Adland rabble-rouser Tom Goodwin has told B&T market mix modelling is “complete nonsense” and that marketers, media planners and buyers spend too much time sat inside, looking at spreadsheets.
Following his speech at ADMA’s Global Forum on Tuesday, where he similarly branded both the creative and media arms of agencies “hopeless” and that their divergent priorities, neither of which were focused on the customer, made success and collaboration “implausible” in the modern marketing world, B&T cornered Goodwin for a chat to unpack his views further.
“I think the culture of advertising [has changed]. My job when I came into the industry, quite a long time ago, was about the celebration of the customer and a fascination with them and a respect for them. Subconsciously in every meeting you had, you had them in your head. Then I’ve been away and come back and forth so I don’t know what happened, but all I know is that if you sit in a room now, it’s full of people looking at dashboards, it’s full of people talking about numbers, it’s full of people pulling levers,” he said.
“We have things like media mix modelling, the idea that you put things into a thing, crank the handle and it’s complete nonsense. How can you create a media plan when you don’t know what the creative is? How you can create a media plan based on what’s worked in the past when you don’t know what’s now new?”
In a long and winding career, Goodwin has spent time with nearly every major name in the world of advertising, including TBWA, Mullenlowe, HUGE, Publicis and Havas. However, a central tenet of both his ADMA speech and our chat was that those in adland cannot see the wood for the trees any longer — or, rather, the people from the numbers.
“[We should] have proper discussions about which metrics actually matter, which metrics we should optimise against, which we should use for diagnosis and which we should ignore,” he told the crowd in Sydney’s Sofitel hotel.
Now, instead, of creating genuinely good advertising that will create long-term memories for consumers and genuinely raise brands’ profiles, everyone in advertising has become obsessed with marginal gains and pointless personalisation as a result of the internet.
“In the context of customer service, personalisation at scale makes sense. A lot of these words are quite broad. But when it comes to advertising, I think personalisation is a completely improbable and undesirable goal. Avoiding irrelevance is wise. We’ve got this weird situation where advertising is a bit like a person going around a room saying ‘Are you Jeff Summers from Middlesborough?’ and people are replying ‘No,’ then advertising says ‘Are you Sally McPherson from Paramatta?’ We’re trying to guess this precision.
“It would be much better to say ‘Are you a woman?’ or something. It would be better to ask, ‘Are you interested in sporting equipment?’
“I don’t quite know why things that worked for a long time went out of fashion. If you’re trying to sell golf equipment, maybe go on golf monthly dot com and put an ad there. If you’re trying to sell a credit card that gets you lounge access, maybe go to websites that people spend a lot of money on. Somehow the industry has become obsessed with very specific forms of advertising for a very specific person. We’d be much better off doing the simple things well.”
However, a lot of money has been sunk into targeting the right consumer, at the right time, in the right place, down to the level of an individual person on a minute-by-minute basis. Similarly exorbitant sums have been spent on creating tools that predict, ostensibly with remarkable precision, the return on spend on any given marketing activity. The investment in these efforts — wrongly in Goodwin’s mind but correctly in many others’ — will likely mean that the data, spreadsheets and numbers are not going away.
“I may be a bit nostalgic and romantic here. Advertising is not a perfect industry. But I do feel like the average person in advertising a while ago was quite fond of their customers. I think they appreciated their job was to understand people. I think they really appreciated people. Somehow the industry has got more in touch with data and technology and it’s lost that respect for people,” he said.
“Back in the day, sort of 2000 onwards, people took a step back away from the work and that it was their job to represent the customer in meetings. I wouldn’t necessarily call it common sense but it was more logical, a bit more seductive, a bit more thoughtful and a bit more considerate.
“If you ask people what their favourite ads are, they will go on and on about the Hamlet ads, the Silk Cut ads, “I Could Do With A D,” the man from the Milk Tray ads, George Clooney for Nescafe… They’ll talk about ads from a long time ago. I can’t give you an example of a new ad that people are fond of.”
Martini lunch anyone? It is Friday, after all.
