Transcript

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

Elena: I'm Elena Jasper, I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.

Elena: And we're joined by a special guest today. Bob Hoffman, known worldwide as the Ad Contrarian. Bob has led two independent ad agencies and served as a CEO of the U.S. operation of an international shop. He's a writer and speaker. He's authored seven Amazon bestsellers like Ad Scam, Advertising for Skeptics, and my personal favorite, Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey.

Elena: He's been invited to speak in 24 countries, even addressing members of the British and European Parliament. Named Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club, Bob's one of the most influential and important voices in the advertising industry today. We can't wait to ruffle some feathers with you, Bob. Welcome to the show.

Bob: My pleasure. Yeah, rustling feathers. I love doing that.

Rob: All right, Bob. So one of my responsibilities prior to the podcast is to hunt down some fun factoids about our guest. And sometimes that's hard, but for you, there was a lot to choose from. And I got stuck between talking a bit about how you're the first person to write an erectile dysfunction ad for the Super Bowl, but I'm assuming that's true based on my research. Although there's probably going to be a lot of Super Bowl news by the time this airs. So the other one was just trying to better understand how you go from middle school science teacher to the Ad Contrarian.

Bob: I'd rather start with erectile dysfunction. It's always a good place to start. Yeah, we did a spot in the mid-90s for a product called Muse, M-U-S-E.

Rob: Okay.

Bob: It was the very first erectile dysfunction remedy that was going to go on TV. And we bought airtime in the Super Bowl and we created a very gentle spot. We had Ed Asner. So Ed was our spokesperson and we did it all with type. It was nothing suggestive in any way and NBC would not allow it on the air. That shows you how much times have changed. They would not accept it. So that's why that spot didn't appear. But we did some good advertising for that product. We had one print ad that said, "This ad can give you an erection." Which I thought was a very good headline.

Rob: We'll get someone's attention.

Bob: Yeah. Okay, now, how do I go from a middle school science teacher? I was the world's worst teacher. I was a terrible teacher. Teachers are angels - they nourish and they're kind and they're helpful. I'm a pain in the ass. I'm impatient, I'm not nurturing. And so I was a terrible teacher, and also I was a bum. I just wasn't a complete human being.

Bob: And then I ran into a friend of mine one day, just by chance, someone I hadn't seen in several years. And we were talking, his name was Richie. I said, "Richie, what are you doing?" He says, "I work in advertising." And I said, "Really, what's that? What do you do?"

Bob: He says, "Well, you know the commercials you see on TV?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "Well, I write those." And it had never occurred to me that people actually sat down and wrote those things and somehow they just appeared on television. I couldn't imagine civilized people sitting down and writing, but he said, "You'd be really good at that."

Bob: I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, you'd be good at that." I said, "So what do I do?" So he gave me some advice on how I could try and get a job in advertising. I followed his instructions and I got a job writing in the advertising department for Panasonic, the electronics company.

Bob: And I worked there for a couple of years. Then I moved out to San Francisco and got an agency job. That was my first agency job in San Francisco. That's how I went from a science teacher to crazy advertising.

Rob: You're like, "I'm a bum and I'm not a good human being." And you're talking to your friend Richie. And he's like, "There's a whole industry filled with those people!"

Bob: Yes! Yeah!

Rob: You're welcome home.

Bob: There's a whole industry for C students, and you'd be perfect for it. I just felt my way into it. I didn't really know what I was doing. I had never taken a class in advertising or a class in marketing. I knew nothing about it, but I was smart. And when I got the job, we were in New York City and at that time it was the Pan Am building. Now it's the MetLife building right in the middle of Park Avenue. It's a big, big old building. I got there the first day and I sat down at my desk and I said, "Holy shit, this is amazing. Unbelievable." I mean, I was literally a bum. And I said, "I am not," am I allowed to use four letter words?

Rob: You are. You can use five letter ones.

Bob: Great. I am not going to fuck this up because I have fucked up everything in my life up until now. And so I went from being like a type Z to a type A, like I flipped the switch. And I worked really hard and ultimately it paid off with my limited skills. I became successful.

Elena: It's funny how one conversation can just totally change the course of your life.

