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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.
...
It’s unclear whether P&G has shifted more spending to other media, including television, as it tweaks its digital spending approach. TV networks have been making an aggressive case that marketers have over-allocated budgets to the dark alleys of digital, and should move ad money back into TV.
Moving ad budget back to TV would be a brilliant move. Septuagenarians present a brisk market for Pampers.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @04:03PM
Do you really need advertising to tell niggers what they're already buying?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @04:12PM (3 children)
What are these on-line ads you speak of? I haven't seen those in years...
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and count my expendable income that I can actually spend on my own desires instead of being told what to desire and buy.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)
Whenever i see ads (not just internets) i think "Do these really work? I don't think so."
God i could drink a Cuke right now.... it's heaven in a can!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @01:57AM
Don't make me call the Elders of the Internet on you...
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Monday July 31 2017, @02:54AM
The weirdest part of it, even though I use ad-block, if I did not I can almost guarantee I wouldn't buy anything that was peddled to me. I am totally not impulsive shopper, I only buy very few items, from very select brands or stores which have a proven track record with me.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Sunday July 30 2017, @04:15PM (9 children)
We can hope the marketdroids finally start to figure out that advertising wastes everyone's time and money.
Salespeople are by nature suckers. They think the product doesn't matter; just excitement and other emotional triggers. That's because they are employed by people who know that what they have to sell is crap, and they want to push as much crap as possible. So to be a successful salesperson, you have to believe nonsense and be able to repeat it with enthusiasm.
So salespeople are suckers for other salespeople. Advertising networks are mostly selling to other sellers, not to you and I. "Pay us to send your SPAM, optimize your search position, and deliver the eyeballs. We have more 'reach' and better 'targeting'." Bullshit. No you don't. It is all a bunch of hand-waving and cargo-cult mumbo-jumbo.
It is time for this circle-jerk to end.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:05PM (4 children)
One of my good friends works in advertising, and he is the perfect example of (can't find the phrase for the psychological phenomenon). He is super susceptible to advertising. I've literally seen him do complete 180s on products after seeing single advertisements. He constantly alternates between specific brands (like coke vs pepsi) and follows trends and positive press like none other. However, as he works in advertising, when he puts his more scrupulous hat on, he can instantly identify exactly what a commercial is doing, its primary market, etc.
My theory is that because he has the more analytical part of his brain working all day on advertising, it gets exhausted. Therefore, when he doesn't realize he is being sold to, he has a lower threshold than average. Does make it really easy to manipulate him into doing what you want as statements like, "but this movie has better reviews," or "so-and-so is more popular," or even, "that one is $0.10 cheaper," will almost instantly change his mind.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:22PM (3 children)
Yeah, that's another thing marketdroids passionately believe: brands matter. On Amazon, for example, I select products by features, ratings, price... but never brand. But sellers think "brand loyalty" is something that will last longer than the first time they screw their customers.
Well, OK, I guess there are a few people who will buy something just because it comes from crApple. The sooner they are separated from their cash, the less ability they will have to harm the world by subsidizing overpriced hypeware.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:05PM
Official versus clone is still a thing though. If you are buying an accessory to something you're more likely to go official over clone if the price is reasonable.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 31 2017, @09:25AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 31 2017, @01:53PM
I read just the other day that amazon and other online marketplaces have heavily diluted brands' premiums because users have been conditioned to shop as you described. User reviews have also come to play a much bigger role, so the days of capturing extra margin by outsourcing production to china where quality inevitably suffers while continuing to charge the brand premium are over.
So amid the heavy job loss caused by the death of traditional retail there's that small silver lining of people saying "so what?" To marketdroids.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:35PM (2 children)
Advertising pays! We are told it, so it must be true. And it is true - it pays the advertising industry $billions.
It is a different matter whether it pays the clients who are paying the advertising industry, the ones who pay out those billions. One day it will dawn on these clients that, on the scale that many of them spend money on advertising, they are mostly wasting it. Hopefully, Proctor and Gamble are the first of many to see the light.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @02:41AM
> Advertising pays
In the car industry it's well known that if you *don't* advertise, you don't have a chance of selling many of a new model of car[1].
If you *do* advertise, then you have a chance of selling some of your new model.
[1] This applies for cars produced in high volume, not talking about limited production of exotic cars.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 31 2017, @02:13PM
There's a little more to it than that. Companies and the brand managers within a company like P&G don't really spend that much on the actual ad campaigns. For example, i created the entire digital presence for Johnson&Johnson and about a score of its over-the-counter brands back when i worked on Madison Avenue. Its budgets for digital were on the order of $30-50K, and those were major brands of mouthwash and such that you've heard of. Years later they still run that same material i produced, so the marginal cost of it is quite low. Likewise when they shoot a TV spot they run the same commercial year after year unless the ad backfired or something.
