Targeting vs Impact — Reality Check

I think of the “digital era” beginning in the year 2000. Very much it its infancy, with porn still being a major driver of traffic. Websites were “popping up”, the world was recovering from the tech wreck and as good a reason as any, it is a nice round number.

The first “recognizable” social media, Six Degrees, started in 1997, followed by Google in 1998 and blogging sites started becoming popular in 1999. Facebook was not even a “gleam in the eye” of Mark Zuckerberg back then. LinkedIn didn’t start until 2002, whilst Instagram (2010), WhatsApp (2009) & YouTube (2005) had not yet been created. And there was My Space, which kicked off in 2006 and peaked in 2007 with 75.9 monthly users. It still has around 50 million monthly users, but I cannot recall seeing it recommended on any schedule or businesses setting up sites.

Laptops were a prestige symbol in 2000. Go through an airport scanner and only the successful entrepreneurs and senior managers (oops, C-Suite) had laptops. Every other poor bugger was stuck with an unportable desktop computer (some irony in the fact that mobile now dominates and it is arguably the single most important reason for the lack of impact of online advertising).

A bit of history never hurts, as it is numbers and targeting used to sell digital/online and social media. One of the most used and abused terms is digital – originally coined to differentiate between computing (analogue & digital). Digital computers came into being in 1973, so they are hardly a new phenomenon.

We enter 2020 and people still sprout “I am a digital marketer”. I don’t know any media of significance that is not digital (TV began broadcasting a digital signal in January 2001).

The recent Superbowl has best demonstrated the power of TV screen advertising. Be it free-to-air, subscription or OTT – Foxtel has clearly demonstrated subscription revenue is not sufficient to cover the cost of offering quality programming.

Whether streaming services will have to take advertising is a moot point. The latest P: E of Netflix is 99:1 (try and find a: ”traditional” company with anything like that that is still trading). My bet is that streaming services will either have a 2 tired pricing – one with no ads and a high subscription cost, or advertising with a lower subscription cost. Or maybe they will end up like Foxtel.

Back to the Superbowl. The appeal of the advertising is nearly as great as the game. (One commentator estimated that a 5-hour game only has the ball in play for 10 minutes.).

The Super Bowl ads generate huge coverage, not just within the marketing and advertising industries, but the audience in general. Where TV ad breaks were a time for a bathroom stop, grab a drink, snack or some other reason, during Super Bowl the audience is more engaged in the ads than large swaths of the game (time outs, swapping offensive with defensive teams. To a former League player, the stoppages take a lot of getting used to).

And what an audience they generate – 102 million viewers across Fox and all its platforms and just under 100 million on Fox alone. Large TV sets have become the norm, so if we talk in terms of impact, it was huge.

But it not just the numbers alone. If your product advertises in Super Bowl, at a cost of around $5.5 million a 30 second spot (US dollars that is), it says you are a brand/company of substance. No “fly by nighter” is going to be running advertising in the Super Bowl live broadcast. Not just TV ads in the Super Bowl broadcast. How can you tell when a purely online business is doing well? They advertise on TV.

And in the days leading up to the game, discussion about the advertising is in a wide range of programmes such as nightly news, current affairs and late-night talk shows. It receives wide attention, less than the game, but more than many other topics of the time. This further increases the currency of the brands who advertise in the game.

Run the same ads on a mobile phone and the reaction/impact would be “bugger all”. Engagement is the term often used, but impact is more apt when it comes to advertising rather than one to one message, advertorials, webpages etc. For advertising, impact is a better descriptor. (Engagement is the final step before marriage. Your last chance to “run away. An old friend did it three times. Cost him three engagement rings, but his rationale was it was cheaper than 3 houses.)

I looked at past articles – “Lies, Damn Lies & Social Media”, “Why Brands Waste So Much on Social Media”, “Why is Social Media so Over- Rated” & related articles such as “Content. So Much Garbage” & “What the Hell is Content”. (Bloody hell. My dear late mum often said: “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, say nothing”. That would eliminate around 60% of my articles. Sorry mum.)

A quick flick through these and other articles, many 3 plus years old and bugger all has changed, such as:

Around 38% of online “traffic” is not human, rather bots.
Partial viewing (3 to 5 seconds will suffice) is counted as “seeing the ad”, as is just part of the ad showing.
So is the ad appearing way below where most people look, particularly on mobile.
No sound is not a consideration. (To be fair, a percentage of TV viewers mute sound when ads come on, but not anywhere near the % of those online).
The huge shift to mobile has been a far greater kick to the groin of online ads than has ever been admitted to. How many had a Super Bowl party, complete with snacks & lunch (Vegan?) and a heap of booze, then put their phone up on the wall as the visual and sound device for the game?

Only a total fool would argue “digital” has not had such a massive impact on society. Social media, which is still relatively in its infancy, has had a radical impact that few could honestly have predicted when it started – there were others before Facebook, but at its launch in 2007, no one seriously predicted where we are now.

Trump, though not the ideal example, will not be the last US President (or any other politician) to conduct Foreign Policy through social media. Anyone who has had experience in being interviewed, knows that what you say and what is broadcast or published can vary to the point of significantly changing the point you were trying to make.

But advertising is vastly different to politics and celebrities in social media. Leaving aside politics and products and services such as financial, insurance etc, where information is actively sort out, a rule of thumb I use for social media is:

If people do not “window shop” your product category, then Social is a waste of time and money.

One big advantage so often put forward by the digiterati is the ability to target – “can run multiple ads aimed at all of the different segments”. All the different segments? Yes, a mass market brand can carve up its audience into a multitude of “segments”. But are they really buying your product for a wide range of different reasons?

Alan Morris, one half of the great MoJo, was once asked “Who is your target market for Tooheys?” (This was after one of the best beer campaigns ever in Australia – “How Do You Feel”). “Anyone over 18 with a mouth”, he replied.

There are never 10 distinctly different reasons for buying a product. This is a great example of how data and media have taken over our industry at the expense of creative.

Realistically, there is usually around 3 major reasons (and that is pushing it), under an overall umbrella, for purchase. And so we used to have 3 ads, all branded the same (distinctiveness), under an umbrella positioning and we had …….. A Campaign!

The loss of creativity in a rising tide of fixation with AI is for another day. But to finish, compare any of the Super Bowl ads, or any well-crafted ad in TV, radio or print and compare it to the growing use of content from “Influencers”. Any company whose business is supplying influencers will say their Influencers provide original and creative content. Put in their words, following is a typical statement from an influencer provider website:

And a couple of examples of this wonderful, or original creative:

And:

I just hope those second-rate creatives responsible for the Super Bowl TV ads don’t get to see this. It will crush them and their confidence, possibly even lost to the advertising industry.

Nothing comes close to a great digital campaign. Hey, maybe I can get a gig as an influencer?

Targeting versus impact? Take the impact.