Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads In the week that Facebook finally went public, General Motors has axed its paid-for advertising on Mark Zuckerberg's social network. GM said today that it was still going to have a Facebook page and everything, but it wasn't going to buy any more ads because they just aren't shifting enough cars. It reportedly spent $10m on …
I've seen a smattering of them in the States, usually magazines or the occasional billboard, but nothing on TV -- and not a one for Ferrari -- while ads for US and Japanese makes, of course, are all over the place, non-stop.
As opposed to Porsche, BMW advertising is like a rash all over US TV, print, billboards, you name it. I don't know what that says about BMW, other than that they're one of the "hip" cars for affluent Americans to drive -- but then, so is Porsche, and I have yet to spot a Porsche ad on TV over here.
Mind you, I'm sure things are entirely different in Europe and the UK.
"Think about most banner ads: they have rich media and flash or video. These are all the things that would compel someone to want to click on an ad"
This is a joke, right?
Totally agree; AdBlock, NoScript and FlashBlock, FTW.
Also, as long as I'm here, just a bit of translation:
"Think about most banner ads: they have rich media and Flash or video. These are all the things that would compel someone to knee a Web site in the groin and, while it's doubled-up in pain on the ground, kick it repeatedly in the teeth."
You're welcome.
and did you try ghostery ? It makes these following ads non-following, removes all unwanted traces, to combat this:
"Say you've visited an airline company to book a trip to San Francisco and then you don't book it because you're just thinking about it. But then as you go to other websites like the BBC or USA Today the ads for that airline company follow you around from site to site, it's like a puppy dog following you home," Kim explained.
I'm amazed how much tracking stuff is on all web pages (only 1 her: "DoubleClick")
That's what I thought, then I realized we're not the people who ever click on ads in the _first_ place. So what makes an ad even more annoying to us, is of absolutely no interest to an advertiser.
if a 'punch the monkey' ad gets clicked on twice as often by the kind of people who click on ads, but causes 53.6% more rage in an adblock user, which of those two statistics do you expect the advertiser to be more interested in?
Just did that, because I've been using AdBlock+ for years, and I haven't looked at the Internet without it for quite some time. Your post made me think I'd have a look, so I checked out El Reg, Demonoid, Listverse, Mental Floss, W3Schools, YouTube and Facebook with it switched off and...
...Holy Mother of God...
...AdBlock+ is back on now, and will be staying that way for the foreseeable future.
D'oh icon because mfw I saw those sites with ads.
However, if you annoy visitors enough one of two things happens:
1) They go away and never come back.
2) They install an ad blocker and never see another web advert.
Both of these are failures for the advertiser, and the latter is more serious.
Option 2 is more likely on a site that the user finds compelling because they want it despite the annoyance, and becomes almost certain if it has a social element that allows users to talk to each other.
Somebody will discover ad blockers, and then everyone will get one.
The American car companies have upped their game in the last seven or so years. My wife would NEVER have considered an American marque but she likes the Cadillac CTS, loved the Potiac Solstice, has seriously considered a Ford when we talk about replacing a VW Golf, ... Besides, when all the components are made in China (and those components include Toyota's bad brakes and BMW's bad fuel lines) and Honda, Toyota, and Subaru have assembly plants in Indiana, ...
. . . we used the Hosts file to block with.
With AdBlock I tend to strip back as much of the adserver URL as possible to save time later.
With Facebook and the current 'news feed' or the new 'here's something the bloke in the pub's brother's mate's dog looked at' there is the option to turn it off.
I am tempted to turn off AdBlock to see what ads are aimed at my minimalistic and totally bogus 'personal details'.
I like it that GM it to keep its free Facebook page - the big firms are learning from the punters.
Dirty American politicians continue to allow the Wall St. 1% of 1%ers like JPM that go caught betting and losing 2 Billion dollars to keep BETTING unsuspecting hardworking people's retirement and savings (mutual funds and 401k), and take the suckers on the street, the casual investors for a ride.
This is 1998 TGLO IPO redux. TheGlobe.com IPO Pop was reportedly a record increase, but crashed a couple of years later, and it was a far SUPERIOR site!
FB = Fools' Buy
"JPM that go caught betting and losing 2 Billion dollars to keep BETTING unsuspecting hardworking people's retirement and savings (mutual funds and 401k),"
Investing is betting, PERIOD. You risk your money in hopes that you will have more at the end.
Nice rant and all, but I'm pretty sure you don't really understand economics that well.
That said, YES Facebook is a fools buy, it's an inflated pop stock with no sustainable business model.
Well, the market droids focus on the explosive growth of FB, deftly avoid mentioning their revenue stream, then compare them to Google. Throw in a little "and Google are losing the social media wars" and the unsuspecting mark is well set to be separated from his money.
I only wish there were far fewer institutional investors in the pool of unsuspecting marks.
Seem to be mainly "have you been mis-sold PPI, Have you had an accident and want to Sue? Do you want to meet sexy singles"
Basically the same sort of spammy shite you get via sms and email.
