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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

#231

Post by joh-nan-drew »

teej wrote: post #218
joh-nan-drew wrote: post #213

Marketing is the price you pay to get attention. All marketing is a hack for attention. Being data-driven and figuring out the 1% of your digital ads that are working, then capitalizing on them, is a hack. Using a unique marketing distribution channel or method is a hack. Embedding the marketing into your product is a hack. These are all "growth" hacks. Cutting in front of the line is a hack to get your lunch faster,…

I think you're painting with too broad strokes by likening all marketing to hacks. Marketing is more like finding alpha in a changing, inefficient market. There are going to be short term and long term strategies that work. The only guarantee is that things will change with time and those with more information will beat those with less.

That sounds right. I look upon the word "hacking" favorably and use it broadly to mean something like "manipulating a system for a particular outcome" rather than just This One Simple Trick, sorry if I wasn't clearer.

I like the guarantee. That's why hacking in the conventional sense today-- which needs constant awareness, involvement, adaptation, experimentation to find out what works, non-codified intelligence, and dealing with the reality of a system -- can beat the process du jour. It might become the new canonical process if everyone else starts doing it.

Sometimes I feel like long-term or well-thought-out strategy is the hack in a sea of self-proclaimed hackers who focus on useless wins and optimizations.

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by rjbwork »

zippergz wrote: post #189
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…

I almost feel like there are two factions. I'm pretty similar to you. I have clicked on ads a handful of times, but it's very rare. However, I have worked in jobs where I had visibility into the metrics, and I have seen internet ads be EXTREMELY effective. Not in terms of clicks (which could easily be accidental or fraudulent), but in terms of people clicking and then purchasing. People aren't going to "accidentally"…

I agree. I think there's a big hump in the middle of people who are like "hmm, this is relevant to me, i'll click it", then 2 long tails of people who click a LOT and people who click rarely or not at all.

On the other hand, there is a not-insignificant number of bot networks and shady clickfarm sites out there. Though, you can usually avoid being taken in by them by not being a cheapskate - quality traffic is more expensive. If you're bidding <$1 CPM for most things, enjoy funding a click farm.

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

#234

Post by virtuabhi »

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…

"If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more likely to buy them; I bought the thing already."

Actually, it is possible that you might want to buy a mattress again. Consider that you found the new mattress to be more/less firm and are looking to return it and get a different one. I think it is reasonable to show ads for the same thing at least till the end of return window.

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

#235

Post by zaroth »

eps wrote: post #222
tomrod wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is an open question of incrementality -- did you just cannibalize a sale from a different, possibly cheaper, channel? How much lift did you actually get? That's the problem I've seen in the digital ad space -- lift is either hard to measure, or ignored completely. Causality to the sale is assumed on the ad.

What's "lift"?

New customers or orders brought in by the ad which you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Lift is a basically unmeasurable quantity which directly relates to the ROI of the ad.

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

#236

Post by DanBC »

detaro wrote: post #220
m-j-fox wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote guidelines! (But still the only way to find out about them is to violate a few. Ex post facto.)

They are linked in the footer appearing on nearly every page of HN (and have been for years). Comments about downvotes are explicitly addressed in them, so not much room for interpretation there either.

They're also suggested next to the text entry box for new accounts.

http://imgur.com/a/R1wyo

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

#237

Post by Jach »

sidlls wrote: post #139
Jach wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thought experiment: suppose my company makes and sells shoes. We're a shoe company, right? Then one day some soda company calls us and says they'll give us money (a generous $10 a pair, our pairs sell for $100, cost $90, hello double profit) if we put their logo on the tongues. Sure, we try it out, shoe sales don't seem negatively affected (they're great shoes) so we keep it and keep taking money for the ad. Basica…

Your shoe company is in the business of selling ads at the point where ad revenue exceeds revenue from the manufacture of shoes. The shoes become the medium of delivery of the ad, but the company would as likely give away slips of paper with the logos on if the ad revenue justified it. A better analogy, in my opinion, is to that of a company that makes billboards: they sell ads, delivered by billboard. They'd stop ma…

Maybe it's a difference of opinion on the purpose of companies. For some people the only purpose of a company is to make money, regardless of how. But for my shoe company, the purpose is to make great shoes for people to wear. Even when the ad revenue is huge, the company wouldn't just as likely give away slips of paper with the logos on it if the ad revenue justified it, because we have no interest in making slips of paper, we just want to make shoes. Similarly, why is the soda company continuing to pay us such high ad revenue unless they think it's justified on their end? Couldn't they make their own shoes, and sell or give those away instead of having to pay us? Except they're in the business of making soda, they have no expertise or desire to make shoes. If the ad revenue dries up, well, we can go back to trying to sell the shoes instead of just giving them away.

The analogy with the company that makes billboards is good if you're trying to point out the fundamental difference between an ad company (there aren't that many of them, despite many companies being funded by ads) and a non-ad company. The only purpose of a billboard company is to make billboards that people see ads on. There's no other reason to make billboards. The day to day of most employees will be about how to most effectively design and position their billboards for better ad delivery and finding advertisers to pay, while a relatively small amount of employees enjoy focusing only on the construction process. The CEO probably doesn't even care about billboards, they just found a nice way to make money.

If Google's ad revenue dropped a lot, there would definitely be a change in focus, but they wouldn't kill off search. They'd probably put some more people on trying to sell Enterprise Search. Google, being a tech company and not an ad company, has tech it can try to sell when the ad revenues go away. An ad company has nothing else. That's the big difference.

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

#238

Post by rtx »

dhimes wrote: post #161
dragonwriter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can mostly guess from the layout.

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

#239

Post by redmattred »

bryananderson wrote: post #165

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. Whe…

We (mavrck.co) actually work with a lot of brands (including P&G) to help them measure the effectiveness of their influencer marketing campaigns, as well as with their loyalty, ambassador, and refer a friend programs.

Happy to chat if you're interested - matt@mavrck.co

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

#240

Post by redmattred »

mattzito wrote: post #230
chokma wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean digital influencer in the sense of social influencer? The latter can be measured quite well, depending on the method. Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebri…

I think you're overestimating how well social influencers can be measured. It's true, you can measure clicks to a landing page, one per influencer - but that's relatively annoying administratively, and only measures clicks, not sales. Plus, that counts on your influencer actually following instructions and using the custom landing page URL, which is harder than you might think. If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxur…

Its can be pretty straightforward if you run your campaigns through a software platform. The way we (mavrck.co) do it is we do outreach for a campaign, screen the influencers based on their engagement rates/relevancy, have influencers connect their instagram/facebook accounts to our platform, generate individual tracking links for each influencer, ingest their posts via API, and measure the comments/likes/clicks/conversions with our analytics.
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