What Do You Mean "100% Of Our Digital Ad Spend Is Wasted?"

Businesses have a serious problem. It’s illustrated in this slide from Augustine Fou.

Yes, you read that right. It’s entirely possible that 100% of your digital ad spend is being wasted. And before you shoot back saying that this slide proves nothing, Fou brought more evidence in an article that he wrote for Forbes. And this quote is a zinger.

"P&G turned off $200 million in digital spend & saw no change in business outcome. Chase reduced showing ads on 400,000 sites to 5,000 (a 99% reduction) and saw no change in business outcomes. Uber turned off 80% of paid mobile app install ad spend and saw installs continue unabated. Ebay turned off paid search and saw no change in traffic or sales on its site. Airbnb cut $800 million at the pandemic's start & saw "traffic levels back to 95% of 2019 without marketing spend." We’re not asking what percentage IS fraud. We’re asking what percentage IS NOT fraud."

This is damning stuff. Even if you question some of it, or don’t agree with all of it, we cannot deny that the rampant nature of fraud and digital ad waste is a very serious problem. How serious depends on who you ask, and how it's measured, but even conservative estimates put the amount lost annually in the billions.

And it was really kind of inevitable. Digital advertising, unlike analog, is largely hidden from our sight. Unlike a billboard or TV commercial, which is out there for all to see, our means of confirming the display of a digital ad are limited, whether it's to the correct audience, or any audience.

Being Ahead Of The Curve Can Be Lonely

At this point, you might shoot back at me, “If this is such a serious problem, why haven’t I heard more about it?” Fair question. I think there are three reasons.

First, buying digital ads is often automated, indirect, and involving third-parties. According to eMarketer, over 80% of display ads were bough programatically in 2018, while Guardian US found 72% of video spend to be going to unauthorized exchanges and SSPs.

Second, pretty much every organization that makes money from digital advertising has a vested interest in you not knowing, and that interest is powerful enough, as a whole, to influence industry perceptions.

And third, many individual marketers and advertisers, both client-side and agency, either don't know where their ads are ending up, or they don’t want to know. Many are accustomed to essentially throwing their money up into a whirlwind and praying their advertising doesn't end up next to porn or white supremacist propaganda.

Others know full well that they're burning money but they're pretending they're not, because they’ve already staked their reputations on digital ad spending and paid targeting. They’ve fired all the skilled creative people and copywriters (i.e., anybody who might have actual ideas), and are now spending all that money on technicians and their tools.

They’ve spent the last decade professing very loudly about how the future is data, personalization, automation, etc., and won’t risk the professional embarrassment of admitting that the magic beans they bought will never grow. And with few skilled creatives, and many organizations now “digital-first,” a big chunk of our industry doesn't know how to do things any other way now. Which means that acknowledgement of this rampant waste makes them orgs obsolete.

Digital spending has become a pacifier, one on which marketing and advertising have become overly dependent, and stubbornly refuse to let go. But eventually the dam is going to burst. Law enforcement is getting involved. And businesses will insist that their money stop being burned. Your business can go on ignoring the smell of smoke coming from the digital advertising industry until that day happens, or you can get ahead of it.

So What’s To Be Done?

Of course, it’s easy to point out what’s wrong with something. Having a better idea is harder. And it’s going to be very hard for businesses that have spent the last decade going all in on another direction to change course, but they’re gonna have to. Their future depends on it.

Augustine Fou offers some ideas here on how businesses can spend their digital ad money more smartly, but even with this in mind, businesses can't just go on doing what they were doing before with a few minor changes. The fraudsters are going to keep getting better. Major change is what's needed. And I have a few suggestions for how to begin. Most of them boil down to, “focus more on things that can’t be faked.”

Do An Audit

The good news is that many forms of fraud really aren’t that hard to sniff out. They can be detected or inferred by a motivated professional. Hire an outside specialist to audit your activities, as quietly as possible. Don’t tell your agencies or ad buyers. And try to keep it quiet from your head of digital as well (though that might not be possible), as that person might be in on it if there is fraud.

Focus On Your Website

Bots visit your website all the time, sometimes by clicking your ads. However, bots are not humans, and they have fairly simple programming. Which means that after arriving on your website, they'll want to get back to their mission (i.e., clicking ads) pretty quickly, and so they'll leave pretty quickly. And they certainly won't linger to fill out an application form, download a PDF, or anything else of that nature.

