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The Marketing Architects
Why Digital Advertising Is Failing Marketers with Bob Hoffman
00:36:49
According to the World Federation of Advertisers, digital ad fraud may become the second largest source of criminal income in the world after drug trafficking. For marketers spending billions on digital ads, this isn't just concerning—it's a crisis....
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- [00:00]
Elena Jasper
Hello, this is Elena with a little pre show message. The episode you're about to listen to is an interview with the iconic Bob Hoffman. He shares a lot of strong opinions, which we love, but there's also more profanity in this episode than usual. So if you have any children present, you might want to pop in your headphones. I hope you enjoy the show.
- [00:19]
Bob Hoffman
The CEOs and the CFOs and the boards of directors cannot rely on getting accurate information out of the marketing department. They just can't. Because the marketing department doesn't know what's real either.
- [00:33]
Elena Jasper
Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob demars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines. And we're joined by a special guest today, Bob Hoffman. Known worldwide as the Ad Contrarian. Bob has led two independent ad agencies and served as the CEO of the US Operation of an international shop. He's a writer and a speaker. He's authored seven Amazon bestsellers like adscam, Advertising for Skeptics, and My personal favorite, Marketers are from Mars, Consumers Are from New Jersey. He's been invited to speak in 24 countries, even addressing members of the British and European Parliament. Named Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club, Bob's one of the most influential and important voices in the advertising industry today. We can't wait to ruffle some feathers with you, Bob. Welcome to the show.
- [01:29]
Bob Hoffman
My pleasure. Yeah, rustling feathers. I love doing that.
- [01:32]
Rob Demars
All right, Bob. So one of my responsibilities prior to the podcast is to hunt down some fun factoids about our guest. And sometimes that's hard, but for you, there was a lot to choose from and I got stuck between, you know, talking a bit about how you're the first person to write an erectile dysfunction ad for the Super Bowl. But I'm, you know, I'm hoping, I'm assuming that's true based on my research, but you can, you can set me straight. Although there's been probably going to be a lot of super bowl news by the time this airs. So the other one was just trying to better understand how you go from middle school science teacher to the ad contrarian. So, you know, perhaps, perhaps we start there.
- [02:18]
Bob Hoffman
You know, I'd rather start with erectile defunct.
- [02:20]
Rob Demars
All right, let's write.
- [02:22]
Bob Hoffman
Any good. It's always a good place to start. Yeah, we did a spot. It was in the mid-90s, somehow, for a product called Muse M U S E. Okay. And the very first erectile dysfunction remedy that was going to go on tv, and we bought airtime in the super bowl, and we created a very gentle spot. We had enough, you know, Ed Asner. Oh, sure, yeah. So Ed was our spokesperson, and we did. It was all type. It was nothing suggestive in any way, and NBC would not allow it on the air. That shows you how much times have changed. They would not accept it. And so that's why that spot didn't appear. We did some good advertising for that thing. We had one print ad that said, this ad can give you an erection, which I thought was a very good headline.
- [03:24]
Rob Demars
And we'll get someone's attention.
- [03:27]
Bob Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Now, how do I go from a middle school science teacher to. I was the world's worst teacher. I was a terrible teacher. Teachers are. They're angels. They nourish and they're kind and they're, you know, they're helpful. I'm a pain in the ass. I'm impatient. I'm not nurturing. And so I was a terrible teacher. And also, I was a bum. I just wasn't a complete human being. And so I wasn't good at teaching. And then I ran into a friend of mine one day, just by chance, someone I hadn't seen in several years. And we were talking. His name was Richie. I said, richie, what are you doing? He says, I work in advertising. And I said, really? What's that? What do you mean? What do you do? He says, well, you know the commercials you see on tv? I said, yes. I said, well, I write those. And it had never occurred to me that people actually sat down and wrote those things. Somehow they just appeared on television. I couldn't imagine civilized people sitting down and writing, you know, but. And he said, but you'd be really good at that, you know? I said, really? He said, yeah, you'd be good at that. I said, so what do I do? So he gave me some advice on how I could, you know, try and get a job in advertising. And I followed his instructions. I got a job writing in the advertising department for Panasonic. The electronics company. Sure. And I worked there for a couple of years, and then I moved out to San Francisco and got an agency job. That was my first agency job in San Francisco. And, you know, that that's how I went from a science teacher to crazy advertising.
