I’ve been doing digital marketing for over 25 years and publishing data on ad fraud for over 8 years. But Q4 of this year is the first time I have felt that marketers are actually taking a closer look at digital ad fraud and suboptimal digital marketing. All of this starts with challenging assumptions and the status quo. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic when everything was running normally, no one wanted to step out of line and “rock the boat.” But said boat has already been rocked, and many marketers paused digital spending earlier in 2020, for a few months. This gave them the opportunity to observe what their digital ad spending was actually doing for their bottom line. These insights are new to them, because marketers rarely take the initiative to run their own “pause digital ad spend” experiments.
Over the years, we’ve only seen three such experiments that have been documented publicly. When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs, because those installs came from people who would have installed the Uber app anyway, not from seeing and clicking ads. Those marketers who did turn off digital ad spending for a period of time this year, look back at the business impact. It may be hard to dissociate the impact of reduced digital advertising from the negative impact of the coronavirus on business activity, but take a look anyway. In some cases, business went dramatically up, even though digital ad spending was turned off.
But the point of this article is to get more marketers to take a harder look at their own ad spending. Budgets will remain tight throughout 2021; and CEOs and CFOs will apply more scrutiny on every line item. So as you are considering what to turn back on and what to spend money on, have a look at the following summary of points to consider.
Trade Associations Told You Ad Fraud is Low
Trade Associations like the ANA and IAB have repeatedly claimed…
