10 things I hate about advertising
If you’ve ever attended a training I’ve delivered, a presentation I’ve delivered, subscribe to our blog, or even sat down with me for more than 15 minutes, you’d know that I’m not a fan of traditional advertising to generate enquiries.
We’ve discussed this before, when we shared how social media and word of mouth is considerably more trusted than traditional advertising.
Hubspot, the folks who coined the term Inbound Marketing, has created this presentation that summarises the main reasons, from the customers’ perspective, why traditional advertising as a mainstream method of generating enquiries, has got to go. Have a look at it. It’s remarkably concise.
10 Things I Hate about Advertising
I’d add a few more “things I hate about advertising” from the business’ perspective, like:
- It costs too much
- It takes a long time to produce
- It’s very hard to measure
- It becomes addictive
- It’s noisy
- It gets ignored
- It doesn’t enable listening
- It’s hard to easily respond to
- It’s subject to exaggeration and hyperbole
- It dumbs down your unique value proposition
The next time you get pitched traditional advertising, consider the above 20 reasons as to why you may want to look outside the box.
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Meet our Founders

Rod Solar
Founder & Fractional CMO
Rod co-founded LiveseySolar and acts as a Fractional CMO for our customers. He’s on a mission to help transform the lives of 10,000 people with vision correction surgery by 2024. To achieve that, he inspires his customers to make confident decisions that will help 50,000 people take the first step towards vision correction.
LiveseySolar completely transformed the way we were approaching this… We’ve gone from having just the dream of having a practice to having a practice up and running with people making inquiries and booking for procedures… It’s extremely pleasing. We feel lucky we connected with LiveseySolar.
— Dr Matthew Russell, MBChB, FRANZCO, specialist ophthalmic surgeon and founder of VSON and OKKO

Laura Livesey
Founder & CEO
Laura Livesey is the co-founder & CEO of LiveseySolar. She has developed powerful refractive surgery marketing systems that increase patient volumes and profits for doctors, clinics, and hospitals, since 1997.
Rod and Laura know as much about marketing surgery to patients as I know about performing it. They are an expert in the field of laser eye surgery marketing. They know this industry inside out. I believe that they could help many companies in a variety of areas including marketing materials, sales training and marketing support for doctors.
— Prof. Dan Reinstein, MD MA FRSC DABO, founder of the London Vision Clinic, UK