Slashdot Mirror
P&G Cuts More Than $100 Million In 'Largely Ineffective' Digital Ads (wsj.com)
schwit1 quotes the Wall Street Journal: Procter & Gamble said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective. Almost all of the consumer product giant's advertising cuts in the period came from digital, finance chief Jon Moeller said on its earnings call Thursday. The company targeted ads that could wind up on sites with fake traffic from software known as "bots," or those with objectionable content. "What it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective, where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands," he said... The cuts echo marketing executives' mounting concerns around the efficacy of digital advertising and the growing perception that they are wasting money on digital ads that never reach their intended audience.
Ads on the Internet make me less likely to buy a company's products. If I go you Youtube to watch a video, and Foobar, Inc forces me to sit through five seconds of their stupid ad before I can watch the video I want to watch, then I become pissed off at Foobar, Inc, and remember that next time I go shopping.
The good news is that stories like this show we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the whole Internet advertising scam.
It took them $100 Million to figure out what they probably knew themselves.
I have more or less trained myself to not pay any attention to ads. This could be part of my overall "training" in the workforce to try and block out everything while I focus on said task, while co-workers are nagging me about lunch, beers, other projects, etc., while I'm trying to focus.
Regardless, the constant barrage of online advertising from the flashing text of the late 90's, animated GIF's of the 00's, interactive flash from this decade, are enough to make any human that spends a large portion of their time online, shy away from this garbage.
The idea of ads doesn't bother me. The forceful "We'll make you read it, like it or not, and we know we aren't targeting you, we only need 1% to respond" type of advertising, is what made me think like this. I actually feel GOOD when I know there is an ad and I know I haven't digested any of it.
With this type of reward system, its no wonder I enjoy not looking at ads. At some level, there is a piece of me that feels that I'm "giving it to the man", when I purposefully don't read their ads. By spending any energy even avoiding this, I also feel like I have lost. In the end it makes me despise the system even further.
Like everything, the bad apples destroy the good intentions of others. I'm sure I would benefit from some form of advertising as there are services I do use and would benefit from if they actually were "cheaper, faster, better", but when I can't trust any of it, the sites that claim "low impact ads", end up getting hurt first, and the 1% of the time I might care, I miss.
Of course, on the other hand, there is a part of me that feels the folks making a killing off of ads no one pays any attention to, are in one sense "winning" from the perspective that the companies, willing to dump money into something so worthless, deserve what they get.
Ads on the Internet make me less likely to buy a company's products.
The ads I'm seeing online are mainly for products I have already bought.
and generate -negative- brand response. That's particularly true of in-line ads, and most of all of Facebook ads that are mixed in (deliberately camouflaged) with user-generated content.
And that's before taking user data mining into consideration, both sucking up my data, and then using it (most often to show me ads for something I've already purchased.)
back in the day. some higher-up made a similar speech as Moeller, but it was about reducing "enrollment" which is "employees". the salesforce was reduced ~ 60% within two years. overall management went down 30%. upper levels were combined and not renewed. P&G is too big to change quickly. when they finally decide to change, it happens faster than standard adjustments. still have friends there. it's sorta like a government job. keep boss happy keep job.
It has nothing to do with "shady" site placement and everything to do with the fact digital advertising simply by and large doesn't work. Seems like YouTube and Spotify, sites with a captive user, are the only ones that can even get their ads noticed (albeit marginally) with most other ads being completely ignored. Though sometimes they really try and force you to look at an ad (covers the page, countdown to proceed) which then causes people to find active ways to remove them from their online experience.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
That too. 'Targetting' advertising basically just means showing me ads for things I already own.
Any company paying for this crap has far more money than sense.