- [05:08]
Rob Demars
So you're. You're like, I'm a bum and I'm not a good Human being. And you're talking your friend Richie. And he's like, there's a whole industry filled with. Yes, like, all right, you're welcome home.
- [05:19]
Bob Hoffman
There's a whole industry for C students, and you'd be perfect for it. I just felt my way into it. I didn't really know what I was doing. I had never taken a class in advertising or a class in marketing. I. I knew nothing about it, but I was smart, you know, When I got the job, we were in New York City, and at that time was the Pan Am building. Now it's the MetLife building. I think it's right in the middle of Park Avenue. It's big old, big old building. I got there the first day and I sat down at my desk and I said, holy shit, this is unbelievable. I mean, I was literally a bum. I didn't know what the hell I was. And I said, I am not. Am I allowed to use four letter words?
- [06:01]
Rob Demars
You are. You can use five letter ones, too.
- [06:03]
Bob Hoffman
Great. I am not going to fuck this up because I. I have fucked up everything in my life up until now. And so I went from being like a type Z to a type A. Like, I flipped a switch and I worked really hard. You know, ultimately it paid off my limited skills. I became successful.
- [06:23]
Rob Demars
That's awesome.
- [06:24]
Bob Hoffman
Yeah.
- [06:25]
Elena Jasper
It's funny how one conversation can just totally change the course of your life.
- [06:29]
Bob Hoffman
Absolutely. You know, you miss a red light or something. You miss a light and your whole world can change because you didn't get this and that didn't happen. But one conversation absolutely changed my whole life. No question about it.
- [06:41]
Rob Demars
Well, thank you, Richie.
- [06:43]
Bob Hoffman
Thank you, Richie.
- [06:44]
Elena Jasper
Well, we're glad you're here today to talk with us, so let's just go ahead and get into it. A reminder, on this show, we try to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results, which should be no problem for Bob Hoffman. And I like to tee these up with some sort of research or article. And I wanted to share just a couple quotes from your keynote speech at the EU Parliament in Brussels. This was in 2023. The subject was the dangers of online tracking, a topic you're well known for. And you said, online advertising has an unnecessary and dangerous dark side. It's called tracking. Doesn't matter what you call it. Tracking a surveillance spine. It's a menace. And you also said, I firmly believe that we can continue to have online advertising that's profitable and successful without the perilous consequences of tracking. The problem is not advertising. The problem is tracking and that's just a little preview of what we're going to talk about today. But before we get into all that, I have to ask about your career journey, because I think it has to be a completely unique human experience. As you just said a little bit there. You were an agency CEO, you became an author, a public speaker, you ran a blog called the Ad Contrarian, which I miss so much. But then I heard you say recently that you're becoming less interested in the advertising industry. So was there a specific kind of moment or turning point that led you from being an ad industry insider to more of one of its critics?
- [08:01]
Bob Hoffman
Yes, there was. It was 2011 or 2012. And I was sitting in a meeting and I was very suspicious of online advertising. We were getting a lot of online advertising people into the agency and pitching us on stuff. I'm a skeptical person. As soon as I hear someone talk and try to pitch to me, the first thing that enters my mind is, how do you know that? And these people would pitch me stuff and I would ask, how do you know that? And they would give me very shaky answers that I couldn't really totally acknowledge as true. And I was sitting in a meeting one day. I'm not going to say who the client was, but our account team was going through some statistics that we had generated based on an online campaign we did for this company. And we had a whole deck, a whole big deck. And we're going through it and we get to the click through rate and the click through rate comes up at 0.02 and move on. And the client says, wait, wait a minute, can you go back to that last slide? And we say, sure. We go back to the last slide and he says, click through rate 2%. That's pretty good. And we all shook our hand and we moved on. And 0.02% is not 2%. He thought that the click through rate was 2 in 100 and it was 2 in 10,000. And we did not. Correct. We just let it go. That evening I was in bed and I was thinking and I said to myself, I have become one of them. I, I am one of these online artists now. I can't do that. I've spent a whole career trying to be upfront and honest with clients and I'm not going to become one of those bullshit artists. From that day on, I knew I had to leave the agency. It took me two years to get out because I had certain responsibilities as CEO of the company. But I knew on that that that was a turning point. For me, where I knew I had to get out.
