Editco.net

Well 43 per cent are results pretenders (committed to measuring ad effectiveness but unable to do so) and 22 per cent make it up as they go along and are much more interested in winning awards. 35 per cent are OK.

Who says?

An outfit called the Fournaise Marketing Group that describes itself as the Customer Acquisition Maximiser. So confident is it of its own abilities that it has trademarked this deathless description.

In other words it's an ad effectiveness consultancy and one might well feel that it's in its interests to ask people (1,000 executives across the world) what they think about their agencies' performance in such a way that the results are critical.

In the survey it also 'discovers' that 74 per cent of these executives felt that agencies lacked the tools and insights to focus their campaigns on the right target audience. Pretty handy then that you can buy them from Fournaise Marketing Group.

If you really believe this stuff you must also believe that media agencies in particular have been completely wasting their time and their clients' money for the past two decades at least.

We don't hold a special brief for these nests of number crunchers but neither do we think they'd have been better off playing Sudoku.

What's unarguable is that media that report these surveys should look a little more closely at their provenance.