Why Digital Advertising Is Killing Brand Identity — with John Long, Author of "Zombie Brands"

In Episode 78, John Long, SVP and Executive Creative Director at Digitas, joins the AdQuick Madvertising Podcast to discuss his explosive new book "Zombie Brands" and why today's digital advertising is killing brand personalities. From the viral "How it started vs. How it's going" meme that exposed terrible banner ads to the systemic forces destroying brand humanity, this conversation reveals what's really wrong with modern marketing.

Get a copy of his book at: https://zombie-brands.com/

Transcript

Adam Singer (00:00):

Hello listeners and welcome to the latest episode of the AdQuick Madvertising Podcast, a podcast that explores the intersection of technology, marketing, content, all of the things that you care about. Today we have a returning guest. We have John Long. He's SVP and executive creative director at Digitas. You all know who he is. We've had him on the show before. He's one of my favorite voices in the marketing sector. He shares ideas and thought leadership that does not suck. I actually enjoy reading it, whereas a lot of other people I don't really ... His thoughts are actually memorable. John, welcome to the show. And you have a new book today, which is one of the reasons we're talking, right?

John Long (00:43):

Yes, Adam, thanks for having me. Yeah, I do have a new book. It's called Zombie Brands.

Adam Singer (00:48):

Yes. And so John in his book talks a lot about what a lot of you have definitely thought either behind closed doors or with marketing industry peers. And I thought it could be helpful to trace the start of it. So John, you trace it back to the really terrible absolute banner ad and your how it started, how it's going meme, then went viral. When did you first realize that this wasn't just a few bad executions, but this was actually evidence of a systemic problem? And do you want to explain the absolute banner meme?

John Long (01:31):

Yeah, sure. So the inspiration, there's a reason I wrote the book and then there's an inspiration for the book. And I think the inspiration for the book is what you're talking about. It was basically from goofing off on Twitter. So I just got this idea one day. I just was horrified at the state of digital advertising and just seeing awful banners in awful social ads. And I started snapping ... Every time I'd see a really terrible banner from a famous brand, I'd snap it and then juxtapose it with a classic ad from the '80s, '90s, even 2000s. And I did this for a while and they caught on fairly well, but then how it started, How It's Going Memes started on Twitter. And I thought, oh, I'll use that construct for these. And I did that and they posted even better. And so if I saw an Apple banner ad or social ad that was terrible, I'd juxtapose it with a think different ad.

(02:36):

If I saw ... No brand was spared. I mean, it was Porsche, Mercedes, Rolex, any great brand you can think of. And one day a Twitter pal of mine in the UK said, "Hey, John, these are great. You should put them on. You should make one master thread of them." And I did, and that's when the thing blew up. It got shared a million times. There was an article written about it in the UK.

(03:04):

And at the top is what you're talking about, which is this awful absolute banner ad, which is just laughably blad. It looks like it looks like literally someone intentionally trying to make a parody of a banner ad next to the classic absolute campaign by TBWA, and it was Absolute LA. It was a beautiful poster. And the more I looked at those two, I started thinking, there's a story there. How did the advertising industry go from making these incredibly impactful, beautifully crafted communications to this just absolute garbage? No one is going to become an absolute customer on the basis of that banner ad. And I thought that story was worth exploring and telling. But I did not want the book just to be a litany of complaints and just bemoan how terrible everything is. The second half of the book actually gets into, well, how can we fix it?

(04:18):

And it offers just a way forward for brands to get their persuasion back, their humanity back, and their appeal back.

Adam Singer (04:27):

I love that. And it almost seems like there's a similar concept in a lot of other areas on the consumer side happening where there's this process of ensitification is what Cory Dotro says and our friend Ed Zitron says sometimes. And it almost seems like there's a similar but different thing that's happened behind the ad creative work that we love ad creative and consumers love great ad creative. And it seems like it's sort of been inshitified. So I'm so glad that you wrote this book and I know our listeners are going to love getting a copy. I just have a question. If a CMO is listening right now, what are some of the simplest everyday signals that a brand has quietly crossed into quote unquote zombie territory that they should be looking out for? If they're listening to this, they're like, "I don't want my brand to be that way.

(05:26):

I'm a champion of great advertising." What should they look out for?

