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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

#161

Post by dhimes »

dragonwriter wrote: post #156
dhimes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases you'll see that they leave your page immediately- too fast for a human to process that it's not what they want if they've actually clicked on an ad. Like, one or two seconds.

One or two seconds is not too quick for a human to reject your page after clicking on an ad.

It is totally too quick if they are looking for content. If they are looking for a car and click on a lumber store then I agree. But anything other than a clear mis-click and you can't absorb the page that fast.

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

#162

Post by dhimes »

mden wrote: post #152
dhimes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases you'll see that they leave your page immediately- too fast for a human to process that it's not what they want if they've actually clicked on an ad. Like, one or two seconds.

One or two seconds sounds pretty long to me. I think I close accidental ad clicks well under a second a lot of the time as I realize what I did without waiting for the site to load.

Yeah I do that too but I don't want to pay for those clicks either. I want genuine interested clicks. Google is set up to get me to pay for clicks, not to give me the right clicks.

Or at least it was when I used them. It's been a while because of that.

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

#163

Post by na85 »

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?

The quality publications will remain, under alternative funding models.

Many sites will perish, and little of value will be lost.

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

#164

Post by RodericDay »

emn13 wrote: post #59
kilroy123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's even necessary. The percentage of people using ad blockers keeps going up and up.

I kind of suspect adblocking is doomed to die rather quickly if it ever seriously threatens the ad industry. As anti-adblock has shown even fairly trivial measures can be effective; and if you control the platform in more depth you can be a lot trickier about it, e.g. by doing minification-esque transforms to the complete dom tree.

Markets and competition should prevent this outcome. Unless we're not in a competitive market situation, in which case regulators can step in.

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

#165

Post by bryananderson »

I formerly worked as a digital influencer across the usual list of content platforms.

One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to marketing.

I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't. They have no idea how to.

When trying to measure the impact of marketing upon sales, teasing the signal out of the noise is almost impossible to do with confidence, especially for huge companies running many campaigns at any given time. I suspect this is true for all advertising, not just influencer marketing.

With few truly reliable metrics, marketers fall back on conventional wisdom. For a long time, conventional wisdom has been that you have to pour a ton of your marketing budget into digital or you're being left behind.

A change in that conventional wisdom seems to be afoot. I saw it as a digital content creator - ad revenues per view have been declining for a while now. Aside from the short-term panic over ads appearing next to extremist content, there might be something more long-term that's changing in corporate marketing strategy.

It's hard to see how this, and not a challenge from a new startup, is not the greatest threat to the success of Google and Facebook. Their business is digital advertising. If spending in that field declines, it's probably rough times ahead for those giants.

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

#167

Post by jshelly »

In my own personal experience, I can honestly say I've never "intentionally" clicked on an ad in the past 20+ years I've been on the internet. I will say I've certainly looked at ads in magazines, billboards, tv commercials (before tivo) and even those small planes pulling banners at the beach.

I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does surprise me is why its taken this long to figure that out.

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

#168

Post by saalweachter »

briandear wrote: post #114
sah2ed wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their business is ad delivery. Apple is a consumer electronics company as they make and sell hardware directed primarily at consumers (as well as niche professional markets – kind of like Panasonic.) Google is an advertising company; the tech they produce is nearly universally focused in some way on the delivery of ads. They make and sell ad delivery. Search: ad delivery. Any innovations around search are all built f…

It's disingenuous from the perspective of what it's like to work at a company.

I worked at a comparison shopping site that turned into an SEO house towards the end, after we failed to get direct traffic. The entire company slowly shifted focus improve our SEO, because that's what dragged us away from bankruptcy. Our engineers were tasked with finding ways to get indexed in Google higher, tweaking our site layout constantly. Search became about latency, since Google crawls faster sites faster. Crawling became about getting more content to mix up and show to Google. It became a rather depressing slog, all things together, after we stopped worrying about users and started worrying about SEO. It was explicit and pervasive.

If you work at Google, you only worry about ads if you work on the Ads team. If you work on search, if you work on GMail, if you work on cloud services you work on and worry exclusively about making those products the best they can be, for the users of those products. If I weren't also a user of Google products, I would almost have no idea that Google had ads; they just aren't a salient part of a workaday engineer's job.

You can still argue that from a business perspective every product is tainted, but from an engineering perspective, ads aren't a consideration at all, let alone the first consideration.

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

#169

Post by lithos »

ameister14 wrote: post #159

I've worked in and around marketing/advertising for the last 6 years in different capacities and have found that the emphasis on audience hyper-segmentation and retargeting to the exclusion of other methods is the single biggest piece of bullshit out there. Targeting people based on what they are apparently interested in vs. places they go that reflect those interests doesn't give better results and can turn off your…

Still getting TONS of car advertising, after I bought one 8 months ago (when I see it).

seriously car ads are what pushed me to JavaScript off by default since their ads are almost as rude as porn ads. Even the normal advertising reset trick of "open all in new tab" on a folder with a dozen cloud/server hosts didn't swap out advertising to their normally sane ads.

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

#170

Post by nsxwolf »

jshelly wrote: post #167

In my own personal experience, I can honestly say I've never "intentionally" clicked on an ad in the past 20+ years I've been on the internet. I will say I've certainly looked at ads in magazines, billboards, tv commercials (before tivo) and even those small planes pulling banners at the beach. I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does surprise me is why its taken this long to figure…

Magazine ads are often fun to look at. Great photographs. Sometimes very entertaining or interesting ad copy to read. Often informative.

Most importantly they are usually for valuable, useful, and desirable products. Banner ads on the other hand...

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