Hasta La Creative!

I am shaking with fury as I write this — reeling from three incidents that individually might have gone unnoticed, but as a group tumbled into my consciousness, leaving me wanting to yell at the top of my lungs, “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore,” in a pathetic mimic of that famous scene from the 1976 movie “Network.”

I was jolted to face the disturbing reality that because ad tech was created in a tech/VC echo chamber, largely excluding marketing practitioners, it is suffering from an overemphasis on the “product” side to the detriment of the human element of marketing. Through these individual experiences, it became painfully obvious to me that the unnavigable ad-tech sprawl is consuming more and more time and resources, yet we are accomplishing less and less.

The first incident started innocuously enough when I was working with an advertiser on a content marketing campaign. The client was working with a very large content venture to develop custom content using this platform’s well-developed skill at creating funny, viral list content. Unfortunately, that approach just didn’t translate well to do the heavy lifting required of great marketing, where effective brand messaging is key. The surprise creative epic fail of this content platform wasted a lot of time all around. Unhappily, it reminded me how far technologists still have to go in applying predictable technical approaches to the delicate and most unpredictable art of marketing.

Continue reading at AdAge.com