Live data from Hacker News

Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

bbc.com

131–140 of 250 posts

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a recession happen the first to go is marketing. As a test, you would need to control other variables, the present economic uncertainty basically rendered that impossible. It's just the CEOs finding a convenient excuse to cut costs.

It's an even better deal: companies are replacing paid advertising with free exposure from being mentioned in news stories and bonus points for "standing up for what's right". In addition, plenty of people (and the news organisations themselves) share these news stories on the very same social media, with 0 costs for the companies involved. Overall it means increased brand exposure for less money.

Good ol' public relations.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's difficult to actually measure impact of ad spending, and marketing teams spin results to their advantage. Have you used any self-serve ad tool? It's quite easy actually.

It's quite easy to get a measurement on your screen. That doesn't necessarily translate to measuring the impact of ad spending. If I have social media ads, paid search, and retargeting ads all live on multiple platforms, there is undoubtedly interaction among them and the quite-easy self-serve ad tool is likely to show me a simplistic "last click attribution" at best.

Most analytics platforms will report on any straight direct line between spend and incremental revenue. The hard part is measuring the indirect part, as you mentioned, but it is possible.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#133
post #104

If my direct competition is partaking in this boycott, I'm doubling down on my facebook ad-spend. Great opportunity to steal customers from your competition while they are worried about posturing.

You'd probably be able to cut your ad spend in half and get the same result if the niche is small enough. If only you are buying ad spots for Amish chocolate teapot fans all of the sudden I imagine the price goes down quickly.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#134
post #7

Of course he's right. If anything I'm surprised advertisers aren't cutting back more given how much revenue they're probably losing during the pandemic. Real change has to come from two sources. Firstly regulation, Facebook will never "self-regulate" and this corporate activism is a joke. And secondly, from employees who in sufficient numbers have at least some leverage.

You do realize that regulating Facebook and other social media companies in order to force them to limit speech on their platforms would expressly violate the First Amendment? And, thank God for 1A, given the enormous amount of interest people have in limiting speech.

that's not true at all. this congressional report[1] outlines the capacity of the government to regulate speech.

"However, the fact that a law affects speech protected by the First Amendment does not necessarily mean that it is unconstitutional. As explained below, the First Amendment allows some regulation of speech and does not prohibit regulation of conduct.[...]"

If a law does regulate speech, a court would consider the type of speech being regulated to determine how closely to scrutinize the regulation. For example, a court may ask whether that speech is commercial and, as such, deserving of less protection under the First Amendment.[...]

Certain categories of speech receive even less protection than commercial speech. For example, the Supreme Court has said that states may prohibit speech advocating violence if that “advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Thus, certain types of threatening or violent speech posted on social media may not be entitled to First Amendment protection"

And also concerning internet platforms in particular:

"A court might also look to the particular nature of the medium being regulated, asking whether there are special characteristics that might justify greater regulation. The Supreme Court has said that “[e]ach medium of expression . . . must be assessed for First Amendment purposes by standards suited to it, for each may present its own problems.”"

So there's considerable complexity to the regulation of speech. It's not at all a binary issue.

[1]https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45650.pdf

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#135

The cool thing about facebook’s highly targeted advertising is that it balances the ad market in favor of niche players vs. generalists, which also means they have a long long tail of millions of small buyers vs. a few huge ones who used to dominate traditional media. Old marketing was carpetbombing, which meant only those with B-52 sized budgets could dominate. It was also deeply entwined with centralized high-volum…

Unfortunately, this model invites a lot of the "fly-by-night" type of companies offering products that may or may not have been thoroughly tested, but they know their target market may be easily manipulated through professional looking ads (eg young/naive people or people who don't know the wealth of data they give to FB to allow precision targeting).

Just one example: Molekule

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#136

My interpretation of what's going on: CEOs finally have leverage against their marketing departments to do black-out testing on social media ad spend. It's difficult to actually measure impact of ad spending, and marketing teams spin results to their advantage. They will observe what happens and re-introduce spending where it actually works.

That is an ingenious interpretation.

Probably too ingenious though, especially across all the companies involved.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#137
There is this very good article of Ben Thompson [1] predicting that Zuckerberg won't budge:

1/ large advertisers represent a small portion of FB's ad revenue

2/ if large advertisers leave and price of ads fall, other "social media ad-dependent businesses" will pick up the slack because they can measure very well their advertising return on investment thus driving the price of ads back up.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#138

Such a statement shows, that he still has learned nothing, specifically not responsibility. For Zuckerberg it needs to financially hurt, in order to cause ethical decisions. Well, such kind of statement will hopefully also prolong the boykott, because no one will want to seem like the beaten dog, beaten. ack into line. Hopefully the boykott will even increase.

>For Zuckerberg it needs to financially hurt, in order to cause ethical decisions. Hasn't he lost ~$6B in net worth because of this?

So he is worth $82B now? Do you think he really loses sleep over that? He knows this is temporary and the stock will most likely bounce back.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#139

Such a statement shows, that he still has learned nothing, specifically not responsibility. For Zuckerberg it needs to financially hurt, in order to cause ethical decisions. Well, such kind of statement will hopefully also prolong the boykott, because no one will want to seem like the beaten dog, beaten. ack into line. Hopefully the boykott will even increase.

You can only hurt him if the outrage mob is large enough. Probably, it isn't, it's just a vocal minority, the rest of the world is going to continue using facebook.

Re: Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

#140
Advertisers certainly will be back, because their public support for the cause du jour is simply a rational decision to make money/avoid losing money. When established corporations support your cause, you should be worried, because what you think you're getting isn't what you're going to get, the status quo.
Post reply on HN