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GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

forbes.com

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Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#221

Post by gcb »

ThomPete wrote: post #118
gcb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never worked with advertising. Advertising agency doesn't sell you a great campaign, idea or pretty pictures. they sell you media. with a HUGE markup. 10mil media can cost way more than 30mil if bought from an agency creating the 'creatives' (in the case of car ads, a picture of the car, or a movie of it cruising on a road where the art director likes to take vacations) 30mil for 10mil of media, GM had a good dea…

No that is what the media buyers do which may or may not be affiliated with an agency. The agencies don't get the markup the media buying companies do. They are to the advertising industry what realtors are to the housing market. Most of the houses have no idea what they are doing, which only works because their clients are even more clueless. It will change within the next 5 years and the media buying houses will be…

that's the point of view of a small agency.

And the big agency would go nowhere if it actually had to do the creative work.

and yes, when the client is clueless, there's lot of people in the way making money.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#222

Post by dredmorbius »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #214
larrys wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you look forward 5+ years, everyone is doing much of their internetting via their phone" Not true. People spend a significant amount of time in front of a computer "at work". Those people are still going to be sitting in front of a "desktop" in 5 years and still have the same behavior. There will be more mobile, but there will always (especially in only 5 years) be people "at the office" doing their job looking f…

Desktops won't last forever in offices. Offices tend to move slow, but tablets and the like will move in slowly but surely.

It'd better damned well be a tablet with a full keyboard, a TrackPoint, three mouse buttons (at least), and support a minimum of dual-head display at 1920x1440 x2.

Yes, it's nice to be able to drag my computing environment around.

It's also damned useful to be able to park it, and get some serious shit done.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#223

Post by eblackburn »

cletus wrote: post #114

I've said this repeatedly: Facebook is a high-risk proposition, particularly as an investment (disclaimer: I work for Google). "Intent" as other commenters have noted is a big part of the story but it's not the only story. Search can broadly be broken up into at least two categories: 1. Navigational eg typing "b and h" into the browser; and 2. Informational eg "cheap flights to jamaica". I don't know what the make up…

Of course Facebook could acquire / lease Bing (or build perhaps?) and plumb that into Facebook.

A user searches within Facebook and the platform can display the results, apply highly targeted adverts and offer links to comments / endorsements (likes) by friends, Facebook exclusive material from advertisers. From within that platform Facebook could also leverage some commerce / shopping too?

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#224

Post by richardw »

steve8918 wrote: post #215
richardw wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) GM is exactly the right type of advertiser for Facebook. They don't want you to buy a car right now, they want to get the brand in front of you. They, with all their resources, can't get it to work. 2) Google Adwords-style advertising is the absolute shortest line between a person who has a need and someone willing to fulfil that. To be worth more, Facebook has to either make "brand awareness" advertising bigger t…

No one is saying that Facebook, as it currently is, is better or more effective than Google in terms of user monetization. My point is that their current methods are terrible and they still bring in $4B per year. If they can actually increase the quality of their user monetization, then they certainly could bring in a lot of revenues. Also, no one is saying that Google's current way of advertising isn't superior to F…

If they can actually increase the quality of their user monetization, then they certainly could bring in a lot of revenues.

Ok, but that's like saying if they can make more money per user they'll make more money. It feels like that's just restating the problem. So what things would happen for them to "increase the quality of their user monetization"? I'm looking for a lever they could pull or push to get more cash out of, say, me or you.

It's like channel surfing as opposed to going to the library to work on a research project.

Channel surfing is a very un-motivated state of mind for the user to be in, so you're less likely to be able to get them to do something you want. The best at this seem to be Zynga et al, but they only work on a subset of the population. Increasing the quality of user monetization will require that either you are able to leverage their dis-interested state of mind, or change it.

You don't select users based on keyword searches. You can select your users based on their interests, their age, etc. And this information is likely to be much more accurate than the information that Google distills from the sites you click on, etc.

I'm absolutely sure my daily searches give Google more info than what I feed Facebook. Today, Google knows which tech stack I'm working in and what problem I want solved this very minute. It knows which stocks I want news about, which types of mountain bike I'm reading about, images I'm searching for, etc. Compared to that, Facebook is trying to get me to search for more friends from my school, because it's figured out that I went to X schools. It might know I have said I "like" something, but that's usually a friend who asked me to like their business.

I think Facebook have an incredible strong position for maintaining the best social graph. It'll take infinity to get my older relatives on anything else. It's just not going to happen. But as to making serious money, I can't see it. Still, I'd like to see how they would do it.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#225

Post by richardw »

diminish wrote: post #218
richardw wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) GM is exactly the right type of advertiser for Facebook. They don't want you to buy a car right now, they want to get the brand in front of you. They, with all their resources, can't get it to work. 2) Google Adwords-style advertising is the absolute shortest line between a person who has a need and someone willing to fulfil that. To be worth more, Facebook has to either make "brand awareness" advertising bigger t…

I have been doing paid advertising with a few million dollars budget, with a strong conversion focus mostly on google, social web sites and content web sites. Social web sites have low relevance, low CTR for most purposes. However they are an ocean of impressions. Facebook has a chance to replace the advertorial parts of cheap TV non-prime time. If you use it properly you may get conversions though a bit lower qualit…

The 'impressions' is very similar to the dot-com 'eyeballs' though. Luckily they have what seems like a lock-in on those impressions so they should have a decade or two to work it out!

But you're absolutely right - it's basically TV-type advertising.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#227

Post by ay »

D_Alex wrote: post #194
untog wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is nothing preventing Facebook from being the next Myspace when something newer, cooler and hipper comes along and the users move on." I would argue that things like the massive photo collections people have made provide a large level of lock-in. I also suspect that Timeline is the first play in a "all your history, here" move that would make moving to another service very difficult.

YouTube has an unrivalled collection of videos. I used to listen to most of my music on YouTube, and built many hours of playlists. But I don't use YouTube any more. The level of advertising got to beyond tolerable. And that is the problem these sites have. I might spend four hours on the weekend with music videos on, but I just could not increase that, there is not enough hours in the day. To grow , the site has to…

There is I think a very interesting idea here - that an excessive "greed" for growth, if unbalanced, actually pushes the service faster time-wise over the lifecycle than it'd go if it were exploited more carefully.

This can be excessive ads, but this could be as well things like excessive features which make the service more bloated and unsuitable for the original audience.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#228

Post by dexen »

pg wrote: post #112

Interesting side point: the WSJ article was on HN first ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3978537 ) but Forbes's rewrite of it got all the upvotes because the WSJ article is behind a paywall.

However you slice it, paywall is bothersome -- one more click to go through, with no added benefit. Let's hope the `netizens' will vote with their feet more often.

Re: GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account

#229

Post by gaius »

molmalo wrote: post #124
pmorici wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's the power of intent and Facebook doesn't have that." Sure they do... Status Update from malandrew's mom: "OMG I can't wait to watch the new episode of The Good Wife tonight!" Facebook ads: "Click here to watch The latest Episode of the Good Wife" Facebook could has something better than Google intent in that they should be able to predict what you intend to search for before you go looking for it.

Let me ask you something: When you want to search something, do you first go to your facebook account and tell your friends "hey, I want to learn more about x!" and then go to your favorite search engine, and actually do your search? I bet you don't. In your example, if the mom is saying "tonight", it probably means that she wants to see it "tonight" (maybe she doesn't have the time right now). so, they should try to…

I dunno, I see lots of looking forward to new Game of Thrones type statuses on my FB.
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