Kirk Cheyfitz is an award-winning journalist, author, editor, publisher and innovator in nontraditional advertising, marketing and content creation. He is also the CEO and chief editorial officer of Story Worldwide, the full-service, global ad agency he co-founded and runs.
For nearly a quarter century, the digital ad business has been acting like a depraved, sociopathic child – growing like wildfire while recklessly betraying, undermining, and pissing off virtually everyone in its global orbit.
Digital advertising’s many deadly sins now have generated an unprecedented plague of problems for everybody. Singly, each would be a disaster. Together, they’re an existential threat to both advertising and publishing.
“Ad blocking is not something we control; it’s something the consumer controls.”
Mike Donahue, ad agency veteran and former executive vice president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies is talking to a roomful of leading marketers at the Wharton School of Business.Continue Reading
Of all the vestiges of old school, traditional ad land, none is as stifling as the request for proposal process. If brands want agencies to look to the future and innovate, they’ll need to stop treating agency selection like a vendor-procurement process.
If the ad industry were a national park, it would easily qualify for the coveted designation of a fossil-rich area; paleontologists would flood the place. Evidence of the distant past is everywhere in ad land, close to the surface, littering the landscape.Continue Reading
With abject apologies to the young Bob Dylan, nobody in adland needs a weatherman to know which way the wind blows these days. It blows toward great content.
Seriously? We’re gonna have another debate about the future of advertising? It’s a little late for that. But there’s still time, I think, for a heart-to-heart about how, and how quickly, we get there. Continue Reading
The Federal Trade Commission has signaled it intends to watch — and possibly regulate — how brands and the media handle native advertising.
Unfortunately, the agency is only highlighting how out of touch it is with today’s media landscape.
The long, noisy debate over so-called native advertising has completely missed that native is a dead end for advertisers and publishers — a passing fad in the slow demise of traditional advertising. Continue Reading
It has been seven years since digital became social… and media changed forever. We all agree interruption as a marketing strategy is dead.
But adland has largely failed to act on that consensus.
It’s clear that valuable content will ultimately replace traditional ads. But the content marketing business has yet to seize — or even squarely face — the future of advertising. Continue Reading
