Turning Advertisers off with visual Vomit

Posted on by Billy Tucker

As a user, Facebook is frustrating, and as an advertiser, it’s downright useless.

Humans are skilled at ignoring the visual vomit around them, and these are skills that have been perfected over many years of increasingly desperate advertising techniques – from the subliminal to the ridiculous.

Stealing 5 minutes to get critical updates on the latest cat meme is what Facebook is all about, and monetising that experience has mostly been limited to targeted advertising (selling your personal details to advertisers so that they can craft ads most likely to drive a response). But with just $10 of annual revenues from each of its 600m or so engaged users Facebook has a long way to go to satisfy its many Shareholders’ many expectations!

The real challenge for Facebook though is that economically it’s still a One Trick Pony with 8 out of every 10 dollars of revenue coming from advertising. So how does Facebook outgrow the rebounding economy in order to drive up shareholder returns?

I think they have three pillars of advertising growth ahead of them, each of which will likely trade off user experience for advertiser revenue:

More advertising inventory – as the rate of subscriber growth slows more inventory is required to avoid an overall slide in the supply of advertising space – meaning more of the Facebook page will be dedicated to paid media resulting in a poorer user experience

More personal advertising – Facebook will give as much data as it can to advertisers to make the advertising product more effective – meaning Facebook will go even further to leverage their users’ personal data

More interruptive advertising – as consumers get better at ignoring the Advertising Vomit, Facebook will push its products to become more interruptive, meaning you have to wait for them to finish or actively “push” them out of the way. A poorer experience but one that is likely to yield more clicks for the advertiser.

And yet, the real challenge here for Facebook is that it just isn’t a great place to advertise for most businesses. It’s neither a great Brand advertising platform, nor is it a great Performance advertising platform – and in this analytically informed world of Marketing, the investment required to evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising platform is lower than ever before – meaning most big advertising dollars have already come and gone.

When brand is not enough

Posted on by Billy Tucker
Great (british) service

On a recent trip I discovered that Virgin Atlantic aircrew behave like they’re between parties, parties I’m not on the guest list for. To be fair, old dags like me with four kids in tow are made to feel about as welcome as a recently discovered STI.

After three painful flights and a comedy of errors it struck me though, maybe all that cooler than thou jet-set party people bullshit is actually as God himself intended (Sir Richard that is).

My theory emerged when I spotted a peculiar magazine selection in the rack. Wallpaper and Style Street were propped at a jaunty angle, albeit they remained so for the entire 14 hour flight. Hardly surprising they didn’t find a reader I thought given the Virgin customers around me were less likely to want to read them than the Virgin staff. Yet those magazines were carefully positioned to enhance the Virgin Atlantic lifestyle and most likely described in nauseating marketing speak in some operations manual back at Party Town, aka Virgin HQ. I suspect somewhere in the depths of the Virgin Marketing Strategy is a view that there are enough <insert B-list celebrity here> wannabees to build them an airline that makes them feel like they’ve cracked the code of cool.

But here’s the rub. The party’s exclusive and customers are there to fill out the numbers. Virgin have recruited staff who look like the customers they wish they had, i.e. the low disposable income high spending b-grade party-set, and have missed the unfortunate side effect, those people aren’t interested in much beyond themselves – and it shows.  The smallest request is met with a gnash of veneers, and eyebrows are ever so slightly raised (I think) at the suggestion of a problem.

What I don’t get, though, it why Virgin Atlantic ads suggest they are something that they are not? Am I to believe from the TVC below that the airline who suggested you may just get into the Mile High Club on one of their planes is trying to be something different? Because it isn’t obvious yet. And until the service rhetoric has become service reality I’d dial back the messaging slightly.

All in all I’d say the biggest disservice Virgin Atlantic has done, to me and to other Virgin virgins, is to set the expectation too high. They have allowed their marketing message to get ahead of the organisation’s ability to execute which has led to a jarring customer experience. I have no intention of flying Virgin Atlantic again, or any of the Virgin branded airlines for that matter. Qantas just invited me to a BBQ.