Never been inclined to respond to the SMS or the spam so am not going to ever click through a FB ad.
Seem to be mainly "have you been mis-sold PPI, Have you had an accident and want to Sue? Do you want to meet sexy singles"
As I mentioned on a couple of other threads... when opening my (rarely-visited) Facebook account, I gave totally bogus info; Facebook thinks I'm a thirty-five year-old woman living in Tripoli. The little thumbnail ads in my right column are hilarious: lots of cute chicks in headscarves, and almost all the ads are in Arabic, with the occasional one in English offering opportunities to study abroad in North Africa.
But then as you go to other websites like the BBC or USA Today the ads for that airline company follow you around from site to site, it's like a puppy dog following you home," Kim explained.
Ah, this wet marketeers dream... To which I say: Fuck you and fuck you puppy too. Just don't tell RSPCA.
My experience is not so much of a puppy following me from site to site as advertisers wasting money on me.
I have a server with Tagadab (good company, don't get me wrong). I visited their site to log in to the control panel.
Three months later, every website with advertising I go to is still advertising Tagadab to me, including LWN.net and lots of big-name sites. Same advert, no special deal or anything, just a link to their website.
I know who they are. I'm a customer. But they (or, more likely, their ad campaign managers) are wasting their money by advertising to me again and again despite the fact that NONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS advertise to me in that same way. I only ever get Tagadab adverts. Similarly for when I bought a GoDaddy SSL certificate. I get advertised WORSE offers from GoDaddy than I can get just by going to GoDaddy's website and logging in. And I only ever see GoDaddy adverts for SSL certificates (and not, say, server hosting).
Similarly, I clicked on a picture of a garment (not even an ad) from Milanoo to show my girlfriend something. Now interspersed, I get the same 3-4 Milanoo adverts all the time on loads of different sites (and how they think I might want to buy a Zentai suit or a "Lolita" country-style dress, I don't know, given that I clicked on a pair of men's trousers). I have no intention of buying clothes online (hell, I can't remember the last time I bought clothes full stop!), but there's no way to stop them throwing their money away on me.
Seriously, given the amount of sites I go to, the length of time its been going on and the amount of advertising I see (I don't block it unless its obnoxious - some of those sites have to pay the bills), I must be costing those companies a significant amount for someone who's never going to be "swayed" by their advertising to do anything they weren't already going to do. Targeted adverts are really anything but targeted. And targeting an advert seems silly - surely the people who deal all day long in server hosting already know about server hosts, but may not know about, say, SSL certificates from you, or something completely unrelated to IT?
Facebook's ads are rarely relevant as it is. Even if you spend ten minutes going through their "all ads" page and marking the ones you're interested in and the ones you're not, you still always see the uninteresting ones. If I'd BOTHERED to tell you what sort of adverts I'm not interested in, at least take note, especially seeing as I took the time to mark individual adverts and not just "Not interested in anything".
In over 15 years of using the Internet, I've never once clicked on a single advert. I don't even mind adverts particularly because I can mentally turn them into whitespace even while speed-scanning a page and they keep some of the smaller operations running (my brother's Scout group gets a couple of camps a year and their hosting paid for by adverts on his Scouting website). But if you want me to actually click on them they have to be not only relevant, but interesting, offer me some incentive to click (not just "I can buy your product" but, say, "10% for me today because I clicked the advert and didn't just visit the site), and not spam me with adverts I've told you I'm not interested in, or adverts sent to me because I'd visited the page of a company that I'm already a customer of.
Adverts are about brand-building and getting people onto your site. Without some sort of incentive, it won't happen, and the brand-building can happen in a million other ways.
As much as we all hate advertising it does work when done properly, this is why companies spend so much on it. Companies wasting money on ineffective advertising might sound good but in the end it's only going to result in the prices of their products going up, or worse, a good product being cancelled because it was advertised in the wrong way and sales were poor.
Wordstream agrees with a Webtrends report that puts the Facebook click-through-rate (ad clicks versus impressions) at just 0.05 per cent, half the average for banner ads and ten times less than Google Display, which has a 0.4 per cent CTR.
---
Last I checked, 0.05*10 is 0.5, whereas 0.05*8 is 0.4....
Apparently Facebook is worth 100 billion dollars because the kids hang out there for hours a week.
The clever analysts like the fact people spend hours on Facebook, and worry about the fact they only spend a few minutes a week on Google. Some believe FB is the future and Google is doomed.
The clever analysts appear to have forgotten that it is better to have ten seconds with a customer who's looking for what you're selling, than having ten hours with a bunch of kids with no money who are just chilling with their mates.
Advertisers drool at the thought of reaching all of those young, supple eyeballs.
Unfortunately the type of people who spend hours on faecesbook are not the people who have money to spend on advertised products and services, because they're wasting their lives away on faecesbook instead of going out into the world and having a job.
Those car ads where the driver is free to speed along winding roads with wonderful views and not another car on the road.
I've always seen those ads as a home goal for the car companies, the landscape and views would be so much nicer without that twat blaring music and speeding through it... Perhaps that view is spreading.