Your digital ads might work better. STOP SHOVING THEM IN OUR FACE! Make your ads static, like in a newspaper, magazine, etc. When I'm reading an article and start to scroll down, and then all of a sudden some stupid ad starts blaring in my face, and I have to scroll up to shut the #(!@(^% thing off, it makes me NOT to want to do business with that company. When people have to install ad blockers to at least enjoy some content without having to worry about pop ups, pop unders, auto launching video ads (with the volume cranked to the max), then you know you have a problem. There are sights (like /.) that I whitelist because their ads are STATIC. THAT
is how web ads should be. I'm more likely to click on a static ad, than a shove-it-in-your-face
ad.
They spend money on both genders' products.
No, we don't. You're thinking of transvestites, aka drag queens, who just play dress-up on Friday nights.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
get a safety razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... best move you can make.. blades are easily replacable and super-cheap. I picked up 100 for around $20 like 3 years ago and still have some left....
Sure, as soon as federated subscription becomes a thing again. Back in 1999, the web had a $9.99 per month service called Adult Check. Subscribers could access numerous participating sites, whose respective publishers were paid based on page view count. I assume the name was supposed to mean "Because grown-ups can pay for nice things."
But nowadays it's $4/mo for WIRED, a similar amount for The Atlantic, etc. Take the number of distinct domains in your past month's browser history and multiply by $4 to see how much you'd have to pay.
What they're investing in quite heavily is fake reviews. Figuring out how to guarantee five star reviews on Amazon and others without alerting people is what's getting their former advertising money. So far they aren't doing so well. 3000 reviews for bounty paper towels, and about a quarter of them didn't get past fakespot.
I've been saying this on and off for years. We're all about to get a taste of all that efficiency folks have been clamoring about for decades. All that bureaucracy and waste is one of the only things that made it possible to pry even a bit of money out of the hands of the super rich. If you think the economy sucks now wait till it's running at peak efficiency.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The future of digital ads from my perspective.
No more chances for advertisers to fix it. I'm done. No whitelists. No browser adblock. No more bullshit. No sympathy. Every time you think you can trust a little... bam... more new horseshit. That pi-hole server running on my network is the coolest fucking thing since sliced bread. It runs in a VM, and even so, it's fast. Every device on the network is protected from a single source.
It's wonderful, and I sing its praise every chance I get.
Beware of the Leopard.
They set the price where the income is maximized.
Sure, but they also need to decide how much to spend on ads and promoting their brand, then that cost has to be incorporated into the price. If a Gillette razor costs $10 and an Equate razor costs $5, you can't expect people to pay the difference based on quality, since the products are basically identical, so you have to run advertisements to make people think your product is better or more prestigious. It is surprising how well this works. When an ad runs, very few people think "If I buy that product, I am paying for that ad".
There was a ton of free content on the Internet before advertising. The main result of advertising has been to flood the Internet with useless sites that exist solely to make money from advertising.
On the rare occasions I see ads, they're almost always for things I already know about. Who the fuck buys a Coke because they saw a commercial for it? Literally everyone in America knows who they are, there is no reason why they need to advertise anymore except for new products. Likewise for any other big brand - sure, maybe Disney needs to advertise their latest movie, because it's new, but what is the point of Ford reminding everyone "hey, that F-150 that's been a staple of the American truck market for most people's entire lives is still around"?
Whatever tiny psychological effect that comes from constantly pestering people can't be worth the huge cost of it all.
There's a bit of saying in advertising. Half of your money in advertising is always wasted. The trick is to filter out what half you can throw away and replace as quick as possible. And this just proved that Facebook's NSA style of mass collection and tailored advertising just don't work. Google is lucky in that they have many other products and services that they offer. And there's another issue that is probably not being considered by too many people that Procter and Gamble's advertising policies are known to signal the trend in which advertising is going. And if they say that Facebook's product is useless other people will listen and change accordingly.
There's a real solid chance that Facebook is screwed. And if they don't bounce back from this it might signal of their downfall.
Except Amazon also started irritating me off with more and more of their own ads. Apparently, it's not good enough that I'm going there to buy something. They have to try to monetize my eyeballs as well by shoving paid adverts in my search results.
