Tag Archives: Facebook

Impossible: 1 + 1 Can’t = 3

23 Mar

dreamstime_xs_6452736Late last week a group of marketers filed an amended lawsuit against Facebook alleging that it knowingly overestimated audience reach levels.

Court papers filed in the suit indicate that:

“Facebook’s internal documents show that Facebook personnel knew for years that the Potential Reach metric that it provides to Facebook advertisers on its advertisement purchasing interfaces (including on Ads Manager and Power Editor) was inflated and misleading.”

The evidence for these actions was identified in the original complaint and was based upon analysis conducted by independent groups, including the Video Advertising Bureau. In their 2017 report, the Video Advertising Bureau found that Facebook’s purported reach in every state in the U.S. exceeded their populations. A red flag to be sure.

Not excusing Facebook’s alleged behavior, one would think that an observant marketer or agency media buyer would question reach levels that are greater than the population of a given market(s) and raise questions, long before such revelations are made in relation to a lawsuit.

The irony is that reach estimates apparently were not questioned by agency planners or clients during the media planning process, nor at the time of post-campaign performance summary meetings. The seminal question is, “Why not?” Further, if and when suspicions were raised, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect media buyers to exclude any publisher suspected of inflating reach levels from consideration to begin with, and cease allocating client media funds to that entity moving forward? The answer is obviously “no.”

When one sees examples of this type of lackluster media stewardship, it is easy to understand why the C-Suite might question the efficacy of their organization’s advertising investments.

The fact of the matter is that Facebook has seen its annual global ad revenues grow from $1.8 billion in 2010 to over $69.5 billion in 2019 (source: Statista, 2020). Along the way, there have been publicly aired concerns about the accuracy of Facebook’s user base, culminating with the platform’s acknowledged purges of 3.3 billion “fake” accounts in 2018 and another 5.4 billion in 2019.

Certainly, as part of the heralded duopoly, media professionals have been keenly aware of the share of digital ad spend which Google and Facebook have accounted for as part of the digital media sector’s meteoric growth. eMarketer estimates that the duo represented 56.3% of total U.S. digital ad spend in 2019, with Facebook accounting for 19.2% of the total.

During this period of increased digital ad spend, advertisers paid their digital agency partners plenty in the way of fees and commissions to provide consultation, planning support, buy stewardship and oversight. So why did it take so long to identify the fact that a media seller’s reach exceeded the audience universe?

“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.” ~ Khalil Gibran

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Time for Action, Not Apathy

31 Jan

ActionFraud continues to run rampant as digital media and programmatic buying continue to surge in popularity, garnering ever larger shares of global advertising spend. Regulatory actions around consumer privacy and data protection are presenting a plethora of challenges for the industry and its ability to use data to customize advertising messaging and delivery.

These are seminal issues that the advertising industry has been talking about for years. The risks and costs to advertisers and other industry players are significant. So how effectively has the industry dealt with these critical issues? If one were to generate an opinion based upon results, it would be easy to adopt the perspective that the ad industry has not dealt with these issues well at all.

Let’s start with the topic of ad fraud. While we all read the headlines, the question is; “Have we become numb to the impact of ad fraud on working dollars?” Consider that according to Juniper Research, advertisers lost $51 million per day to ad fraud in 2018. AFFISE estimates that 35.3% of all processed traffic in the first two quarters of 2019 was fraudulent. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has stated that ad fraud will hit $50 billion per year by 2025.

One short year ago Facebook, in a highly publicized move eliminated 2.2 billion fake accounts, this following the elimination of 1 billion fake accounts during the 4th quarter of 2018. Interestingly, Facebook, one-half of the vaunted “duopoly” which captured over 65% of U.S. digital ad spend in 2019, itself accounts for 1 out of every 5 dollars spent on digital media in the U.S. (source: eMarketer) before and after this move.

