A year ago the head of brand for P&G, the largest advertiser in the world, told the digital advertising platforms that they had until the end of 2017 to clean up their act. He wanted much better accountability and transparency about their ad spend – a better system for knowing that the ads they were paying for were actually running, and were fully visible to people for a set amount of time.
This week Marc Pritchard gave the industry a passing grade. While not all issues have been resolved, he said that so much progress had been made by the major players (Facebook and Google), and they were demonstrating so much effort, that he was satisfied (with more work to be done). He did say, though, that some smaller ad platforms had not shown as good a results and P&G had cut their advertising from them.
P&G is still off of YouTube because of brand safety issues: they aren’t assured that the videos that their ads are showing on are on brand.
That was a big sigh of relief from the ad industry that you heard.
But then Monday the CMO of Unilever, the fourth largest largest advertiser in the world, said that they would pull their advertising from digital platforms that “breed division in society or fail to protect children.”
“As a brand-led business, Unilever needs its consumers to have trust in our brands. We can’t do anything to damage that trust—including the choice of channels and platforms we use. So, 2018 is the year when social media must win that trust back,” said CMO Keith Weed.
He didn’t name names but the assumption is that he is especially talking about Facebook, Twitter and Google.
This is a little curious to me. I know that there are issues with fake news and bots, but the vast majority of content on Facebook is posts from friends and family. A few weeks ago Facebook said they would reduce content from brands and publishers even further — even if that meant a cut in usage time by people.
Ads on the Google Display Network appear primarily on third-party sites. They claim they can reach 90% of Internet users worldwide on over two million sites. On the AdWords Display Network Placements tab you can see exactly where your ads are running – and you can blacklist sites. Surely an advertiser the size of Unilever can automate the monitoring of those sites.
Twitter, on the other hand, is still the wild west.
