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Top advertiser Procter & Gamble, competitor to Unilever and likewise an owner of many distinct brands, has been very vocal about the sorry state of digital adve

Top advertiser Procter & Gamble, competitor to Unilever and likewise an owner of many distinct brands, has been very vocal about the sorry state of digital advertising [1], threatening to drastically cut spending [2] on ad networks that made it difficult to gauge ROI. When in 2017 they cut spending on Facebook [2], they noticed no corresponding drop in sales, leading them to conclude that the spending they cut was probably ineffective to begin with [3][4]. [1] http://adage.com/article/media/p-g-s-pritchard-calls-digital-grow-up-new-rules/307742/ http://adage.com/article/media/p-g-s-pritchard-calls-digital... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-to-scale-back-targeted-facebook-ads-1470760949 https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-to-scale-back-targeted-face... [3] https://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2017/07/28/pg-cuts-100m-in-digital-adspend-sees-no-business-impact/ https://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2017/07/28/pg-cuts-100m-in-d... [4] https://wolfstreet.com/2017/07/28/procter-gamble-slashed-digital-ad-spending-what-happened-next/ https://wolfstreet.com/2017/07/28/procter-gamble-slashed-dig...

randyrand 9y ago
On top of that, I'd wager most people don't very strongly weight a Youtube advertiser with the video it's played before. At least not me.
- i_feel_great 9y ago
  I weigh those ads very negatively. Looking at you, Grammarly. Seriously, why do they play the same ad over and over again, one after the other, to the same viewer? What with all that AI and machine learning and deep neural networks, they can't tell the same session has been served that same ad 50,000 times already?
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    Haha, this made me laugh. It’s humorous that we’re living in a period where a vocal group of critics declares that ML, AI, and incredible amounts of data and tracking are being leveraged to push ads at me so skillfully and subtly that I’m helpless to resist. Meanwhile, like you said, I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Where are all the ads for stuff that’s so desirable and targeted to me that I just can’t resist purchasing them?? Not saying that critics of advertising have no valid claims, but the juxtaposition is funny.
    - hoopladler 9y ago
      I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash. That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard. And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.
      - methodin 9y ago
        "They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at." I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase. A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.
        code_duck 9y ago
        We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.
        devjam 9y ago
        Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.
  - snr 9y ago
    On facebook though, I actually disabled my ad blocker because I wanted to see the ads. However, I immediately skip over any videos that show ads. My general rule of thumb is if a video has an ad, I don't need to watch the video.
  - arel 9y ago
    The single most annoying set of adverts on the internet. Hammy with extra ham on top.
  - CodeCube 9y ago
    OMG yes!! I honestly really mostly kinda don't mind ads for media that I value (youtube, spotify, etc) ... however, when it comes down to it, when I get served the same freaking ad over and over and over and over, it just drives me up the wall! I'd go as far as to say that the end user would be more receptive to ads, if they filled ads with pro-bono charity ads promoting some charity or another ... then the user wouldn't start to hate ads, and they could probably write off the ads they donated.
  - prepend 9y ago
    It’s because the message that the algorithm is trying to match you to ads you are interested in is BS. They are matching you to ads that will make you, and others like you buy. So they are ok with pissing off lots of people since it results in shares. The reality is that people don’t actually want enough to cover ad revenue, but ads make them buy more.
  - nitwit005 9y ago
    Unfortunately, the repetition is probably intentional. It's like the old idea of constantly playing the company jingle. They hope to bludgeon the product into your brain through brute force. I'm sure it raises "brand awareness" measurements, at the cost of making people hate them.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - knicholes 9y ago
    Sounds like the advertiser needs to create a progression of videos/display ads instead of showing the same one. I work for a company that provides tools to create such ads. Maybe they need me. :D We definitely know how many times we've shown ads to which people (even across devices).
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      How is that possible. You don't know how many YouTube vids I am watching vs someone else who watches more or less per day.
      - knicholes 9y ago
        I was referring mostly to display advertising, but with video ads, VAST compliant players sent http requests to whichever endpoint specified based on different quantiles (start, 25%, 50%, 75%, video finish). This endpoint would be our servers so we can track which video and how much you've seen. The same is true for display, where we get an impression. You load the image which hits our ad servers, along with your cookie (who are you), and redirects to the actual image.
  - dmix 9y ago
    I believe `randyrand` was talking about weighing the advertising company based on the Youtube videos their ads play on, not which videos that ad company produces...
  - tomlock 9y ago
