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What's interesting here is that these big brands see Facebook advertising as non-essential to their business. I suspect a large part of Facebook's market cap ma

by ajb 6y ago

What's interesting here is that these big brands see Facebook advertising as non-essential to their business. I suspect a large part of Facebook's market cap may rest on the assumption that it's an essential advertising outlet. If so, the knock-on effect of this would be much larger than just the loss of revenue, hence Zuckerberg rushing out a response.

nimbius 6y ago
Bold of you to assume Unilever has so little understanding of their consumer that they are relegated to the metrics they collect from their vendor. Facebook is a fat red X for young new markets who increasingly eschew it's tone-deaf cash cow platform for increasingly less commoditized alternatives. what once stood as a beacon of unity is now an increasingly ugly and divisive platform that's outlived its original purpose: predatory surveillance capitalism. Brands are in my opinion evolving, and using zuckerbergs increasing incompetence as an excuse to loose themselves from contracts.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Member since the student requirement. I must have missed the "beacon of unity" phase. It is just another website. I remember other websites providing similar functionality around the time Facebook appeared (not MySpace, Friendster, or any of those), including the ability to see who last visited your page: other members. You could then go visit their page. AFAIK, Facebook never had that. Instead it had "poke". If today you could see who is accessing your Facebook page, it would probably inhibit you from posting so much personal content. The entire design of today's Facebook is to dissuade you from activiely checking friends' or potential friends' pages on your own initiative. Instead Facebook wants to "feed" you content from other members (and advertisers). Default settings and behaviour discourage exploration and encourage relying on "suggestions" (by Facebook) instead. They even go so far as to ask for money to "promote" your page to others.
  - pm90 6y ago
    I remember a time when all my friends were on Facebook. Being able to connect in a concrete way with people that lived far far away seemed magical. Facebook was that scrappy SV upstart that wanted to change the world and provided an ads free experience focused almost completely on people. It seems like a hazy memory, but I do remember liking it and imagining it as an agent of good in the general scheme of things. Very different from the toxic wasteland it is today.
    - labster 6y ago
      I wasn’t really all that surprised how it went. But then again, when The Facebook first expanded to my campus, I used it to run targeted attack ads on student government candidates, as an independent expenditure unaffiliated with any candidate or campaign committee. Maybe I was the cancer that is killing Facebook. But I pretty much left Facebook when they introduced the News Feed — that’s when I realized they were after all of our privacy.
    - ghettoimp 6y ago
      I probably just don't use it enough to understand this perspective, but why is it a toxic wasteland? My facebook feed has my friends from college, family far away, etc., and yeah there's an occasional political argument from time to time, but if anyone gets annoying you can just block or unfriend them, so...?
      - minerjoe 6y ago
        It's just so easy for a naive and trusting person to be pulled into an information bubble. Like a few off topics and then get all the confirmation-bias support you would ever need with no "need" to go search out countering information.
nabla9 6y ago
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... eBay stopped online advertising and the traffic changed from paid links to unpaid links. >The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents It turns out that brand keyword advertising metrics are misleading, especially for established brands. Boycott gives opportunity for Unilever take a pause and run the experiment.
- kolmogorov 6y ago
  ebay just stopped paying for people who search for "ebay" and related. (these are called "brand" keywords). that's a completely different statement than saying advertising is a fad. depending on the business it may be but ebay definitely spends a ton on keywords with buying intent. FB is in a very different market from both brand keywords and non-brand high intent keywords.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    >completely different statement than saying advertising is a fad. Nobody is saying that. There is sickening commenting trend where people take maxim of every argument, then argue against that.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      It's called HN pedantry. In chess, we use the term "woodpusher." HN pedants think a post is a mathematical proof, and they won by discovering a loop hole to falsify it - "Aha!" They're keyboard warriors who don't have any experience in the real world - they're really Luddites, but they just don't know it. Usually it doesn't matter (because they don't matter), but the corona pandemic shows what happens when woodpushers take over the world. "Imma make a fake, unapproved ventilator, herp derp. U 2?" - multiple HN threads. The US has fallen and it can't get back up. IT people actually have valuable skills in being able to merge different disciplines at both the technical and policy levels, and could have made a difference. But for pedants like, "I don't want my nephew to die, even if we have to shutdown a $22 trillion economy, so shut up." - again, multiple HN threads. Not the finest moment for either the US or HN.
raverbashing 6y ago
Remember when fb inflated video view counts to bring more advertisers? Nobody should be trusting ad metrics from them
- methodsignature 6y ago
  Or when they collected the wrong passwords you entered and used then to try to access your other web accounts to collect data?
  - garblegarble 6y ago
    >Or when they collected the wrong passwords you entered and used then to try to access your other web accounts to collect data? ...what?! Do you have a source on that I can read? I thought my opinion of facebook couldn't go lower...
ceo_tim_crook 6y ago
fight back, https://adnauseam.io https://adnauseam.io
Zenst 6y ago
Even more so if sales increase over this, may become marketing to not be upon facebook - then thinks would suddenly turn.
bitxbit 6y ago
Alternatively it’s a signal that FB no longer holds most relevant data. They used to be able to market themselves as indispensable marketing tool (and they were) but that’s changed dramatically in the past couple of years. I imagine Apple played a bigger role than people realize.
- smart_jackal 6y ago
  The article is half truth because Unilever has exited advertising from ALL social media platforms including Twitter, not just FB.
dmarchand90 6y ago
I'm not sure if it necessarily means Facebook is non-essential. This actually makes me think social media has entered a deep stage of maturity. Anyone else here remember how advertisers were primary regulators of content on TV? That unusually offensive content was avoided out of fear that companies would pull their commercials? I think we see the Facebook has now entered this stage.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  CPG brands are not core to FB's revenue growth. In general, FB make most of their money from direct response advertising, rather than brand advertising. Additionally, the CPG model of ad buying doesn't make a lot of sense for eithe Google or Facebook, I'm not sure that this boycott makes much difference from a revenue perspective. However, because Unilever are so huge, it probably does make a difference from a PR perspective, which is why we see lots of articles about this.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  It's an interesting perspective, yet a TV a ban on 1 show or network was pretty limited for the advertiser since there was proper regulation on media at the time. I.e. dropping the most popular news program still left you with ~50% reach in the same category on the other 2 networks. An advertiser dropping a major tech company today is refusing to be seen in all social contexts of one type, or all searches, etc. If advertisers go ahead with this on a permanent basis it is a very interesting message, and I think we don't know so much about this since our past regulations were really based on outcomes with individuals and small companies as the victims of bad markets.
econcon 6y ago
If we really take the macro view, it seems Facebook is a bank which can print money at its whims. Sure, advertises commit their billion dollar adspent but Facebook can always claim their commited amount have been spent and populate the dashboards with realistic data. The big brands do not base their ad expense on specific metrics like small businesses do. Once you are big enough to make billions, chasing matrics results limiting your market.
- ojilles 6y ago
  This doesn’t resonate with me at all: at those scales there are entire teams dedicated at tracking impact and outcomes of said spend on the advertiser side. Sure FB could lie about the metrics, but won’t be able to keep that up for long (matter of weeks).
  - econcon 6y ago
    If your CTR on ads drops for all advertisers on facebook. What can you do? How can you figure out of its just a technical glitch or someone purposely wrote bad code to create this situation where Facebook is benefiting at expense of every other advertiser.. Infact, Facebook can hire a residential IP service provider like Luminati and use bots to click their advertiser's landing pages in name of malware checks and bill them and later when caught say "ohh we made an error" then even your CTR or landing page tracking metrics are going to fail. I come from adtech, so I know what is possible in this space and what my smart colleagues are capable of doing.
philshem 6y ago
One big reason that Big Brands advertise is to drive up the ad price and block out smaller competitors by raising the cost of entry.

