JP Morgan Chase publicly announced that they'd cut the number of sites on which they advertise from 400,000 to 5,000 - with no difference in marketing outcomes.
YouTube announced that its Creator program is being given a new floor. Where previously any YouTube creator could participate in the flow of advertising, now only those creators with a set minimum of followers are qualified.
Fake news, fraud, viewability issues and dodgy content have pushed many marketers to pound the table and demand a new level of care around distribution of their ads. In so many words, P&G's Mark Pritchard said we'll play in a somewhat smaller arena if we just stop the nonsense and get back to making great ads and showing them to real people.
Welcome to the age of less.
This week's Drift is proudly underwritten by Krux, the Salesforce DMP. Krux drives more valuable content, commerce, and advertising experiences for the world's leading marketers and media companies. Clients include Anheuser-Busch In-Bev, JetBlue, Kellogg, L'Oréal, Meredith Corporation, NewsCorp, the BBC, and Peugeot Citroen. Learn more at www.krux.com.
For two decades, the growth and capitalization of the online ad business has been built on assumptions of abundance; that more page views, more ad calls, more reach and more clicks would always be the answer. Now we are faced with a different question: how might our companies thrive in an age where we must manage scarcity?
Our planning for this era has taken on a bit of urgency. If the headlines above weren't enough, there's the simple fact that the war for reach and scale is over. (Spoiler alert: Facebook and Google won.)
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but supposedly the Chinese character for crisis combines characters of both danger and opportunity. (If not true, it should be.) In this crisis, there is indeed a huge set of opportunities. Now that it's no longer possible (or desirable) to reach a bazillion users, we can get back to knowing our customers, speaking their language, creating great stories for them. We can pull the reach needle out of our arm and start a respectable life solving business and marketing problems.
We can all get more of what we want. In the era of less.
