ADVERTISING AUTHENTICITY #COKEFAIL

As a digital planner I can still appreciate great above the line work and today I witnessed both the beautiful and ugly side of advertising.

Firstly the good, Magners "Now is a good time". Produced by The Red Brick Road the campaign is designed to bring to life the sociability and spontaneity at the heart of the brand.

Despite the campaign living on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest there are no hashtags or FB logos, no stupid calls to action, just great casting, direction and poetic scripting. The end frame uses the line "Now is the time" and those interested enough will seek and discover, those who aren't then so be it. Great work Magners / The Red Brick Road.

Now the ugly, the new campaign from Coke which encourages us to "Spread a little happiness and surprise a friend with their own virtual Coke can, created by you. Just connect to Facebook below to get started."

So I guess the brief was similar to Magners but with an injection of social media crack. We must have Facebook integration, we must have a hashtag, we must create an authentic relationship and thank someone who means so much to us by sharing with them a virtual can of coke with their name on it.

Really?

SHERYL SANDBERG INVENTING FACEBOOK INFLUENCE

Facebook Q1 earnings report clearly impressed Wall Sreet but whilst they are managing to migrate revenues to mobile they are a long way off the kind revenue growth which will help them realise their $100bn IPO. 

The 12 cents a share earning was a mere 1 cent off analyst estimates but their P/E ratio is still astronomically high and unless they can figure out a way to accelerate growth the stock price could be in for a shock over the next year.

It has been widely reported that acquisition numbers have peaked in leading markets with  users migrating to networks such as Path and Instgram. So how much growth exists in their ad model? Sheryl Sandberg's comments in the post earnings conference call gave a significant hint that they may be close to maxing out and advertisers are not seeing the necessary returns from FB to keep spending.

We've run a number of FB campaigns for our clients and the reality is that any campaign which takes users outside of the Facebook network performs poorly, especially when measured against traditional display (itself a dog), email and search. The only way we have managed to prove value in our campaigns is through ultra targeted ads building the page Like count.

But how much value is there in a Like? Personally I'd rather 1 email address than 25 Likes. With client campaigns we have proven time and time again that we can convert an email database database into a good source of repeat purchase customers. With Facebook we are able to drive a conversation but we also notice fatigue and thus the animal needs continually feeding.

Further Facebook has driven up the cost of managing audiences with double charging, firstly you pay to build your audience and then you pay to ensure the audience sees the message.

This brings me back to Sheryl. In the post earnings call she dismissed the role of clicks as the lead measure for tracking campaign performance, rather the mere fact that the advert exists on Facebook drives offline purchase. Yes clicks, that standard measure we have always used, the thing which has had advertising and media agencies scrambling to build digital divisions as their budgets get moved online.

“99% of people who saw a Facebook ad and then bought the product in a store never clicked on an ad.”

— Sheyl Sandberg

Really?

Are you actually saying that?

REALLY?

This statement suggests that Facebook has reached the point that media buyers did where they were unable to prove that display ads worked and thus brought in Post Impress Tracking as a measure to justify their campaigns. I've written about post impression tracking before, it is a scam.

Investors beware, along with LinkedIn's Q1 earnings report showing concerns with in its Q2 guidance the bubble may be about to burst, again!

THE SILLY THINGS AGENCIES SAY

We are currently working on a new website for McCormack & Morrison, we recently made Tim Peacock a director and are looking to change our name to reflect this. Our strap has always been "Good Old Fashioned New Media" which we felt was a great way to explain our traditional approach to digital strategy. But when we wrote this we had 6 employees and we are now a team of 24, a lot has changed so we feel it is time to update our website and copy.

In preparing the brief I took some time to look at how other agencies decribe themselves, agencies I respect, and found some of it laughable. Here are some examples:

• A new breed of agency creating never ending stories.
• We make brands more valuable to people and people more valuable to brands.
• As a Brand Activation agency we help clients maximise brands commitment across the purchase decision journey using proprietary insights across customer, shopper and trade dimensions. (Honestly who wrote this?)
• Put simply, we connect storytelling to data.
• We create ideas people can belong to.

