Reactions to 'Advertising has reached self-delusion' (and my response)
A few thoughts on the reaction to last week’s piece.
“I wish my article had included that!”
Sooner or later, I say this after something I write is published. If only I had remembered that killer stat, chart, quote or insight, my piece would have been so much better.
It’s an occupational hazard of having deadlines, which is why deadlines are wonderful constraints. Rather than think of constraints as negative because of they disallow, it’s important to see them as the traffic lights that ensures some cars are allowed through safety, rather than have a free-for-all which leads to a huge crash. (More on the ‘Theory of Constaints’ here)
Sometimes, this catalogue of missed opportunities presents itself from readers.
Now, I don’t usually do this, but the response to last week’s ‘Stories That Matter’ piece — Advertising has reached peak self-delusion — produced some genuinely good challenges from people who know this industry well. Challenges that, had I had the wit to include them in the first place, would have made my argument so much better.
So here, briefly, is my attempt at a next-best thing: a Points of View-style Q&A. (You know that thing Anne Robinson used to do before telling game-show contestants how stupid they are:
Here goes…
“How does high-attention media build brands if nobody’s reading it?”
— Colin Lewis, former CMO and Marketing Week columnist
“Two points on this that I have to pick up on: 1. ‘High-attention media — the environments where advertising actually builds brands…’ How do they ‘build brands’ if they have diminishing audiences? Surely advertising in newspapers cannot ‘build brands’ if they have collapsing reach? 2. If marketers and advertisers are supposed to be ‘data-driven’, then they are acting rationally by not advertising on channels that do not deliver reach or are showing reduced reach year on year?”
Colin’s right about reach and I could have been clearer that I was talking about attention.
The point isn’t that declining media is ‘the answer’ — it’s that the industry has shifted billions toward environments where almost nobody is paying attention, and called it a smart trade. A smaller audience that actually reads something will outperform a mass audience that scrolls past it. That’s not nostalgia for print; it’s just what the effectiveness data says.
Here’s me talking about this with an effectiveness expert:
On his second point — are data-driven marketers simply behaving rationally? — I'd agree, up to a point. "Data-driven" is only rational if the measurement system you're using is actually helping. Which is why I cited the WARC data that 80% of campaigns achieve their reach targets, but only 25% deliver real effectiveness results. If your dashboard is telling you the campaign worked but most of the spend is not producing a measurable effect on the brand, that's only rational if you’re incentivised to look good at marketing rather than actually be good at marketing.
Which led me to ask: are marketers even optimising for brand growth? Or are they optimising for job security?
What else explains the rise of spend on ineffective media, other than it is the career-safe option to produce spreadsheets a CFO recognises. Explaining why you’ve been pouring money down the toilet for years is not a conversation most marketing departments are incentivised to have.
Colin subsequently confirmed as much, noting — with some hard-won candour — that as a former CMO, “behaving rationally is a good way to keep your CFO and CEO happy... keep food on the table.” He added that perhaps the finger should be pointed at mass reach channels rather than CMOs.
Whoever is ‘to blame’, this exchange hits on the key problem: the system punishes honesty and rewards the safe bet.
“It’s not just bad measurement. It’s the entire system of incentives.”
— Kathy Newberger, business development and ad strategy consultant
“Appreciated this part of the piece most: ‘I’ve argued before that measurement is never neutral; it reflects the interests of whoever holds it. The platforms built attribution models that credit themselves. The dashboards that govern performance budgets were designed by parties with skin in what those dashboards conclude.’ In my opinion it is that — combined with the very real human need to do more with less, faster, and to do what the people in charge of us expect and will reward, be they an agency leader or CFO or Wall Street or a CMO with little runway — mean that dashboard/keyboard media wins over time and non-platform media loses over time, no matter how much better it can be for brands.”
Kathy’s point is that even if you fixed the data, the incentive structure would produce the same outcome. But both things can be true at the same time… which makes the problem considerably harder than a measurement fix alone.
“You’re describing the advertising market. The advertising industry is something else entirely.”