    This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody involved gets anything out of stopping this happening. Incoming extreme cynicism. First off, the marketers are still mostly using demographic segments - often a marketer will encounter a machine-learning model, and their first question is "who are these people" and when you can't explain how the model works, they revert to using demographic segments because they trust them more. This means they often do analysis demographically, and over target people in particular narrow age and gender demographics because they did better last month by chance. Second, management want to keep their budgets large so their resumes look good. Their desire is to increase the amount of people they can target, while simultaneously appearing to work on interesting tech. Since social and video have recently been en vogue, spend increases on these platforms, while projects focus less on increasing spend efficiency and more on taking credit for sales by tracking customers through the pipeline. This creates a weird scenario where everyone says they're using sophisticated machine learning models, but the contractors and consultants involved are glorified powerpoint factories. Third, the big silos, google and Facebook, probably have some incredibly sophisticated models of consumer behaviour that are incredibly efficient - but why would they want to give their advertising customers something that would reduce spend?
  - ransom1538 9y ago
    I am not sure the advertising party has a say. You give a budget, put your media in, and start the campaign. I don't believe the obvious feature exists: "Only play my ad once per user". It definitely wouldn't be a money maker for google. Every advertising party could use this feature to cheaply sweep through all the unique eye balls.
    - bcoates 9y ago
      At least Youtube and Facebook offer this feature. It's pretty standard. The problem is that a lot of their inventory is an inch wide and a mile deep. The rule is roughly "narrow targeting, cheap impressions, reasonable frequency, pick any one". A shady ad agency (but I repeat myself) will never pick "reasonable frequency" because their advertisers aren't sophisticated enough to ask if their ad is being sent to one person 50 times in a day. It only takes one buyer to not set the frequency control option to spam you with the same ad over and over -- everyone else is one-and-done.
  - mdani 9y ago
    Its not what you want to see or buy - they’ll push the ad from a provider who’s bidding highest and providing them most revenue.
  - dorfsmay 9y ago
    I'm always wondering who thinks it's a good idea to show me ads for a product I just bought, ad that I never saw before bought the item. Similarly, twitter showing ads for Mac/windows only product when my user-agent clearly says Linux!
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    It's because grammarly is paying a boatload more than anyone else would
  - stevenh 9y ago
    Grammarly's ad links directly to an immediate single-click-to-install page for their suspicious browser extension whose fine print asks for total access to look at your private webpage data, keystrokes, ability to inject mysterious scripts into every single page you visit, including email, banking, cryptocurrency exchange login pages, etc. With over 10 million active installations, they could easily use this absurd amount of power to profit in a shady manner. The ROI for their ad spend must be incredible because the average tech-naive person just has to fall for it once and then this extension is installed for the remaining lifetime of their computer. The whole thing has a stench similar to the Hola browser extension botnet incident.
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    "Hi, I'm <E-list celebrity> and I made my own website..." Ugh. Seriously though I suspect it is because their algorithms have decided that you like X and therefore they only show you adverts about X, which is a small subset of all available adverts, so you get the same ones again and again. On TV they can't target so accurately so you basically get shown every advert. This means there are more to show and it is less repetitive. I also think advertisers don't mind showing the same person their advert a million times. It may be annoying but it works - name one competitor to Grammarly off the top of your head.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      My brain is a competitor to Grammarly
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    Yep, Grammarly and Wix seem to be pervasive on the channels I watch. I have no interest in using either of them, they're usually out of context with the content I want to watch, and the only times I watch them is to make sure my favourite channels get the cash (although signalling that they should target me more...)
jbob2000 9y ago
They make soap and toothpaste, I buy these things regardless of their advertising. They could cut cable ads and nothing would change as well (I don't even have cable). To the contrary; they need to advertise on the internet to capture the next generation, who don't watch as much TV. If it turns out that facebook ads were influential, P&G could risk losing billions by giving up on that market.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Haven't we learned recently that young people aren't on Facebook? It's not a surprise; everyone who complains about my not being on FB is older than me, and I'm no spring chicken.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    Yes, that has been a known trend for years, dating back to the dawn of Instagram and Snapchat.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Instagram is Facebook
- niftich 9y ago
  Brand preferences are overwhelmingly set in the youth years and it's been sliding younger and younger [1]. Sure, they make soap and toothpaste and food and a billion other things, but so do their competitors. Every sale of a bottle of shower gel is a competition between P&G, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, and Henkel; every tube of toothpaste is a competition between P&G, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Church & Dwight, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline... And most white-label generic store brands are the product of an alliance between a retailer and a manufacturer, whereby spare plant capacity is used to run a slightly different product through, whose bulk amount was paid for by the retailer ahead of time. This way, the big brand still gets paid, and retailers make better margins on store brand items than big brands. [1] http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-does-brand-loyalty-start-62841/ http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-does-brand-loyalt...
