Your obsession with pandering to 18-34 year-olds is decades out of date
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay One of the enduring absurdities of the marketing and advertising industries is the old wives’ tale that “people over 50 want to be like young people.” Ask any brain-dead CMO of a car company why the people who inhabit his commercials are all young, when 18-24 year-olds buy 1% of all new cars, and you’ll... Read More
The Dissident Spin Doctor: Dear Brand Manager, your social brand strategy bores us
by Emma King (@EmmainSA) We’ve all been cornered at some point in our lives. Cornered by an acquaintance or co-worker into listening to lengthy and detailed descriptions of holidays (we did not get to have), all while living through a computer avalanche of accompanying slides. Surely, they know we don’t care. We see brands spending more money and time trying to tell stories... Read More
Online Advertisers Getting Hosed
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay Here at Ad Contrarian Worldwide Headquarters, one of our axioms is that there is no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he’s missing a trend. We’re starting to think that the same can be said of the entire advertising industry. Our industry has been desperately trying to convince itself that the web... Read More
Fake followers are the greatest invention since inflatable girlfriends
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay Apparently, the market for fake Twitter followers is exploding. According to The New York Times… “There are now more than two dozen services that sell fake Twitter accounts… there are now as many as 20 million fake follower accounts.” Being the Luddite that I am, I am way behind the curve in attracting... Read More
News24′s leap into Kenya and Nigeria
by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Type in www.news24.co.ke to your browser or www.news24.com.ng and you get a site that looks familiar to the South African eye: it has the colour palette and lay-out of our biggest news portal, News24, but look a bit closer and you see the content is different: about Kenya and Nigeria respectively. These two sites are, in fact, News24’s great big... Read More