The deeper reason why ad companies make so much money is because the companies and brand managers use them for product direction and deniability. That is, the ad companies are a sort of professional whipping boy. If a campaign goes well, the companies and brand managers always take all the credit, and if it doesn't the agencies are always to blame. The brand managers are only there to stamp their passports on the way to higher positions. They have no strategic vision or creativity of their own. The resultant psychological dynamic is a bit messed up, in that the ad people are depressed and disgruntled because their creativity and souls are whored out to godless corporations, and the brand managers are egotistical aholes who abusive to the people at the agencies they secretly resent because they have creative talent. That dynamic is worst among the financial clients like banks.
The whole field has been changing, though, thanks to the internet and people like us who are actively sabotaging their comfy status quo. They don't know what to do, which is why they're flailing around like this. That puts a small smile on my face.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Monday July 31 2017, @11:05AM
Not as long as the marketdroids still believe getting customers to view ads is more important than showing the product. We have four local television stations. I sometimes have one online at work, mostly to get local weather reports. One station I have never been able to view online and another I have not been able to view at all in quite a long time. Apparently, it would require me disabling AdBlock as well as globally allowing scripts to run, which I will not do. So, instead they lose my viewership entirely. The stations I can view both show some commercials as part of their feed, so it is possible for them to advertise without depending on intrusive third party advertisers forcing their wares upon viewers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by black6host on Sunday July 30 2017, @04:36PM (6 children)
Brisk market for Pampers? Well, that all Depends...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:34PM (4 children)
Oh god's teeth, did you really just say that?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:35PM
No! He typed it!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:47PM (2 children)
What, are you too pampered for puns?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
What a bunch of crap!
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Tuesday August 01 2017, @01:02AM
That was a piss-poor attempt at a joke. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @09:21PM
https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/44ia8q/depend_vs_depends_adult_diapers/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geezer on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:33PM (2 children)
Hopefully this is the beginning of the great Advertising Balloon deflation. P&G is no small player, and other companies' marketdroids will hopefully follow suit.
No doubt the savings will go toward PROF1T! but there's always a small chance some meager portion could be devoted to, I don't know, price-point competition or quality maybe?
The stuff that dreams are made of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:55PM (1 child)
This is going to be great.
All the insane online non-businesses will go the way of the dodo, and we can get our internet back.
Right?
Guys, why are you all laughing? Guys?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:30PM
Have YOU donated to SoylentNews today?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @10:04PM (4 children)
https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/ [techcrunch.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 31 2017, @08:22AM (3 children)
That was an interesting article.
The same could be said of TV advertising, which has become so burdensome that I find it nearly impossible to watch TV without time-shifting it so I can do fast forwards.
If I *have* to watch OTA live, I mute it when the ad starts up, and leave the timer to turn the set off after an hour or so. If I come back in time to watch some more of the program, fine, but the TV, muted, usually just times out as I find something better to do than watch unwanted ads. The problem is the ads are so damned long these days, and I lose the flow of the program I was watching.
Advertisers ( for me, diet pills, debit card vendor, reverse mortgage shyster, funeral plans, medicare plans, car insurance, and those misleading breaking news ads ) can be especially annoying by their constant and lengthy nags, as well as avoiding saying anything concrete. I hate guessing-games. And that's all they leave me with.
The first thing advertisers do anyway is say something that looks good, while flashing what they said on the screen, along with some fine print that takes a high resolution monitor and freeze-frame to read... especially when the small text is deliberately adjusted to have low contrast to the background image. At this point, the business has already told me they hope to mislead and trick me. They are just fishing with a plastic worm. This is one helluva way to start off a relationship with a customer. All that fine print and asterisks are constantly reminding me that this business is fixing to snarl me up in all sorts of legal crap should I make any sort of contact with them.
I know a business will have nothing to do with hiring me if their first impression of me is I am gonna steal from them, yet ad-men specialize in making that same first impression with me. I fail to see why business will have anything to do with people who talk that way. They are specialists in taking 60 seconds of verbiage, yet committing to nothing.
Last ad I saw was some sports guy trying to sell me on some sort of car repair plan. The video stream was full of images of car repair bills in the thousands, then showing the same bill with PAID stamped on it. But the head kept on hocking up the word "covered". With all that fine print, I knew good and well whatever went wrong, I probably wasn't "covered" for that. No little bird is gonna pay my bills.
I have become hyper-sensitive to "business-talk", that is the art form of saying many high sounding noble words that commit to nothing, commonly used in advertising tirades. When I sense it, I know the business is going to pull a fast one on me, and best let sleeping dogs lie. Its like avoiding eye contact with people at store entrances when I know they are beggars at best, and possibly thieves if I have anything to do with them. I admit I would be quite leery of approaching someone if they had a knife holder on their belt, just as I am quite leery of approaching a business flashing disclaimers. I know that men who carry knives may have no problem using them. I also know businesses that flash disclaimers will have no problem using them. A knife can do bad things to me if he gets me close enough. A businessman can do bad things to my credit score if he gets my signature on his papers. They have already told me as much by how they presented themselves to me. Deceitful from the very start.
