The Future of Advertising is Extinction

I know many people in the advertising industry often debate about whether brand advertising or direct response advertising will prevail. I have a very different opinion: Advertising will fail altogether.

Note that I am not saying that there will no longer be opportunities for creatives. Instead, I simply feel that it will be increasingly difficult for brand names to dupe people into buying something, take their money and run.

No doubt: Companies with inordinate amounts of crazy money will continue to invest inordinate amounts into crazy advertising campaigns — just look at Uber, awash with Google investments, spending it wildly on crazy ideas from an even more eccentric leader. Of course the people who use Google to find rental cars, taxis, etc. are paying for all of this nonsense (e.g. by having to use Uber, even if other alternatives might exist — but which Google will not show Google users unless that taxi company is willing to cough up the inordinate sums required to provide the kind of investment capital Google wants to invest).

But ultimately corrupt companies will fail. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time — but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time (even if there is a sucker born every second).

I believe Americans have to decide on which future they prefer: They could clutch onto the past, fixating themselves on meaningless brand names and retard media because they believe in the empty promises these brands make time and again, leading them down false paths towards deserted landscapes, burdened with debts brought on the by promising mirages used to sell student loans, mortgages paid on overpriced real estate land grabs, and all sorts of hocus pocus marketing tricks; Or they could overthrow these scheming schmucks and instead build an economy upon the social fabric of markets exchanging ideas and engagement that is focused on long-lasting partnerships rather than shortchanging your business partner in order to make this quarter’s profits seem rosier, or to shuttle such profits off to foreign accounts to pay for more long drinks for executives on some remote island resort.

You may be shocked, but I think many — if not most — Americans will choose to continue to subscribe to the business ethics of duping your business partner out of some cash in order to invest it in new ventures on duping even more people out of even more cash. There are several reasons for this. First, I think there are indeed some people who would argue that it is human nature. I might not go that far, but secondly I do admit that it has become a very long-standing American tradition — right from the first days of the European invasion, for example when some of the first settlers bought Manhattan for a bunch of furs and the like. But perhaps one of the strongest indicators are those many empires throughout history which have also squandered their wealth on meaningless nonsense.

So, to quote Dr. Seuss: UNLESS American people wake up and smell the coffee, the future will no longer belong to America — and in my opinion, I think it might be a very good thing if the future were no longer dictated by a bunch of illiterate ignoramuses.