly sad way they have quite a lot of meaning.

So, I’m just incredibly frustrated that we seem to be getting it all wrong. Advertising deserves to have a place in our heart and to be an industry that makes us feel proud to be a part of.

It’s time to Make Advertising Great Again.

If you liked this piece, read Tom’s last entry here: Yes, AI will redefine marketing – but not the way you’d expect.

Tom Goodwin is a globally recognized expert in marketing trends, AI, and digital transformation. He is the founder of All We Have Is Now, author of Digital Darwinism, and a keynote speaker at events all over the world. His work emphasizes “nowism,” a pragmatic approach to futurism that advocates using existing technology to drive meaningful change.

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.