Despite projections that the market for digital advertising will grow to $120 billion by 2021, the world’s biggest advertiser, P&G is opting for different ways to reach customers.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Suzanne Vranica reports that P&G cut its digital advertising budget by $100 million in the second half of 2017. With new data, P&G discovered it wasn’t getting what it wanted out of its ads. Vranica writes:
Once armed with more measurement data, P&G discovered that the average view time for a mobile ad appearing in a news feed, on platforms such as Facebook , was only 1.7 seconds. The Cincinnati-based company also realized some people were seeing P&G ads far too many times.
“Once we got transparency, it illuminated what reality was,” said Mr. Pritchard. P&G then took matters into its owns hands and voted with its dollars, he said.
Long the biggest advertiser in the world, P&G carries significant weight among marketers and its efforts are closely tracked.
With such a high profile advertiser cutting bait on digital strategies, it will be educational to watch how other companies respond. Will they follow suit, or will P&G be an outlier in an ever expanding market for digital advertising.