John Long (05:32):

Yeah. One thing is the logo test. So take a piece of work that you've done, cover the logo and see if someone can identify it based on the headline or the image. If it's a TV spot, mute it and see if someone can tell you what brand it is. The other thing is, if you're spending most of your time as a CMO or a senior marketer, if your calendar is filled, most of what you're talking about are digital ad units, that's a problem. Because the point I make in the book is that most digital ad units, be it a social post, a social ad or a display ad, they're akin to postcards. We talked about this last time.

(06:25):

They're like a postcard. They're like a reminder of a brand. They can't carry the weight of the full brand for various reasons. One, they're too small to create emotional impact, and that's what drives brand health, is connecting with people emotionally, drives growth, and it creates memory structures for people to fall in love with your brand. The other thing is any media that scrolls is inherently disposable media, just is. Going back to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. Anything that's scrolling, whether it's email or Twitter or Instagram, it's subconsciously, that's not that important. And the third thing is, yeah, there's a simple size problem.

(07:19):

You can't have impact persuasion and communicate something great in something the size of a postage damp. So if you're spending as a marketing team, if most of your hours of the day and the week are focused on these things and not what gives them meaning, that's a danger zone. And then the last thing I'd say is just take a look at your media mix and your media spend. In the book I point out, Adidas turned up the dial on their pure performance media too high and the brand tanked. So those are all warning signs that your brand might be turning into a zombie.

Adam Singer (08:04):

Yeah, it's interesting. I think some marketers wrongly started to believe that there were ... And this was probably true for a while, that there was a dial you could turn up for conversions for your company. And I think that was true. There's a brief window of time when the internet was first created. If you ranked first in Google for something, you could actually get conversions and there weren't a hundred other e-commerce stores for every single product, but that's like this small window of time. And I think it got extended when all of the ad techs started to cannibalize existing brand traffic and was like, "Look how much money you get back if you put more money in. " And it's just been all of this work, to your point of this short-term capture of demand that's already in market versus the hard work of actually building the durable demand of a large company across time where it's like you don't even need to really run too many search ads to remind people to buy things because they're going to go to the store and buy it anyway.

(09:13):

And so I love that there's a lot of people in the industry simultaneously talking about it. One of the reasons I like that you wrote this book is you're bringing together, I think a lot of what marketers see into one picture. And you also point to four big forces. You talk about the internet, digital media, social media, and smartphones as the drivers of zombification. If you had to pick one, I'm curious what it is because I want to see if it's the one that I think is the worst for humans overall to spend time with.

John Long (09:47):

Yeah, that's easy. It's the smartphone. If the smartphone, I think of the current media landscape like a big janga puzzle and the smartphone is the little piece and if you pull it out, the whole thing falls. There's no question in my mind about it. All four of the social channels are undergoing some sort of transformation, as you say, in shitification or some sort of business crisis. We know about Twitter, that's gone. That's no longer a reliable platform for advertisers. Instagram is, there's been multiple scandals with Meta and Instagram, and they're banning it for teenagers in Australia. They're just saying, no more. That's it. No more social media at all for teenagers. There's plenty of evidence it's not good for you. Facebook is basically a message book for old people, a message board for old people, and is just filled with AI kind of garbage. And TikTok is being sold to Ellis the Ellisons.

(10:52):

And we just saw what happens when billionaires buy these things. I can't imagine it's going to get better, but the smartphone is what makes all this thing work. So someone might push back on me and say, "Well, people can do this on their desktop. I know, but it's not the same because the other thing the smartphone does is I can take it into a store and check stuff and I can download coupons and QR codes." It is the indispensable piece of hardware for this ecosystem. And I do think there is an increasing awareness that these things are not good for you. They're addictive devices, they're keeping people isolated. There's a crisis of loneliness because everybody's staring at these screens. And I think people are going to have an awareness. I'm not saying that tomorrow people are going to stop using smartphones. I don't think that, but I do think there's an increasing awareness that these things are harmful and these things aren't great for you and they will ... I think we're at peak smartphone.

(12:02):

I don't think any more of the population I think is going to adopt the smartphone. I think we're only going to see more and more people just walking away from it.