Bob: Absolutely. You miss a red light or something and every part of the world can change because you didn't get this and that didn't happen. But one conversation absolutely changed my whole life. I'd be driving a taxi if not for that.

Rob: Well, thank you, Richie.

Bob: Thank you, Richie.

Elena: Well, we're glad you're here today to talk with us. So let's just go ahead and get into it. A reminder on this show, we try to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results, which should be no problem for Bob Hoffman. And I like to tee these up with some sort of research or article. I wanted to share just a couple of quotes from your keynote speech at the EU parliament in Brussels. This was in 2023. The subject was the dangers of online tracking, a topic you're well known for. And you said "Online advertising has an unnecessary and dangerous dark side. It's called tracking. It doesn't matter what you call it - tracking, surveillance, spying. It's a menace."

Elena: And you also said, "I firmly believe that we can continue to have online advertising that's profitable and successful without the perilous consequences of tracking. The problem is not advertising. The problem is tracking." And that's just a little preview of what we're going to talk about today.

Elena: But before we get into all that, I have to ask about your career journey, because I think it has to be a completely unique human experience. As you just said, you were an agency CEO, you became an author, a public speaker. You ran a blog called the Ad Contrarian, which I miss so much. But then I heard you say recently that you're becoming less interested in the advertising industry. So was there a specific moment or turning point that led you from being an ad industry insider to more of one of its critics?

Bob: Yes, there was. It was 2011 or 2012 and I was sitting in a meeting and I was very suspicious of online advertising. We were getting a lot of online advertising people into the agency and pitching us on stuff. I'm a skeptical person. As soon as I hear someone talk and try to pitch, the first thing that enters my mind is, "How do you know that?"

Bob: And these people would pitch me stuff and I would ask, "How do you know that?" And they would give me very shaky answers that I couldn't really acknowledge as true. I was sitting in a meeting one day - I'm not going to say who the client was - but our account team was going through some statistics that we had generated based on an online company's deck, a whole big deck, and we're going through it and we get to the click-through rate. The click-through rate comes up at 0.02.

Bob: And we move on and the client says, "Wait, wait a minute. Can you go back to that last slide?" And we say, "Sure," we go back to the last slide. And he says, "Click-through rate 2%. That's pretty good." And we all shook our heads and we moved on. And 0.02% is not 2%. It's not 2 percent - it's 2 in 10,000.

Bob: He thought that the click-through rate was 2 in 100, and it was 2 in 10,000, and we did not correct him. We just let it go. And that evening I was in bed, and I was thinking, I said to myself, "I have become one of them. I am one of these bullshit artists." I can't do that. I spent a whole career trying to be honest with clients, and I'm not going to become one of those bullshit artists. From that day on, I knew I had to leave - it took me two years to get out because I had certain responsibilities as CEO of the company, but I knew on that day that was a turning point where I knew I had to get out.

Elena: Well, let's talk about that then. So you leave the advertising industry, you start speaking out about some of this stuff. Why do you believe that the current digital model is, I'd say, both inefficient for marketers, but more importantly, just bad for society in general?

Bob: The reason it's inefficient for marketers is because there's so much and there's so many bullshit metrics that are completely unreliable. But more importantly, it's bad for society because of the development of algorithms and the way that platforms use algorithms in a way that divides us. And we, as consumers, we're not really aware what's going on under the hood. What's going on under the hood is best described in a fact about Facebook. In 2018, a bunch of Facebook executives wanted to know exactly what effect the Facebook algorithm was having on Facebook.

Bob: They did a study and they found that of all the people who went to extremist groups on Facebook, 64%, almost two-thirds, were led there by Facebook's algorithms. In other words, Facebook's algorithms were saying "you're going to like this" and led them to those groups. And this has had a profound effect on society here in the U.S.

Bob: I think our society is more divided than ever. There's less trust in institutions. And it's very hard to believe that one of the things that's driving our society is something as silly as advertising. But it's the information that is captured by online advertising. Most of online advertising isn't advertising - it's spyware designed to look like advertising. The advertising business used to be about distributing information. It's now about collecting information.

