Commentary
Gnats On An Elephant's Back
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, June 28, 2020
Rishad Tobaccowala once famously described the ad industry as cockroaches. He meant it as a compliment, because like roaches, ad people always find a way to adapt, survive and persevere. But today, I'd like to compare the ad industry to gnats. The kind that bite the back of an elephant. …
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
Excellent commentary. Mislead by the big ad spending figures circulated constantly, many people assume that FB is the medium of choice---or even the "must buy" medium--for just about everybody, including those big TV branding advertisers. Not so. As pointed out in this article, most FB ad dollars come from what I term "mom and pop" ,small advertisers, many of them local not national in orientation. Therefore it's not realistic to expect that the likes of Coca Cola or Unilever will force FB to change by temporarily holding back their relatively small ad spend---even if it is bad public relations for FB and something of an annoyance.. Sadly----as this will introduce many other problems to solve----government intervention and/or regulation appears to be the only avenue that might be partially effective.
Really interesting!
Insightful as always. Although the mom & pop operations may not be aware of sophisticated media planning principles and metrics, every media planner I ever worked with, and there were many, was always proud to advise me that based on using "proper" media metrics and models, they could plan around any media platform and certainly around any media vehicle and deliver equivalent and often even better media metrics for their advertiser client.
As noted in another comment on Media Post, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 47 U.S.C. § 230 that provides immunity to social media companies on the internet must be eliminated by Congress and these companies must be required to act as fully responsible publishers based on the same regulations applied to main stream media.