Mixed messages?Goodwin, a former Publicis, Havas, IPG, Huge and Lowe exec turned author, consultant and conference circuit mainstay, told ADMA's Global Forum delegates both not to panic, but also to recognise that media, marketing and advertising risks plotting its own downfall.Firstly, by trying to attribute everything while diving headlong into the platforms’ performance trap. That approach has led some of the best consumer marketing companies of all time to throw out the brand baby with the bathwater, per Goodwin.“We’ve got people likeUnilever talking about [flipping billions of dollars, literally half of its budget into] influencer marketing. We’ve got people like P&G talking about the need to have one-on-one conversations at scale. For me – and people will disagree – this makes no sense. I don’t want to have a conversation with Head & Shoulders.“At the same time, [mass reach] traditional media owners … are being persuaded to do the digital stuff, persuaded to ‘close the loop’, to show effectiveness, to show contextual placement. So, we have this very weird environment where everyone is trying to follow the performance playbook.”Goodwin thinks platform-aping has played out particularly badly for traditional publishers (others would argue what choice did they have, faced with the outflow of dollars as media buyers and marketers made a handful of start-ups some of the world’s largest companies in under 20 years.)“Over a trillion dollars a year is spent on advertising, but what we experience as a consumer is largely crap. If you actually open up The Guardian or the New York Times or the Sydney [Morning] Herald and you actually looked at the ads you are being served, this idea that advertising technology is working is just not true. We are surrounded by enormously irrelevant advertising.”He says the platforms are not much better – but a generation of marketers and the supply chain have been schooled in what cannot be measured cannot be managed, attributed, nor credit claimed.Hence, a “dangerous situation where people are getting obsessed with attribution and short-term impact, utterly obsessed with this idea that unless you can show success and claim impact, it doesn’t matter … obsessed with moving money toward the point of purchase … with this idea that we need to reach ever smaller audiences and that our whole job has become about conversion ... obsessed with everything we can measure.”Outside context problemFor a futurist, Goodwin is nostalgic about the roles brands once played. He cited Carlton Draught’s ‘Big Ad’ as one of the last of the line of advertising’s “first era”, where ads “were designed to create impact”.