Ad Scandal of the Week

Why would Forbes do this? According to The Drum, “While a reader on Forbes’s primary domain usually encounters between 3 to 10 ads throughout an article, viewers of www3.forbes.com (the MFA site- BH) might see over 200 ads during a single page view.”

You don’t have to be an MBA to figure out that putting 200 ads on a page yields a lot more cash than 3. And you don’t have to be a CMO to figure out that a page with 200 ads and no audience is a world class waste of money.

The advertisers conned by Forbes were not clueless idiots from Cheap Charlie’s Discount Plumbing Supplies, these were clueless idiots from Microsoft, Disney, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz, Oracle, Fidelity, Marriott, Ford, United Airlines, Omnicom, Publicis, Havas, IPG, Dentsu, and GroupM. Along with hundreds of other, ya know, “sophisticated” and “agile” marketers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The finding shines a light on the opacity of the digital-ad market, where brands frequently have to play whack-a-mole to keep their ad budgets from being wasted.”

The WS Journal also reported that, “All six major ad-agency holding companies—WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic Havas and Dentsu — bought ads that ran on that site. Those brands and ad-holding companies either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment.”  Lots of integrity there.

The personal interest of a marketer is not necessarily in alignment with the interests of the brand he or she is representing. Within the marketing industry, and within corporations, there are perverse incentives at work.

As we know, CMO is a very insecure job. Reports claim that the average life of a CMO is somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 months. According to Harvard Business Review, “Eighty percent of CEOs say they don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs.” This is not good.

A marketer’s interest is in appearing to be efficient – reaching large numbers of “the right” people, and reaching them inexpensively. A brand’s interest is in selling stuff. Theoretically, these two goals would be aligned. But they are not necessarily so.

The metrics that are used to measure the success of online advertising – CPMs, clicks, etc – are terrible proxies for actual sales results. Attribution models for connecting ad metrics with actual sales or brand lift are a cruel joke.

Obviously, wasting millions of ad dollars by buying useless advertising is a terrible thing for a brand or a business. But it’s not necessarily so terrible for the personal interest of a marketer. To understand why, let’s first agree on a couple of unpleasant realities:
   1) A marketer’s first priority is to keep his/her job.
   2) Trying to tease out the effect of advertising on brand health from all the other business variables (price, product quality, sales force competence, operations, design, distribution, competitor activity, economic conditions, etc.) is a never-ending brain destroyer.

This is why there is such great demand for garbage. Remember garbage may stink, but it’s very cheap. The metrics generated by garbage sites, garbage buys, and garbage reports provide marketers with fabulous nonsense that they can wave in front of their overlords…

“Look how many people we reached!”
“Look how many clicks we got!”
“Look how low our CPMs are!”

But don’t look too close, because it’s all bullshit.