• by Ray Kingman , Op-Ed Contributor, October 6, 2017

Facebook and Google represent an advertising duopoly. In a sense, we’ve come full circle and returned to the early days of the commercial internet, when walled gardens like AOL and Yahoo were the main games in town.

Of course, walls are “in” these days, as any political junkie or “Game of Thrones” fan can tell you. But, while walls are intended to bring consumers a sense of structure and security, critical issues such as ad fraud, viewability and fake news are far less transparent behind the walls.

In fact, while advertisers and their agencies have become more involved in knowing who they’re targeting and how they’re measuring ad spend effectiveness, the duopoly will ultimately disappoint, because Google and Facebook, for different reasons, each have a messy data problem.

Facebook looks like the place to be, but your brand’s mileage will vary.

To its credit, Facebook has leveraged its social footprint through slick tools that make online advertising really easy from Fortune 500 media buyers all the way down to mom and pop small businesses. The trouble is, Facebook remains a trial and error black box when it comes to validating intent and measuring attribution.

Inside that box, the assumption is that there is a deep reservoir of lifestyle and brand preference data just waiting to be tapped into. These preferences come from consumers sharing information by taking quizzes and posting memes. But because Facebook is a black box, you have no way to connect the behavior you’re buying with a defined audience or context.

Moreover, while Facebook cultivates a narrative of consumers sharing frequently and liberally, the fact is if you’re a marketer focused on big household decisions like mortgages, insurance, cars, etc., any fundamental targeting metrics like income, ownership and life stage run dry pretty quickly when you’re drawing from a well of inferences connected by likes on memes and quizzes.

And for B2B marketers beyond the mom and pop store, Facebook offers neither the framework nor the scale required. The only corporate audience sharing memes and quizzes are social media managers.

Google has a low-quality inventory problem. Google’s advertising business model is designed to leverage a captive audience across low-cost inventory. Rounding out your media buy with low-cost inventory is common practice. However, campaigns that aren’t connecting qualified audiences where they are likely to transact (see Facebook) suffer from marginal engagement with serious prospects.

In those scenarios, the only alternative is to buy a lot of volume and retarget when a serious prospect resurfaces elsewhere. Paying for your campaign to find your real prospect is inefficient.

Now that we live in a world of programmatic audience targeting where the marketer can essentially onboard and execute “direct mail online,” we shouldn’t have to round out media buys with low-cost CPMs to manage budgets or establish reach to marginal prospects. Associating audiences with quality inventory in order to drive verified reach is crucial.

Real attribution solutions — the ones that go way beyond “last click” — always reveal what works in audiences and media investment.

Brands will ignore this warning. There’s an old saying: “Nobody ever got fired for going with IBM.” These days that logic applies to Google and Facebook. Marketers embrace the duopoly because Google and Facebook are safe.

That used to be true of some other walled gardens, too. Eventually, transparent attribution and measurement will open the black box, because enterprise brands expect more than a safe bet.