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What content means is that advertising has been hijacked by people who are slick with their Macs and their iPhones and their iPads, and great at bullshitting you — but who know precious little about advertising.

What content means is that these geeks in weird clothes who like to be called “digital natives” have many fans and followers, both fake and real. Often more than your clueless company will ever get round to amassing.

What content means is that they tell you and your company that the medium is the message. But “being on Twitter” is neither a strategy, nor a message. McLuhan perhaps would have loved this, but it’s completely wrong.

What content means is that by now even the bean counters have figured out that writing rubbish themselves for their own companies or for their clients costs less than buying ad space on the rubbish other people write.

What content means is that advertisers think that those people, the consumers, would gobble up anything as long as it’s pushed down their throats hard. But then “organic reach” on Facebook slips into the single digits…

What content means is that there is no idea. Not just not a big one: no idea at all.

Don’t be content.

I bought Josh Sklar’s book Digital Doesn’t Matter during a shopping spree and without realising (LOL) that the title of the book was ironic. The real irony, however, is that after reading the book I am all the more convinced that Digital Doesn’t Matter.

Josh’s book is a very long one, the content coming from 135 interviews with big shots in Advertising, and, to be perfectly honest with you, I can’t say I enjoyed all of it. However, the book does provide some interesting answers to some important questions.

For example: why is Digital all of a sudden all the rage, after having been neglected and ignored and even scorned for so long? That’s a simple one: because there are over a billion people on Facebook, and that, of course, changed just about everything.

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AdTech is in denial. It’s shocking. Things are much worse than I imagined.

For example, Grant Le Riche, Managing Director for Canada for TubeMogul, says there’s too much fuss about ad-blocking: Ad Blocking Hype is Overblown. To keep things short, ad-blocking grew “only” 41% globally last year, but there’s no reason to worry because ad impressions available from *their* platform in Canada grew 275%.

Is he serious? If his company is doing fine, that’s good for them. But what does that have to do with the state of online advertising? And even if ad impressions had grown 275% globally, which is very unlikely, there would still be a huge problem: more impressions cannot make up for a smaller reach, especially if it’s the younger, more educated, more informed, heavy user crowd that is rushing to install ad-blockers.

Which, of course, is exactly what is happening.

But it gets worse: he apparently doesn’t understand that if the problem was caused by tracking and targeting, more tracking and more targeting is unlikely to be the solution:

Finally, as the quantity and quality of data used for audience targeting improves ad relevance and drives increased engagement, ad blockers’ popularity and prevalence should stabilize.

But, trust us, we would not stand by if it were a real problem. Right!

Not sure that creating a new web ads business that works is something that can be done, but there’s little doubt that Don Marti is right:

The same content can bring in an order of magnitude more ad revenue in print than online. In any other technology business, failing to keep up with 19th-century technology would be cause to reinvent things from the ground up. It’s time to apply the same standard to web ads, and not just protect the existing web ad business from ad blocking, but make a new web ad business that works.

The problem is: who is going to reinvent things from the ground up? Publishers don’t have a clue about how to do it. And the AdTech industry has no good reason to reinvent anything, because things are working just fine for them.

I wrote a short – and free! – Ebook about Online Advertising in which I asked…

Does Online Advertising work? The right question to ask would be: for whom does Online Advertising work? Does it work for Publishers? Does it work for Advertisers? Or does it just work for the Middlemen based in Silicon Valley?