— Nick Manning, founder of Manning Gottlieb Media and former Ebiquity CSO
“The ad industry is in crisis while the figures bandied about for growth relate to the advertising market, where a few big players get the big increases in revenue from many thousands of advertisers, big and small…. And the results are obvious to everyone, with poor ads bombarding the public, day in, day out. Meanwhile responsible media channels are starved of oxygen and the providers of scale audiences don’t get the money they deserve to make high quality content. And this is a vicious spiral as money pours into channels where it’s wasted on fake traffic and massive transaction costs.”
Nick’s distinction between the market and the industry is a really important reframe which I wish had been in my article.
The market — the aggregate money flowing through advertising — is growing.
The industry — the ecosystem of agencies, publishers, broadcasters, and independent operators — is in crisis.
These are not the same thing, and the headline number conflates them.
He goes further: some of the growth in performance advertising is itself a symptom of failure. When advertising doesn’t work, the response is to buy more of it i.e. targeting one person at a time, chasing responses, throwing money at a problem that more money won’t solve. The vicious spiral he describes — wasted spend, fake traffic, starved publishers, poor creative — is what growth looks like from inside a broken system.
Nick co-founded Advertising: Who Cares?, an organisation I support because it was created to have this conversation and come up with real solutions for a better ad industry. The fact that it remains a grassroots effort rather than a mainstream industry priority tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously the problem is being taken.
Advertising: Who Cares? is hosting a three-hour session in Central London next month, featuring two long-form discussions about two things our industry mostly avoids talking about in public: the future of home-produced, ad-supported media as budgets continue to migrate to social platforms + what it actually takes to make social platforms safe for people and brands.
I’m moderating a stellar panel, more info here!
“The growth figure is picking up signals it was never designed to read.”
— Ged Carroll, strategy director and author of Strategic Outcomes
“Online advertising is growing because it’s not only pulling spend away from ‘traditional’ advertising. It’s competing for spend with shopper and channel marketing, commercial real estate particularly for retail (there is some great academic research out there quantifying the amount of value in the commercial property sector that has transferred from rent growth to online advertising), in the case of Chinese businesses operating beneath the de minimis price point — it’s spent in lieu of setting up local subsidiaries in their markets (like the UK) and ultimately domestic industrial jobs due these adverts being a lubricant for globalisation.”
Building on Nick’s reframing of ‘the market’, Ged added a layer I hadn’t fully considered: the adspend figures are being inflated by categories that were never traditionally counted as advertising at all.
Retail media, for one — trade marketing budgets migrating onto Amazon’s platforms and being reclassified as adspend. Not new money, but reclassified money.
And then there’s the ‘de minimis’ effect. Temu and Shein are among the biggest spenders on Meta and Google right now. That spend isn’t really advertising in any conventional sense — it’s a cross-border logistics subsidy enabled by an import duty loophole, with Meta’s targeting infrastructure as the engine. Each parcel ships directly from a Chinese warehouse, kept just under the £135 UK customs threshold, slipping through duty-free. The ads and the loophole depend on each other: without Meta and Google’s targeting, you can’t find enough individual buyers to make the model work. The US has moved to close that loophole. The UK, for reasons I don’t understand, hasn’t.
So not only do we have a a ruler that is measuring the wrong thing. It’s also picking up signals it was never designed to read.
Justin Lebbon — founder of the Future of TV Advertising global events series and a former colleague — added the question nobody else quite asked:
“okay, we’ve had nearly ten years of attention data so why are we doing the opposite of what the theory tells us!?”
I don’t have a tidy answer to that but I certainly have a few ideas… As they say: Watch this space.
I’m very grateful to anyone who comments publicly or emails/DMs privately. This industry matters but a) many, many people don’t agree or don’t understand this, b) the takeover of ‘technical stuff’ has cast a dark shadow over the economic and power moves that are as important today as they were in the analogue times.
As always — reply, push back, tell me I’m wrong. This is a safe space to be an unsafe space.
Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions
I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.
As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.
This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients. Every Tuesday I publish a Stories That Matter edition dissecting the week’s big story, as well deeper dives, things I’m reading, and more.
Alongside this, I’ve recently launched oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. More at oomphoomph.com.
So much goodness in here. Nick's distinction between the advertising market and the industry, Kathy's point about measurement and incentives and Ged's point about definition creep are all excellent points. The distinction between the market and the industry really matters and certainly contributes to the self-delusion.