Transparency<\/strong> although FB\u2019s walled garden approach is hardly transparent.<\/p>\nThere was more: \u201cMedia advertising before Facebook (and Google) was slow, inefficient and rotten to the core, with backhanders and dodgy deals\u201d.<\/p>\n
To be fair he has a point on the last bit \u2013 something the Cog Blog has bored on about for years but, and this is a point missed by so many of the digiterati, advertising did in fact exist before online platforms.<\/p>\n
Brands were built, nourished and became extremely valuable without Facebook and Google.<\/p>\n
I know FB, Google, Amazon and some others are great examples of\u00a0massively successful businesses built online by providing services people wanted, at the right moment.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve built e-commerce, improved many buyers\u2019 experiences, provided an amazing service to those unwilling or unable to get to the shops, brought a range of goods previously out of reach to us all, made the vast knowledge accessible online available to all, and linked families and individuals across the globe.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve also derailed advertising.<\/p>\n
By obsessing over short term metrics, by reducing \u2018a view\u2019 down to \u2018a passing glance\u2019, and by promoting these and other metrics as true indicators of brand value they\u2019ve sent the ad business down a blind alley where the channel is seen by marketers as being far more important than the idea.<\/p>\n
Their interaction with marketers has focused on the audience and the metrics. In this environment, creative ideas are an after-thought. They\u2019ve subsequently withered \u2013 to the detriment of advertising as an industry.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the content. By creating a user-generated free-for-all Facebook and friends have led us to a point where hate speech is easily spread and multiplied, where conspiracy theories abound, where anyone daring to voice an opinion is hunted down, threatened, abused and insulted by those holding a different opinion.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s really not good enough to say this is a few idiots responsible for a small minority of posts. It\u2019s also not acceptable to hide behind freedom of speech. As someone once said, freedom of speech doesn\u2019t give you the right to run into a crowded cinema and shout fire.<\/p>\n
This is clearly a societal problem, but the consequence is that these platforms do not deliver a healthy environment for brand advertisers, regardless of how many people there are on them.<\/p>\n
There are many examples of small businesses using FB and friends highly successfully as direct response channels. Absolutely nothing wrong with that; if the businesses concerned generate a response, and if the response generates a profit then good for them.<\/p>\n
But it is wholly different for the big guys. The big guys care about brands. And brands are built, as the great Jeremy Bullmore has it like birds builds nests, from the twigs and sticks they come across along the way.<\/p>\n
One of the sticks is the context within which brands appear. After all, you\u2019re known by the company you keep \u2013 and you wouldn\u2019t want to hang around with much of what\u2019s on social media.<\/p>\n
Hence the boycott. It really isn\u2019t about money. We all know that Facebook has a massively long tail of advertisers. Even the hundreds of boycotters represent only a fraction of FB revenue.<\/p>\n
What the boycott has done is strip away the veneer surrounding FB specifically and social media in general.<\/p>\n
The world won\u2019t end for the boycotting brands if they don\u2019t advertise on Facebook. I doubt their models will pick up any sort of decline in business.<\/p>\n
Whisper it quietly but the king has no clothes. Facebook and friends are not a suitable place for advertising designed to build brands.<\/p>\n
The boycott has changed advertising\u2019s view of the social media world.<\/p>\n
I would say it has moved us all on but actually it\u2019s made us pause, rethink and reset.<\/p>\n
Advertising has a chance to regroup; brand ideas have a chance to flourish as budgets are invested (online as well as offline) in edited, context-appropriate, attention-grabbing, sales-generating media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been a busy few weeks at Facebook, what with the ad boycott, hastily arranged meetings with agencies, bullish statements from Mark Zuckerberg (\u2018who needs advertisers, and in any case they\u2019ll be back soon enough\u2019), and remarks from the company and its supporters that there\u2019s really nothing to see as here at Facebook we were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1355,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions\/1355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}