Crystal Ball Breakers

If you ever need a good laugh, a surefire place to start is by reading the futuristic bullshit of marketing geniuses.

Last week, Ad Age ran the 10,000th  piece on the future of advertising and how agencies need to adapt or die. Yes, it's 2005 all over again.

First the writer of the piece sets the tone by combing LinkedIn for every marketing cliché he could gather and smashing them together into a sentence:

"They must manage marketing across devices and serve customized ads to specific audiences based on real-time analysis of constantly changing data. That data must inform creative, CRM and media buying strategies tied to new commerce and brand experiences."

Yeah, we'll get right on that.

Then the parade of experts show up with their absurd comments and dreadful, trite nonsense.

"We're looking for a higher degree of consolidation to make integration and interdependence more effective,"

Yeah, that's what the agency business needs, more consolidation. Martin Sorrell and his financial wise guy clones haven't fucked it up ENOUGH. We need MORE consolidation. Is it possible that someone could be this abysmally stupid and actually believe this?

Then we get...

"Agencies need to make their complexity invisible."

Huh? Make complexity invisible? I don't even know what the fuck it means, and this guy thinks it's a big problem. I think what he's trying to say is that we need to simplify things. But by talking in the bullshit vocabulary of marketing, he does exactly what he's railing against -- making complexity visible.

Here's a heavy thought...

"We're going to need to be much more accountable to our clients for results"

Oh shit! Accountability? Not that! I'd like to know when we weren't accountable so I can get all my lost accounts back.

The CEO of Publicis had this to say -- I'm not kidding:

'Mr. Levy's vision of the new model as "modular instead of being siloed"'

Gosh, what a new and provocative thought. I guess talking in stale banalities is how you become a ceo. I know it worked for me.

Then there's the guy who is...

'trying to build what he called the "anti-holding structure." The company's plan was to absorb every type of agency bought into one brand that could handle cross-discipline work.'

Oh my god, The Agency Of The Future! We haven't had one of them in about.. let's see...2 weeks.

Anyway, I stopped reading the piece when my brain started melting. The future is always the place knuckleheads love to pontificate about because it's the one and only place where your stupidity can't be fact-checked.

The future may turn out to be better or worse, but one thing you can absolutely rely on -- it's never what anyone expects.