• by Tig Tillinghast , June 7, 2001

Coming out of college, I had to choose between journalism and advertising. I visited reporters and newspaper editors while interviewing and asked them what they thought of the choice.

The editor of the Chicago Sun-Times told me, "You'd be an idiot to take journalism as a career." Every other editor and reporter - to a one - told me effectively the same thing. With low pay, long hours and very little appreciation, they said the romance waned quickly.

Across the river, at Leo Burnett, in a window office facing the Sun-Times Building, a senior vice president told me, "Advertising is great! It's the most satisfying thing I've ever done, outside my family." All the account executives I spoke with beamed with satisfaction and pride.

Eight years later, I now realize that those two different groups had equally satisfying (or dissatisfying) jobs in most respects. But the culture of journalism compels writers to always be thinking about the way things should be, usually concentrating on the negative. Advertisers, on the other hand, live in a world where they get punished unless they put the best face on all troubles.

And therein lies a festering problem with the advertising industry, and perhaps the online part of it in particular. We have trouble being honest with ourselves about some things.

This column is the first of a new weekly series that will seek to take a hard look at issues where the current industry practice may deviate from rational behavior. Some common themes will likely surface. Hopefully, some common causes of the irrational will also come to light. Among the rogues gallery of causes: - Conflicts of interest - Misplaced evangelism and zealotry - Phony research - Selective vision - Outright fraud - The pervasive marketing attitude of "If we can make it into a good story to the client, than that's good enough."

Ad agencies tend to control the data we get back in online campaigns. They write the post-mortem histories, and not surprisingly, they tend to cast themselves as the heroes. This type of self-reinforcing self-evaluation can be a major cause of strange industry practices.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, the political structure of the Communist Party created self-reinforcing policy exaggerations. When Chairman Mao stated "We must be careful, lest we become capitalist roaders," his minions competed with one another to appear the most effective.

The governor of the Shanghai province ordered his subordinates to detain all the Chinese nationals working for Western corporations. The governor's subordinates, striving to appear most zealous, arrested them and threw them into jails. The jailers, fearing to treat these political prisoners as well as the criminals in the system, put them on starvation diets and tortured "confessions" out of them. This was not, initially, a desired policy, but it spun out of control.

Meanwhile, Mao continued to get report after report about how successful his policy had proven. The people at the execution level wrote the performance reports. They determined, time after time, that treasonous disaster had been narrowly thwarted by their diligent efforts. To question these reports was reason enough to be denounced and tortured.

For a decade this went on, until finally the performance claims became so ludicrous relative to reality. It ended when a lieutenants under Mao determined that the damage being done to the country (millions of people were starving because of irrational economic policies and fictional grain stores) began to outweigh their sense of personal risk.

I do not mean to trivialize the deaths of millions of Chinese in the Cultural Revolution by drawing a comparison between the country and the interactive industry. Instead, I merely wish to point out that in marketing organizations we share a very similar political structure. And the results continue to be predictable.

In the top-down structure of an ad agency, for instance, the very fact that you are a member suggests that you must have faith in this precept: that sending carefully crafted messages to people has a salutary effect on the client's bottom line. That's not negotiable in most organizations (some direct houses, affiliate marketing organizations and the like may prove exceptions). The account directors there must send their minions out with orders to extract large budgets out of the clients to feed this engine of media spending.

The account supervisors must create research structures that reinforce the logic of having spent all the money in the particular manner they chose. The account executive's job is to make sure that everything gets spent on time, with as few glitches as possible. The planners and buyers are supposed to choose which vehicles will win the media money based on already narrow criteria defined by people above them. In traditional media, that criteria usually has nothing to do with real performance. In online media, it sometimes does, and that's precisely where the rose-colored glasses of the marketing industry fail to block out the carnage around us.

The interactive people find themselves with a greater degree of scrutiny, disallowing them from reverting to the lazy thinking of traditional marketing.

Jim Meskauskas, in a recent commentary on MediaPost, quoted the old saw about marketers knowing that half the money they spend is wasted, but they just don't know which half. But in the fantastical world of marketing, we like to think of ourselves living in a fictional society where people claim none of their marketing dollars are ever wasted.

Almost every post-buy report generated by marketers shows only success of various shades. The agency draws up the post-buy report. The marketing manager prettifies it and hands it to her management. The VP of marketing collates it with a bunch of others and tells the board of directors how utterly unusually successful the marketing and branding efforts have been.

There are no losers in the marketing world, at least until the pink slips get handed out. If marketers were truly interested in honest evaluative results, they would have an independent group looking at the outcomes. But that would introduce an unpredictability too dangerous to the established marketing department structure.

So, we come back to the political structure of marketing; a structure that can breed a culture of exaggeration, hubris and evasion. And that should be a very fun topic to revisit each week, poking holes in some of the myths and trying to figure out a better way to do business.

- Tig Tillinghast helped found and run several of the largest agencies' interactive groups, including those of Leo Burnett, J. Walter Thompson and Anderson & Lembke. At several Internet startups, he helped design several of the industry's media standards and financial practices. He is currently writing a book on interactive marketing to be published in the fall.