tomrod 9y ago
Chase bank did something similar a year ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtube-fake-news-offensive-videos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtub...
CaptSpify 9y ago
I always hear about how online advertising has a lot of data to show how effective it is. I've always been skeptical of that, but I have no evidence either way. This seems to show that it wasn't working for this company. I really wonder how many companies are actually getting anything for their money. Does anyone know of any data either way?
- jonathanjaeger 9y ago
  I can't speak for advertising in general, but I do performance marketing on Facebook for clients and if it's not profitable we don't get budget. It's profitable for us (we're in the middle doing the arbitrage) and presumably profitable for them, or at least the clients of ours who are doing the measuring with their call centers, ROI, etc. How I wish all the brand dollars that are probably wasted stopped advertising and making our clicks so expensive, ha!
- icelancer 9y ago
  We're doing well but our annual ad spend is like any of those company's lunch breaks at best. I imagine profitability analysis doesn't scale well, plus you run into more and more bots / fraud as you spend that kind of money.
- mediaman 9y ago
  When people say ads are ROI trackable, they are referring to ads that have specific monetizable actions, such as buying a product. There's definitely some advantage there. However, most big ad spenders engage in "brand" advertising, where the goal is building brand recognition to influence decisions at the future point of purchase decision rather than driving a purchase decision at the point of viewing the ad. I don't see what measurement advantage an online ad brings for this type of advertising, and I see many reasons why it would be inferior to, for example, TV, which can more fully capture a viewer's engagement than a side banner ad.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    And the internet is probably the worst outlet for brand-building. Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills?
pasbesoin 9y ago
When do I change what toilette paper I buy? When they cheapen whatever I am buying enough to discomfort me, or raise the price per unit significantly with no apparent justification. (My supermarket chain was sold from one giant conglomorate to another, and the house brand immediately went up a dollar a package. Then was replaced by the new outfit's house brand, that seemed slightly inferior (and also more variable in quality), but also offered less quantity at that price.) Maybe brand recognition plays some role, at that point, but the push to change almost always seems to be the degradation of what I'm currently buying. Or, just outright dropping it. This happens frequently enough, when I find something I like, that I joke with the store staff that they're watching me on the cameras and if I seem to like something, dropping it to pull my chain.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  There was a news story a few years back about consumers who were found to consistently tend to purchase new products that soon fail overall in the marketplace.
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    I take your point, but it does not apply to all or most of my cases. Often, long-established brands and products. Store staff themselves express surprise. Granted, their perspective is limited to that store and what they notice. But I've had them comment that the product sold well, and they have no clue why it was discontinued. And how I'm not they only one they've heard from about this. In one case, it wasn't even the supermarket's decision. A product that had been purchased by the Frito Lay brand. It sold, but the Frito Lay rep who stocked Frito Lay products at that store (yes, more and more, supermarkets don't do their own stocking -- not for big brands, who purchase shelf space from them) just stopped stocking it. Store management was even readily willing to request its return. It did return, for a few weeks, and then no more. One way or another, big brands seem to lose customers more through their own actions than direct competition. Like my recently acquired Merrell boots. (There was a thread on that brand, recently.) Merrell used to be -- still "are", in one associates mind -- "the best". But, they apparently have gone volume and cheaped out. I won't be buying them, again. Not because I found a better competitor, but because they sabotaged their own product. But, maybe they're selling tons of them, trading accumulated good will against profits. Someone will bonus out, leaving the eventual wreckage behind.
ako 9y ago
This article is not about effectiveness of ads on social media. They don't want to be associated with all the fake-news on social media. I wonder if they show adds on foxnews. Foxnews also seems to be filled with mostly fake news.
- test112 9y ago
  Says the democrat.Opposite site tells you CNN is the fakest fake ever faked.In my view, both are to blame but FN is probably more blatant.Its the difference between Trumps direct fake news and Hillarys, more elaborate, "i like to be seen as competent and neutral" fake news. (Im not us citizen or live in us)
  - ako 9y ago
    Not a democrat, way to right wing for me. Anyway, fake or not is a difficult discussion, i agree. Personally i think religion is also fake news, no evidence available as far as i'm concerned. Reason i mentioned fox is that i recently read: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-need-to-watch-this https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-need-to-watch-this It seems a bit shortsighted to just single out social media for fake news, when regular media is as much to blame.
noja 9y ago
> leading them to conclude that the spending they cut was probably ineffective to begin with There's a simple explanation for that: they cut only the advertising spend that was ineffective.
jhayward 9y ago
"I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half" -- John Wanamaker