Bob: And the information that it's collecting is very dangerous. Because we know the history. It's not a mystery what happens in these cases. When people are followed, when governments know about everyone you are talking to, everything you are saying, and has secret files - this is not a healthy thing. And now it's the marketing industry that's doing that. It's the marketing industry that knows everything about us, that knows who we talk to, that knows what we say. And there's no precedent for that. We know what happens when government has it. What happens is KGBs and Stasis and Gestapos.

Bob: That's what happens when government is secretly following everything that individuals do. Now the marketing industry is doing that, and the marketing industry is getting closer and closer to our government. I don't think I have to tell you about what's happening with the Billionaires Boys Club and the administration in Washington. This is going to be nothing but trouble. It may not be this week, it may not be this year, but there is going to be a lot of trouble about our government spying on individuals. I can promise you that.

Elena: Well, let's talk a little bit about digital advertising, because you do clarify in your work that the tracking is the real villain here, not the advertising itself. And as an agency, we're lucky. We don't buy digital. We just buy television. So it allows us to have conversations like this with you. We're not sweating right now, but one thing we have noticed just looking at our clients' campaigns is typically all of this targeting they do - it's actually not as effective. So it's crazy - you have all this information on people and it generally leads to worse results. But how do you see digital advertising being more effective or continuing to be effective if we didn't have this type of surveillance model?

Bob: Advertising has been effective without spying on people for decades. Television, radio, magazines, newspapers, outdoor - they never spied on people and they were successful for decades. Advertisers don't need to do that to be successful. Platforms don't need to do it. It's so absurd. We're talking about some of the most profitable companies the world has ever known - Google, Facebook - some of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.

Bob: And these guys are telling us they need to spy on people to keep their business going. It's complete bullshit, but it helps them sell their product. And marketers fall for this bullshit. It's very clear that very little of this tracking results in anything that's useful to marketers. And what we're doing is we're undermining the democratic institutions of our republic for what? The convenience of some platforms so they can say they know everything about us? No, I'm sorry. It's not good for business and it's not good for society.

Bob: In Europe, they have GDPR and they have a couple of other laws, which pretty much put a huge halt on tracking. The problem is they're not being enforced and the big platforms are still getting away with this crap, but at least they have acknowledged that it's an issue. Here in the states, it's ridiculous. The Billionaires Boys Club - they run companies that are stronger in many ways than a lot of state governments.

Rob: If you were given a magic wand to be able to address what's going on in the advertising ecosystem, whether it is legislation, industry best practices, what would you do? What would you wave the wand and do?

Bob: I'd wave the wand and say tracking is illegal. That's what I would do. Very simple. The very first thing we need to do is end spying on individuals. We do that and a lot of the problems in the marketing industry and in society start to go away, not all, but a significant amount.

Rob: What would you say to the folks - and I think Elena is right, we're in the TV space so this is easy for us to pick on digital - but what would you say to the folks who say it actually improves the customer experience, that the ads are more tailored, they're more meaningful, there's less waste?

Bob: I'd say that's total bullshit. If you were to read my newsletter from this past week, I'd prove that it's total bullshit because there is research from consumers that shows the thing they hate worst about the internet experience is advertising. It does not improve the consumer experience and the research shows four out of five people say that collecting data for the supposed benefit of giving people more personalized advertising is totally bullshit. Four out of five people are against it and don't like it.

Bob: So I hope you will read the newsletter that I wrote this weekend because what I've done is I've taken quotes from ten of the most famous people in our industry who are supposed to know stuff, and I've taken quotes from them, and then I've shown research about how wrong they are, how they know nothing, how they're full of shit. And it's very clear. If any of you out there listening or watching would like the proof of this, please email me and I'll send you the newsletter so you can see for yourself. You don't have to believe me - you can see with your own eyes because what I think and what you think and what the people out there think, that doesn't matter. That doesn't mean a thing. It's the facts that matter. It's the truth that matters.

Rob: Let's double down on our theme here with digital and talk about ad fraud for a minute. Tens of billions are lost. You had said that it is the second largest criminal income in the world.

Bob: That's not what I say. That's what the World Federation of Advertisers says. They say that online ad fraud in 2025 will become the second largest source of criminal income in the world after drug trafficking.

Rob: All right. So why are these fraudsters so successful?

