How can anyone take marketing seriously when people spew out such incoherent guff

You’re quite right. Marketing and advertising are populated by incompetent, illiterate, clueless nitwits – or so the research shows

I read this in Advertising Age about an hour ago.

“What fraud is doing is making this category of engagement advertising, raising it up quite a bit and saying that this is our anti” – Joe Marchese, CEO of True[x], an ad-tech company which creates ads requiring human engagement to unlock content.

Imagine being in the same room as someone who trots out such incomprehensible piffle.

But, come to that, why should you be surprised? Here are some facts from Are your marketers trained in marketing? in Malaysia’s Marketing magazine yesterday.

– 90% of marketers have no training in Marketing Performance & Marketing ROI.

– 80% struggle to show the business effectiveness of what they do to their bosses.

– 67% don’t believe marketing ROI requires a financial outcome (!!!)

– 63% don’t include any financial outcome when reporting or presenting results.

So how do they measure the effectiveness of what they do?

All the wrong ways.

64% rely on Brand Awareness above all.

58% rely on “Likes”, “Tweets”, “Clicks” and/or “CTR”.

31% of the poor deluded souls think measuring the audience reached gives ROI.

And over 80% cannot write a simple P&L and balance sheet.

Well, years ago Richard Branson admitted that he can’t read a balance sheet, and nor can I, so that doesn’t worry me.

What does is the fact that these people don’t even realise what they are there for.

Are you thinking this is just Malaysia? No.

Fournaise interviewed over 1,200 CEOs and senior people in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia

They measured the effectiveness of 2.5+ million B2C/B2B marketing strategies, campaigns and ads.

We’re talking about an industry that invests over $400 million per annum – on sheer folly.

In the words of Jerome Fontaine of Fournaise, these people are seen as  ‘money spenders who jump on and hide behind the latest fads and blow smoke’.

Yesterday I also watched a splendid speech by Bob Hoffman which talked about all this folly.

In relation to current fads, how these bozos measure what they get paid for and how they squander their firms’ money he noted:

–  Banner ads have a click-through rate of 1/1000

– Only 38% of total online traffic is human; the othr 62% Bots

–  54% of internet display ads between May 2012 and February 2013 never appeared in front of a live human being.

– Facebook’s “Pages” Platform reaches only 6% of a brand’s followers – going down.

And as I hope we all know, e-mail is 40x more effective at getting new clients than Facebook and Twitter combined.

All this and similar stuff has pushed me over the edge.

I have been thinking for years of writing another marketing book – but have put it off.

Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing has been (so my publisher assures me) a best seller since 1982. But it has also swollen grotesquely. There’s just too much to read.

And marketing has changed. The internet means that pretty much all marketing is now direct.

So now that I am too old to benefit, marketing has moved my way, and I am now working on Commonsense Marketing which will be a lot shorter but I hope a much easier read.

I shall be offering the first chapter free so you can see if my hand and brain retain their ancient cunning.

But also to help you get more than your fair share of this $400 million business infested by nitwits.

I don’t know where the $400 million figure came from. I am sure it is many times that. Maybe it just refers to the campaigns Fournaise measures.