Offensive Facebook Posts Force Brands to Drop Ads

Recently Facebook faced what some described as a “watershed” moment for the company. The Financial Times reported that advertisers such as Nissan and Nationwide, as well as a number of smaller brands, chose to pull their advertising from the social networking site after their ads were placed next to offensive posts and images. The exodus came as a result of the #FBRape campaign led by Laura Bates, founder of “The Everyday Sexism Project", asking Facebook to change its advertising policies. Complaints on twitter followed as embarrassing screenshots of ads appearing on the social networking site next to misogynistic content, including images of abused women, were circulated.
This highlights some serious issues for Facebook’s targeted advertising, which put simply, targets users believed to be most likely to buy a product based on their likes and other profile information. Ads are placed on pages wherever the user goes and for Facebook on which there are nearly 100bn pages, the majority of which are user generated, this represents a huge policing issue. Until there is a sound technological solution the likelihood is that incidents like this will continue to happen.

The Brand Response
The contrasting response to the brands involved highlights how important swift corrective action can be. Nationwide, Nissan and many of the smaller brands were lauded for immediately cancelling their Facebook advertising until the issue is resolved. On the other hand, Santander, who were slow to react, faced criticism and even pledges from consumers to switch their banking over to Nationwide! More extremely Dove the skincare brand, have faced a heated backlash from consumers (examples below) for not pulling their Facebook ads completely.

 

From a media agency perspective it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Dove who have limited control over the actual content their ads are placed next to. Most of the blame should sit with Facebook, firstly for allowing the offensive content on the site and secondly for the poor control over where ads are placed.
Having said that, I can’t help but feel surprised that Dove, which prides itself on empowering women and “inspiring inner beauty” refused to pull its ads completely.  In my opinion Dove should have been the first to cancel their advertising. They missed an opportunity to lead the condemnation of the content in order to turn a bad situation into something more positive.
As for Facebook, if they want to continue growing their advertising revenue, to improve on the $1.46 billion revenue figures announced in Q1, then they need to start taking a lot more responsibility for their content and advertising controls.

Written by Peter Barnes, Account Executive

Are you following the money?

Some 60 clients joined MC&C  this morning for a 90 minute seminar on the topic of "attribution in a digital world"
It may sound slightly dry, but actually it's fascinating, honestly

Essentially attribution is merely the discipline of finding out which bits of your media investment generated what sales. You can then use that insight to drop the bits that don’t work and do more of the bits that do.
Common sense really

Image from Google showing digital attribution 

What I found shocking was how few clients do this when it's so effective.
Only 54% of clients do any form of attribution, and only 35% track the online sales caused by offline media, despite the fact that 54% of them say this has very large impacts on their profits (this from research Econsultancy did in November 2012)

The biggest opportunity for clients to improve profitability in this area is probably in linking online sales to offline media investments
We offered three pieces of advice
1. The vast majority of online sales journeys start offline: typically between 80% and 95%
2. Typically our clients see some 30% of their total sales from media investments now coming online
3. If they use offline to online attribution they can improve the profitability of these sales by between 20% and 30%

Its not easy to do, but tools now exist that can help 
Clients have a choice of Econometric modelling, or media event matching software.
Our recommendation is to start with matching. It gives clients the everyday micro insight as to which bits of their media schedules worked. C4 or Sky. The Sun or The Sunday Times. And investments can be optimised on that basis

Larger campaigns (typically £3million+) will benefit from Econometrics, which can answer questions like: exactly how much impact did my TV campaign have on my search, my door drops, my press, and my retail sales. And how much can I spend before I see diminishing returns.

We use both tools as appropriate. Our view: if you can measure it, how can you manage it?

Written by Mike Colling, MD