What kind of shmuck comes all the way from San Francisco to London to talk about bullshit? Bob Hoffman, in his own words, is who.
Introduced to the stage by ITN broadcaster Mark Austin, Hoffman, author of The Ad Contrarian and partner of Type A Group, presented a frank and provocative discussion on how ‘bullshit’ has come to be a powerful weapon that has gone on to cause damage to consumers, clients and ultimately ourselves. We were warned that the three objectives of his talk were to annoy people, contradict everything we were likely to have been told at Ad Week so far and have us leave the building feeling sceptical and uncomfortable. The auditorium of media and advertising professionals was about to have years of their industry beliefs torn apart.
Before he began his tirade against bullshit in the world of advertising, Hoffman first clarified the differences between bullshit and straight-up lying; "Bullshit is more insidious than lying, Often people who bullshit don't know what the truth is and don't care." He asked us to question what we actually know about consumers and their relationship with brands versus what we think we know.
Next he discussed how ‘experts’ who had made predictions about upcoming technological advancements radically reshaping the ways in which we consume media had made these prophecies based on complete ‘baloney’. He believes that advertisers have been given a ‘free pass’ to make profound statements about the industry without anyone checking up on the facts. In the space of ten minutes, Hoffman debunked statements from the past decade including ‘advertising is dead’ and ‘we have reached the end of traditional advertising’ by presenting us with facts and evidence, including Apple’s significant success, proving otherwise. His following statement required no explanation; “Experts keep saying advertising is dead? I'm confused, I see adverts everywhere.”
Addressing a media-heavy audience, he then went on to bravely announce that we need to stop obsessing over delivery systems and get back to creating great products and great ads. Ultimately, in his opinion, paid advertising continues to be the most effective means of acquiring customers versus social media marketing, which simply exists as another channel for this paid advertising. Pepsi’s ‘Refresh’ campaign served as a perfect example in Hoffman’s argument. The cancellation of their TV ad spend around the Super Bowl in 2010 in exchange for heavy social media investment may have seen them gain 3.5m Facebook Likes, but ultimately cost them $50-100m and a 5% loss in market share. And yet Pepsi’s Marketing Director provided a piece of golden bullshit at the time, when they were quoted; “The success has been overwhelming.”
Hoffman also argued that advertisers are foolish to ignore the 50+ consumer audience who possess increased spending power and youthful ambitions. With this demographic of Americans alone wielding ‘more economic power than Germany, Japan and Sir Martin Sorrell’, the 5% of ad spend allocated to them is quite simply ‘bullshit’. Advertisers need to change their view that middle-aged consumers are a bunch of ‘old farts’ that are ‘dying out’ and acknowledge the spending power they possess has been overlooked.
Hoffman finished by declaring the need for more ‘troublemakers’ in advertising, for it would be these people who would tackle the increasing volume of bullshit that exists in an industry based on ‘fairy tales versus facts’. Hoffman may have known a whole lot about bullshit, but it was clear by the end of his discussion that he had provided us with anything but that.