The former marketing chief of Mastercard Raja Rajamannar has slammed advertising, YouTube and called for a complete reset in a provocative presentation at the Marketing Association of Australia’s conference RESET.
After claiming that market research is largely “garbage” and “worse than tossing a damn coin toss”, the widely revered marketer took aim at advertising with one particular channel in the firing line.
Rajamannar, who is an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, which has done “a tonne of research on this” claims that only 2 per cent of ads actually deliver on their stated objectives and 98 per cent of ads are a “waste of money”.
“It’s a trillion-dollar industry. If you look at the concept of advertising, it’s terrible. The need to communicate is there, but the way we are communicating is horrible. We need to reinvent advertising,” he said.
To illustrate his point, Rajamannar cited YouTube ads in particular ads that are unskippable for five seconds.
When watching “Bollywood songs and crap like that”, Rajamannar said that “YouTube decides to stop my experience” with an ad that he is not focused on because he is waiting for the “damn skip button”.
“The moment the five seconds is over, some idiot who has paid for that advertisement is paying YouTube. I have seen five seconds. So this is a viewability matrix,” he said.
“Somebody has come up with this viewability matrix, and we, like idiots, are accepting those and paying their money. Kudos to YouTube. If any Google people are there, I applaud you. You know how to extract money,” he continued.
“Thanks to the sponsors who are putting their money, which is dumb money in this case.
“Now YouTube decided that torturing me once is not enough. Now they have two ads. One ad which I have to suffer for 15 seconds. I cannot skip.
“Five seconds, and they’re doing me a favor by allowing me to skip an ad. I didn’t ask in the first place. And if I don’t want to pay, they said you better pay $14.99 per month, so they begin ad free viewing. This is called blackmail.
He continued: “This is not marketing, and honestly, it’s not a laughing matter. If marketing is seen to be a con game and an annoying profession, I think we have justifiably earned it because we have messed up the entire practice of marketing so badly and we just take it with a sense of helplessness.
“We just keep going with it and optimise within whatever stupid context that we have been handed over by people who don’t understand marketing, they’re coming from Silicon Valley. It’s extremely annoying, and it’s the same thing with any form of advertising.”
Focus on ‘stickiness’
After taking a swipe at advertising, Rajamannar questioned loyalty programs, arguing that 85 per cent of consumers aren’t hardwired to be loyal; using some shocking research that found the majority of people would cheat on their partners if they could get away with it.
He believes that the focus should shift away from “loyalty” and more on “stickiness”.
Rajamannar believes there are three things marketers should do tomorrow to improve the effectiveness of the function.
Firstly, define what the role of marketing is going to be in a company. He believes the role is: “You build, nurture, and protect your brand. You drive business in a credible, attributable fashion that is demonstrable. And number three, you build platforms for sustaining a competitive advantage.”
He also believes that with AI technology eventually creating a “sea of sameness” marketing is the function “which is going to distinguish and differentiate a company”.
“Use the technology that is there. Don’t be scared about it. Learn it and deploy it like crazy,” he said.
