Google gives me the creeps. There’s just no getting around it. And it goes beyond the company’s avowed affection for people with advanced degrees, (which does step on the toes of at least one autodidact I know). The company is simply too powerful, too sure of itself and too inclined to go wandering off into areas of great importance to me where I don’t think it belongs.
Bad enough it’s managed to get a lot of people to think of search advertising as actual advertising when it’s really more like the Yellow Pages sans the jaune. I can even live with it obviating the need for agency media departments by placing newspaper ads itself. To be honest, the advertising industry beat Google to obviating media departments when it decided to spin them all off into freestanding profit centers.
But when I read that the company is now proposing to help advertisers create their own ads–as I did in a squib in The Wall Street Journal Friday–I start to get like The Three Stooges did when they heard the words “Niagara Falls”.
So let me make sure I have this right: Soon, all an advertiser will have to do is upload some product information and images using Google’s free template and voila, instant ad ready for distribution to newspapers from one end of the country to the other? Sounds pretty simple to me. Why didn’t Bob Gage or Ralph Ammirati think of that?
I’ll tell you why. Because any ad conceived of in such a manner is bound to be awfully darn ordinary and consequently of little if any value to its sponsor. Something the summa cum laude set out in Mountain View doesn’t appear to think matters. Or maybe they don’t care. Which is a distinct possibility.
After all, “caring” is a verb like “empathizing” or “communicating”. One of those tasks performed far more adroitly by humans than algorithms. (Or templates, as the case may be.)
Here are a few words of advice chosen somewhat randomly from Howard Gossage’s book “Is There Any Hope for Advertising?” •• “Is advertising worth saving? From an economic point of view I don’t think that most of it is. From an aesthetic point of view I’m damn sure it’s not; it is thoughtless, boring, and there is simply too much of it.” • “The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” • “If a fellow tells a girl he loves her, that is propaganda. If he kisses her, that is exploitation. Advertising is propaganda; marketing is exploitation.” • “Advertising is not a right, it is a privilege. Our first duty is not to the old sales curve, it is to the audience.” • “Nothing is perfect, not even mediocrity.” • “A career in advertising is like skin-diving in a barrel of piranhas.” •• Bottom line: Were it not for the fact that Mrs. Gossage and Carl Ally, one of my mentors, scattered the Great One’s ashes over San Francisco Bay, I’d say it’s likely he’d be turning in his grave if, from the great beyond, he had even the slightest inkling of the events in advertising now taking place just a few miles south of the fire house he called his office. Or maybe, since he stuttered, he’d simply say, “I… I… I told you about the piranhas!”
Curvin! Anyone who quotes Howard Luck Gossage is cool in my book.
Mark, Google just hired Andy Berndt from Ogilvy - so they aren’t exactly hiring people who don’t know good from bad when it comes to advertising.
The reality is, you don’t have to be in advertising to make something worth watching anymore- does the name Judd Laipply ring a bell?
How about 65 million plus views on YouTube? Those are almost Superbowl numbers- and that’s with crap video at low rez.
If you don’t think Google (which is actually powered by you and me) isn’t going to be the dominant force in Advertising- you are clueless. The “wisdom of crowds” will guide us to what’s hot- and what’s not- and the king of that- is Google.
My understanding is that Berndt’s position at the Creative Lab is more about strengthening Google as a medium. And I’d guess to also make that medium more relevant from a creative standpoint. But that does not make them an ad agency.
To quote Sally Hogshead, most new-media revelations today will seem laughably quaint in a few years, but true human insight will never go out of style. If Google can compete with agencies that live by these words, great. But they’ll have to offer more than relevant eyeballs.