MUSHROOM CLOUD ON HORIZON FOR GOOGLE'S AD NETWORK?
For those of you who've been following this blog-post, you'll recall that we've been predicting that advertisers (and shareholders), will at some point grow tired of being jerked around, by Google's less-than-transparent, ROI-metric challenged, on-line ad network, which consists of over 2 million web-sites + YouTube. This Ad-Network/YouTube maize, has grown to consume nearly 50% of all digital ad placements, with little or no outside performance auditing. As noted in the below articles, that cash-cow-free ride, may be coming to an end--with a growing "mushroom-cloud-blow-back" from major advertisers, building on the horizon. We sometimes have felt like the industry's heretic, by questioning the supposedly sacred validity of Google's super-sophisticated, machine-controlled, world of programmatic ad serving. Unfortunately, the machines & their ethics-free algorithms, have fallen prey to highly viewed pornography pages---(visited by the machine's ideal demographic)-- click robots, ghost ads, mini-pixels, agency kick-backs, and payoffs---which combine to deprive CPG brand shareholders of their precious dollars. This whack-a-mole game, results in hundreds of millions of dollars being casually handed out to an ecosystem which is sorely lacking in transparency at best--and hijacked by fraudsters, at worst. The end result at CPGs? Fine factories close due to poor sales. Good people lose their jobs, in cost cutting moves. Both, poor substitutes for prudent marketing. False blame is cast about. Morale deteriorates. The best people leave. Meanwhile, most CPGs continue to ignore their mega-retailing partners, who are closing stores---and almost begging for "retail environment-marketing-partnerships." In the opinion of this author, those CPG-CMO's who are first to acknowledge, that the RETAIL ENVIRONMENT is now THE most important brand advertising medium, will be the winning CMO's, and those most likely to still have a job 24 months from today. (See articles below on this week's "Google Ad Apocalypse"). J.F.McNulty; CEO-Didgebridge
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AT&T, Verizon, other US brands join Google blacklisting
AUTHOR
PUBLISHED
March 23, 2017
Dive Brief:
- AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and other major U.S. companies are pulling their advertisements from Google and Google's YouTube video portal over issues with the platforms' brand safety assurances, according to USA Today and a number of other media outlets. Ads have continued to appear alongside extremist content featuring terrorists, hate speech and acts of violence, especially on YouTube.
- Last week, Havas Worldwide, the world's sixth-largest ad holding group, halted all of its Google ad spend in the U.K., joining the U.K. government, major media organizations like The Guardian and the BBC and brands including Marks & Spencer.
- On Tuesday, Google apologized for its failures to ensure brand safety and said it was enacting a tougher stance on offensive content and ads appearing next to illegitimate creators on YouTube. The tech company suggested it would provide new tools to advertisers and is hiring "significant numbers" of people to bolster the content review process.