- [10:14]
Elena Jasper
Well, let's talk about that then. So you leave the advertising industry, you start speaking out about some of this stuff. Why. Why do you believe that the current digital model is, I'd say, both inefficient for marketers, but more importantly, just bad for society in general.
- [10:28]
Bob Hoffman
The reason it's inefficient for marketers is because there's so much fraud and there's so many metrics that completely unreliable. But more important, it's bad for society because of the development of algorithms and the way that platforms use algorithms in a way that divides people as consumers, we're not really aware what's going on under the hood. But what's going on under the hood is best described in a fact about Facebook. In 2018, a bunch of Facebook executives wanted to know exactly what effect Facebook algorithm was having on Facebook users. And they did a study and they found that of all the people who went to extremist groups on Facebook, 64%, almost 2/3, were led there by Facebook's algorithms. In other words, Facebook algorithms told them, you're going to like this group. Here's the group, and it led them to those groups. And this has had a profound effect on society here in the U.S. i. I think our society is more divided than ever. There's less trust in institutions. It's very hard to believe that one of the things that's driving the deterioration of our society is something as silly as advertising. But it's the information that is being captured. The advertising business used to be about distributing information. It's now about collecting information. It's not a mystery what happens in these cases when people are followed, when governments know everything you are talking about, everyone you are talking to, this is not a healthy thing. And now it's the marketing industry that's doing that. It's the marketing industry that knows everything about us, that knows who we talk to, that knows what we say, and there's no precedence for that. Everything that individuals do now, the marketing industry is doing that. And the marketing industry is getting closer and closer to our government. I don't think I have to tell you about what's happening with the billionaires Boys club and the administration in Washington. This is going to be nothing but trouble. It may not be this week, it may not be this year, but there is going to be a lot of trouble about our government spying on individuals, I can promise you that.
- [13:02]
Elena Jasper
Well, let's talk a little bit about digital advertising, because you do clarify in your Work that the tracking is the real villain here, not the advertising itself. And as an agency, we're lucky. We don't buy digital, we just buy television. So it allows us to have conversations like this with you. So we're not, we're not sweating right now. But one thing we have noticed just looking at our clients campaigns is typically all of this targeting like that they do, it's actually not as effective. So it's crazy. It's like you have all this information on people and generally broader targeting leads to better results. But how do you see digital advertising being more effective or continuing to be effective if we didn't have this type of surveillance model?
- [13:43]
Bob Hoffman
Advertising has been effective without spying on people for decades. Television, radio, magazines, newspapers, outdoor. They never spied on people, they didn't follow individuals around and they were successful for decades. Advertisers don't need to do that to be successful. Platforms don't need to do. It's so absurd. We're talking about some of the most profitable companies the world has ever known. Google, Facebook. In the history of the world, there haven't been many companies that have been this profitable. And these guys are telling us they need to spy on people to keep their business going. It's complete bullshit. But it helps them sell their product. And you know, marketers fall for this bullshit. It's very clear that very little of this tracking results in anything that's useful to marketers. Very little of it. It's not good for business and it's not good for society. In Europe they have GDPR and they have a couple of other laws which pretty much put a huge halt on tracking. The problem is they're not being enforced and the big platforms are still getting away with this crap, but at least they have acknowledged that it's an issue here in the States. It's ridiculous.
- [15:10]
Rob Demars
So if you are given a magic wand, then yeah, to be able to address what's going on in the advertising ecosystem, whether it is legislation, industry best practices, what would you do? You'd wave the wand.
- [15:24]
Bob Hoffman
And I'd wave the wand and say tracking is illegal. That's what I would do. Very simple. The very first thing we need to do is, is end spying on individuals. We do that. A lot of the problems in the marketing industry and in society start to go away. Not all, but a significant amount.
