It takes courage to admit you made a mistake, more so to do it in public in front of one’s peers, but if we don’t do it, we don’t make progress. One of the biggest problems in science today is called positive publication bias. For the sake of their careers, scientists tend to only publish research that has positive results and thus the scientific world largely ignores null results. The same is true in advertising since we only share successful case studies to enter award shows. When we don’t share failures, others can’t learn from them and thus repeat the same mistakes. Brands, like scientists, are in competition, so there is a bias towards not sharing failures for that exact reason. This hinders the entire industry at a time when the advertising effectiveness could use help. We should all be grateful then to Simon Peel, Global Media Director at Adidas, for his candid EFF Week presentation last month. He stated that focusing on efficiency, not effectiveness had led the brand to over-invest in digital advertising. This was not entirely unexpected. In 2017 when the new CEO announced that Adidas was abandoning television advertising because “digital engagement is key,” many commentators called this out as being misguided. They have been vindicated — but the danger here is that we latch on to this as evidence of something too simple, and fail to learn anything. We need to invest for the long term, leverage a suitable mix of brand and performance, and much of digital advertising works like direct marketing. Growth is a function of penetration – 60% of Adidas revenue came from first time buyers – not loyal customers. Well, yes, we know all that – and so did the people at Adidas, as Simon said in his talk. Yet the …