42% of Advertising Executives are Dim, finds McKinsey Research

The venerable consultancy, McKinsey, has just published some rather extraordinary research, in the latest edition of McKinsey Quarterly. Well, it's extraordinary to my way of looking at the world anyway.

They questioned 124 Advertising Executives from 39 European counties asking them a very leading question indeed, as the interesting part of the findings would be in the second, supplementary question.

So the first question was:

Would you allocate more ad spending to a channel, offering attractive ratings growth - for example, via new technologies such as SMS?

This clearly invites a positive response. As in, "would you like to increase the effectiveness of your marketing programmes" or "would you like to be paid more money and be more attractive to the opposite sex?".

How can you say "no" to this?

Anyway, 14% of respondents weren't sure - how can you call yourself a professional ad-person and not have an opinion on increasing your advertising effectiveness? A further 28% said "no". Concluding that 42% of Ad Execs have shit for brains. Nothing new there :-)

But what of the bright sparks who spotted the "right" answer and said "Yes"?

They obviously accounted for 58% of the survey. But 54% of them then got stuck in D'oh land as they didn't know where the money for this activity would come from, bless 'em.

The remainder said that it would come from new investment (32%), which frankly doesn't seem very likely the way most corporates work, or reallocation from the print budget, which was chosen by 14%, who are the winners in this little "How to be a Vaguely Credible Advertising Executive in 2005" survey.

So if you're an Ad Exec, or better still, took part in this research, please defend yourself by leaving a comment. Why wouldn't you allocate more spend to a channel offering attractive ratings growth, huh?

Cartoon courtesy of Gaping Void, which I hope it's OK to use. Check it out if you want to know what happens next after Dr Market calls time on his patient, Tristan Terribly-Eighties-Advertising.

Story spotted on MocoBlog.

Comments

[Chris]

Because ad execs make most of their revenue from TV advertising - the sums involved are thousands of times the magnitude of the typical mobile marketing campaign. It's a sad fact that they are recommending media that supports their bottom line and not the clients objectives. For all the talk of the death of TV advertising - there is still no better way to communicate your brand to a mass audience and influence consumer buying behaviour in a short period of time to a national population - this will change with fragmentation of TV but the process isnt going to happen as fast as everyone believes. The mobile industry may want ad dollars that are destined for TV to be rerouted to to SMS/WAP campaigns but consumers needs to catch up too. I think mobile will be very important part of the mix and we'll see it commanding more and more share of digital budget every year from here on in, but TV won't go away - its just too damn effective for brand golliaths who want to hit 10 million people in a 30 second spot.