Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, the company’s chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard explained that its attempt to very narrowly target its ads on the social media platform had not seen enough return.
“We targeted too much, and we went too narrow,” he said in an interview.“Now we’re looking at: What is the best way to get the most reach but also the right precision?”
Questions for Facebook
P&G’s move, coming from the biggest advertising spender in the world (its 2015 budget came in at a reported USD 7.2bn), is a decisive one.
It suggests that Facebook may have to reconsider its ad business, which relies on the premise that the more targeted an ad is, the more valuable it is to brands - the opposite of how P&G describes its recent experience.
As Sharon Terlep and Deepa Seetharaman write in the WSJ, “P&G could be the bellwether on how consumer goods companies and big brands use digital advertising.
“Over the past year, some marketers, specifically consumer product companies, have discovered they need to go ‘much more broad’ with their advertising on social media sites such as Facebook.”
Beauty: be ‘less interruptive’
L’Oréal’s chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet recently spoke of the need to create branded experiences rather than traditional adverts when marketing beauty brands online.
Speaking to the Financial Times, the beauty industry expert said diversifying a brand’s digital offering is increasingly crucial to keeping consumers engaged.
“This is really about creating greater content and experiences, greater formats for our consumers — especially in an age where ad-blocking is going mainstream,” she said.
“The whole thing that ad-blocking is pointing to is classical advertising fatigue,” she continued. “We need to reinvent the experience and we need to make it less interruptive, more immersive, more rewarding, more personalised.”