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Purple Cow
Why The Wall Street Journal
Annoys Me So Much
The Journal is the poster child for marketing old-think.
Every day, more than a million dollars’ worth of full-page
ads run in this paper – testimony to traditional marketers’
belief that the old ways are still valid.
A full-page ad in the Journal costs more than a house in
Buffalo, New York. Page after page of dull gray ads, each
pitching a dull product offering from a dull company.
If you took 90 percent of these ads and swapped the
logos around, no one could tell. Switch one stock photo of
a guy in a black derby hat with another stock photo of an
earnest-looking pan-Asian smiling employee, and no one
could tell.
One morning, with time to kill at a fine hotel, I interrupted
a few people who were reading the Journal over
breakfast. I waited until they had finished the first section,
and then I asked them if they could name just two of the
companies that had run full-page ads. Not one person
could.
Then I took one of the ads, folded down the bottom
with the logo, and asked the Journal readers which company
ran the ad. No idea.
Finally, I asked them the million-dollar question (literally).
Had they ever requested more information about
a product because they’d seen a full-page ad in the
Journal
You can probably guess the answer.
It’s not just TV that’s broken. Just about all the ways
marketers promote themselves (whether they sell to businesses
or to consumers) are becoming less effective.
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