Everyone’s heard of FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. They’ve probably experienced it too, like missing out on Black Friday deals or this year’s must-have Christmas toy. Perhaps some have heard of FOFO too. I first heard the term from Mike Donahue, a veteran of the advertising industry and copywriter extraordinaire. FOFO means “Fear of Finding Out.” I have witnessed how both FOMO and FOFO have afflicted marketers for years when it comes to digital marketing. Let me explain.
First FOMO
FOMO comes in waves; and it usually happens after a few large players are tricked, oops “convinced,” to buy something “digital.” I’ve been around long enough to have seen big brands resist creating ecommerce websites, fearing that that would cannibalize their catalog and in-store sales; that was 1997. Then all of a sudden everyone scrambled to make websites and commerce-enable them. Then everyone jumped on the Flash bandwagon to make their websites “cool and interactive,” to the detriment of their SEO value (Flash, like images, made it hard for search engines to properly index the sites). Then brands started putting ads on UGC (user generated content) and social media, followed by buying likes and views to make those efforts look like they were performing.
Even to this day FOMO is causing advertisers to continue to buy adtech snake oil — from programmatic ads placed on millions of long-tail sites to privacy-invasive “surveillance marketing” where tons of data are gathered for the purposes of hyper-targeting ads. One “fools gold” after another, resulting in what I consider to be a “lost decade” of digital marketing. I am not saying that digital marketing didn’t work in the last decade; but I am saying that enormous sums of money were spent chasing adtech shiny objects that didn’t work well or didn’t work at all. That money could have been saved or better spent on other forms of advertising that would have driven better business outcomes.
I won’t belabor this point, but will cite some examples that have been covered extensively elsewhere. Showing ads on millions of long tail sites is not that effective because of the bot problem and because most humans don’t visit millions of long-tail sites millions of times. Long-tail sites don’t have large human audiences, so they turn to bot traffic to make more ad revenue. The fraud detection technologies that marketers paid for failed to detect most of the bots that were advanced enough to trick their detection or ones that just blocked their detection tags altogether. Advertisers then went on to pay for viewability measurement, but missed the point that even if ads were 100% viewable, they were still useless if shown to a bot. Advertisers paid more for targeting parameters, believing that more targeting meant more relevant ads; but they missed the part about the data being wildly inaccurate. The list keeps going, because marketers just kept buying “shiny objects.”
Then FOFO
Once marketers…
