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Most marketers had happily paid for programmatic advertising over the past decade and took great pride in being “digitally transformed”. They also liked to use vanity metrics like CPM prices, number of impressions, and click rates as these were easy to measure and easy to report. Buying digital ads became as easy as playing a video game. The colorful dashboards showed them which great discounts they received (“cost efficiency”), how many impressions they bought (“reach”) and how many clicks they received (“reach”). Performance “). But this triple cocktail of low price, long range, and high performance was addicting because every part of it has been counterfeited by scammers.

The low CPM prices were only possible on fraudulent or fake websites that plagiarized all of their content or did not use any content at all. Real publishers with a real human audience had a real cost to produce the content. As a result, they couldn’t sell ads at very low CPM prices. Also, there are a limited number of people who visit their locations each month. so they couldn’t magically manifest much more reach. But fake websites could easily do this by buying traffic and expanding the target audience. No one can force a herd of people to go to the same place all at the same time to increase traffic and audience. However, it doesn’t take more than a command line to instruct a large botnet to generate a large number of pageviews on a site – the exact amount it was paid for. And these bots click on the ads too. Not too much, otherwise it would be suspicious. Bots tune their click-through rates to be in the range of 5 to 15%, which is always higher than people’s actual click-through rates. In this way, marketers are tricked into believing that ads on fake websites perform much better than ads on real websites with real people. Hence, they allocate more or all of their budget to programmatic channels that work with such fake and deceptive websites.

Do you see how it all worked together? Greater amounts of ad impressions, lower CPM prices, and better performance – in fact the illusions of reach, cost effectiveness, and performance – resulted in what is now known as the “Lost Decade of Digital Marketing”. When “programmatic” ad buying really increased in 2012-13, the deviation from reality really increased too. Note the green and yellow lines in the table below that represent human use of the internet, social media, and cell phones. These two lines have been pretty flat since 2012-13. This suggests that real human usage had already reached a plateau and was already maxed out. However, the blue line for spending on digital advertising continued to go up. How can this separation from reality be explained? Easily with bots. Bots are simple software programs that can be controlled remotely to automate browsing (load more pages) and simulate desirable human actions such as clicks on ads. It was technically trivial to simulate all the things marketers wanted to buy – more reach, more clicks, lower prices.

programmatic started in 2012-13

Augustine Fou

The rise of the programmatic also corresponded to the digital transformation of the marketer. Marketers were shifting more and more budgets from offline to digital channels. Conveniently, vanity metrics in the digital realm reinforced the “rightness” of these “go digital” decisions so that they were reported across the board and became the standard metrics for reporting the success of digital marketing campaigns. In doing so, marketers have lost sight of the real metrics that should matter – business results. Obviously, the results weren’t that easy to report – after all, marketers had to figure out the complex attribution models that determined which sales were driven by which ad or action. What they forgot is that advertisers don’t need to know who bought the shampoo – which person; Advertisers really just need to know that people who were exposed to ads bought shampoo at a higher price than people who weren’t shown the ads. This was a perfect example of “too much data” from digital channels, which led marketers into a rabbit hole that yielded poorer insights.

Some marketers have had the courage to turn off experimentation with their digital media. Interestingly, everyone found that turning off their digital advertising spending didn’t change business results – eBay (2015), P&G (2018), Chase (2017), Uber (2019), AirBnB (2020). What did they spend millions of dollars on in digital if it didn’t lead to real, measurable business results? We may never know. What is clear, however, is that more marketers need to scrutinize their own digital editions and do things differently than they did in the last decade – or should I say “lost decade”?

Marketers should pay higher CPMs by buying ads from real publishers with real human audiences. You know you have to show your ad to someone before you can get any business results, right? Showing ads for bots, no matter how low the CPM prices are, doesn’t do any extra business for you, even if it looks really good in the video game called Digital Ads. You got the highest score ever this year because you bought more ads than ever before at lower CPM prices than ever before. Yay! But that wasn’t marketing.

Total costs against unit costs

Augustine Fou

Paying higher CPM prices doesn’t necessarily mean higher costs either. This is because CPMs are unit prices (cost per thousand digital impressions). If you’ve purchased fewer ad impressions even at higher CPMs, your overall costs may actually be lower. You don’t need the large quantities or the enormous “range”. It’s not real reach, it’s just the illusion of reach when you don’t “reach” people anyway. You don’t have to buy as many ad impressions to reach real people. People tend to visit a small handful of mainstream sites repeatedly. Although they occasionally visit long-tailed niche content sites, the “scale” amounts of impressions from the programmatic long-tail are also an illusion that has helped scammers delight in marketers’ ad dollars over the past decade.

Finally, accept lower click-through rates. People very rarely click ads (when was the last time you clicked an ad on purpose?). However, the lack of clicks does not mean that the campaign has performed poorly. On the other hand, the presence of bots fake clicks means that the campaign was poorly carried out. These clicks are not real, and the high click-through rates (click-through rates) don’t mean real performance. When you understand the above, you will also understand that the most important factor in digital marketing is getting your ad in front of a human first and foremost. Everything else – like targeting, visibility, click rates, etc. – is secondary. Smart marketers forego ad tech targeting (costs more, works worse) and just show ads to Safari and Firefox users. Savvy people use iPhones (Safari browsers) and Firefox browsers. Bots prefer to pretend to be Chrome in order to make more money from ad targeting. Advertisers who serve ads to Safari and Firefox users also get a lot – 50-70% lower CPMs – since other marketers don’t even bid on those browsers. Showing ads to people is better than targeting business results in the first place because the targeting may not be accurate and bots will pretend to be the audience segments you are targeting.

After the last decade of digital transformation, marketers should now pull out the “lost decade” of digital marketing based on vanity metrics – low prices, wide reach, high clicks. Time to think differently and do different digital marketing. Pay high CPM for ads on real publisher sites served to real human audiences (finite reach) and low clicks. You will see that you are doing better digital marketing, indeed marketing that actually leads to real business results.