Bob: Because marketers are idiots. Marketers don't know what they're buying. They buy all this stupid stuff. It's worthless. They know it's worthless, but it generates great numbers that they can show. "Look, CEO, look what I got here. We got one million viewers." Yeah, one million bots is what you got, moron. You didn't get one million viewers. But they can sell it. Let's be honest. What's a marketer's first priority? What's the first thing he or she is trying to do? It's to keep their fucking job, right?

Bob: And the way you keep your job in marketing - it's very hard to draw a straight line between advertising and business success. Very hard. There are so many variables. There's what your competition is doing, there's price changes, there's economic factors, there's all kinds of things that can muddy what you would hope would be a straight line. But the one thing you can wave is "look how many people we reached, look how many clicks we got, look how low our CPMs are."

Bob: And the online advertising ecosystem provides marketers with wonderful bullshit metrics that they can prove how useful what they're doing is, and the CEOs and the CFOs, they don't know that it's all bullshit. They think it's real. They say, "Oh look, look what we got here. I can't complain about that. If you got 10 million hits on this, I can't complain about that." There's a whole industry of fraud acceptance because it really doesn't harm individuals. It harms the brands, it doesn't harm individuals. It makes the individuals look good.

Rob: So what should brands do about it?

Bob: First of all, they have to educate themselves. CEOs and the CFOs and the boards of directors cannot rely on getting accurate information out of the marketing department. They just can't because the marketing department doesn't know what's real either. The marketing department is getting reports from their agency and the agency is getting reports from the media suppliers and the media suppliers are getting reports from the web publishers. And all along the way, there's opportunities for fraud to come into the process. The more complicated a system is, the more room there is for bad information to enter into the system.

Bob: If I were a brand, if I were the CEO, if I were a CFO, I would hire an expert who is not affiliated, doesn't have something to sell me. Just go in there, go inside and tell me what's going on. The average programmatic online campaign goes to 40,000 different websites. How in the fucking world are you supposed to do forensics on 40,000 websites to find out A, if your ad actually ran anywhere, and B, if anyone actually saw it? A lot of the websites won't even let you get into the basic files to see what's going on. It's a black box and it's a con game. And as you say, there's probably upwards of 100 billion and maybe even more being stolen. And where is this money going? Nobody knows, but it's a pretty good guess it's going to organized crime.

Elena: Yeah, what's crazy too, as we've covered on this show, there's actually a lot of studies that show and prove everything you're saying about third-party data, how it's not as effective, how much of it is inaccurate. There are peer-reviewed academic studies that you're right - marketers need to read, learn and share with their C-suite because it actually doesn't work as well either.

Elena: And I think we're always frustrated when we talk to marketers that are spending 100 percent of their budget on digital, zero on something like linear television. It's like, you don't even know who's seeing those ads. How can you miss out on something like TV? It makes us frustrated sometimes.

Bob: I can understand that.

Elena: One thing I wanted to talk about was one of the first advertising books I ever read was yours. It's "Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey." And I think for me reading that book, it was kind of a pivotal moment in my early marketing career, because I started to approach some of the industry fads with more skepticism.

Elena: And as listeners can probably guess by that title, the book's about how consumers and brands are often not on the same page. And you've also said one of my favorite brand purpose quotes of all time, which is "people are mostly too busy, too lazy, or too indifferent to give two fifths of a flying shit about brand meaning." So why are you so skeptical of brand purpose as a marketing tactic?

Bob: I think brand purpose is suspect as a driver of business success. There have been companies that have used it successfully, but only a few. I think of brand purpose as like arguing from the extreme - you take an extreme version like Patagonia, for example, and you say that's the model. Well, it's not the model and it's two or three standard deviations from normal. The idea that people are so interested in your brand that they're going to... Which peanut butter should I buy? Oh, let's see which one sources its peanuts from this place or that place.

Bob: I'm sorry, people don't work that way. That's not how it works. In some cases, yeah, there are some people who do that. And there are some brands who are very committed to it, but they're a very small minority. In marketing, it's about likelihoods and probabilities. There's no yes or no, there's no right and wrong, there's no black and white. There's just what's more likely and what's less likely.

