As Bob Hoffman put it. He may be blunt, but he always hits the nail on the head with his relevant, accurate and substantiated comments. And he certainly had a point this time..
In his last issue of 20 November, Adformatie posits “Online media rules” as one of the conclusions of the major marketing survey. DVJ Insights, a large Dutch research firm, led the questioning and summarised the conclusions for 2020 in 8 findings/developments. So one of them is the role of online. To the question “What type of medium do you have the highest expectations in terms of reach?” 30% of professionals answer, “Branded content on social media”.
Thirty percent therefore mainly look to social media to position their brand. Last year this was 25%. E-mail is number two with 15% (compared to 10% last year) and “conversations on social media” scored 11% (compared to 12% last year). In other words, in the top 3 we find “social” twice and with a good dose of rounding off that means almost half of the marketeers have the highest expectations for social… For your information, the medium par excellence for building awareness, TV, drops from 12% to 7%….
At about the same time AdAge comes up with a white paper in collaboration with Spider Labs (a renowned company specialized in anti-fraud solutions) whose conclusions completely threw us! Ad fraud today, according to their research, amounts to around 66 billion dollars! In other words, about 20% of the total online spending is lost to fraud and is therefore a complete waste! Wait, it seems you don’t quite get it: every minute, dear marketer, about 125,000 euros’ worth of online advertising ‘disappears’ into the dustbin! Every minute a big fat Porsche is lost to fraud and scams! Online advertising is of course more than just social advertising, but it still makes up a very substantial part of it.
In that environment, dear marketeer, you continue to believe in online advertising. In that environment, you continue to adjust your budgets so that you can spend more in social. Because you know better than anyone that online and social make the difference and that online advertising is the only way to reach your target group. You do so in good conscience. You do so, based on your conviction that the battle for the consumer is taking place there. Ipsos Canada has interviewed more than 300 of your colleagues about their ideas on media consumption in 2020. Those peers estimate that 91% of the audience uses Instagram at least once a month. In reality, it’s 42%. On twitter, the marketing specialists surveyed think that this is 74%. The reality is 25%. For TikTok the number stands at about 56% compared to 13%.
While Canadian marketeers believe that the shift from linear TV to on-demand is inevitable, even more so, that linear TV is on the brink of death, in 2020, linear watching appears to have risen from 2.4 hours a day to 2.5 hours, an increase of more than 4%. These are just some data from this jaw-dropping study. A study that exposes the gap between those who call themselves specialists and the real world, between those who have to market a product and those who have to buy it…
Dear marketeer, no, you are not completely wrong and online advertising is not completely wrong. You’re not, but you have been warned: don’t put all your eggs in the online basket and above all, in your media plan, choose the online advertising that does operate in good faith and that can be controlled! And that we are all convinced we are right and that we know it better? Well, maybe we should try to tone it down a bit in 2021.
By the way, did you notice that the last sentence is the only one in this text that refers to “us”?
Enjoy the end-of-year period, dear marketeer and see you next year….