Facebook offers 'fantastic' opportunity for marketers, says Dentsu Aegis global digital director Jerry Daykin as he disputes 'irresponsible' London School of Marketing white paper
The London School of Marketing has released a white paper into the use of Facebook by advertisers over its decade in existence which stated by the end of last year marketers were left “disappointed” by the platform, a claim that Dentsu Aegis global digital director Jerry Daykin has taken issue with.
The paper, Facebook Marketing Through the Years, has been written by Upekha Makumbura for the school, and has aimed to explore the development of advertising on the world’s largest social media platform during its existence and “find out what went wrong”.
However, Daykin has come to the defence of Facebook after reading the paper, having described it as “an interesting history” but added “it’s clearly built out from news articles rather than any meaningful research or discussions with marketers.”
The paper cites media sources such as Mashable, Ad Age and AdWeek in delivering its year-by-year account on the development of Facebook as an advertising platform. However Daykin told The Drum: “It makes a big deal about minor technical releases and barely mentions radical transformations such as the launch of promoted posts and mobile newsfeed reach.”
“Unfortunately, like much written about Facebook it reinforces a false narrative that organic reach was once meaningfully high but has been actively lowered for marketers to make more money. The opportunity to pay to promote posts to a vast, targeted audience is far more valuable to marketers than the opportunity to reach a few, and the platform offers that now more so than ever. Facebook will almost certainly make more in advertising revenue over the years 2015 and 16 than it has for its entire history prior to that and with good reason - it offers a fantastic opportunity to drive relevant scale for marketers willing to pay for it.”
Daykin continued to criticise the lack of research, results and evidence within the paper. “It is in many ways an irresponsible conclusion designed clearly to garner media attention, he added.”
He also highlighted the piece by Forrester Research analyst Nate Elliott which is another source cited within the paper as one which “spells out the negative shift in the false hope of ' one to one' relationship marketing” and added that there was a failure to reflect any opportunities that were generated to replace those.
“They state that in 2014 the last hope of driving ROI were dashed, but offer absolutely no evidence on this point - Whilst Facebook continues to offer competitive CPMs and strong ROI in research I see every week I'll still continue to recommend it to my clients,” added Daykin.
“Rather than advertisers leaving it in droves, Facebook's bigger challenge is that increased competition for its inventory is beginning to push up CPMs which requires them to more to differentiate themselves from other media and prove the greater impact they can have.”
The full whitepaper can be downloaded for free from the London School of Marketing website.