randyrand 9y ago

On top of that, I'd wager most people don't very strongly weight a Youtube advertiser with the video it's played before. At least not me.

i_feel_great 9y ago
I weigh those ads very negatively. Looking at you, Grammarly. Seriously, why do they play the same ad over and over again, one after the other, to the same viewer? What with all that AI and machine learning and deep neural networks, they can't tell the same session has been served that same ad 50,000 times already?
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Haha, this made me laugh. It’s humorous that we’re living in a period where a vocal group of critics declares that ML, AI, and incredible amounts of data and tracking are being leveraged to push ads at me so skillfully and subtly that I’m helpless to resist. Meanwhile, like you said, I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Where are all the ads for stuff that’s so desirable and targeted to me that I just can’t resist purchasing them?? Not saying that critics of advertising have no valid claims, but the juxtaposition is funny.
  - hoopladler 9y ago
    I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash. That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard. And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.
    - methodin 9y ago
      "They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at." I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase. A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.
      - devjam 9y ago
        Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.
- snr 9y ago
  On facebook though, I actually disabled my ad blocker because I wanted to see the ads. However, I immediately skip over any videos that show ads. My general rule of thumb is if a video has an ad, I don't need to watch the video.
- arel 9y ago
  The single most annoying set of adverts on the internet. Hammy with extra ham on top.
- CodeCube 9y ago
  OMG yes!! I honestly really mostly kinda don't mind ads for media that I value (youtube, spotify, etc) ... however, when it comes down to it, when I get served the same freaking ad over and over and over and over, it just drives me up the wall! I'd go as far as to say that the end user would be more receptive to ads, if they filled ads with pro-bono charity ads promoting some charity or another ... then the user wouldn't start to hate ads, and they could probably write off the ads they donated.
- prepend 9y ago
  It’s because the message that the algorithm is trying to match you to ads you are interested in is BS. They are matching you to ads that will make you, and others like you buy. So they are ok with pissing off lots of people since it results in shares. The reality is that people don’t actually want enough to cover ad revenue, but ads make them buy more.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  Unfortunately, the repetition is probably intentional. It's like the old idea of constantly playing the company jingle. They hope to bludgeon the product into your brain through brute force. I'm sure it raises "brand awareness" measurements, at the cost of making people hate them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- knicholes 9y ago
  Sounds like the advertiser needs to create a progression of videos/display ads instead of showing the same one. I work for a company that provides tools to create such ads. Maybe they need me. :D We definitely know how many times we've shown ads to which people (even across devices).
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    How is that possible. You don't know how many YouTube vids I am watching vs someone else who watches more or less per day.
    - knicholes 9y ago
      I was referring mostly to display advertising, but with video ads, VAST compliant players sent http requests to whichever endpoint specified based on different quantiles (start, 25%, 50%, 75%, video finish). This endpoint would be our servers so we can track which video and how much you've seen. The same is true for display, where we get an impression. You load the image which hits our ad servers, along with your cookie (who are you), and redirects to the actual image.
- dmix 9y ago
  I believe `randyrand` was talking about weighing the advertising company based on the Youtube videos their ads play on, not which videos that ad company produces...
- tomlock 9y ago
  This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody involved gets anything out of stopping this happening. Incoming extreme cynicism. First off, the marketers are still mostly using demographic segments - often a marketer will encounter a machine-learning model, and their first question is "who are these people" and when you can't explain how the model works, they revert to using demographic segments because they trust them more. This means they often do analysis demographically, and over target people in particular narrow age and gender demographics because they did better last month by chance. Second, management want to keep their budgets large so their resumes look good. Their desire is to increase the amount of people they can target, while simultaneously appearing to work on interesting tech. Since social and video have recently been en vogue, spend increases on these platforms, while projects focus less on increasing spend efficiency and more on taking credit for sales by tracking customers through the pipeline. This creates a weird scenario where everyone says they're using sophisticated machine learning models, but the contractors and consultants involved are glorified powerpoint factories. Third, the big silos, google and Facebook, probably have some incredibly sophisticated models of consumer behaviour that are incredibly efficient - but why would they want to give their advertising customers something that would reduce spend?
- ransom1538 9y ago
  I am not sure the advertising party has a say. You give a budget, put your media in, and start the campaign. I don't believe the obvious feature exists: "Only play my ad once per user". It definitely wouldn't be a money maker for google. Every advertising party could use this feature to cheaply sweep through all the unique eye balls.
  - bcoates 9y ago
    At least Youtube and Facebook offer this feature. It's pretty standard. The problem is that a lot of their inventory is an inch wide and a mile deep. The rule is roughly "narrow targeting, cheap impressions, reasonable frequency, pick any one". A shady ad agency (but I repeat myself) will never pick "reasonable frequency" because their advertisers aren't sophisticated enough to ask if their ad is being sent to one person 50 times in a day. It only takes one buyer to not set the frequency control option to spam you with the same ad over and over -- everyone else is one-and-done.
- mdani 9y ago
  Its not what you want to see or buy - they’ll push the ad from a provider who’s bidding highest and providing them most revenue.
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  I'm always wondering who thinks it's a good idea to show me ads for a product I just bought, ad that I never saw before bought the item. Similarly, twitter showing ads for Mac/windows only product when my user-agent clearly says Linux!
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  It's because grammarly is paying a boatload more than anyone else would
- stevenh 9y ago
  Grammarly's ad links directly to an immediate single-click-to-install page for their suspicious browser extension whose fine print asks for total access to look at your private webpage data, keystrokes, ability to inject mysterious scripts into every single page you visit, including email, banking, cryptocurrency exchange login pages, etc. With over 10 million active installations, they could easily use this absurd amount of power to profit in a shady manner. The ROI for their ad spend must be incredible because the average tech-naive person just has to fall for it once and then this extension is installed for the remaining lifetime of their computer. The whole thing has a stench similar to the Hola browser extension botnet incident.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  "Hi, I'm <E-list celebrity> and I made my own website..." Ugh. Seriously though I suspect it is because their algorithms have decided that you like X and therefore they only show you adverts about X, which is a small subset of all available adverts, so you get the same ones again and again. On TV they can't target so accurately so you basically get shown every advert. This means there are more to show and it is less repetitive. I also think advertisers don't mind showing the same person their advert a million times. It may be annoying but it works - name one competitor to Grammarly off the top of your head.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    My brain is a competitor to Grammarly
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Yep, Grammarly and Wix seem to be pervasive on the channels I watch. I have no interest in using either of them, they're usually out of context with the content I want to watch, and the only times I watch them is to make sure my favourite channels get the cash (although signalling that they should target me more...)

