There definitely is -- and it may still be too early to say "was" -- a period of social media advertising frenzy among Fortune 500 companies in the last few years. Until fairly recently (with GM's $30M pullout of Facebook advertising the most visible harbinger). Now the honeymoon is just about over, and with it will go the easy money that had basically been throwing itself at Facebook's heels. Facebook in specific, and social advertising in general, will have to find a way to deliver
actual results in line with people's sky-high expectations. And they'll have to do it soon. This won't be easy, given that Facebook's ad sales teams have spent the last 3+ years promising the moon to F500 marketing and advertising execs.
But why were all these advertisers so willing to be wooed in the first place?
Because there's a very real (and growing) hole in the advertising landscape. With the erosion of TV advertising as a reliable way to generate mass impressions at scale, advertisers are anxious to find a replacement. TV is still the largest advertising vechicle, by media spend, for most F500 companies (if not all of them?). But premiums on TV are growing each year, even while total ratings are declining, audiences are dispersing (both across networks and onto other platforms), and ads are basically avoidable. While the bloom was on the Facebook rose, it seemed like a hell of a savior to people desperately seeking one.
The fallacy underpinning the leap from TV onto the Facebook bandwagon was the assumption that social media could be bought, and advertised on, in pretty much the same way as TV. In reality, the advertiser needs to be much more savvy and sophisticated about social advertising. He needs to worry about more than just reach, frequency, and CPMs. He'll need to consider the quality of his content, refresh rates for content, geo-targeting and context-targeting, the relevancy algorithms powering his anticipated reach and engagement figures, and the micro-segments to which he serves different ads at different times. Instead, right now he's spent the last few years simply throwing giant checks at Facebook and expecting TV reach, impressions, etc.
I'd consider both parties at fault here: the advertisers for being naive, and Facebook for playing to the deep-pocketed suckers. Picking the low-hanging fruit, in this case, may have set back Facebook's credibility within the advertising community for quite some time. And it also set expectations that Facebook wasn't, and still isn't, prepared to meet. (In fairness, I'm sure Facebook received a great deal of pressure to take the easy ad money in order to make its books look as attractive as possible in anticipation of the IPO).