- [15:48]
Rob Demars
What would you say to the folks? And again, I think Elaine is right. We're in the TV space, so this is easy for us to pick on digital. But what would you say to the folks that say it actually improves the customer experience, that the ads are more tailored, they're more meaningful, there's less waste.
- [16:05]
Bob Hoffman
I'd say that's total bullshit. And if you were to read my newsletter from this past week, I prove that it's total bullshit. Because there is research from consumers that consumers say the thing that they hate worst about the Internet experience is advertising, that it does not improve the consumer experience. And the research shows four out of five people say that collecting data for the supposed benefit of giving people more personalized advertising is totally bullshit. That four out of people are against it and don't like it. So all this stuff, I, I hope you will read the newsletter that I wrote this weekend. Because what I've done is I've taken quotes from 10 of the most famous people in our industry who are supposed to know stuff, and I've taken quotes from them and then I've show about how wrong they are, how they know nothing. And it's very clear. If any of you out there listening or watching would like the proof of this pudding, please email me and I'll send you the newsletter so you can see for yourself. You don't have to believe me. You can see with your own eyes. Because what I think and what you think and what you think and what the people out there think, that doesn't matter. That doesn't mean a thing. It's the facts that matter. It's the truth that matters. That's what matters.
- [17:35]
Rob Demars
Let's double down on our doubling down our theme here with digital. And talk about ad fraud, Minute tens of billions are lost. You had said that it is the second largest criminal income in the world.
- [17:51]
Bob Hoffman
That's not what I say. That's what the World Federation of Advertisers say. They say that online ad fraud in 2025 will become the second largest source of criminal income in the world after drug trafficking.
- [18:08]
Rob Demars
So why, why are these fraudsters so successful?
- [18:11]
Bob Hoffman
Because marketers are idiots. Marketers don't know what they're doing.
- [18:17]
Rob Demars
They're from Mars.
- [18:18]
Bob Hoffman
Yeah. They buy all this stupid shit. It's worthless. They know it's worthless. But it generates great numbers that they can show. Look, CEO, look what I got here. We got 1 million viewers. Yeah, 1 million bots is what you got, moron. You didn't get 1 million viewers. And you know they can sell it. Look, let's be honest. What's a marketer's first. What's the first thing he or she is trying to do? It's to keep his job, right? And the way you keep your job. It's very hard to draw a straight line between advertising and business success. There are so many things. There's what your competition is doing, there's price changes, there's economic things that. There's all kinds of things that can muddy that. What you would hope would be a straight line, but the one thing you can waive is, look how many people we reached. Look how many clicks we got. Look how low our CPMs are. The online advertising ecosystem provides marketers with wonderful bullshit metrics that they can prove how useful what they're doing is with these metrics. And the CEOs and the CFOs, they don't know that it's all bullshit. They think it's real. They say, oh, well, look, look, look what we got here. Can't complain about that. She got 10 million hits on this. I can't complain about that. There's a whole industry of fraud acceptance because it doesn't harm individuals. It harms the brands, but it doesn't harm individuals. It makes the individuals look good.
- [20:03]
Rob Demars
What should brands do about it?
- [20:04]
Bob Hoffman
First of all, they have to educate themselves. The CEOs and the CFOs and the boards of directors cannot rely on getting accurate information out of the marketing department. They just can't, because the marketing department doesn't know what's real either. The marketing department is getting reports from their agency, and the agency is getting reports from the media suppliers, and the media suppliers are getting reports from the web publishers. And all along the way, there's opportunities for fraud to come into the process. The more complicated a system is, the more room there is for bad information to enter into the system. You know, if I were a brand, if I were the CEO, if I were a cfo, I would hire me an expert who is not affiliated, doesn't have something to sell me. Just go in there, go inside and tell me what's going on. The average programmatic online advertising campaign goes to 40,000 different websites. How in the fucking world are you supposed to do forensics on 40,000 websites to find out, A, if your ad actually ran anywhere, B, if anyone actually saw it, a lot of the websites won't even let you get into the files, the basic files, to see what's going on? It's a black box. And as you say, there's probably upwards of $100 billion and maybe even more being stolen.