Adam Singer (12:11):

Yeah. I removed all social media apps from my smartphone a few years ago and my anxiety levels are lower. I even removed my work notifications. Good for you. And I try to create that division. And I'm so happy with it. I bought this really cool smart locker for my home. So when I have guests over, I actually force them, some of them, not all of them have a problem, but for some of them, I take their device and I put it in this little lockbox and I set the timer for the two hours they'll be here. And I take my wife, Sue, because she likes her phone, and we have so much of a better time.

John Long (12:52):

That is amazing that you do that, but also sort of depressing.

Adam Singer (12:56):

It is sort of depressing. So I stopped myself from using it, but other people really ... But the thing is if you can remove them from their phone for a little bit after 10 minutes, they don't even miss it. So I'm just trying to help certain friends.

John Long (13:08):

Oh, it's great. I think it's great. It's very brave of you and it's true. It's like, well, why are you getting together with people and then staring at your screen? So yeah, to put a button on your question, I think this smartphone is ... It's also the nature of the screen. The screen is so small that brands became fixated on optimizing everything for that device. And that's how visuals got stripped down. That's how they started thinking about that one channel almost more than anything else. And at that size, you just lose so much personality and humanity.

Adam Singer (13:57):

I think so too. And there's something just deeply wrong about watching clips of a movie or for some people, like a whole movie on their phone. It's like everyone now has a high quality 50-inch plus TV in their home. They could actually enjoy a movie on and they choose to look at screens. I don't get it. I hope that ... I think to your point, we're past peak smartphone because I notice many other people kind of rejecting a life of having a tiny screen lead them around. But it's like even when you want to enjoy content, to your point, it's just the worst screen because it's so small.

John Long (14:41):

It is strange, but then you have ... It wasn't that long ago when Oppenheimer made a billion dollars.

Adam Singer (14:50):

Yes. So

John Long (14:51):

There's still an appetite and to pay a premium in an IMAX theater, there's still an appetite for that. And there's a lesson in Oppenheimer for brands, I

Adam Singer (15:03):

Think. Oddly, I saw the war on ergonomic start when I was at Fang. And I was at Fang when smartphones were just becoming popular and being promoted. And one of the OKRs I got was we were actually asked by our VP to do an entire week of work just on our phone. And I get the exercise was to basically see how you could do things on your phone. And I did it and I don't think it was all work. It was like, see how much you can do. And I found the process just ergonomically very ... I was just unhappy and I gave a lot of feedback as this is a poor way to do work. And I think for some frontline workers, having a smartphone is probably pretty useful. But for us working on creative projects, audio visual things, ad creative, actually having two screens and a monitor is great.

(16:01):

And then go, we talked about this on the show last time, go be with your team without electronics to do brainstorming and to do creative work. And I've found as much as the tech companies want us to do things on mobile, the metaverse is a joke too. That's just the best way to do things is to have focused work in an ergonomically sound setting and then be with your team face-to-face without technology. And I don't know how it changes. I think that's a timeless thing for me. I don't know what would change that.

John Long (16:35):

Yeah, I completely agree.

Adam Singer (16:38):

So a few other notes I wrote down when I was reading your book, and we're not going to give everything away because I want everyone to go buy a copy, but I guess let's see, which one should we talk about next? You're pretty blunt that performance marketing, AB tests and Always On Buy Now comms have crowded out long-term persuasion. I guess for a marketer who lives and dies by performance dashboards, can you give some convincing arguments you can make for rediscovering fame and maybe a little bit of waste and spend and maybe doing some things that aren't as perfectly trackable and why they could want to get back to

John Long (17:23):

That? It's really easy. I'll just point to the two largest athletic gear companies in the world, Nike and Adidas. They both did the same thing. Adidas turned up their performance marketing to ... I forgot what the percentages were, and I'm not an MBA, but something like over 70%. I can't remember what the CMO said, it's in the book And the sales tanked, and he came out and said, we had thought, and the quote is, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, "We thought it was the digital ads that were driving the sales, but in fact it was the brand that was driving the sales." And there is my postcard metaphor again. If I get a postcard from a brand I love and know, that postcard could spur some action. If I get a postcard from a brand I don't know, it goes in the trash. So the CMO of Adidas said that.

