Oddly, up to that point I was senior enough to daily manage the budget, but not senior enough that my opinion on what to do was taken seriously. We're talking > 50% wastage, so I just didn't do my job in the end and stopped providing the creative for the wastage part, saved money, made no difference to the end result.

Never underestimate how so much of bad advertising is because of clueless people in the chain of command.

Hello fellow person with in-house advertising experience.

Good freaking lord you hit the nail on the head here about most of marketing career!

Then you get in trouble because your boss's boss wants better ROI and blames YOU for an overextended budget because you manage the money, but you just have to sit there and take the blame because your immediate boss won't budge on the strategy.

Thankfully I've moved up, but I feel that pain so bad.

Also, some people measure their self worth on the size of their company's ad budget. And those same people tend to have stupid amounts of money compared to their childhood peer groups.

So buying ads is like adding a set of metal balls to a truck hitch. Revenue was never the point.

Also, a lot of entrepreneurs have short attention spans and constantly change things out of fear, taking it from easy to do well to impossible to know.

Whenever I tried to talk about them there's always someone who asks that question. It's a BS question though, because it presupposes that humans somehow always instantly adopt the great new thing, but history shows that we just don't.

(E.g. Marconi was called before US Congress to testify because they thought radio might be a scam.)

We have all kinds of awesome stuff that gets ignored. Or even simple obvious things that no one notices (Why do refrigerators have doors instead of drawers?)

Sorry for picking on you. Nothing personal. :-)