Hoffman's brutal rebuff of marketers and tech

Industry Contributor 29 Apr 2019 - 2 min read

Hoffman's brutal rebuff of marketers and tech

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Count on the brutal Bob Hoffman to say what many would like to but don't dare. Even Prof. Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute says: "I'm jealous. I wish I was brave enough to be this rude."

In this instance the retired US creative agency boss unleashes on marketers - again - for their everlasting tolerance towards the relentless misdemeanours in the online advertising industry.

As the San Francisco-based Hoffman wrote this week, a former State Department official labeled the worldwide disdain with Facebook as a "massive wave of outrage that will crash straight into the central premise of the company's business model." Then Facebook's share price shot up $40 billion after it announced it had put aside $3-5 billion for violating its privacy agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission.

As a recent New York Times report "Regulators around the world are circling Facebook" makes it way through the intelligentsia, Hoffman says there's only one group who still "seem enthralled by the horseshit": marketers.

The ongoing "pathetic threats of marketing bigwigs" against Facebook and other online miscreants, says Hoffman, continues to be "nothing but hot air. The absence of integrity is thrilling to behold," he writes. "The double-talking aristocrats of the advertising and marketing industry couldn't give a flying shit about how corrupt and irresponsible Facebook is but want to talk like tough guys by grandstanding at conferences and in the press." Almost 100% of Facebook first quarter results came from advertising "and it keeps growing", he says.

Captain Cranky is right. It's perpetually troubling that brands and an entire marketing services sector will protest and pull from associations on issues that don't go as deep or as frequent as Facebook's. The duplicity is abundant. Hoffman should keep yelling at the moon - it's an elite but growing club.

But there remains one powerful group on Facebook's side: small and medium enterprises. They account for circa 70% of Facebook's revenues and care far less about broader bad behaviour as they do about low cost ads they hope will work.

Still, Hoffman is correct and one day a bigger swathe of the industry will nod: the cranky writer was right.