Toothpaste, a 7,000-year-old product, is rarely a leading indicator. But the world’s top purveyor of the stuff—along with laundry detergent, dish soap, diapers, and other sundries—made a decision earlier this year that could portend a big shift in the advertising industry.
Procter & Gamble, the sprawling 180-year-old consumer goods conglomerate, had, like most of corporate America, readily embraced digital advertising. YouTube pre-roll videos and targeted Facebook ads—whereby advertisers select narrow categories of people to whom they wish to pitch their products—were the name of the game.
Until, that is, they weren’t. In the second quarter of 2017, as part of general cost-cutting measures, Procter & Gamble slashed digital ad spending by more than $100 million. The Ohio company also announced it was moving away from targeted advertising. (On Facebook, “I can literally target 50-year-old women in Peoria, Illinois, who like cats and whisky,” explains Champlain College digital marketing professor Elaine Young.) And what price did P&G pay for this pull-back? None: They reported 2 percent sales growth—results that surprised even industry analysts.
Which brings us to the $64,000 question. Or more precisely, the $100,000 question of the day: Did the roughly hundred grand that Kremlin-linked groups spent on social media ads in 2016 have an effect on the presidential election? (By way of comparison, Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent around $450 million in total, including about $150 millions on television ads.) Targeted social media ads are apparently not that effective at selling dental floss, as the Procter & Gamble example suggests. But were they enough to install Donald Trump in the White House?
To hear the media—and the social media companies themselves—tell it, the answer is obvious. Russian-sponsored Facebook ads and Twitter bots join uber-villains James Comey and Julian Assange to constitute the parade of horribles that put the underqualified real estate tycoon in the Oval Office. In a more-in-sorrow-than-anger performance before Senate and House committees last week, a Facebook honcho humble-bragged that some 126 million Americans saw Russian-sponsored ads in the run-up to the election last year. Left unsaid was that Facebook, an advertising business, has a vested interest in talking up the reach—and the efficacy—of the ads it hosts.
While 126 million impressions may sound like a lot, the figure pales in comparison to many social media ad campaigns. (An “impression” is every time an ad is seen, whether or not it is clicked on.) In 2013, Frito-Lay ran a contest in which people voted on new flavors of potato chips to offer. More than 1 billion Facebook impressions were generated by the gimmick. Even niche products can draw a huge audience: More than 124 million people have viewed a Facebook ad for the Squatty Potty, a stool that sits underneath a traditional toilet. Twitter, for its part, hasn’t been left out of the party. Earlier this year, a Twitter user asked Wendy’s how many retweets he would need to garner to win free nuggets for life. Wendy’s responded: 18 million. The rejoinder went viral, reportedly generating some 330 million impressions.
So it’s probably not surprising that Mark Zuckerberg initially claimed it was “crazy” that Facebook may have affected the outcome of the election. Now he says the company he founded may indeed have swayed things. That would be bad for democracy, of course. But it’s not good for business to scoff at the advertising power of one’s platform.
The truth is it’s a complicated process to assess whether social media ads work that well. “First and foremost, if one wants to assess the effectiveness of advertising, and truly know the answer, one has to run randomized experiments,” explains Eric T. Bradlow, the chair of the marketing department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “The simplest form, as they are known, are called A/B tests. In this case, the experimenter needs to randomize who gets exposed to ads and who doesn’t. Then, one can simply look at the difference in, say, voting pattern, buying habits, click-through rates, etc., of the treated group versus the control group.”
At this point, we simply don’t have these data, so we can’t assess in this way whether those who saw Russian-sponsored ads were ultimately more inclined to pull the lever for Trump than those who didn’t. Further complicating the narrative is that some Russian-bought ads were not, on their face, pro-Trump at all. It’s recently emerged, for example, that the Internet Research Agency, a supposedly Kremlin-linked troll farm, bought ads in support of Black Lives Matter. The BLM ads were even targeted to communities where they would have had particular resonance, like Ferguson, Missouri, the birthplace of the movement.
This suggests a few possibilities: Russian efforts may have been geared more towards sowing general societal discord than helping the Trump campaign. (The chaos-as-an-objective strategy is indeed one we’ve seen in Eastern European countries in recent years.) Or perhaps it was a brilliant jujitsu move, and the Kremlin had the insight that Black Lives Matter is unpopular enough that increasing its visibility would help the Trump campaign. On the other hand, it’s always possible that the move was in earnest, and that a particularly woke devotee of Ta-Nehisi Coates is currently strolling the streets of St. Petersburg.
Social media ads do offer the same value proposition to political campaigns they do to consumer goods companies—the ability to target with incredible precision. “Around 2004, when the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign led the way in micro-targeting, it had gotten down to targeting households,” notes Dennis G. Lennox, the former executive director of the Virgin Islands Republican party. “Now, several years later, campaigns are using big data to target the same household as 2004, but with the different messages for each household member.”
Nonetheless, those who’ve worked in campaigns firsthand express doubts about the efficacy of social media advertising. An ad is “only as good as what it’s next to,” observes one political consultant who has managed congressional campaigns. A pricey TV spot running on a prestigious cable drama, a Cartier watch ad in an upmarket print publication—these can work.
But social media ads, crammed into an endless stream of cat videos, incoherent political rants, and inane customer service complaints don’t have that pull. Viewers “don’t respect the content, so they don’t respect the ad,” he says. They’re also easy to ignore; years of web surfing have conditioned Internet users simply to tune out online ads. Indeed, an experiment run by PC World in 2013 found that Facebook ads have abysmal click-through rates—that is, the percentage of people who tangibly respond to an ad they see. That suggests they’re easily ignored.
The consultant adds that the best political ads persuade voters—that’s the purpose of negative ads, for example. His experience in campaigns suggests that social media ads are horrible at persuasion: “Someone would have to be an idiot to be swayed by them,” he avers. TV ads are where the real persuasion occurs.
“Facebook ads are hardly a substitute for a good candidate with a compelling message,” concludes Dennis Lennox, the former Virgin Islands director. And in 2016, “build the wall” trumped “you’re all irredeemable”—probably regardless of what the Russkies posted on Facebook.
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