Companies just can't seem to resist the siren's lure of some "free" extra profit (nevermind how it annoys some customers). The web just got ridiculously top-heavy with ads, and worse, they started becoming *dangerous*. That's when I installed an ad-blocker, and no amount of cajoling will get me to lower my shields... not when infected ads even get delivered by mainstream sites, not just the sketchy ones.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
In the beginning, well early on, there was this thing called google and when I was interested in buying something, I'd search and find the companies selling the thing. Then I'd go to these companies websites via the very convenient links google returned. I'd look over the products and select the one I wanted and either buy it online or go to brick and mortar. Back then companies spent money providing info on their web sites. As others have said, I completely ignore web ads, and pretty effectively block the obnoxious ones on a computer. I find on mobile, this is somewhat more difficult, so I rarely use mobile for browsing. So for me, P&G and many others are just throwing money away by paying for ads on the web. My 2 cents. Of course if the jig is up, facebook, twatter, and many other social media companies will be toast. I have my fingers crossed.
Ads before a movie. Products placed in a movie for different parts of the world. Promotional USA content or a traditional global brand .com site can ever layer over.
Products and actor used in traditional non internet ads.
Ads during and before a tv series.
Ads on buildings, in print, side of bus.
Radio and tv ads. Harder to stop listening to talk radio or block out an image in a magazine.
Ads placed in streaming media stream as part of the show not as part of the social media site's own ad layer.
The content maker will be contacted direct for a very traditional ad placement. The streaming site that hosts and streams the show will not get any cash share for that.
Ad link in the description by the content creator and mentioned in their content.
The use of the shows own creator to voice the ad.
The ad and the hosts or presenters own voice are then trusted more than anything the
That 20 mins of a 1980's keyboard or computer been repaired and reviewed? Watch an 2017 ad first that the presenter voiced and created with the shows own style?
Their music, their graphics, a trusted US brand helping fund fun, new, creative digital content in the USA.
Cost to the brand is postage and having staff to find fun video clips.
The ads are looking for content people want to watch and presenters who would like to share in cash. No more ads on sites that users block with browser scripts.
Playing music on tape or records on a video site? Send a tape or a record with brand music that can be used for free.
The next test of hardware plays back the brand's own music as it is new, free to play, on the right format and supported the show.
No mute, no having no the sound or telling the audience what music sounded like. The ad and brand plays as part of an unrelated review over many new video clips as part of the show.
The hosting site gets its ads blocked by most users browsers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Put another aloe strip on that fucker, too. That's right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me—the second strip lathers. It's a whole new way to think about shaving. Don't question it. Don't say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we're on the edge—the razor's edge—and I feel like dancing.
http://www.theonion.com/blogpo...
Noishkel wrote:
From the article (if only people read before commenting):
The very next sentence though:
There has been a war brewing between old and new media. These two videos (if you can excuse the pithiness) summarize it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0IYzF-zLMw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQHNtc3y0M
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
From the article (if only people read before commenting):
Not every Slashdot commenter subscribes to The Wall Street Journal, in which the featured article was published. To which sites should Slashdot users expect to have to subscribe before participating in comments?
I've always wondered how advertising justifies its spending, never moreso than in the internet era.
Personally, I believe the internet would be well served by a drop in advertising revenue by a couple of orders of magnitude. Many,, many people who make their living mysteriously "on the internet" would of course have to get real jobs.
-Styopa
get a safety razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... best move you can make.. blades are easily replacable and super-cheap. I picked up 100 for around $20 like 3 years ago and still have some left....
I picked up a ten years supply for the equivalent of $50. I used to use a straight razor, but those things require too much maintenance. My safety double-edged razor cost $5 in the 90s, and I'm still using it.
The best part is that the single-bladed (per side) means that only a single edge goes across my face. Having two edges placed next to each other means that the first blade pulls the follicle out a little while the second blade cuts it. This results in the hair actually being *lower* than the surface of the skin, resulting in in-grown hairs.
The single-edge shave results in a smoother face over time.
So, not only is it cheaper but it is better as well.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.