While surely an astute media planner could readily make the case for Facebook’s appeal to advertisers, the justification for its share of the digital ad market is mystifying to the layman. According to the United Nations Population Division, there are 7.7 billion people in the world. Nielsen Online has identified 4.5 billion internet users globally. So, if Facebook eliminated more than 3.2 billion accounts, albeit fake over the course of four months, how many accounts could it possibly have had? What level of due diligence were agencies and advertisers undertaking to verify the base? Or, could it be that the industry simply has no valid means of verifying or measuring key digital audience factors?

The term “Big Data” was coined in the early part of the 1990s, referring to the vast amounts of data being gathered as the internet expanded. The data allowed marketers to conduct computational analysis that could reveal patterns, trends and associations related to human behavior. As the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence and marketing automation technology has come into vogue, the ability to more finitely target an advertiser’s message to specific niches, based upon this data, held great promise. This led to the meteoric growth of AdTech and MarTech solution providers vying for a share of advertiser dollars.

Then, in 2016, the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ushering in laws designed to protect consumer data and privacy. GDPR has since served as a model for regulatory action in countries around the world and within the United States, with the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The impact on the ad industry has been significant as marketers, technology providers and publishers have struggled to comply with these varying laws. In turn, this led one important player, Google to announce the elimination of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser to avoid some of the risks associated with privacy regulation. The impact on marketers’ audience targeting and attribution modeling efforts will be swift and significant. Some have suggested that this could even signal the end of personalized marketing.

From this author’s perspective, the industry has not effectively dealt with these challenges. There are simply too many disparate interests at stake, which have served as very real impediments to progress in tackling these issues.

Let’s face it, in spite of the impact of fraud, fake devices, fake locations, fake impressions, fake consent strings, ineffectual brand safety and fraud detection services and a lack of uniform industry measurement and verification standards, advertisers continue to spend on media types, intermediaries and technologies that are simply not generating a return worthy of their investment. So where is the impetus for change?

Rather than working on real solutions to address real problems, the industry adopts labels or coins phrases that cover its retreat. Examples such as “Human Marketing” and the need to treat our target audiences as “people” as a solution to the inability to deal with the challenges presented by big data, technology and regulation to customize and personalize at scale. Or the use of the term “Contextual Marketing” in which ad delivery is based upon scanning texts of web pages and serving up a marketer’s ads based upon relevant keywords, rather than behavioral data. Or the nuanced notion of “Brand Suitability” versus “Brand Safety” to mask the inability to adhere to advertiser blacklists and or to ensure proper editorial adjacencies. Really? How is this all of a sudden more appealing than the noble quest, funded by advertisers, that gave birth to the “MarTech 5000” list.

From the outside looking in, it appears as though the industry is content with taking the path of least resistance, opting for a safer, more self-centered approach to issue resolution, rather than focus on doing what is best for the entire industry and ignoring advertisers’ desires to increase the effectiveness of their marketing spend.

To paraphrase American author, Richard Yates from his novel about 1950’s suburban life entitled Revolutionary Road; “It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little mediocrity.”

 

 

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Will Facebook Go the Way of Myspace? And Can Regulation Be Far Behind?

21 Mar

facebookIt wasn’t long ago that the world’s largest social networking site was overtaken by a rival and lapsed into irrelevancy. Will the same fate befall its successor?

Many will remember that from 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the number one social-networking site in the world and the most visited website in the U.S. Aside from the emergence of new competitors, analysts have cited factors such as Myspace’s inability to enhance their users social networking experience, an over proliferation of advertising (which slowed the site down) and the inability to effectively filter inappropriate content or to limit phishing, spam and malware, as reasons for its demise. 

It was Facebook, the shiny new object with expanded social-networking apps that succeeded Myspace as the world’s largest social media platform. At the time, social networking was immensely popular with young people, and Facebook was no different, building its fortune by focusing on 18 – 24 year olds in general and college students in particular.

Over time, older adults began to flock to Facebook in record numbers driving both platform usage and advertiser appeal. However, the growing presence of GenXers and Boomers on Facebook caused many younger users to lose interest, turning to alternatives such as Instagram, a Facebook owned company, and Snapchat. Ironically, the dynamic of having this younger user base abandon Myspace for Facebook is what precipitated its decline from the number one website in the world to its current rank of 4,446 based on total web traffic (source: Alexa Traffic Ranks).

