Ongoing growing pains for Connected Society — who pays for it?
The dot-com boom of the late 90’s can be summed up with the famous quote from the movie Field of Dreams — If you build it, they will come. Yes, if you could build the website, then the traffic would come, and with that traffic came millions of dollars in venture funding and digital advertising dollars.
Having been one of those people managing large-scale online media campaigns and massive partnership deals, the reality is that the data is never perfect. There are always “blips” that make no sense, results that are fantastic one day and horrible the next with no explanation. Post crash, a slight degree of sanity returned, but instead of the Wild, Wild West, it’s now just the Wild West. We’ve gone from just trying to track banner ads on web pages, to tracking them across desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, and even TV’s. Throw in video ads across social networking sites and you can see the fuzziness of the data setting in.
Now, this week, Facebook seems to be coming clean to some degree, but only confusing marketers even more . . .
These developments add to the nagging sense for marketers that digital advertising—for all its promise as a way to reach consumers who are tethered to mobile devices and are spending less time on traditional media—has real pitfalls and risks.The lack of transparency and trustworthy measurement in online advertising will be among the issues weighing on ad executives gathering in New York next week for annual Advertising Week festivities. Also on their minds: fears that they are wasting billions of dollars on ads that aren’t “viewable,” or visible to the human eye, or are being shown on sites with computer-generated fake traffic.The confluence of issues “could be a tipping point” for how marketers perceive digital advertising, potentially denting growth in the $194 billion global digital ad market, said Bob Liodice, chief executive officer of the Association of National Advertisers. The trade group represents large advertisers such as General Motors and AT&T.
Source: Doubts About Digital Ads Rise Over New Revelations – WSJ