(18:15):

And then Nike went, said, "We don't need to do these campaigns anymore. We don't need to do all this fancy brand building and all this storytelling, all this stuff. We're just going to go D2C. We're going to sell to our own customers." Well, how did that work out? So that was a colossal failure. They did not learn the lesson from Adidas. And so I feel like I don't have to prove it. It's like if Nike, and it didn't work for Nike and Adidas, it's not going to work for anyone else. I will take issue with, you said waste. I don't think it's waste. I think brand building is one of the most valuable things you can do in advertising because the brand is where the value is. And I think it's folly to think you have to measure everything. You have to measure every dollar.

(19:12):

It sounds great. It sounds like super efficient. I'm just going to track every set and I'm going to track every dollar and every click I know what I'm getting. It's just not the way human behavior works and it's not the way memory systems work.

Adam Singer (19:27):

Yeah. And a lot of, I've talked about this with a few guests and I even got someone who runs an analytic firm to admit this, that the most, probably some of the most important marketing cannot be tracked in a dashboard because John, it's like you and me sitting down for coffee and just having a conversation about something. And I mentioned a new electric toothbrush I got, that's great. And you're like, "Shit, I needed one and it would never get tracked." Ultimately, that would show up in some dashboard as like Google brought you this lead, even though a discussion with a friend did. And there's so many interactions like that. Tom Goodwin talks about this a lot and basically shows that even though we do have a digital Panopticon, it is very imperfect of showing the precise points that actually led someone to purchase. And I think that's okay.

(20:20):

I think I always have felt like KPIs are directional and health indicators, but it's like for a big company, are you really ... It's not like you could have AB tested your way to think different if you were Apple. There's no way you would be able to get there. Some of the greatest creative is just you being bold and audacious and doing what you know is something that will resonate as a creative person. You mentioned Oppenheimer. It's not like Christopher Nolan is workshopping movie ideas, right? He's an arturur. He comes up with creative concepts, he knows how to execute them and advertisers aren't ... We're doing creative because it's trying to sell something, but we're still, at the end of the day, telling a story and persuading people. And so it's-

John Long (21:11):

That's the key.

(21:13):

So again, going back, it's study after study, after study, after study shows that emotion is what ... Connecting emotionally is what builds brands and builds value. And I think it's pretty definitively clear that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to consistently make emotional connections on these things. So what that tells you is you have to do stuff outside of that because if everything is buy now, shop now, learn more, you're just literally papering people's windshields with flyers, and that does not lead to brand growth. And by the way, I may not be a customer today. As you said, you just mentioned, that's a good anecdote. I like sitting down, you mention a brand, and maybe I don't buy it that day, but maybe you told me a really compelling story about the Quip toothbrush or something. And then six months from now, I remember that because it was such a compelling pitch that you gave me, and now I'm in the market for a quip, but I wasn't in the market for a quip when you told me.

(22:21):

So a buy now is not going to do me any good. That is the power of emotional connections because I always hear this, I've heard this for years, right person, right time. When have you ever bought anything like that? Literally, maybe some impulse buy like, geez, I feel like a pizza, but right by or right time just seems, in theory, it seems really good, but it's just not the way I buy things. Do you buy things that way? Yeah, right.

Adam Singer (22:54):

No, that's the way the tech companies sell ads because they're inherently having to redefine what all of this is in order to

(23:03):

Drive new behavior and basically try and set what advertising is. And to their credit, they've done a pretty good job convincing a lot of people and companies that this is the way it's done. And I think a lot of professionals are actually probably having to undo a little bit of the situation that they helped create because I think a lot of marketers are the ones who, you've seen the Trojan horse meme, they brought Facebook and Google and smartphones into brands and into their teams, and they were the champions of it. And I think in a lot of ways they were a little rug pulled by what happened later. So we were talking about social at the beginning of this call. And one really sad thing to me is Twitter as an example, I used to be able to go into a town for a conference and post one Tweet I was there and I would have my schedule full for the whole event.