Even if I had any interest at all in what they were selling, by the time I see the ad, I will become very skeptical. Then I look up the internet reviews on those who did buy the thing, paying the most attention to the ones that did not like the product - as I already know that glowing reviews are frequently written by ad-men. The ones with tales of woe are often far more truthful of their experience than those trying to sell the thing, and will often tell you downright what tricks the business is using to make sure the transaction won't reverse. I am quite aware how many jobs out there are in writing positive reviews for businesses ( aka "Internet Reputation Management" ), as they try to drown out the people who felt shafted.
The ones who got shafted are precisely the ones I want to hear from the most! I do not know all the tricks businessmen come up with, just as I do not know magician tricks. Often one has to fall into the trap and make contact with a business to find out how the trick works. Businesses which advertise a lot seem to have a much higher likelihood of screwing me than ones my friends and neighbors recommend to me. ( Actually, I cannot recall a single time I have had a problem with a business that came recommended by a friend or neighbor - while the worst experience I ever had with a business was when I said "yes" to a cold caller. A business can screw you up big-time once they have your signature on their piece of paper! )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 31 2017, @02:30PM
That's a pretty good rule of thumb, but that's partly why a lot of companies are trying to shift to social marketing through your friends and neighbors using a platform like facebook. They know that the internet and social media in general have begun to innoculate people to older advertising tactics so they're trying to harness the network effects that malcolm gladwell talked about in the "tipping point." P&G in fact started a program a decade ago to basically pay off social influencers (the one person you sort of know who spends all their time telling other people what's cool) to pitch P&G products to you. That company is also the ones who invented soap operas to sell people soap, as a sort of product-placement. So they are a trend leader in marketing as the article said. And it does point up how much trouble they have had cracking the code of online advertising.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday July 31 2017, @07:07PM (1 child)
I will listen to friends and neigbours but weigh what they say in the balance. They are often poor judges of what they have bought, or don't want to admit that they have bought a lemon. They might recommend something on the basis of entirely different features from what you value. Anyway, friends and neighbours are not so likely to have the stuff I am thinking of buying; my tastes are an edge case.
For anything expensive (car, camera) I do a lot of research, starting with the makers' own websites, going on to professional and amateur review sites, and then to enthusiast sites which can be real eye-openers. Reviews (professional or amateur) are usually of the thing when new and don't show that a particular car's drive shaft invariably fails expensively after 20,000 miles - you need to browse an enthusiast website to find that out. Adverts don't come into it, except for the makers' web sites as a catalogue to find what they offer - there can be no objection to that.
For consumables like beer you can simply try different ones until you find one you like - advertising such stuff seems completely pointless to me.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday August 01 2017, @07:27AM
That was definitely the case when I bought my van.
At first, I wanted one of those Mercedes "Sprinter" vans. But a bit of internet research uncovered a lot of people who wrote their regrets and why. With gratitude to the internet community, I turned my attention to one of the Chevy vans.... I guess because I have been a Chevy guy cuz my Dad was. Same thing. Seems the Chevrolet Diesels were giving a lot of people fits. Especially the harmonic balancer. I had my mind made up by then I definitely wanted a Diesel.
A lot of people were posting very favorable reviews of the Ford Powerstroke and the Dodge Cummins. From what I could see, the Cummins engine was probably the "best" out there, my defining "best" for me... as robustness, cost to maintain, and torque output ( in that order ) topped my list.
Oh how I wanted one of those Dodge RAM vans with the Cummins. Apparently, they never made those.
But the Ford Powerstroke was in their E350 series of vans. Now, which year? Apparently there are some really good designs out there as well as some not-done-yet stuff out there which was rushed to market with governmentally mandated stuff on them.
The diesel truck forums I saw had quite a few people disappointed with the latest diesels in the Ford lineup. Powerstrokehelp.com even had posted a bunch of quite helpful videos on what that particular mechanic thought of the various releases. After seeing that, I knew I wanted the earlier ones. The 7.3L one. But it came in two flavors... the pre-Powerstroke IDI and the later Powerstroke first edition. The IDI is much simpler in construction, but it has a known cavitation issue. The Powerstroke did not have the cavitation issue, but it has substantial additional complexity ( and more power ). My mechanic advised me the IDI was robust and if I did not mistreat it and work the dog out of it, it would likely outlive me. So, I went with it. Its not the most fuel efficient beast, that's for sure, but at my age, I really don't drive it all that much, nor am I a lead-foot.
I have to admit the initial advertising did affect my initial bias toward what I felt I needed, but it was mostly the word of internet forums and of a trusted mechanic that had the most influence when I started putting money on the table.
I ended up getting it off of Craigslist, as advised by the guy at Powerstrokehelp.com. He struck me as someone I could trust. He did not speak in squirrelytalk like most sales types do. I guess a lot of salesmen bring back memories of my cousins teasing me when I was a kid. They would tell me something, then I would do something really stupid based on my trusting them, then they would all go to laughing at me and my gullibility for trusting them, as they would tell me it was OK to lie because they had their fingers crossed. To this day, I consider businesstalk, asterisks, and fine print to be the modern business equivalent of crossing one's fingers, meaning the businesshead is apt to tell me all sorts of lies, and laugh at me just as soon as I make a move based on trusting what that head had to say.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]