How to ruin your Brand in 7 easy steps

If zero is empty, two is a company and there is a crowd, then digital advertising is a disgusting cesspool of misinformation, irrelevant sophistry and meandering obfuscation.  

Unless you are an organization that relies and acts upon first-party data, there are more reasons to not advertise online than to do so.   

Without further ado, we shall enumerate 7 of them –  

1. Brand Safety Compromise  

There is no knowing where your branding occurs. There is zero real-time monitoring, you have no idea if your brand is being associated with misogynist and xenophobic demographic by displaying your logo next to hate or related imagery. 

2. Association with Fake News 

Even though fake news has come to mean different things to different people but placing your advertisements next to unverifiable sources of news in unreliable media platforms does not augur well for meaningful branding. 

3. Viewability  

The ad sizes for digital advertising are not standardized, with media queries a lot of ads can be managed but viewability is always a concern. There are also adblocking software and ad-free subscription services that manage to keep the brand out of focus from discerning consumers.    

4. Fraudulent Bot traffic 

Digital advertising is highly incentivized towards measuring data points that are for the most part meaningless to some definitive brand experience, direct sales or an increase in revenues. These incentives pave the way to increase impressions or view by engaging bots to manipulate count. 

5. Mistargeting

Mistargeting happens when you rely on poorly researched data. If you neither possess nor process first part data, mistargeting is bound to happen. Any organization, big or small, serious about brand building must build their data warehouse with user personas, customer segmentation and location intelligence.  

6. Unreliable Metrics 

Let me put it this way – the impression and viewership estimates provided by Google and Facebook are off by fifty percentage points. There is at least a fifty per cent markup in measurements and subsequent fees that an advertiser is charged.  

Not to mention the targeting of customers is highly inaccurate. Unless you have your own data sets for planning and subsequent comparison, your ad spend shall rise to meet similar objectives. 

7. Ad Fatigue 

Once the bombarding of advertisement starts – the fatigue builds in instantly. User is subjected to the same graphic and messaging over and about, that he gets bored and starts to ignore the advertisement. There is no real way of controlling ad frequency and ad fatigue happens more often than not.  

Epilogue  

Their world of online advertising has become far too skewed for the major players. The choices have narrowed down. Even with dwindling advertising, lack of overall demand and falling sales, the revenues of major digital advertising players keep on increasing.  

Diversification is not an option but an imperative for sustainable branding experience. The major take away is that an organization that engages in brand building must build their own data warehouse. For a lot of marketing woes out there, first-party data still holds the answer.  

Another thing to shun is over-reliance on meaningless metrics. The only metric worth measuring is revenues and every penny spent must be benchmarked to it.  

Contact us to learn more about building your data warehouse and employing first-party data to effectively communicate with consumers.