jbob2000 9y ago

They make soap and toothpaste, I buy these things regardless of their advertising. They could cut cable ads and nothing would change as well (I don't even have cable). To the contrary; they need to advertise on the internet to capture the next generation, who don't watch as much TV. If it turns out that facebook ads were influential, P&G could risk losing billions by giving up on that market.

jessaustin 9y ago
Haven't we learned recently that young people aren't on Facebook? It's not a surprise; everyone who complains about my not being on FB is older than me, and I'm no spring chicken.
- code_duck 9y ago
  Yes, that has been a known trend for years, dating back to the dawn of Instagram and Snapchat.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Instagram is Facebook
niftich 9y ago
Brand preferences are overwhelmingly set in the youth years and it's been sliding younger and younger [1]. Sure, they make soap and toothpaste and food and a billion other things, but so do their competitors. Every sale of a bottle of shower gel is a competition between P&G, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, and Henkel; every tube of toothpaste is a competition between P&G, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Church & Dwight, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline... And most white-label generic store brands are the product of an alliance between a retailer and a manufacturer, whereby spare plant capacity is used to run a slightly different product through, whose bulk amount was paid for by the retailer ahead of time. This way, the big brand still gets paid, and retailers make better margins on store brand items than big brands. [1] http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-does-brand-loyalty-start-62841/ http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-does-brand-loyalt...

tomrod 9y ago

Chase bank did something similar a year ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtube-fake-news-offensive-videos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtub...

