Adobe's Ad Baloney

Who are you talking to? What are you saying? And why?

Below is the full text of this full-page broadsheet ad—all 42 words of copy:

THAT'S BALONEY.
Marketing works, and we can prove it.
With Adobe® Marketing Cloud, you
get a complete set of integrated
solutions: analytics, social,
advertising, targeting, and
content management.
Go from data to insights
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ADOBE & MARKETING
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"Marketing is not BS," said Emma Chalwin, brand marketing director of Adobe in her explanation of the ad, and it is "time to dispel this myth."

She continued, "For too long, marketing has been misunderstood, undervalued and seen as a soft profession, which has too much guesswork and doesn't provide too much impact on business strategy and bottom-line results."

Adobe spent $529,885 to reach a combined circulation of 2.3 million readers of the Times and the Journal. They spend many of billions of dollars a year on marketing to acquire customers, clients or donors. To them, this ad is a total non sequitur.

Without marketing, none of them would have a business and they know it.

Note to Adobe creatives: if you want to win over people who think that marketing is bullshit, it won't happen using just 42 words of highly technical terminology that would be understood only by hard-core digital marketers. To non-marketers, this is gibberish.

The entire premise of this Adobe effort is a preposterous.

About Advertising
After a lifetime in the business, I can now boil down everything I have learned about advertising to three simple pieces of advice:

1. It pays to spend money on being relevant—making sure you are talking to the right people and irritating as few others as possible.
2. "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.'" —David Ogilvy
3. Frame over your desk in large type the following paragraph by the late, great copy master Vic Schwab from his book, "How to Write a Good Advertisement": The copywriter's aim in life should be to try to make it harder for people to pass up his advertisement than to read it.

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