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Advertisers trapped in an age of online obfuscation（601 words）
By Ian Leslie
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This year is a watershed for the advertising industry: for the first time, marketers will spend more online than on television. Nevertheless, 2017 may end up being remembered for advertisers finally finding the gumption to ask technology companies they have made rich what exactly they are paying for.
Ever since it became an article of faith that online marketing is vastly more efficient than conventional methods, clients have shifted dollars out of TV and print and into digital media. The biggest advertiser of all, Procter & Gamble (P&G) led the way. In 2012, it announced to Wall Street that it would make $1bn in savings by targeting consumers through digital and social media. Unfortunately, it didn’t translate into sales growth; since then, P&G has become increasingly sceptical of the promises of online advertising platforms.
The creeping doubts are not confined to P&G. In a survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) over 70 per cent of marketing executives expressed dissatisfaction with the state of digital marketing. Clients are finding it increasingly hard to tell how their marketing budgets are being spent and some are beginning to smell a rat.
In January, P&G’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, went further than any senior client has yet done in articulating the concerns. In a speech to the IAB’s annual conference, he came close to accusing the digital industry of perpetrating a massive con.
Mr Pritchard began by noting that the age of online advertising had brought with it an “exponential increase in crap”. No wonder consumers are resorting to ad blockers, he said, with so many bad ads interrupting their feeds and slowing down page loads. Mr Pritchard then observed that it is not even clear if consumers are seeing the online ads they don’t block. An ad can flash up on a screen for a fraction of a second and be counted as a view, or “impression”, at which point the media owner and agency take their cut.
But the client cannot be sure if it registered in a consumer’s consciousness, nor indeed if a consumer was present at all: a recent investigation by the Association of National Advertisers found that up to 37 per cent of online impressions are made by bots — fake consumers.
The bots are allowed to flourish because the business of buying and placing ads has been handed to machines and made bafflingly complex. Media buying and selling is increasingly run by software that delivers hyper-targeted ads across multiple platforms, supposedly to make every ad dollar count more.
But there seems to be no real evidence of it being good for any business except that of the software vendors, agencies and social media platforms. Without mentioning either by name, Mr Pritchard took aim at Facebook and Google, who have sucked in ad dollars while failing to get serious about measuring the effectiveness of ads that run on their platforms. So far, they refuse to publish their data or agree to an industry-wide standard for measurement, verified by a third party, as TV companies did years ago.
The digital age of transparency is just as often an age of obfuscation. Mr Pritchard recalled putting the case for third party verification to a senior executive at an unnamed digital platform, only to be told: “You should know that your competitors are spending billions with us without that.” As he relayed this response, Mr Pritchard made his contempt for it crystal clear. “Frankly,” he told his audience, “the jig is up.”
Facebook’s explosive growth has depended in part on exploiting the naivety of advertisers. That may be about to change.
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