(24:05):

And because they've algorithmically now changed it to almost more like Reddit or TikTok where this one thing trends for everyone on the For You page and no one checks the following page. And it's not just Twitter, every social network has basically removed the social elements to entertain us because that they figured out is higher value for them than the connection. So it is kind of sad because it's really not the bill of goods that we were initially working on. And everyone was busy and they kind of changed the entire

John Long (24:41):

Dynamic. No, and they've degraded, as we talked about, insurification. They're not the same experience as they were even three or four years ago. And look, I'm not anti-digital ads and I'm not anti-social ads, although I do think social channels are really getting more problematic, but there's just a place for them. There's a role for them in ... There's absolutely a role in any media ... If I was a CMO, I would not stop digital spend. That'd be crazy. I'm talking about in the book is rebalancing, is making sure that you're spending enough time and spending enough investment on that high attention media that creates emotional impact. That's all. It's not about getting rid of a channel or getting rid of this. I think the more channels, the better, but it's how we use them and how much time we're spending on them is the issue.

Adam Singer (25:43):

So I like that you say that because you're also a bit hopeful in the book you talk about brands getting their humanity back, especially as younger audiences are moving away from smartphones, we hope and add supportive feeds. If you were handed a legacy brand like Sleepwalking through the zombie era, your new CMO there, what would you do in just the first 90 days to unzombify it? Or even in the culture, what would you start to do?

John Long (26:17):

Again, I would follow the playbook that works. I look at the last four years and you look at a brand like Liquid Death and look what they did. Do they invest crazy in banner ads and promoted social? No, they don't do that. What do they do? They have a highly distinctive voice that's this sort of heavy metal, punk rock, hilarious voice. They have a very distinctive look and feel that they are very consistent about. They invest in long form video that's very entertaining. That's their secret sauce is they view advertising as entertainment. That's the right way to do it. When they do show up and out of home, it's always good. So the craft is there and they experiment. One of my favorite things is they did is they took a bunch of negative reviews and did a heavy metal album and put it on Spotify.

(27:29):

There's an example of a use of a digital channel that's innovative in brand building, but that's what I would do.

(27:39):

I think we know how this stuff works. I think there's plenty of case studies that show how you build brands. It's not a secret. It requires very strong definition of the brand and a very strong point of view, but once you get that, it's simply executing against that in the right way. So yeah, I would follow them, but they're not the only ones. They came to mind. I mean, in 2019, they had zero sales. That's when they were founded and no one in 2019, there wasn't a single person on the planet who was saying, "We need another water brand." It was already an incredibly saturated cat. Even I was like, "Really? Another water brand? Go to your grocery store look how many water brands there are. " And now they're a $2 billion beverage company and they did not do it with AI and they did not do it with QR codes and augmented reality and 3D printing and they didn't do it.

(28:41):

They did it with a really strong brand and executed brilliantly against that brand.

Adam Singer (28:46):

Yeah, I love that and I love that example. They're doing real marketing. They're not marketing people sitting in a room saying, "This new technology exists. We need to do this tactic." So our CEO sees that we're checking the AI box or the metaverse box. They're actually doing real marketing. They're not doing the sort of Dilbert fake work type stuff.

John Long (29:09):

That's right.

Adam Singer (29:14):

I've always been vocal against ... The whole time the metaverse was being pumped, I was kind of making fun of all these fake titles, and I kind of see the same thing. Some of the people who were previously metaverse consultants before that, they were social media consultants before that. They were SEO consultants. They're now doing AI training and prompt engineering as their title, and it feels like they're kind of metamorphosized as the world

John Long (29:46):

Goes. Every hold of metaverse, including in Facebook, their name is meta because of the ... How is that not an albatross over the whole company? Like you came out and said, "This is what we're going To do, and everybody's just kind of like, "Oh, nevermind." That whole thing that we've renamed our entire business around and that basically Second Life 2.0 is all it was.

(30:12):

And they just kind of move on. And Silicon Valley does this a lot. I mean, Elon Musk has been doing this for years with self-driving cars. They just keep making claims over and over and over and then everyone just moves on. But when they make another announcement, everybody jumps like rabid Mongies like, "Oh, this thing is going to happen." And it's like, that's why I am not ... You're talking about AI and the evangelists. There's bears and bulls. I am not totally bearish on AI. I think it is a pretty remarkable tool. I also think a lot of those claims are exaggerated. I don't think we're going to be firing our lawyers in six months.

