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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: 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]