by ajb 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago

Bold of you to assume Unilever has so little understanding of their consumer that they are relegated to the metrics they collect from their vendor. Facebook is a fat red X for young new markets who increasingly eschew it's tone-deaf cash cow platform for increasingly less commoditized alternatives. what once stood as a beacon of unity is now an increasingly ugly and divisive platform that's outlived its original purpose: predatory surveillance capitalism. Brands are in my opinion evolving, and using zuckerbergs increasing incompetence as an excuse to loose themselves from contracts.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Member since the student requirement. I must have missed the "beacon of unity" phase. It is just another website. I remember other websites providing similar functionality around the time Facebook appeared (not MySpace, Friendster, or any of those), including the ability to see who last visited your page: other members. You could then go visit their page. AFAIK, Facebook never had that. Instead it had "poke". If today you could see who is accessing your Facebook page, it would probably inhibit you from posting so much personal content. The entire design of today's Facebook is to dissuade you from activiely checking friends' or potential friends' pages on your own initiative. Instead Facebook wants to "feed" you content from other members (and advertisers). Default settings and behaviour discourage exploration and encourage relying on "suggestions" (by Facebook) instead. They even go so far as to ask for money to "promote" your page to others.
- pm90 6y ago
  I remember a time when all my friends were on Facebook. Being able to connect in a concrete way with people that lived far far away seemed magical. Facebook was that scrappy SV upstart that wanted to change the world and provided an ads free experience focused almost completely on people. It seems like a hazy memory, but I do remember liking it and imagining it as an agent of good in the general scheme of things. Very different from the toxic wasteland it is today.
  - labster 6y ago
    I wasn’t really all that surprised how it went. But then again, when The Facebook first expanded to my campus, I used it to run targeted attack ads on student government candidates, as an independent expenditure unaffiliated with any candidate or campaign committee. Maybe I was the cancer that is killing Facebook. But I pretty much left Facebook when they introduced the News Feed — that’s when I realized they were after all of our privacy.
  - ghettoimp 6y ago
    I probably just don't use it enough to understand this perspective, but why is it a toxic wasteland? My facebook feed has my friends from college, family far away, etc., and yeah there's an occasional political argument from time to time, but if anyone gets annoying you can just block or unfriend them, so...?
    - minerjoe 6y ago
      It's just so easy for a naive and trusting person to be pulled into an information bubble. Like a few off topics and then get all the confirmation-bias support you would ever need with no "need" to go search out countering information.