- [21:39]
Elena Jasper
What's crazy too, as we've covered on this show, there's actually a lot of studies that prove everything you're Saying about third party data, how it's not as effective, how much of it is inaccurate. There are peer reviewed academic studies that you're right, marketers need to read, learn and share with their C suite because it actually doesn't work as well either. And I think we're always frustrated when we talk to marketers a lot that are spending 100% of their budget on digital zero on something like linear television. It's like you don't even know who's seeing those ads. How can you miss out on something like tv? Makes us frustrated sometimes.
- [22:09]
Bob Hoffman
I can understand that.
- [22:11]
Elena Jasper
One thing I wanted to talk about was one of the first advertising books I ever read was yours. It's Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey. And I think for me reading that book, it was kind of a pivotal moment in my early marketing career because I started to approach some of like the industry fads with more skepticism. And as listeners can probably guess by that title, the book's about how consumers and brands are often not on the same page. And you've also said one of my favorite brand purpose quotes of all time, which is people are mostly too busy, too lazy, or too indifferent to give 2/5 of a flying shit about brand meaning. So why are you so skeptical of brand purpose as a marketing tactic?
- [22:49]
Bob Hoffman
I think brand purpose is suspect as a driver of business success. There have been a few companies that have used it successfully, but only a few. I think of brand purpose as like arguing from the extreme. You take an extreme version of something like Patagonia, for example, and you say that that's the norm. Well, it's not the norm and it's two or three standard deviations from the norm. The idea that people are so interested in your brand that they're going to, you know, which peanut butter should I buy? Oh, let's see which one sources its peanuts from this place or that place. I'm sorry, people don't work that way. That's not how it works in some cases. Yeah, there are some people who do that and there are some, you know, people who are very committed to but that they're a very small minority. You know, in marketing it's about likelihoods and probabilities. There's no yes or no. There's no right and wrong. There's no black and white. There's just what's more likely and what's more probable. And the probability is most of the people who buy most of this stuff aren't really that interested. They don't see that much difference. Between your product and your competitor. They see it's pretty much alike, and they buy the one that they're most familiar or comfortable with, or the one their mom used or the one their friend told them about. That's good. People don't have that much time or energy to involve themselves in sussing out the meaning of everything they buy. You know, marketing is not about all the things that marketers obsess over. Marketing is about how humans behave. That's what it is. How do human beings actually behave? And if you understand that, then you can develop an intelligent marketing strategy. But first you have to start there. Why does a human being buy this peanut butter and not that peanut butter? What goes into that? And you have to develop a philosophy about that, a theory about that, a thesis about that. And once you have that, then you can feed that thesis. Until you have that, you're. You're not clear on anything. You're trying this and you're trying that, and you're doing this and you're doing that. And brand purpose is one of those fantasies that we'd love to believe that people are also thoughtful about what they do and their behavior. Sorry, not in this world.
- [25:25]
Elena Jasper
I think the height of this a few years ago was when brands started posting for everything that happened in our society. And I remember thinking, like, thank goodness I know what Taco Bell thinks about this political issue. Like, what would I do?
- [25:36]
Bob Hoffman
What is, what is my toilet tissue? Think about the immigration issue.
- [25:41]
Elena Jasper
And I was asked, even as someone who runs our marketing, social media, should we post about it? And I said, no one cares what we think. I believe me, no one's thinking, oh, what is this Random agency. Think about this like a social topic. Like now nobody's waiting to hear.
- [25:54]
Bob Hoffman
I agree with you, Dana. And I'm glad you read my book and liked it. You're obviously a very smart person.
- [25:59]
Rob Demars
Yeah, I love the title. Marketers are from Ours, Consumers are from New Jersey. It reminds me of the old David Ogilvy quote. The customer's not an idiot, they're your wife.