Are we beginning to see chinks in the Facebook armor?

Of note, on a recent earnings call, Facebook executives indicated that the organization had experienced declines in both the number of daily users and time spent on the site. The negative indicators for these two key metrics caused the stock price to fall and analyst to begin to question Facebook’s stranglehold on its social networking position. As an interesting corollary, the duopoly of Facebook and Google, which is projected to account for a 56.8% share of digital media spending in the U.S. in 2018 (source: eMarketer) is expected to see its share of “new” digital media spend drop to 48% from a high of 73% in 2016.

Fast forward a few weeks and Facebook has been hit broadside by a data scandal stemming from the actions of a political behavioral research firm, Cambridge Analytica that secretly “scraped” the personal data of up to 50 million Facebook users, without the accountholders permission. Once again, the financial markets reacted quickly, with Facebook shares falling more than 12.0% over a two-day period, wiping out billions of dollars in shareholder value.

However, the bigger risk resulting from the Cambridge Analytica scandal is not the near-term impact on share price, but concerns regarding “trust” and the lack of data and privacy protection for users, advertisers and government regulators. Facebook users will surely be upset that Facebook was seen to be not only lax in protecting their privacy, but greedy in aligning themselves with and profiting from a relationship with a firm like Cambridge that is involved in nefarious activities designed to impact political elections in various countries around the world.

Further, lawmakers in both the U.K. and the U.S. are moving forward with requests to compel Facebook’s chairman, Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the appropriate parliamentary and senatorial committees to answer questions about the company’s recent lapses in data security and privacy controls along with the firm’s ongoing lack of transparency and or cooperation with government regulators.

Beyond the recent consumer privacy protection shortcomings, Facebook’s acceptance of fraudulent advertising during the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. and its lack of screening controls for fake ads and inappropriate content had already raised the specter of U.S. regulatory involvement.  The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection has indicated that there is a “strong possibility” that it will be launching an investigation into whether or not the company violated federal rules prohibiting “unfair, deceptive acts or practices.”

Unfortunately for Facebook, its ongoing indifference toward lawmakers and the lack of sensitivity it has demonstrated or sense of ownership that it has taken regarding the aforementioned issues are not winning it many friends.

Of note, neither Facebook’s CEO, COO or Chief Privacy Officer have provided public commentary on the Cambridge Analytica situation as of this writing.

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Increase Your Digital Coverage by 40% In One-Easy-Step

1 Aug

simpleisgoodConfucius once said that “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

Perhaps the same can be said of digital media buying. Too often it seems as though the onset and rapid growth of programmatic buying has created more problems than solutions. An expanded media supply chain with multiple layers of costs, increased levels of fraud, brand safety concerns, visibility challenges, a lack of transparency and perhaps most troubling, eroding levels of trust between advertisers and their agencies.

Growing pains? Perhaps. But something needs to change and this author would like to suggest one potential solution… abandon programmatic digital media buying altogether. Seriously? Why not?

Consider the following and the concept won’t seem so far-fetched:

  • In 2015, advertisers spent $60 billion on digital media, with close to two-thirds of that going to Google and Facebook (source: Pivotal Research).
  • According to the advertising trade group, Digital Content, today this duopoly is garnering 90% of every new dollar spent on digital media.
  • What happened to the magical pursuit of the long-tail and the notion of smaller bets being safer? Economics. The fact is that the notion of the long-tail simply didn’t work as researchers and economists found that having less of more is a better, more statistically sound pursuit. To wit, Google’s and Facebook’s market share.
  • Today, programmatic digital display advertising accounts for 80% of display ad spending, which will top $33 billion in 2017 (source: eMarketer).
  • Between 2012 – 2016 programmatic advertising grew 71% per year, on average (source: Zenith).
  • In 2018, programmatic will grow an additional 30%+ to $64 billion, with the U.S. representing 62% of global programmatic expenditures (source: Zenith).

Come again. Two publishers are getting $.90 of every incremental digital dollar spent and programmatic digital media buying accounts for 80%+ of digital media spend. What are we missing? Is there an algorithm that specializes in sending RFPs and insertion orders to Google and Facebook in such a manner that the outcome yields a 40% or better efficiency gain?