(30:58):

And I wish in the ad community, I use AI all the time. It's a great copywriting tool. It's a great word finder, but I wish we would talk about AI in the advertising industry. I wish we would not talk about it in terms of efficiency. We have enough efficiency. We have enough speed. We don't need any more of that. What I'd like the conversation to be is about how we can use AI to make more impactful communications. That's what we should be talking about. Because again, it comes back to persuasion, creating emotion in people. And if anyone wants to talk about how AI can do that, I think that's a great conversation. I do not think it's a great conversation to say AI will spit out more ads faster.

Adam Singer (31:43):

Yeah. I really want ... Right now, an existential pain I have is anytime I need to get phone support from a company, you have to wait on hold to get someone. What I really want AI to do is I want AI to answer my call, and I want an AI actually capable of taking action on the account. So I don't even have to talk to someone. If I didn't get a package or if there's a credit freeze on my account or something, I want the AI to be able to actually do something. And then it's useful. It's not just a chatbot. It actually can take action. And I actually don't want AI to write movies for me or generate music for me. I think they're human affairs, but I want AI to do the repetitive work that gives me more time in my life to work on the creative parts.

(32:34):

Yeah.

John Long (32:35):

It's no different. I think it's no different as a writing tool than ... We're walking around with these incredible cameras. You can walk into any cathedral in Europe in low light and point your phone up and shoot it. And you'll get an image that 25 or 30 years ago would've taken all kinds. It would've taken probably a $2,000 camera, a very specific lens, perhaps lighting equipment. Does that mean photography as an art form is dead? No. Does that mean everybody's just answer atoms? Of course not. But a lot of the technical problems have been solved. And I do think that AI is similar. The use of AI in advertising and creativity could be similar. I don't think it replaces a great eye, but I do think it can help you actually create more impactful communications. I just don't think that's a topic of conversation very often.

Adam Singer (33:37):

I saw another really good post, and I've made this analogy too. Someone just wrote a whole post on it, but they basically said no robots at the gym. And so they were talking about, don't bring a robot to lift weights for you. If you're doing creative work, don't let the robots handle every single new idea for you. Because it's true, anything that you let a machine do and repetitive process you have it do, your skill at that will atrophy. And that might be okay for things where it's just punitive for you to have to do that work. But if you have it do everything for you, where do you end up? It's funny because I've had this argument with a friend of mine who's ... I take care of my own lawn. I really like to mow. I find it very zen and he doesn't get it.

(34:23):

And we've had these long debates and I'm like, "You need to till your land a little bit, even a little bit. And you'll have a renewed appreciation for things because he sometimes has some depression issues." And I'm like, "Your depression issues I'm convinced are linked to the fact that you outsource every element to your life." And I think there's something real there.

John Long (34:40):

Well, you're a hundred percent right about the atrophy. There's already been multiple studies. And there was one in the UK, there's one that if you use AI to do too much, your skills go down, your brainpower goes down.That's not in debate. As a tool for a copywriter, if you're looking for a word that starts with L, that means funny. Give me 20 words that start with L that mean humorous. It's amazing for that. It basically mashes up a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary, which is fantastic. But you still have to have an idea. That's the whole point. It starts with great creativity, great advertising starts with an idea. You can't outsource that to AI because all it's doing is scraping every other idea that's ever been done. So I'm a fan, but I agree with you. You got to mow the lawn.

Adam Singer (35:45):

Yeah. The other easy example for me is my handwriting has atrophied because I'm a typer blogger for ears and I don't write anything with my hand and it's okay. I don't need to write things with my hand. I have an MD signature, but that will happen. I think about this actively when I'm using AI for things, I'm like, I shouldn't use it too much because I'll lose it like my handwriting. And do I want that? And maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe handwriting doesn't matter. But for other areas, I want to still be able to play piano and key and chords. I like to make music, so not going to give that test to the machines. John, where can people go to get a copy of your book and to connect with you?

John Long (36:30):

Well, the book comes out February 11th. If you go to Amazon and just search zombie brands, John Long, it'll come up. The paperback, right now it's available on pre-order for Kindle. The paperback drops February 11th. To connect with me, just connect with me on LinkedIn. Just type John Long Creative Director. It'll pop up.

Adam Singer (36:52):

Awesome. And we will put links to connect with John in the show. In case you're driving, when you come back home, hop into the episode and grab the link there. Thank you all for listening, and we will see you on the show next week. Thanks

John Long (37:05):

For having