- [26:09]
Bob Hoffman
You know, I have a book in my drawer that I've written about that quote. Right. The name of the book is David Ogilvy Never Met my Wife. And I'm afraid to publish it because I've never written, I've never published fiction before. All my books have been non fiction. They've been about advertising. This book is also about advertising, but it's fiction. And I'm just not confident that I can write fiction well, so I haven't published It. But I'm thinking it's kind of a novella. It's about 75 or 80 pages. And will you read? I'll send it to us. Yeah, I'm gonna send it to you guys, and you tell me if I would. You read it, then tell me if I could.
- [26:59]
Rob Demars
100.
- [26:59]
Bob Hoffman
You promise?
- [27:00]
Rob Demars
100.
- [27:01]
Bob Hoffman
Okay. Okay. Promise. You got to send me your emails. Email addresses. So I'll send it.
- [27:05]
Rob Demars
For sure. For sure.
- [27:07]
Bob Hoffman
Okay.
- [27:07]
Rob Demars
So us marketers, we love to complicate stuff. That's how we make money, right? We make stuff. Hardy, you wrote a book, the three word Brief, simple advice for people who Advertise. And it warns about how marketers are making stuff hard. Right. So what should we be focusing on? How do we just simplify, get through the clutter and get to what really matters?
- [27:29]
Bob Hoffman
Well, I think Byron Sharp has a pretty good idea of that. He calls it mental and physical availability.
- [27:36]
Rob Demars
Availability.
- [27:37]
Bob Hoffman
I hate those words. You know, I. I think his idea is right, but that sounds like marketing. What marketing is basically about is fame and distribution. Okay? It's the manufacturer's responsibility to create a product worth buying. It is the marketer's responsibility to make that product available and seem attractive. And it's the advertiser's responsibility to make it famous. Those are the three basic. You know, I'm whittling it down right to, in my opinion, to the bones. Those are the bones. Manufacturer, make a product worth buying. Marketer, make it available and attractive. Advertiser, make it famous. If you do those three things, if those three things happen, you have a way, way better chance of being successful than any other philosophy of business that I know of. And what marketers. I'm not a marketer per se. I'm a copyright. I'm an advertising guy. Marketers have to do things that I know nothing about. I don't know anything about distribution. I don't know anything about pricing, financials, new product development, customer relations. You know, marketers have to do that. I don't. I never had to do that. I was just a copywriter, so my opinions about marketing are suspect. I've never read a marketing book in my life. I've never taken a marketing class in my life. My opinions about marketing are suspect, but that doesn't mean I don't have them. And that doesn't mean I haven't been around marketers for a long time. And I see what marketers do, and most of them, I think, are very mediocre. I am not impressed with marketers as a whole. Now there are some who are brilliant. There are the Mark Ritson's and the Byron Sharps. Those people are brilliant and they have brilliant things to say. And then there's 3 million other people in marketing who have no ideas, who just repeat what Byron Sharp and Mark Ritz. They go around saying mental availability, positioning, you know, they, they've learned a language, they've learned sayings that they repeat over and over and you make, you want to stick your a knife in your head because that's all they can talk about the same thing over and mental availability and positioning and differentiation and branding engagement. All these terms that you know, a lot of them mean nothing. What the hell does branding mean? It's a meaningless term about a nonsense activity. You don't do branding. Branding is basically the basics of marketing. That's what it is. Anyway. It frustrates me. Like I say, there are some brilliant marketers and I've met a lot of brilliant, not a lot, some brilliant marketers. There are a lot of very mediocre people who don't know anything. I don't know anything about marketing. I'm faking it. I just know what I've been able to observe. And I think a lot of marketers, so called marketers, think they know things that they don't really know. So I'm skeptical and I think skepticism is one of the most important things you can have if you work in our business. If you're skeptical, you're going to do a lot better than if you're gullible. You should always ask yourself, you know, you people out there listening to this, you should ask yourself, how does he know that? How does Hoffman know that? And you should ask that about everyone who tries to, tries to influence you. How do you know that? And do you be surprised how many people don't really know it, think they know it, but they don't really know it.
