Rejoice! Ad Age's Garfield to Aid Nation's Chronic Shortage of Marketing Consultants
- UPDATE: Even though Bob Garfield believes brands should "shut up and pay attention to what is being said," this apparently does not apply to him: When Lewis Lazare was less than reverential about his departure, Garfield responded "My God, you are bad at your job."
Research -- which is the old-fashioned word that Garfield has now reinvented under the moniker "Listenomics" -- has never been Garfield's strong point. At Age, the first 20 years of his job was to literally open the mail and pop tapes into a VCR, and then jot down his feelings about them. In the last five years the videos probably came via email.
Believe me, this is not taxing work. I've done it myself. Certainly, if you spend enough time covering advertising you learn to spot good and bad ideas quickly. There's a value to that. But I'm not sure watching Super Bowl ads and giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down translates into a business. (In fact, he didn't actually watch the game this year and the famed Google (GOOG) TV ad flew right under his radar.)
Garfield has been pitching himself for new business for a while, judging by this lengthy piece on The Business Insider and this set of videos on CurationNation. But what, exactly, Garfield hopes to offer clients isn't clear. Ad Age says it's "a limited consulting practice in association with several strategic partners to be announced later in the spring." Oh goody. There are so few of those out there right now. Garfield says:
Listenomics is what marketers, media and all institutions that hitherto had dictated from the top down, whether it's the US government, the Republican Party, the Vatican, Proctor and Gamble, whatever it is, to the art and science of learning to shut up and pay attention to what is being said among your various constituencies.Uh huh. Sounds like market research. What exactly are you -- or your clients -- going to do?
It's a different world. It's not as efficient as the mass media world where you had something to say, you had the trucks full of gross rating points backed up to your loading dock and you just sent your ads out there. It's much more tedious. You got to get on your knees and cultivate the garden. And it is endless, painstaking seeding and weeding and feeding. But if you do that it's sustainable in a way that the old model never was and in the long run far more productive.He's certainly mastered the vague, trendy, management-speak babble that clients love so much. Thus, Garfield Inc. will be a smashing success.
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