Untruth-itude

Statistics Can Be Bothersome

When ecommerce marketing details get in your way, ignore them.

Every once in a while we're afforded a nonchalant gaze behind a commercial curtain. "Certainly," popular opinion dictates, "these billion dollar ecommerce companies must know what they're doing!"

They don't.


Advertising has never been an exact science, no matter what metrics companies say. How do you measure a brand except subjectively? What really is an impression? Just who is compelled to convert into
a customer? All very foggy stuff that has, for years, been addressed by complex and overly-wrought pseudo-social-science.

In a very well-detailed article, The New York Times' David Segal explores the complicated and obtuse business of marketing using video content. It seems that it's not very efficient:

Vindico, [ed.: rhymes (kinda) with vindictive] an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”

Is there another industry that would permit such ambiguity? Such outright failure? Basically, your track record is near 2/3rds failure.

It gets worse.

This Wild West Online Advertising Circus actually impacts companies negatively. A lot. When presented with performance data, an agency responsible for a major video-heavy marketing initiative did an audit. The results?

“We looked at this data and my jaw dropped,” Ms. VanHeirseele remembers. “And then I felt a little sick to my stomach.”

[D]isappointment turned to rage when she read the list of domain names where the ads were running; it included pornographic websites. The team opened one site with an especially lewd name and gaped in horror. “Oh my God,” some shouted. Others cursed. Ms. VanHeirseele picked up her phone to call the media buyer in a fury.

Just FYI: the product being advertised was a maternity-related item. I'm pretty cool with porn in its glorious diversity but I'm pretty certain I would be held accountable (and fired) if my client was in the mom business and I orchestrated the media buy on porn sites.

What's really at the core of this deception? Or lack of attention? Or total, outright failure? Of course, it's cash:

“Except for the advertisers, no one has a vested interest in spending less money,” said Jeff Semones, president of M80, a direct-marketing company, who was at the conference. “Whether it’s the publishers, the ad platforms, the agencies that manage these activities. Right now, it behooves almost no one to clean up this mess.”

Read the whole (very in-depth) article here:

The Great Unwatched, New York Times, May 3, 20014 by David Segal