This means that digital marketers need to go more old school with their metrics again, and focus more on getting people onto their website and keeping them there. This won't be easy, as the social media hubs have spent the last five years trying to keep people from leaving their sites, and have been encouraging brands to follow suit by making it easier for them to play videos, post downloadable PDFs, and publish other forms of media natively (i.e., on the social media site itself), and by limiting the reach of posts that link elsewhere.

But if brands want to minimize fraud, they're gonna have to bite the bullet and do things this way.

More Earned Media

Earned media, also known as publicity or word of mouth, is a very good way to drive awareness. It’s more credible than paid media, and it can be a highly-effective sales lubricant, whether in B2C or B2B, since it essentially functions as validation. I think it’s become underused in recent years as the term “earned media” has come into greater use, because it’s not as predictable as other media, and can’t be automated. But I think it’s due for a comeback as it dawns on marketers again that earned media better appeals to human psychology than other forms. Remember, buzz, not banners, are what win the Internet.

For more on this for B2B, here’s a previous article I wrote.

More SEO

With fewer shortcuts at your disposal, digital marketers will have to rely more on their ground game, and that means SEO. This means shortening your Google load times, especially on your mobile site, as Google is now mobile-first, yet the average Google score for a mobile site is only 31.

This also means thinking beyond blogs. You need to think about publishing a few home-run pieces of content (like whitepapers or annual state of the industry reports) each year that can function as “pillars” on your website that other pieces of content on and off your website can reference and link to. You also need to be answering questions on Quora (often the first organic response to a Google query), and trying to reach audiences on other sites and channels that aren’t yet cluttered with spam, outrage, and pictures of somebody's kids.  

More Organic Social

Organic social media has become something of a popular target for mockery in recent years as the algorithms keep making it harder to reach your own followers. But with regulators and device vendors starting to clamp down on paid targeting and ad fraud, I actually think the pendulum is going to swing back towards organic again.

However, even though, as a content person, I’m not really supposed to tell you this, I don’t necessarily recommend every brand build a full-blown newsroom. I think a lot of brands are already spreading themselves too thin already creating too many pieces of weak content. I think brands should better focus their content resources, as I said earlier, and create fewer, better pieces of home-run content.

But this needs to be coupled with more effort and creativity in how that content is packaged and repackaged for online consumption. Too many businesses “fire and forget” when it comes to content. This happens because content is often created to serve SEO goals and/or fill a calendar, with no one thinking much beyond that. Also because brands may lack dedicated social people, or may have modest creative and layout resources.

But the truth is, most blogs, case studies, product webpages, whatever, can be repackaged with at least two or three different angles, with long-form content offering even more options. And this can be done a month to a few months apart for each post. So my take-home message for this is “writer better, promote more.”

Temper Expectations

However, organic social is not exactly free of fraud either. I myself have seen my very own blogs achieve metrics that I know to be impossible. So ultimately, I believe this new digital world is going to need tempered expectations, because, as far as marketing is concerned, Internet data is a failure. All those things we’ve been promised over the last decade simply aren’t going to happen.

We will never achieve one-to-one attribution and causality (at least not anytime soon), and therefore we need to take a more holistic view of things, especially in light of the fact that a lot of the digital and social data you've spent years collecting, including your benchmarks, is compromised.

We therefore need to view metrics more in the broadstrokes (i.e., less granular). The data just isn’t accurate enough to justify going into great detail. We need to use metrics more as indicators, not as measurement tools, with those indicators merely some among many. And if you're not sure what I mean by that, basically an indicator can tell you if something is hot or cold, but it can't tell you why.

Broaden Our View

I believe we’ve focused excessively over the past decade on digital and data because of what we were promised, a marketing utopia of attribution and mass personalization. But this proved to be fools' gold, and caused us to neglect other things at the same time. Many companies aren’t digital-first, they’re digital-only.

And even when those that aren't are creating non-digital marketing assets, you can still see digital thinking in them. Logos all look like they’re displayed on a flatscreen now. Large visual assets look like social posts. Serif fonts are dead. At first we tried to recreate analog assets as digital assets, and now we’re feeding back the other way.

The problem here is we never really figured out how to make analog and digital work together using their respective strengths to create a better and more effective overall experience. Digital can do a lot for analog, and vice versa, but they're rarely asked to. Our “integrated” campaigns mostly see the same things repeated on all channels. They don’t synergize or compliment each other in any kind of serious way.

This has to change, and the brands that do it can get rich. And it won’t necessarily be the biggest ones. I think siloes are one of the biggest hindrances to this happening, so being smaller (i.e., less siloed) might be to your advantage. Use it.