As we all know, there have been numerous industry studies, including those sponsored by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which have suggested that at least 40% of every digital media dollar spent goes to cover programmatic digital media buying’s transactional costs (third-party expenses and agency fees), with only $.48 – $.60 of that expenditure going to publishers.

So, for an advertiser spending $40 million on programmatic digital media, if the law of averages holds true, $16 million will go to cover transactional costs and agency fees. That means that of the advertiser’s original spend, they will actually get $24 million worth of media. While we know that programmatic media can yield efficiencies, can it overcome that type of transactional deficit?

If that same advertiser eschewed programmatic digital and decided to rely on a digital direct media investment strategy, what would it cost them?

Assume that they hired ten seasoned digital media planning and investment professionals for $150,000 each (salary, bonus, benefits), they would spend $1.5 million on direct labor costs. Further, in order to afford their team maximum flexibility, let’s say that the advertiser allocated an additional $1 million annually for access to ad tech tools and research subscriptions to facilitate their Team’s planning and placement efforts. This would bring their total outlay to $2.5 million per annum.

If they were spending $40 million in total, this means that the team would be able to purchase $37.5 million worth of digital media. Don’t forget that placing digital buys direct will greatly reduce fraud levels that can eat up another 8% – 12% of every digital ad dollar, while also greatly improving brand safety guideline adherence. Compare that to the $24 million in inventory purchased programmatically.

So how efficient is programmatic?

Sadly, most advertisers can’t even address this question, because their buys are structured on a non-disclosed, rather than a cost-disclosed basis. Even if they had line of sight into what the third-party costs (i.e. media, data, tech) and agency fees being charged were, they wouldn’t have a clue as to the fees/ charges that sell-side suppliers were levying, further eroding working media levels.

A simplistic solution? Perhaps. But the fact that the industry continues to drink the programmatic “Kool-Aid” without any significant progress toward resolving the dilutive effect that programmatic transactional costs, agency fees and fraud have on an advertiser’s investment seems a tad irresponsible.

Ask yourself. What would you do if it were your money?

 

 

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May You Live in Interesting Times

23 Dec

confuciousOften referred to as the “Chinese Curse” this popular saying derives from the English Politician Sir Austen Chamberlain in the early twentieth century. Used ironically, the phrase has been used to suggest a set of outcomes that are a little more ominous, “May you experience much disorder and trouble in your life.”

As we reflect on what has been a tumultuous 2016, those working in the marketing and advertising industry most certainly would agree that we are living in interesting times. Recent news suggests that the industry’s troubles will not abate much in the coming year. The year began with evidence suggesting that the level of digital ad fraud would eclipse $8.0 billion in 2016, this was followed by the blockbuster findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) / K2 study on “Media Transparency” which rocked the global ad industry.  Sadly, the industry is winding down 2016 with a litany of additional actions and outcomes that pose serious threats to the level of trust, already shaken, between stakeholders in the $540 billion global advertising marketplace.

In the last two weeks, the industry heard once again from Facebook that it had made yet another audience reporting faux pas, its third of the year, which many in the ad agency community have been all too willing to forgive. Who could possibly be surprised with advertisers for being genuinely perplexed as to why the media agency community hasn’t more thoroughly scrutinized Facebook’s audience measurement reporting or pushed more aggressively for independent verification of those results.

Concurrently, halfway around the globe, Australia’s three largest magazine publishers (News Corp, Bauer Media and Pac Mags) decided to cease their participation in the Audited Media Association of Australia’s (AMAA) magazine circulation service leaving advertisers no other choice but to rely on these publishers’ self-reported “readership” numbers, rather than audited circulations figures.

In the United States, the federal government’s Department of Justice has subpoenaed agencies from four of the world’s largest holding companies; WPP, Omnicom, IPG and Publicis as part of its investigation into illegal bid-rigging for commercial production jobs. It is alleged that these agencies coerced and or rewarded independent production houses to submit inflated bids, ostensibly to manipulate the process in favor of agency in-house production resources. Many believe that the DOJ’s investigation will have a profound impact on both the estimated $5 billion production sector and potentially the rest of the business. Let’s not forget, the DOJ has not yet weighed in regarding agency practices identified in the ANA/ K2 study on media transparency.

