Is Advertising all about Fraud?

It's about time that we had some straight talk about, what we call Fraudgate because most advertising and marketing reporting is total BS!

A combination of wishful thinking, propaganda and deliberate deception. We've been trying to track accountability (or rather the lack of it) in advertising and marketing for over twenty years. The one constant that keeps returning is “How do these people get away with it”? Because the real mystery is how come that they are spending even more money on advertising in these days of economic deprivation.

Nobody seems to grasp the scope and depth of the dishonesty in advertising, in marketing, in Business Schools, in Government – in fact it's all over!

The first thing you need to know about advertising and marketing is that it is everywhere, but any attempt to construct any form of accountability is absurd and pointless – the fact is there just ain't none!

The main tool employed by advertising people is the mantra, totally untrue by the way, “Advertising works”.

Amazingly. Marketing has got away with the perpetuation of complete and utter crap regarding the supposed benefits of advertising.

We now accept unquestioningly the supposed reality of what advertising and marketing people routinely present as “fact”, despite the absence of any kind of evidence, of any kind, to support this “fact”!

There appears to be a kind of collective denial that kicks in when any discussion on Marketing and advertising commences and you cannot really register the fact that there really is no supporting evidence to substantiate the outlandish claims made on behalf of advertising.

We now routinely allow these people to get away with murder, killing off our free press, producing substandard television, providing us with an over-informed media. And the real frightening thing? We don't know where it's all going to end.

After all it's not as if we weren't warned about change. In 500 BC, Confucius predicted the future of marketing communications when he said, "Tell me and I'll forget/Show me and I'll remember/Involve me and I'll understand." This has become the foundation for the future of part of the industry, but we appear to be finding ourselves woefully unprepared to modernize and, despite all of this growth and advancement, the underlying business model has remained essentially the same.

Mind boggling isn't it? We're relying on a model established nearly 50 years ago to carry us into the future where massive changes are taking place in the wider media world. It's no wonder this model isn't working for us, as evidenced by the fact that industry talent is leaving places they fear can't and won't change. For the most part, it's not that agencies don't want to evolve. They are simply stuck in old processes and production models that can't adjust. Well-established agencies are really struggling to figure out how to shift their focus and think beyond single disciplines such as "advertising" and "digital." They are trying to change their DNA -- no small feat compared with the characteristics baked in at smaller, start-up agencies born in the digital age.

So what to do next? Destroy and rebuild.

Certainly the confusion in media regarding social media is worrying to say the least:

Social media resembles a "wild west" for brand owners, as agencies in a wide range of disciplines compete for control over this aspect of clients' communications activity
However, advertisers are currently being forced to grapple with gaining an understanding this emerging medium while having to pick between the creative, digital, PR and media shops pitching for their business.

"You can't walk out your house without bumping into a social media expert today. The reality is the space is still very much a wild west."