Bob: And the probability is most of the people who buy most of this stuff really aren't that interested. They don't see that much difference between your product and your competitor's product. They see that it's pretty much alike and they buy the one that they're most familiar or comfortable with or the one their mom used or the one their friend told them about.

Bob: People don't have that much time or energy to involve themselves in sussing out the meaning of everything they buy. Marketing is not about all the things that marketers obsess over. Marketing is about how humans behave. That's what it is. How do human beings actually behave? And if you understand that, then you can develop an intelligent marketing strategy. But first you have to start there - how do humans behave? Why does a human being buy this peanut butter and not that one? What goes into that? You have to develop a philosophy about that, a theory about that, a thesis about that. And once you have that, then you can feed that thesis. Until you have that, you're not clear on anything.

Elena: I think the height of this a few years ago was when brands started posting about everything that happened in our society. And I remember thinking like, "Thank goodness I know what Taco Bell thinks about this political issue."

Bob: Yeah. What is my toilet tissue's view on the immigration issue?

Elena: And I was asked, even as someone who runs our marketing and social media, should we post about it? And I said, no one cares what we think. Believe me, no one's thinking, "Oh, what does this random agency think about this social topic?" No, nobody's waiting to hear.

Bob: I agree with you Elena, and I'm glad you read my book and liked it. That's very - you're obviously a very smart person.

Rob: I love the title "Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey." It reminds me of the old David Ogilvy quote, "The customer's not an idiot. She's your wife."

Bob: You know, I have a book in my drawer that I've written. That quote is right there. The name of the book is "David Ogilvy Never Met My Wife." I'm afraid to publish it because I've never written, I've never published fiction before. All my books have been non-fiction. This book is also about advertising, but it's fiction. And I'm just not confident that I can write fiction well, so I haven't published it, but I'm thinking of it - it's kind of a novella. It's about 75 or 80 pages. Will you read it? I'll send it to you guys and you tell me if I should publish it. You promise? Okay. You got to send me your emails.

Rob: For sure, for sure. So us marketers, we love to complicate stuff. That's how we make money, right? We make stuff hard and you wrote a book, "The Three Word Brief: Simple Advice for People Who Advertise" and it warns about how marketers are making stuff hard. So what should we be focusing on? How do we just simplify, get through the clutter and get to what really matters?

Bob: Well, I think Byron Sharp has a pretty good idea of that. He calls it mental and physical availability. I hate those words - I think his idea is right but that sounds like bullshit. What marketing is basically about is fame and distribution. It's the manufacturer's responsibility to create a product worth buying. It is the marketer's responsibility to make that product available and seem attractive. And it's the advertiser's responsibility to make it famous. Those are the three basic elements - I'm whittling it down right to the bones.

Bob: Those are the bones. Manufacturer, make a product worth buying. Marketer, make it available and attractive. Advertiser, make it famous. If you do those three things, if those three things happen, you have a way better chance of being successful than any other philosophy of business that I know.

Bob: And what marketers do - I'm not a marketer per se. I'm a copywriter. I'm an advertising guy. Marketers have to do things that I know nothing about. I don't know anything about distribution, pricing, financials, new product development, customer relations. I don't do any of that. Marketers have to do that. I never had to do that. I was just an advertising guy. So my opinions about marketing are suspect. I've never read a marketing book in my life. I've never taken a marketing class in my life. So my opinions about marketing are suspect, but that doesn't mean I don't have them and that doesn't mean I haven't been around marketers for a long time.

Bob: And I see what marketers do. And most of them, I think are very mediocre. I am not impressed with marketers as a whole. Now, there are some who are brilliant. There are the Mark Ritsons and the Byron Sharps - those people are brilliant and they have brilliant things to say. And then there's three million other people in marketing who have no ideas who just repeat what Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson say.

Bob: They go around saying "mental availability, positioning" - they've learned a language. They've learned 25 sayings that they repeat over and over and make you want to stick a knife in your head because that's all they can talk about - the same thing over and over: mental availability and positioning and differentiation and branding and engagement, all these fucking terms that a lot of them mean nothing. What the hell does branding mean? It's a meaningless term about a nonsense activity.