CaptSpify 9y ago

I always hear about how online advertising has a lot of data to show how effective it is. I've always been skeptical of that, but I have no evidence either way. This seems to show that it wasn't working for this company. I really wonder how many companies are actually getting anything for their money. Does anyone know of any data either way?

jonathanjaeger 9y ago
I can't speak for advertising in general, but I do performance marketing on Facebook for clients and if it's not profitable we don't get budget. It's profitable for us (we're in the middle doing the arbitrage) and presumably profitable for them, or at least the clients of ours who are doing the measuring with their call centers, ROI, etc. How I wish all the brand dollars that are probably wasted stopped advertising and making our clicks so expensive, ha!
icelancer 9y ago
We're doing well but our annual ad spend is like any of those company's lunch breaks at best. I imagine profitability analysis doesn't scale well, plus you run into more and more bots / fraud as you spend that kind of money.
mediaman 9y ago
When people say ads are ROI trackable, they are referring to ads that have specific monetizable actions, such as buying a product. There's definitely some advantage there. However, most big ad spenders engage in "brand" advertising, where the goal is building brand recognition to influence decisions at the future point of purchase decision rather than driving a purchase decision at the point of viewing the ad. I don't see what measurement advantage an online ad brings for this type of advertising, and I see many reasons why it would be inferior to, for example, TV, which can more fully capture a viewer's engagement than a side banner ad.
- mozumder 9y ago
  And the internet is probably the worst outlet for brand-building. Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills?

pasbesoin 9y ago

When do I change what toilette paper I buy? When they cheapen whatever I am buying enough to discomfort me, or raise the price per unit significantly with no apparent justification. (My supermarket chain was sold from one giant conglomorate to another, and the house brand immediately went up a dollar a package. Then was replaced by the new outfit's house brand, that seemed slightly inferior (and also more variable in quality), but also offered less quantity at that price.) Maybe brand recognition plays some role, at that point, but the push to change almost always seems to be the degradation of what I'm currently buying. Or, just outright dropping it. This happens frequently enough, when I find something I like, that I joke with the store staff that they're watching me on the cameras and if I seem to like something, dropping it to pull my chain.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
There was a news story a few years back about consumers who were found to consistently tend to purchase new products that soon fail overall in the marketplace.
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  I take your point, but it does not apply to all or most of my cases. Often, long-established brands and products. Store staff themselves express surprise. Granted, their perspective is limited to that store and what they notice. But I've had them comment that the product sold well, and they have no clue why it was discontinued. And how I'm not they only one they've heard from about this. In one case, it wasn't even the supermarket's decision. A product that had been purchased by the Frito Lay brand. It sold, but the Frito Lay rep who stocked Frito Lay products at that store (yes, more and more, supermarkets don't do their own stocking -- not for big brands, who purchase shelf space from them) just stopped stocking it. Store management was even readily willing to request its return. It did return, for a few weeks, and then no more. One way or another, big brands seem to lose customers more through their own actions than direct competition. Like my recently acquired Merrell boots. (There was a thread on that brand, recently.) Merrell used to be -- still "are", in one associates mind -- "the best". But, they apparently have gone volume and cheaped out. I won't be buying them, again. Not because I found a better competitor, but because they sabotaged their own product. But, maybe they're selling tons of them, trading accumulated good will against profits. Someone will bonus out, leaving the eventual wreckage behind.

ako 9y ago

This article is not about effectiveness of ads on social media. They don't want to be associated with all the fake-news on social media. I wonder if they show adds on foxnews. Foxnews also seems to be filled with mostly fake news.

test112 9y ago
Says the democrat.Opposite site tells you CNN is the fakest fake ever faked.In my view, both are to blame but FN is probably more blatant.Its the difference between Trumps direct fake news and Hillarys, more elaborate, "i like to be seen as competent and neutral" fake news. (Im not us citizen or live in us)
- ako 9y ago
  Not a democrat, way to right wing for me. Anyway, fake or not is a difficult discussion, i agree. Personally i think religion is also fake news, no evidence available as far as i'm concerned. Reason i mentioned fox is that i recently read: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-need-to-watch-this https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-need-to-watch-this It seems a bit shortsighted to just single out social media for fake news, when regular media is as much to blame.

noja 9y ago

> leading them to conclude that the spending they cut was probably ineffective to begin with There's a simple explanation for that: they cut only the advertising spend that was ineffective.

jhayward 9y ago

"I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half" -- John Wanamaker