Last week, the Times ran a piece lamenting the "junk-ad epidemic:" poorly targeted ads made cheaply for extremely cheap products. According to Tiffany Hsu, who wrote the piece, "advertising experts agree that crummy ads...appear to be proliferating."Advertising moves in cycles, and it has recently swung from a period of ballsy image-based advertising driven by creative departments to a period of product-based hard-sell advertising driven by management and tech-raised number-crunchers. From Crispin's Burger King in the aughts to OKRP's "Whopper Whopper" jingle Burger King in 2023. Very few advertising creatives want to make hard-sell, product-based ads. You don't win awards, you don't get promotions. And since 25% of iOS users opted out of Apple's ad tracking, which Hsu does mention, "deep-pocketed marketers have pulled back" because digital ads just don't perform that well on these platforms right now.
With a few exceptions, like Burger King, deep-pocketed marketers don't feel like twisting the arms of expensive creatives to make hard-sell product-focussed ads for them when the creatives don't want to, when it doesn't win anyone on either client or agency side any promotions, and when it won't perform that well anyway. So they pull back on spending even on Facebook and Amazon and Google where non-professionals can fill the creative hole with low-cost crap, and expensive creatives spend months trying to convince clients to make big purpose-driven image-based lightning-in-a-bottle work only for the ideas never to get made. If you make ads, you’re getting squeezed from both directions: there’s nowhere for your big ideas to go anymore, and there are now even less places for your small ideas to go. It’s not over, it’s just a cycle.
What You Need to Know
Insights for your "midlife crisis millennial" target audience when you need it. (Bloomberg) "What happens to all the laid off tech workers?" is a key question to answer considering they're the core customer for a lot of the low-interest-rate-era brands, products, services and experiences that still spend money on agencies. (Bloomberg)
"The number of Gen Zers interested in influencers has dropped 12% since 2020, and the number who take note of what influencers wear has fallen 16% since then." (Axios) TikTok's parent company trying to control VR seems...ominous. (WSJ) The AI photo app trend peaked, might come back. (TechCrunch) If you ever doubted that people value status over money, as I mentioned last week, please see how Elon Musk is being driven insane by his phone. (Platformer)
Very interested in watching Epic's new clips app. (The Verge) This explanation of their incoherent Will Ferrell Netflix SB spot by GM's CMO must have passed through 100 pairs of PR eyes and still doesn't make any sense. Even Ben Smith basically said the ad sucked. Asleep at the wheel! (Img) Mr. Beast's viewership numbers are up there with a Netflix Top 15 show and YouTube recently passed Netflix in share of TV viewing. (Benedict Evans)
Can Netflix do for golf what it's done for Formula 1 and tennis? (NYT)
Pickleball Looks Really Dumb on TV (Intelligencer)
Irresistible details about Bill Simmons in this piece on Spotify's big bet on podcasts. (Semafor) Podcasts: “The dumb money era is over.” (NYT)
"Off the court, at least, [Kyrie] Irving is far from unknowable. In his own way, he can even be considered — and here’s a word no one has ever used to describe him — ordinary." (NYMag)