- [31:23]
Elena Jasper
That's great advice. And I think that's how you as a person have come to a lot of your own original ideas and your own original thoughts from questioning what other people have said. And you've shared a lot of those contrarian beliefs today. I was wondering if we could kind of end here on what's one big myth or misconception if you had to pick one that marketers should just unlearn immediately.
- [31:43]
Bob Hoffman
Ooh, that's a toughie. What should you unlearn? Okay, here's what you should do. I'm gonna rephrase this if you don't mind marketers and I'm gonna Paraphrase something that a brilliant guy named Richard Feynman once said. My opinion of marketers are they're clever enough to understand what they've been taught, but they're not clever enough to question what they've been taught. And what you need to unlearn is to accept the opinions of experts. And you need to question the opinions of experts. So unlearn that. Learn how to improvise. Marketers are terrible improvisers. You talk to them and they, you know, they know all the truisms and any problem that they come up against, they apply one of the truisms. But they're not good at improvisers. And improvisation is creativity. Improvisation. You know, if you see a funny person and what they see, the same things we see, but they connect them differently, that's what improvisation is, that's what creativity is. It's connecting things that don't seem to be connected somehow. Marketers are not good at that. And they need to become good at that to be better at what they do.
- [33:01]
Elena Jasper
That's great. We actually. I lied. We have one last, more fun, light hearted question for you, which is you've traveled all over the world. I found on your site that you've spoken in over 24 countries. If you could bring back one customer, a sort of different tradition from a different country back here in the States, what would you pick?
- [33:19]
Bob Hoffman
You know, the world is a strange place when it comes to marketing these days. Okay, you guys tell me, who are the marketers that you think of when you think of leaders in our industry? Give me some names.
- [33:32]
Elena Jasper
Mark Ritson. Byron Sharp. Jenny Romanuk. Peter Field. Les Binette.
- [33:37]
Bob Hoffman
Okay, stop right there. What do those people all have in common?
- [33:41]
Elena Jasper
They're smart, they do research.
- [33:44]
Bob Hoffman
Give me something else. You know what they all have in common?
- [33:47]
Elena Jasper
Oh, they're not from the United States. I said Mark Pritchard. Okay, I got one, I got one person.
- [33:52]
Bob Hoffman
They're not not from the United States. There's very little going on in the United States that is at the forefront of business thinking and particularly marketing and advertising thinking. And so what would I bring back from overseas to the us? Original thinking. We're locked into old ways of thinking and it's very sad. In most categories, whether it's science, business, art, anything, it's the young people who are rebellious. And in marketing and advertising, it's not. It's the old fucks like me who are rebellious. And the young people are buying into all the bullshit that's being sold to them and not being Rebellious and not saying, how do you know that? And they're just buying it. It's very upsetting for me to see because I know that young people should be rebellious. I expect that. And that's what I would like to see. And I'd like to see more rebelliousness in our industry.
- [34:58]
Elena Jasper
Yeah, I think we can agree with you there. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us today before we kind of close things off. I know you mentioned people can email you for your newsletter, but if there's anything else you want to promote, we'll share your website, your recent books, you know, anything else?
- [35:11]
Bob Hoffman
Yeah, my new book is called the Three Word Brief, and it's a good book. It's about three things. Number one, how advertising works. It's about the bullshit of the programmatic online industry, and it's about why I don't trust marketers. And so it's in three, three sections like that. And even if you don't agree with me, and you probably won't, a lot of you who are listening, I think it's worth reading and seeing a different opinion than the one you usually get about what we usually do. So it's called the Three Word Brief, and you can find it at your local Amazon. As for my newsletter, my website is bobhoffman's website.com and you can connect to my newsletter through the website.
- [36:04]
Rob Demars
And we can't wait for your next book. David Ogilvy never met my wife, so.
- [36:12]
Elena Jasper
We can't, the two of us can't.
- [36:14]
Rob Demars
Either wait to read that today.
- [36:17]
Bob Hoffman
Okay, you guys have to send me your email addresses and I'll send you a PDF of them.
- [36:22]
Elena Jasper
We will.
- [36:23]
Bob Hoffman
We will. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. It's a nice conversation and good luck to you and to your viewers.
- [36:30]
Elena Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing. Marketing Architects.