Most recently, WhiteOps, a U.S. a cyber security firm providing ad viewability and fraud detection supporting the advertising industry, announced that it had uncovered a Russian led digital fraud effort that was literally stealing up to $5 million per day from advertisers. It was reported by the NY Times that the fraudsters impersonated more that “6,100 news and content publishers” while delivering up to 300 million fake ad views per day. How were they able to do this? By creating over one-half million bots that replicated the web surfing patterns of humans, starting and stopping videos and moving and clicking the cursor. 

If client organizations were experiencing a “crisis of trust” hangover following 2015, it certainly wasn’t remedied in 2016. Going into the New Year advertisers have every right to step back and ask, “Who can we trust?” Our agency partners? Ad tech vendors? Media Owners? Measurement Services? And who would blame advertisers for taking matters into their own hands and make a New Year Resolution to more directly deal with these issues. After all, it is their monetary inputs that fuel the entire industry and they certainly deserve better that what they’re getting right now. In the words of the iconic American actor, Clint Eastwood: “Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.”

 

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3 Thoughts on Facebook’s Video “Watch Time” Issue

3 Oct

facebookFrom an advertiser’s perspective, there were three things that stood out in the wake of Facebook’s recent disclosure that it had mistakenly overstated average video ad watch times.

First and foremost, the miscalculation was not uncovered by the advertising agency community. Given the dollar volume being committed to Facebook, whose digital ad revenues will eclipse $6.0 billion, it would be fair to assume that ad agencies had a fiduciary duty to verify/investigate Facebook’s performance monitoring methodologies prior to investing their clients’ media dollars. The fact that Facebook had not embraced industry standards and asked the Media Rating Council (MRC) to accredit its performance metrics should have been the hot topic of conversation prior to Facebook’s disclosure, rather than after the fact. Ironically, in the wake of this disclosure, WPP stated that the mistake “further emphasizes the importance and need for third-party verification of all media — not only to verify trading terms but also to verify performance.” So if agencies truly felt this way, why wasn’t this standard not being applied here-to-for?

Secondly, it would appear as though the agency community is somewhat fearful of Facebook. Too many agency executives spoke to the trade media on the basis of anonymity rather than overtly stating their personal and or their company’s perspective on both the inflation of the viewing time metric and the need for accreditation. This seems an odd dynamic given the percentage of digital media spend represented by the “Big 4” agency holding companies. Advertisers might rightly expect that the scale of these entities would offer them some level of leverage and protection when interacting with media sellers. This is apparently not the case.

Thirdly, advertisers need to put a stake in the ground when it comes to media transparency and performance authentication. Self-reported performance indicators, such as Facebook’s average video watch time, cannot be the basis upon which they invest their media dollars. If a media seller has not had its delivery and performance metrics audited and accredited by an industry accepted resource such as the MRC, IAS, Nielsen or comScore for example, then they should be excluded from the media investment consideration equation.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) CEO, Bob Liodice appropriately addressed this issue when the ANA issued the following statement: “ANA does not believe there are any pragmatic reasons that a media company should not abide by the standards of accreditation and auditing” calling this important step “table stakes” for digital advertising.

The issue with the misstatement of the video ad watch times is not whether or to what extent the :03 second watch time threshold was utilized by ad agencies to assess Facebook’s performance. Quite simply, the issue is that self-reported performance metrics are unequivocally no substitute for independently audited outputs.

For anyone to suggest that the miscalculation is really no big deal, because it is a metric that is not utilized when considering the purchase of video advertising on Facebook, is misguided. The lack of transparency, further compounded by the media seller’s lack of adherence to industry standards when coupled with the self-reported inflated viewing times can and did wrongly influence agency and advertiser decisions. Thus, raising the all-important question: “Absent an independent audit, what portion of Facebook’s self-reported performance metrics can an advertiser trust?”

 

 

 

 

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