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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.

10 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ads on the Internet != Other mediums by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re: Spend that 100 million on improving products by negRo_slim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Ads on the Internet != Other mediums by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Here's an EASY way to make sure by p51d007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:A $100 million study by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Keep in mind that the people at P&G planning the internet ad campaigns need to justify their jobs, so they will find any bogus stat they can, starting with "Ad spending on Facebook is up X% year-over-year, we have to be there too." Internet ad buys are heavily influenced by what competitors are doing, rather than on any proof that it works, because it's really easy to show what the competitors are doing (screenshots of their ads) and really hard to show any effectiveness (mostly because there is none, and the fallback "creates brand awareness" is now more and more known to be bullshit).

    Hopefully the trend will continue, and social media will DIE DIE DIE!!!

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  6. Big data sucks by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/
  7. Re:Future of digital ads? by Known+Nutter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What do you think the future of digital ads will be?

    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.
  8. Re: Spend that 100 million on improving products by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  9. Re:Ads on the Internet != Other mediums by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Facebook and Google are now in SERIOUIS trouble. by Noishkel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.