TLDR: Procter & Gamble cuts online advertising by 78% (!) and German online marketers hardly feel any impact? Because an estimated 70% of spendings in D go to BLACKBOX GooBook. Advertisers can neutrally check the efficiency of these investments at any time. A cooperation of the Blackbox is not required.
78% less online spendings from the biggest advertiser - and nobody feels it?
It's strange that in May Horizont writes about the dramatic budget cuts that Procter & Gamble has not only decided to make, but has already made. Then it fulfills its journalistic duty of care and investigates by asking German marketers about the effects. And then she gets as an answer from the online marketers: "none" (UIM) and "not affected" (ASMI). Aha, ok, so the biggest prank concert in recent online history is taking place, but no one feels any impact.
Can this be? What is going on here, we asked ourselves, and it took us a bit to find 2 explanations.
- The digital market is much smaller than it appears to the media and marketing trade.
- Within the digital market, we don't have an 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one sees, but a giant black box hiding. We call it the "Hamburg Black Box," others call it GooBook.
Reality Check - German online marketers no longer represent the German market.
In the following chart, we have referred exclusively to Nielsen's advertising data and made some assumptions.
- Assumption 1: If P&G, the largest German advertiser, has been cutting online budgets for some time now to an unbelievable minus 78%, and (in the U.S.) succinctly states that this has no negative effects, then we can rightly assume that other fast-moving branded companies are doing the same and are also not missing anything. The lack of effects among German online marketers would therefore have to become apparent. Now, one could assume that the answers of the marketers are intentional or unintentional misinformation or "fake data". But that is not very plausible. It would be stupid not to correct, because the (concealed) damage would become even greater. So, if you really do not feel any effects, what is the explanation?
- Assumption 2: The deducted FMCG budgets never landed with the German marketers, so they don't feel anything. Logical!
Here the chart
What to do as an advertiser? Of course, you can also cut online budgets yourself - and without negative consequences.
Of course, the first step is to determine what effect the 70% of online advertising budgets that go to Google and Facbook (often, by the way, by specially assigned "employees") actually have. All it takes is a little expertise, creativity, and a willingness to experiment.
Ex post data analyses are out of the question. Since the Hamburg black box remains beyond *any* control even after a decade of intensive lobbying by German media players, determining GooBook's impact contribution on the basis of data that GooBook itself provides would not be a good idea. You might as well roll the dice or play other KPI shell games, digital performance data is in principle not controllable if it is measured by external sources. That's technology, so please don't take our distrust personally, dear people at GooBook.
What is a good and working way, on the other hand, are external methods for checking the efficiency of GooBook investments. This is possible at any time, a cooperation of the black box is not required for this, you just have to isolate the measure to be checked as an advertiser within the framework of experiments. We will be happy to tell you exactly how this works and, as consultants, we will of course help you 😉 .
Outlook - What's next for P&G and others?
The colleagues from the (recommendable) Netzwirtschaft have pointed out an interesting interview with Kristina Bulle, her sign CMO for P&G DACH.
What she says we can only support, on every single point.
"Digital was, is and will remain an important part of our marketing. But what we now urgently need in our industry is a new realism. We need to focus again on what is really important: on creativity and on what consumers want. A central challenge for the professionals is the right accentuation and the integration of the different channels. It comes down to the right interaction, as with so many things."
That's right. So everything is still in motion, and we wish you lots of fun and success surfing the next, somewhat sportier wave in the media market. For advertisers, it is a good chance to get out of the "digital matrix", the illusory world of false media data.