Back to the Future
The world of digital marketing is blowing up, and it will never be the same.
Thank God for that.
The root of this dumpster fire goes all the way back to 2013, with Edward Snowden. Europe saw the extent of digital snooping that the US government engaged in, and they were alarmed. The snowball of privacy regulation started then and there, and almost ten years later, the snowball has picked up a lot of snow as it has rolled downhill.
Privacy laws change everything. Targeting is not as effective, and measurability (what people did after they saw the ad) becomes even more limited.
Even Facebook knows that the gig is up. Established, successful companies don’t often decide to change their identities. Facebook knew that their old business model—premised on the illusion of targeting and measurability—would no longer work. Good for them for getting out in front of this.
Targeting was always overrated; even Apple says that untargeted ads work just as well for them as targeted ads.
Measurability was worse than overrated. It was a crock, sold to senior executives who craved numbers to inform their decisions. Any numbers, even bad ones. Marketers suspected something—all of us who did business with Facebook and Google knew from selective disclosure of data that something was amiss—but anyone who was skeptical of the revolution was committing career suicide, speaking in a voice that couldn’t be heard in a hurricane anyway.
More on that for another day. But what it dd was focus executives more on where the messages were communicated, and less on the content of that message. Which is why ads stink.
When you are wasting 50% of your ad budget on targeting that is overrated; believing in the false premise that you can SEE how effective the ads are; AND your content stinks, you really aren’t getting much from your enormous marketing spend.
There is a better way.
Reduce digital as a percentage of your marketing spend. Just try it. Just spend less and less each quarter, and see if it makes a difference to your actual business performance (hint: it won’t).
Beef up your creative spend. We don’t NEED any of the shit we buy anyway. As a culture, that ended back in the 1920’s and 30’s. We buy because we WANT. Want is an emotion, and it is triggered by compelling, deeply rooted messages. Sales for Dove grew from $2.5 billion to $4 billion over ten years on a vision for beauty equality. They turned a bar of soap, that lives unseen in your bathroom, into something that gave a psychic benefit. Absolutely amazing work.
Beef up the tools you give your creatives. Creative tools, you say? What are those? Coming soon, but here is a hint. If history shows us one thing, over and over, it is that we never learn from history.