For us digital has always been about making things honest, helping people find things and making life easy for customers. It is important that language is natural, you should talk to a customer how you would talk to a friend and thus an agency should also take the same approach when talking to prospective clients.

The role of a digital agency is to help clients solve business problems such as increasing sales or retaining customers, never has a client said to me "We are having a real problem with our story telling and need some helping connecting our social conversations with our sales stream, blah blah blah".

Look at Dare, their strap is "An agency for the digital world", simple and easy to understand.

Why can't agencies just say what they do? Why do people have to come up with such silly meaningless statements which don't relate to how the world really works?

THE POST IMPRESSION MEDIA BUYING SCAM

As a digital planner you tend to spend a lot of your time looking at spreadsheets and numbers trying to figure out where your clients should be spending their money. The best digital planners are able to take performance data, wrap it with common sense and give brilliant insight and recommendations. With this I have become alarmed at the rise of Post Impression Tracking as the lead reporting metric for display advertising.

I can only put the blame for this on media buyers trying to replicate their current business model online with channel specific silos to take a % of the media. But digital buying is much more complex than bus shelters and escalators ads, and hence why the best digital agencies plan against the entire customer journey. The problem with channel silos is without consideration of other channels and touch points it is far too easy to misreport campaign performance.

The best example of this is with the typical media buying strategy for PPC being heavily weighted to brand terms. Why? Well the cost per acquisition (CPA) is lower because brand terms are less competitive and thus have a lower cost per click and natural conversions are being cannibalised by the paid links

With this the media buyer reports a low CPA to the client and the client is happy. Yet managed correctly the client should have a higher average CPA for PPC but a lower CPA across all channels.

And it is a similar problem with display ads. Because they can be tracked the client wants to know what their click through and conversion rates are. Now rather than be honest with clients and explain why they don’t perform as a DR channel, media buyers have slipped Post Impression Tracking under the radar. Failing campaigns are now being reported as successful without any question of the methodology.

So what is Post Impression Tracking? Well the theory is if your browser is exposed to an ad online and you purchase from that brand, then the ad was what influenced you. So with my visit to Amazon (see below) I received tracking cookies for Thomson Holidays, British Gas, Barclay Card and Europcar. The problem with the theory is that at no point did I actually physically see these ads because they were below my fold. Yet if I purchased from any of these brands then the ad would be attributed as responsible or influential on the purchase. And even worse some media buyers will track this on a 30 day window.

The media buying strategy here is reach, let’s get the ads everywhere, let’s create as many coincidences as possible. They sell this to the client by saying we’re only going to the networks who offer a CPA, the client is always impressed “you mean I only pay when I get a sale? Well let’s do it then”. But the CPA networks are just as complicit in this whole mis reporting of conversions. They have built huge networks of websites to ensure as many people as possible have the tracking cookies and then only accept campaigns based on Post Impression Tracking. 

Common sense says that if someone sees an ad, clicks on it and makes a purchase then this is a valid conversion. Yet this is where the problem lies. Click through and conversion rates for display ads are usually very low, especially when compared to PPC. Google reports an average click through rate ranging from 0.05% to 0.26% depending on creative size. If media buyers only reported on click through conversions then most of their clients would pull their campaigns. Expedia know this and recently pulled all their display activity. Alex Gisbert, Director of Online Partner Marketing presented at Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing this year and explained that they have stopped all their display activity and seen a tiny impact on conversions. 

Chances are we all have the same display tracking ads on our computer, chances are as we buy things media buyers are patting themselves on the back when they had nothing to do with it. All they have created is a huge network of coincidences. 

Display ads are a great brand channel, just look at the YouTube executions. They also give the benefit of a deeper engagement for some but they are not a DR channel and tracking on Post Impression overstates their role in conversion. The ads should be tracked as Post Click only on a 3 day window (possibly longer for more expensive purchases).

Digital planning and reporting is complex and clients need honest and impartial advice. Operating in agency silos leads to inter agency competition and protectionism. A lead planner needs to work across all traffic driving and conversion channels using attribution tools and common sense to accurately help their client make good decisions.