eBay stopped online advertising and the traffic changed from paid links to unpaid links.
>The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents
It turns out that brand keyword advertising metrics are misleading, especially for established brands. Boycott gives opportunity for Unilever take a pause and run the experiment.
Nobody is saying that.
There is sickening commenting trend where people take maxim of every argument, then argue against that.
Additionally, the CPG model of ad buying doesn't make a lot of sense for eithe Google or Facebook, I'm not sure that this boycott makes much difference from a revenue perspective.
However, because Unilever are so huge, it probably does make a difference from a PR perspective, which is why we see lots of articles about this.
An advertiser dropping a major tech company today is refusing to be seen in all social contexts of one type, or all searches, etc.
If advertisers go ahead with this on a permanent basis it is a very interesting message, and I think we don't know so much about this since our past regulations were really based on outcomes with individuals and small companies as the victims of bad markets.
Facebook is a fat red X for young new markets who increasingly eschew it's tone-deaf cash cow platform for increasingly less commoditized alternatives. what once stood as a beacon of unity is now an increasingly ugly and divisive platform that's outlived its original purpose: predatory surveillance capitalism. Brands are in my opinion evolving, and using zuckerbergs increasing incompetence as an excuse to loose themselves from contracts.
I remember other websites providing similar functionality around the time Facebook appeared (not MySpace, Friendster, or any of those), including the ability to see who last visited your page: other members. You could then go visit their page. AFAIK, Facebook never had that. Instead it had "poke". If today you could see who is accessing your Facebook page, it would probably inhibit you from posting so much personal content. The entire design of today's Facebook is to dissuade you from activiely checking friends' or potential friends' pages on your own initiative. Instead Facebook wants to "feed" you content from other members (and advertisers). Default settings and behaviour discourage exploration and encourage relying on "suggestions" (by Facebook) instead. They even go so far as to ask for money to "promote" your page to others.
But I pretty much left Facebook when they introduced the News Feed — that’s when I realized they were after all of our privacy.
Sure, advertises commit their billion dollar adspent but Facebook can always claim their commited amount have been spent and populate the dashboards with realistic data.
The big brands do not base their ad expense on specific metrics like small businesses do. Once you are big enough to make billions, chasing matrics results limiting your market.
Infact, Facebook can hire a residential IP service provider like Luminati and use bots to click their advertiser's landing pages in name of malware checks and bill them and later when caught say "ohh we made an error" then even your CTR or landing page tracking metrics are going to fail.
I come from adtech, so I know what is possible in this space and what my smart colleagues are capable of doing.
Nobody should be trusting ad metrics from them
...what?! Do you have a source on that I can read? I thought my opinion of facebook couldn't go lower...