Mark Ritson muses on the idiocy of today's marketing. Brilliant stuff

Yesterday I watched 20 mins of a video cast of the Adobe Summit in London  that is all about becoming an Experience Business. I don't how long it will remain online but here is the link. 

The reason I watched was because an old chum had attended the event was astonished at the poor quality of the communications. It seems as if a string of jargon now trumps well thought out and expressed statements. If the main speaker uses the word 'experience' once he must do a thousand times.

This makes me sound like the archetypal miserable old sod. Well I seem to be in good company with Mark Ritson who writes for Marketing Week.

This week he has a hilarious article about the way that marketing is fast descending into black hole of lots of tactics (mostly digital) and little if any strategy. I kept thinking of the Adobe presentation as I read this article.

I also like Ritson's views about Millennials

I quote the text from Marketing Week: 

Marketers are obsessed with millennials. Ask almost any brand what demographic they are targeting and they will say it is those aged between 18 and 33. In Ritson’s analysis of articles appearing in the trade marketing press, the ratio of articles about millennials versus other demographics was 42:1.

Yet is this really sensible? Ritson estimated that millennials account for less than 10% of the population and an even lower proportion of disposable income. And he questioned in reality whether this one homogeneous group that includes everyone across a 15-year age gap even really exists.

His conclusion? “The answer to every question [in marketing] is millennials. It’s lazy marketing. Millennials don’t exist. They do as a group of people but the idea they are different from Baby Boomers, it’s not true.

“Millennials just help us to confirm our absolute obsession with youth. That’s the real power of it. That marketing is only really interested in young customers.”

Finally, if you might like to sit back and listen to Ritson on Social Media.

You might disagree with some of it but he really hits the nail on the head and says things that I am sure a lot of marketers think but dare not say. Dick Stroud