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P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

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Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#91

Post by acangiano »

emn13 wrote: post #56
VMG wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833508 > The growth of “zero-sum” activities may, however, be even more important. Look around the economy, and it’s striking how much high-talent manpower is devoted to activities that cannot possibly increase human welfare, but entail competition for the available economic pie. Advertising seems to be a zero-sum game. I can imagine some industries cartellizing…

It's a pipe dream; but advertising/lobbying deserves regulatory hurdles much like other public health threats (e.g. tobacco). And before anyone shouts "freedom of speech" - we already do that extensively for stuff like fraud, libel, and incitement to violence/terrorism, so this isn't really anything particularly new. It's simply detrimental to the overall ability for us to think .

Suggested read on this topic, "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" by Tim Wu.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#92

Post by quakenul »

amptorn wrote: post #81
riffraff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is: given how much of the web relies on advertising, how would things fare once ads are gone?

The web will be for people who are willing to pay to say something, I guess.

Also it will be for people who are able to pay for everything.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#93

Post by halflings »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #83
sgt101 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that they are measuring, but determining the cause and effect of each campaign is very hard. Sometimes ads have a clear impact, but those are cases that no one argues with. Mostly advertisers simply say (in effect) we got your message out, and there was an impact. If the low/high uptake was due to the ad or to the quality of the product or to the weakness of competitors - well no one can say.

>well no one can say. // P&G must have the most and best data on the planet. By now they can probably say with a pretty high confidence interval.

That's not a real argument though.

Just assuming that they have a magical way to solve attribution for traditional ads because they're a bit corporation. If they did have that, they could just use the same tools on digital and report fake clicks and bots to Facebook and Google to get reimbursed. (Google at least refunds all impressions and clicks that were later detected as being fraudulent)

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#94

Post by walshemj »

0xbear wrote: post #46
wyc wrote: post #8

Bob Hoffman at the Ad Contrarian called this in January: "P&G To Online Ad World: We've Had Enough" - https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/p-to-online-ad-wor... Digital advertising is rife with (what should be considered) fraud. Advertisers feel as though they are getting fleeced, and the advertising middlemen reap massive margins. The accountability isn't where it needs to be; there are websites that hide ads u…

Yeah, but it's not like traditional advertising is free of fraud either. You can't even really pretend to measure the effectiveness of campaigns there. And there's much more money in it.

a while back I saw a traditional display ad for KFC it was on a site heading out of town where the next KFC would have been 20 miles away - not sure they where getting much value out of that advert,

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#95

Post by oliwarner »

elorant wrote: post #66

I have to admit that at a deeper lever I'd love if advertisers get the fuck off of the web. I don't have a problem with advertising per se but the way it's used today hurts the medium in so many ways. Sites are bloated with ads, journalism is riffled with native advertising articles, malware is mainly spread through infected ads and on top of that we have a legion of companies out there which are collecting every kin…

The good thing about Google's cost-combative platforms like Adwords and DoubleClick is it prices the lowest rung of spammers out of the market.

Multinationals leaving these platforms means the price drops down. This not only means more illegitimate entities can afford to compete, but that publishers need more of them, in more places, just to stay afloat on the same income.

You could argue that this is falling apart because Google takes a 50-68% cut of what the advertisers pay, away from publishers. I'm not sure how this competes with old world advertising, but that seems pretty severe. If they edged off on this —they'd lose a ton of money but— they'd probably make the internet better.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#97

Post by sah2ed »

saimiam wrote: post #87
Jach wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Google and Facebook work on "tech that directly impacts lives and how a person's day flows". So far producing more value than Uber has, but Uber provides a valuable service too. And while Google & Facebook's revenue is primarily from their ad business, they're not ad companies, like, say, Rubicon Project.

How are they not ad companies? Together, FB and GOOGL receive a massive proportion of online ad spend.

They are tech companies not ad companies.

It just happens that Google and Facebook draw most of their revenue from being middlemen in the advertising industry, the same way Uber is a middleman in the transportation industry -- Uber doesn't have the fixed costs that you'd expect a large cab company to have.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#98

Post by smhost »

flohofwoe wrote: post #89
riffraff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is: given how much of the web relies on advertising, how would things fare once ads are gone?

Since ads on the web are mostly produced by bots for bots, and distributed through shady borderline-criminal ad-networks I think we've already reached rock bottom years ago and it can only get better.

Wasn't that always true though? The earliest internet I knew was through AOL cd's, but it still seems like the internet as we know it was born of cancerous (mostly pornographic) ads.

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#99

Post by kuschku »

riffraff wrote: post #75
elorant wrote: post #66

I have to admit that at a deeper lever I'd love if advertisers get the fuck off of the web. I don't have a problem with advertising per se but the way it's used today hurts the medium in so many ways. Sites are bloated with ads, journalism is riffled with native advertising articles, malware is mainly spread through infected ads and on top of that we have a legion of companies out there which are collecting every kin…

The trouble is: given how much of the web relies on advertising, how would things fare once ads are gone?

We can ask ourselves what could exist without ads.

Most newspapers could make old-style ad deals, like they do for print. A few newspapers also still finance their sites almost entirely through subscriptions, and those would continue to exist (e.g. Süddeutsche, SPIEGEL). As would obviously publicly financed sites (BBC, ARD, ZDF, NPR).

Also products financed via paying customers, such as imgur used to be, or possibly reddit if they change the way reddit gold works.

Also, most people's blogs would continue to exist, as many self-host or use services where the free users are subsidized by the paying ones. Even WhatsApp used to be profitable with that model.

We'd be going back to a 2010 era web, and I'm not so sure that's actually bad. We'd lose the corporate dominance over the web, Google, Facebook, etc.

Now, there is one part where paying user subsidizing doesn't work, but where ads are currently the only model of financing, and that's search engines.

But considering those act as a public service, maybe after advertisers leave the web and Google goes down crashing, a government could just buy Google (as the German government bought DHL, or major shares in VW, they could probably just outright buy Google).

Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

#100

Post by JD557 »

Slightly relevant to the discussion, since P&G seems to have started make some changes to their digital marketing strategy earlier this year (It seems to have been a major change, since one of the companies actually had to shut down).

https://adexchanger.com/advertiser/pg-parts-audience-science...

https://adexchanger.com/platforms/audiencescience-shuts-door...

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