It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, when I hear that a company has spunked millions of £££s down the drain, on advertising which didn't work.
Please can we have another feel-good follow-up story, about this leading to GM making some overpaid 'novelty tie and trendy glasses wearing' marketing executives redundant too?
One reason your advertising isn't as effective as it could be is because of your products.
1) It's hard to convince people to buy a lousy product from a poorly run company. Quality, fit, and finish have never really been a GM strength. Aesthetically speaking your products lag behind the foreign competition. 60,000 miles into the car and the interior looks faded and worn, the thing rattles, and it's completely uninspiring to drive. Oh yeah, and the trade in value is excessively low too. Why would I buy a car from you?
2) When I go to a web page and it takes a long time to load, and half the reason is because I'm stuck with some stupid GM ad that I have to sit through before I can get to the content I want, I consider that irritating. Generally, irritating a potential customer is not the way to get them to purchase your product.
People chase great products; great products don't chase people.
Corollary - mediocre products chase people.
Props to GM for killing Facebook ads, that makes you a less irritating company. Your problems however run deeper than just marketing.
"People might own a car for ten years so it can be very difficult to know exactly when they're in the process of trying to buy a car."
The change of a GM making it to 10 years is pretty slim, they are starting to fall apart by the time the warranty is over.
If FB were wise, if they see you like GM, start giving them Taxi and wrecker services ads, maybe even some walking shoes.
"Think about most banner ads: they have rich media and flash or video. These are all the things that would compel someone to want to click on an ad. The Facebook ads are very boring, not very imaginative, they're not able to deliver a very rich experience because of the limitations of the ad format."
They do? Is that what all those empty boxes with a "naught" symbol in them are? Thank goodness for flashblock 8-).
Anyway... a lot of the type of people that use Facebook are the same ones that don't know anything about cars but think they do, they parrot the line that Toyotas and/or Hondas are the best cars on the market, and GM makes unreliable junk (neither of which has been true for about 15 years. Toyotas are now rated *average* in terms of defect rate, not that the defect rate on them has increased but almost every other make has decreased their defect rates.) In light of this, GM spending money on advertising is just pissing money away.
""Say you've visited an airline company to book a trip to San Francisco and then you don't book it because you're just thinking about it. But then as you go to other websites like the BBC or USA Today the ads for that airline company follow you around from site to site, it's like a puppy dog following you home,"
And it's advertising something I DECIDED NOT TO BUY.
Or, it's advertising something I DID BUY AND DON'T WANT ANOTHER ONE RIGHT NOW.
Things that you don't want to have come up advertised on everything that you view, include dating web site, weight loss products, medical products, job search, lawyers...
I browsed for a RAM uprgrade, then I bought a module in a local store instead, and I was seeing advertisements for RAM for like a month, and this is WITHOUT using Facebook - although Google probably knows a lot about me. But I guess they don't know about other things that they could advertise to me.
As a former print journalist, I'm always delighted at anything which helps ensure the longterm survival of hard-copy media. From local through to national, media depends upon ad revenue, but has since the 'Net came along suffered badly at the hands of eejit marketeers who say print is dead, the Net is the place to sell a product to zillions.
Hilarious. Every week that passes sees more and more users turning to stuff like adblock and ghostery because they don't want advertising hype skipping after them like a 'puppy dog' (the guy who said that really does need to re-train for something else.)
So. . . Well done, GM, for chucking $10 million at something as daft as Facebook with a user profile that perfectly matches the unemployed adolescent. A further $1 million could be saved by shutting down your entire marketing department, too. Oh, and definitely well done, all the lunatics investing in FB. As their losses mount and regrets harden, realisation will dawn that a decent intelligently produced ad in the print media -- say, reminiscent of the Volkswagen classics and Heineken -- is and always will be the way to go.
Finally. . . I've also worked in advertising for many a year and what's so especially wunnerful about that is the fact that when a new client account is pitched for, we -- like every other agency -- always say that advertising has never sold anything and advertising never will. Advertising merely raises awareness. A-w-a-r-e-n-e-s-s. As in, not one TV commercial but many, many repetitions. As in, not one billboard but hundreds. Repetition counts. NOT relevance. Because what's relevant to a consumer may only occur *after* exposure to advertisement repetition.
The gurus of Internet advertising, however, never admit to that because well, they'd be as deservedly jobless as so many FB users. Media 'experts' of the kind ramping up the FB offer are just as institutionally dumb: they actually do want everyone to believe that "relevant" advertising can be "delivered", in as much the same way as a few centuries back they'd doubtless have been hyping investment in spaceships made of wood and sail-cloth as the best way to go harvest all that lovely green cheese of which the moon is made.
Shovelling ads out over the Internet where awareness of them can be blocked by the very target audience an advertiser hopes to capture is as futile as it gets. But don't ask prospective FB shareholders or corporate marketing depts or even ad agencies to accept that. They need their delusions of adequacy, even if it costs mega $millions to fuel such..
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