19th of September 2017

Published by The Drum See original article

Facebook exec says focus on mobile helps soften the impact of FMCG giant’s reduced digital spend

As the world’s biggest advertisers like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble continue to operate on lower advertising budgets and spend less on media buys in 2017, Facebook believes that putting its faith in mobile advertising will help it ride the storm going into the next year.

Ever since P&G’s top marketer Marc Pritchard announced that the Ariel and Pampers advertiser will review all of its agency contracts and called for more transparency in the media supply chain at the start of year, the advertising industry has seen some major shakeups.

Unilever dropped half of its creative agencies under its employment and reduced spend to $200m, while P&G reduced up to $140m of its ad spend and stopped investing in areas where it was unsafe for its brands, on top of its move to stop targeted ads on Facebook in 2016.

The cutbacks by the FMCG giants were necessary to clean up the supply chain and remove fraudulent inventory, acknowledges William Platt-Higgins, vice president, global client partnerships at Facebook in an interview with The Drum in Singapore, and notes that it is in everybody’s interest that fraud be eliminated from the ecosystem.

“We have seen various marketers and agencies taking a hard stance on this publicly and some clients very surgically try and cut out as much of that as possible. They have done so without any negative impact on their business because the inventory that they are weeding out is actually not good inventory to begin with,” explains Platt-Higgins.

“It won’t be eliminated completely, but I think all the clients that we work with in all regions of the world are focused on reducing fraud as much as they can and getting transparency into the supply chain by using third party verification.”

While Facebook has previously come under fire for reporting miscalculated metrics and for a lack of transparency because of its closed marketplace around its user data, brands and agencies still trust the social media giant, according to Platt-Higgins, which is why all Facebook verticals are growing, including FMCG.

Read the full article on The Drum.

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