Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson is a fun fellow. And a troublemaker. I like him.

I don’t follow him on Twitter (actually, I do now, just clicked follow as I write this) but I really don’t have to follow him. His posts are always mucking up my feed because over a dozen people I do follow retweet him. Sometimes there are four or five retweets almost in a row of the same Ritson tweet.

Now there’ll be one more.

Dick Stroud tossed up a video of a recent Ritson talk:

Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Is marketing in such a bad state as depicted by Mark Ritson - probably
… When reading about the exploits of marketers I spend more and more of my time shaking my head in disbelief. How can they be so dumb?

Click the YouTube logo for the wide-screen version:

At 2:20 Mark goes on a waggish rant about the death of. Everything in marketing and advertising is dead and replaced by ……?

I’ve laughed about this for years. A few moldy posts:

01 May 2010
Foretellings
… Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.

18 May 2010
Advertising Is Dead. Again. (Part I)
It’s official.  The last sixty-four years of advertising has been declared ‘ineffectual’.

19 May 2010
Advertising Is Dead. Again. (Part II)
But … what about social media marketing?  That’s the new thing, what everyone’s talking about, the only way to go nowadays. It’s the greatest thing since the telephone.

21 July 2017
The Interminable Death of Television
Nothing I can think of is as lively and chipper as television in its final throes. If we all began dying as happily, healthily, slowly, and painlessly as TV, we wouldn’t fear the process - but welcome it.

At 12:18 in the video, Mark talks about one of my favorite subjects (because it doesn’t exist), Brand Purpose. He does a funny bit where he asks the audience to match the brand purpose with the product/company.  I did pretty much the same thing a decade or so ago when talking about Baby Boomer sites and their mission statements:

14 September 2006
INVASION OF THE BABY BOOMER POD PEOPLE

27 August 2009
Advertising to Baby Boomers Can Be Tricky Business
… “Now, take out a pencil and paper.  It’s time for a test.  Match the graphics with the tag lines.”

Around 19:40 he’s all over digital nonsense. Again, very funny. Reminded me of some of my takes on digital nonsense:

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?
… Television is now digital, commercials are shot with digital cameras – so are commercials digital advertising?  Are digital spots on digital radio digital advertising?  Print ads are created on computers, usually rendered as PDFs, delivered digitally. Digital advertising?  Magazines, both editorial and ads, are digitally produced.  Digital advertising?

04 November 2013
Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges
Clients and just about everybody else seem to be confused about advertising on all these new-fangled gadgets.  Added to the mix are odd, stupefying concepts like digital and mobile and native. Most of this stuff is gobbledygook, but I’ll try to separate the chaff from the chaff …

Keep watching Mark Ritson’s video for more laughs and insight.