Bob: You don't do branding. Branding is basically the basics of marketing. That's what it is. Anyway, it frustrates me. Like I say, there are some brilliant marketers and I've met some brilliant marketers, but there are a lot of very mediocre people who don't know anything. I don't know anything about marketing. I'm faking it. I just know what I've been able to observe. And I think a lot of marketers, so-called marketers, think they know things that they don't really know.

Bob: So I'm skeptical. And I think skepticism is one of the most important things if you work in our business. If you're skeptical, you're gonna do a lot better than if you're gullible. You should always ask yourself - and you people out there listening to this - you should ask yourself, "How does he know that?" How does Hoffman know that? And you should ask that about everyone who tries to tell you something. How do you know that? And you'd be surprised how many people don't think they're skeptical but they really are.

Elena: That's great advice. And I think that's how you as a person have come to a lot of your own original ideas and your own original thoughts from questioning what other people have said. And you've shared a lot of those contrarian beliefs today. I was wondering if we could kind of end here on what's one big myth or misconception - if you had to pick one that marketers should just unlearn immediately.

Bob: Ooh, that's a toughie. What should you unlearn? Okay, here's what you should do. I'm going to rephrase this. Marketers, and I'm going to paraphrase something that a brilliant guy once said - in my opinion, marketers are clever enough to understand what they've been taught, but they're not clever enough to question it.

Bob: And what you need to unlearn is to accept the opinions of experts, and you need to question the opinions of experts. So unlearn going along with experts - learn how to improvise. Marketers are terrible improvisers. You talk to them and they know all the truisms and any problem that they come up against, they apply one of the truisms, but they're not improvisers. And improvisation is creativity.

Bob: Improvisation - you know, if you see a funny person, they see the same things we see, but they connect them differently. That's what improvisation is. That's what creativity is. It's connecting things that don't seem to be connected somehow. Marketers are not good at that. And they need to become good at that to be better at what they do.

Elena: That's great. We actually, I lied, we have one last, more lighthearted question for you, which is you've traveled all over the world. I found on your site that you've spoken in over 24 countries. If you could bring back one customer or different tradition from a different country back here to the States, what would you pick?

Bob: You know, the world is a strange place when it comes to marketing these days. Okay. You guys tell me who are the marketers that you think of when you think of leaders in our industry? Give me some names.

Elena: Mark Ritson, Byron Sharp, Jenny Romanuk, Peter Field, Les Binette, Mark Pritchard.

Bob: What do those people all have in common?

Elena: They're smart. They do research.

Bob: Something else. You know what they all have in common?

Elena: Oh, they're not from the United States. I said Mark Pritchard. Okay. I got one person.

Bob: They're not from the United States. There's very little going on in the United States that is at the forefront of business thinking and particularly marketing thinking. So what would I bring back from overseas to the U.S.? Original thinking. We're locked into old ways of thinking.

Bob: It's very sad in most categories, whether it's science, business, art, anything - it's the young people who are rebellious and in marketing and advertising, it's not. It's the old folks like me who are rebellious and the young people are buying into all the bullshit that's being sold and not being rebellious and not saying "how do you know that?" They're just buying it. It's very upsetting for me to see because I know that young people should be rebellious. I expect that. That's what I would like to see. I'd like to see more rebelliousness in our industry.

Elena: Yeah, I think we can agree with you there. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we kind of close things off, I know you mentioned people can email you for your newsletter, but if there's anything else you want to promote, we'll share your website...

Bob: Yeah, my new book is called "The Three Word Brief" and it's a good book. It's about three things: Number one, how advertising works. It's about the bullshit of the programmatic online industry. And it's about why I don't trust marketers. So it's in three sections like that. And even if you don't agree with me - and you probably won't, a lot of you listening - I think it's worth reading and seeing a different opinion than the one you usually get. So it's called "The Three Word Brief" and you can find it at your local Amazon. As for my newsletter, my website is bobhoffmanswebsite.com and you can connect to my newsletter there.

Rob: And we can't wait for your next book, "David Ogilvy Never Met My Wife."

Elena: Well, we can't - the two of us can't wait - I want to read that today.

Bob: Okay. You guys have to send me your email addresses and I'll send you a PDF.

Elena: Cool.

Bob: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. It was a nice conversation and good luck to you and to viewers.