Adscam Paperback – Import, 10 October 2022

If you follow Bob's content at all - whether interviews, speaking engagements, newsletter and/or blog The Ad Contrarian (if not, you should) - every book is a hit. Quick reads. Great takes. Any perceived redundancies should be considered as passionate reinforcement of Bob's perspective at-hand.I also find these make great "industry gifts" as well as great reads for non-industry folks to expedite their familiarity with the art form of advertising.Bob's work-work, will live forever but it's great to have his perspective on these titles that will live on in the annals of advertising (some of his critics would prefer I write "anal of..." but you can't please everyone).Love ya Bob!

Yes this book details how much misrepresentation and fraud in online ad industry

The digital ad market is so obviously a huge con, anyone who is online knows you never get ‘targeted ads’ just ads for things you’ve just bought and therefore are literally the last person who should be shown an ad to. I had garden chairs for a decade, everywhere, on every site initially but still popping up. I bought nice expensive garden chairs. It’s probably why I got ads for this high margin product. But unless they were of laughable quality and fell to bits I ain’t gonna buy any more for years and years. Any algorithm that tries to sell me more is simply wrong.Bob’s insider knowledge, caustic wit and love of kicking his industry up the arse when it deserves to be makes this book funny, factual and original. I used to work in tv and used to see the (much better paid and usually very good looking) people who made ads drifting around on a cloud of money, jargon and arty pretence us making the shows these ads paid for couldn’t afford.I now feel all of advertising is a hilarious conspiracy, one of the few that is actual and real, because all the stuff about ads working subliminally is a load of horseshite and real time auctioning of stolen data doesn’t exactly help the industry, does it? In the past you could point to beautiful mini movies, good slogans and - in Britain at least - quirky, odd, silly and surreal ads that you hardly ever tired of seeing.Now we have badly dubbed Euro-wide bland and boring lumps of idiocy, where the only fun is return to work out which language they’ve badly dubbed into English. I read that toothpaste ads are dubbed even worse than usual to make you look at the mouths more, and see the lovely teeth.If that’s true it’s sad. If that’s not true it shows the length marketers will go to trying to defend the indefensible.I’m sure Bob would robustly challenge my views on this, and change my mind using his evil years’ honed powers of persuasion, making me laugh and nod as I buy whatever he’s been paid to flog to me.The devil has all the best jokes, as they say. But at least he won’t spy on me, rummage thru my contacts, track my every movement and use down machine learning tools fed on bad, old, incomplete or wrong data to try and predict what I might want to buy.And then try and sell me a once-a-decade purchase every. single. day. For thousands and thousands of days. This book explains why and how advertising went wrong.

Bob Hoffman brilliantly consolidates and presents powerfully what the dissenting have been saying for many years about the unresolved issues with digital advertising, particularly programmatic advertising. The problem is that the billion-dollar global advertising business is perhaps too big to be challenged, so the vested interests have closed ranks, firstly proclaiming that there is no problem and when challenged with facts and examples, pleading that it is too hard to fix. Now that Mr Hoffman has lifted the lid and shone a bright light on these issues, let's see who amongst those with the most to lose has the courage to finally take the action needed.

This book should be required reading on marketing courses in degree programs and for corporate executives across marketing and finance functions to meet the fiduciary duty they owe to shareholders and their responsibility of care to customers and society at large.