Ad man and bestselling author of books such as Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey; Advertising for Skeptics; and AdScam, Bob Hoffman is back shining an unfiltered light on the industry. He’s not impressed with what he sees.
Given that his blog, The Ad Contrarian, was named one of the world’s most influential by Business Insider, when the former ad agency boss calls out rampant ad fraud, to the tune of around $100 billion (€91 billion) a year, you’d expect the industry to act.
But it doesn’t, and for a very good reason, he tells Dentsu’s Dave Winterlich. “Everyone’s making money and everyone is prospering,” says Hoffman. If he were buying online advertising, he would only buy direct from the publisher or from a quality trusted network, he tells Winterlich. “I would never buy programmatically.”
That’s because so much ad fraud is attributable to automated, programmatic advertising. It means brands are spending money and too often getting nothing in return.
“The money is being stolen. You would think they would care but what is bad for the brand may not be bad for the marketing people,” he argues.
“The CMOs (chief marketing officers) and the marketing people are getting these fraudulent reports about what they’re buying, the low cost per thousands and the millions of people seeing their ads, and it’s all bulls**t. But they can wave it in front of their CEO, or their board, and say ‘See what I’m getting for this money we’re spending in programmatic online, see all the good stuff that’s coming from it?‘”
It is much harder for a CMO to go back to their boss and say actually, “we’ve been screwed. We lost tens of millions of dollars last year to fraud and I didn’t know about it. I’m an idiot,” he adds.
What the brand has actually paid for is anything from bots to click farms, but worse, their money is lining the coffers of cyber criminal gangs.
“According to the World Federation of Advertisers, in 2025 ad fraud may become the second largest source of criminal income in the world after drug trafficking,” says Hoffman. Part of the problem is that the marketing industry is, almost by definition, “immune to facts”.
“They exist on legends and rituals. They ignore the facts and just keep doing what they’ve been doing, and everyone seems to be satisfied with fraud, and the damage that some of it is doing to society. It’s frustrating.”
It’s a topic he explores in his latest book, The Three Word Brief, a newly published collection of his most thought provoking and controversial essays, in which he characteristically pulls no punches taking apart the so-called “best practices” of the advertising, media and marketing industries.
His thesis is that the most important thing any brand needs to tell its ad agency is three words: “make us famous”. “It doesn’t matter what you are selling, if your competition is not famous and you are, you have an enormous advantage over them because most people don’t really think very deeply about what they buy.”
‘To me the most important part of advertising is to be noticed, and it doesn’t take a brilliant strategy to do that’
Marketing and advertising is about likelihoods and probabilities, he says. “There’s no yes and no, no always and never. And if you are famous, the likelihood of your brand being bought is substantially greater than your competition that is not famous. And that’s the number one thing advertising can create,” he says.
It’s very simple really but unfortunately another characteristic of the industry is a compulsion to obscure simplicity, he believes. “Because that’s how we make money. We make money by complicating the shit out of everything. We take the obvious and make it incomprehensible,” he argues.
Marketing is about strategy, advertising is about execution. “To me the most important part of advertising is to be noticed, and it doesn’t take a brilliant strategy to do that,” he says.
It’s why marketing should be left to marketing people and the execution of advertising to advertising folk. Unfortunately that happens less and less.
“The skills to be a good marketer are that you need to be logical – to connect A to B in a logical way. In advertising, logic doesn’t work. Advertising is not about logic. Advertising is not a court case where I list the points in my favour and you list the points in yours and whoever has the best-case wins,” he points out.
Indeed, he reckons Monty Python was the best ad agency that never existed. The legendary comedic troupe would have “done some of the greatest advertising in history”, he says, because of their core strength – silliness, one of the most underutilised facets in advertising.
“People love silly advertising,” says Hoffman. “Ads don’t need to be logical or make sense, and they don’t need to be emotional and make you cry. They need to be beautiful or silly or funny or somehow intellectually stimulating. They need to do all the things marketing people think they shouldn’t.”
He believes that how strong brands are created is grossly misunderstood. “You don’t create a strong brand by ‘branding’ – whatever that means – you create it by doing a lot of other things right, like making a terrific product, by making it attractive and easily available, and by making it famous,” he says. It’s not about putting a logo on a pair of socks.
As advertising is an art, not a science, marketers need to be wary of using endless data and metrics to prescribe it, he cautions, not least because so much of the data is unreliable. More than that, data is meaningless without a human who can synthesise and develop a sensible strategy out of it, he adds.
Indeed, it’s the humans that make the difference in this business, given that data is so ubiquitous and commoditised as to be no longer any source of competitive advantage.
Part of the difficulty the industry has in recognising this is that it has been bought up by very large financial institutions.
“Holding companies are not advertising agencies, they are financial institutions who have bought up all the big advertising agencies and milk them, and that’s how they make their money,” he says.
“They are not run by the craftspeople who built the advertising industry, the copywriters and art directors and researchers and (client) accounts and marketing people. It was built bottom up. But now it is a top-down industry in which the large financial institutions optimise for efficiency, they don’t optimise for craftsmanship.”
Though there is so much that concerns him, and so little sign the industry has the will to mend itself, he won’t stop calling it as he sees it. “Advertising is the only thing I know about,” he says. “I feel a responsibility to some degree to try and do what I can.”
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