nabla9 6y ago

The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... eBay stopped online advertising and the traffic changed from paid links to unpaid links. >The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents It turns out that brand keyword advertising metrics are misleading, especially for established brands. Boycott gives opportunity for Unilever take a pause and run the experiment.

kolmogorov 6y ago
ebay just stopped paying for people who search for "ebay" and related. (these are called "brand" keywords). that's a completely different statement than saying advertising is a fad. depending on the business it may be but ebay definitely spends a ton on keywords with buying intent. FB is in a very different market from both brand keywords and non-brand high intent keywords.
- nabla9 6y ago
  >completely different statement than saying advertising is a fad. Nobody is saying that. There is sickening commenting trend where people take maxim of every argument, then argue against that.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    It's called HN pedantry. In chess, we use the term "woodpusher." HN pedants think a post is a mathematical proof, and they won by discovering a loop hole to falsify it - "Aha!" They're keyboard warriors who don't have any experience in the real world - they're really Luddites, but they just don't know it. Usually it doesn't matter (because they don't matter), but the corona pandemic shows what happens when woodpushers take over the world. "Imma make a fake, unapproved ventilator, herp derp. U 2?" - multiple HN threads. The US has fallen and it can't get back up. IT people actually have valuable skills in being able to merge different disciplines at both the technical and policy levels, and could have made a difference. But for pedants like, "I don't want my nephew to die, even if we have to shutdown a $22 trillion economy, so shut up." - again, multiple HN threads. Not the finest moment for either the US or HN.

raverbashing 6y ago

Remember when fb inflated video view counts to bring more advertisers? Nobody should be trusting ad metrics from them

methodsignature 6y ago
Or when they collected the wrong passwords you entered and used then to try to access your other web accounts to collect data?
- garblegarble 6y ago
  >Or when they collected the wrong passwords you entered and used then to try to access your other web accounts to collect data? ...what?! Do you have a source on that I can read? I thought my opinion of facebook couldn't go lower...

ceo_tim_crook 6y ago

fight back, https://adnauseam.io https://adnauseam.io

Zenst 6y ago

Even more so if sales increase over this, may become marketing to not be upon facebook - then thinks would suddenly turn.

bitxbit 6y ago

Alternatively it’s a signal that FB no longer holds most relevant data. They used to be able to market themselves as indispensable marketing tool (and they were) but that’s changed dramatically in the past couple of years. I imagine Apple played a bigger role than people realize.

smart_jackal 6y ago
The article is half truth because Unilever has exited advertising from ALL social media platforms including Twitter, not just FB.

dmarchand90 6y ago

I'm not sure if it necessarily means Facebook is non-essential. This actually makes me think social media has entered a deep stage of maturity. Anyone else here remember how advertisers were primary regulators of content on TV? That unusually offensive content was avoided out of fear that companies would pull their commercials? I think we see the Facebook has now entered this stage.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
CPG brands are not core to FB's revenue growth. In general, FB make most of their money from direct response advertising, rather than brand advertising. Additionally, the CPG model of ad buying doesn't make a lot of sense for eithe Google or Facebook, I'm not sure that this boycott makes much difference from a revenue perspective. However, because Unilever are so huge, it probably does make a difference from a PR perspective, which is why we see lots of articles about this.
foolmeonce 6y ago
It's an interesting perspective, yet a TV a ban on 1 show or network was pretty limited for the advertiser since there was proper regulation on media at the time. I.e. dropping the most popular news program still left you with ~50% reach in the same category on the other 2 networks. An advertiser dropping a major tech company today is refusing to be seen in all social contexts of one type, or all searches, etc. If advertisers go ahead with this on a permanent basis it is a very interesting message, and I think we don't know so much about this since our past regulations were really based on outcomes with individuals and small companies as the victims of bad markets.

econcon 6y ago

If we really take the macro view, it seems Facebook is a bank which can print money at its whims. Sure, advertises commit their billion dollar adspent but Facebook can always claim their commited amount have been spent and populate the dashboards with realistic data. The big brands do not base their ad expense on specific metrics like small businesses do. Once you are big enough to make billions, chasing matrics results limiting your market.

ojilles 6y ago
This doesn’t resonate with me at all: at those scales there are entire teams dedicated at tracking impact and outcomes of said spend on the advertiser side. Sure FB could lie about the metrics, but won’t be able to keep that up for long (matter of weeks).
- econcon 6y ago
  If your CTR on ads drops for all advertisers on facebook. What can you do? How can you figure out of its just a technical glitch or someone purposely wrote bad code to create this situation where Facebook is benefiting at expense of every other advertiser.. Infact, Facebook can hire a residential IP service provider like Luminati and use bots to click their advertiser's landing pages in name of malware checks and bill them and later when caught say "ohh we made an error" then even your CTR or landing page tracking metrics are going to fail. I come from adtech, so I know what is possible in this space and what my smart colleagues are capable of doing.

philshem 6y ago

One big reason that Big Brands advertise is to drive up the ad price and block out smaller competitors by raising the cost of entry.