P&G To Put Money Back Into Advertising; Twitter Doesn't Get Much Political Ad Spend

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Lean Machine

You can’t slash your way to growth. Procter & Gamble, which made huge cuts to its marketing budgets to improve profits this year, now plans to invest more in advertising, management said on the company’s Q1 earnings call. The plan is to increase ad spend by 1.4% as a share of sales by the end of the year. The CPG giant shrank its roster of 6,000 (!) agencies by 40% last year, saving about $370 million in agency and production costs, as part of a five-year plan to get lean. “We delivered another strong quarter of productivity improvement and cost savings, and we increased investments in innovation, advertising and selling capacity to enhance our long-term prospects for faster, sustainable top-line growth and value creation,” said P&G CFO Jon Moeller. More in The Wall Street Journal. Or read the earnings call transcript.

Vote With Your Dollars

Twitter might be one of the big three online outlets for political messaging (Facebook and Google are the other two, natch), but the little blue bird isn’t seeing the green. According to Re/code, 85% of digital political revenue goes to Facebook and Google, leaving Twitter “a distant third.” Read more. But Twitter claims it’s just biding time until the primaries are over and the general election campaigning starts – at which point ad messaging will go from fundraising to branding. According to Twitter’s head of political ad sales, Jenna Golden, that’s where the platform really shines. Odd, though, considering Twitter has made attempts, as recently as a year ago, to pursue those precious DR dollars. TellApart! Where art thou in Twitter’s time of need?

Snackable Videos Get Snackable Ads

You know what’s good for short videos? Short ads. At least Google hopes so, as it rolled out six-second “bumper” ad units. Google’s Zach Lupei, product manager of video ads, writes in a blog post that these are “haikus of video ads.” (Would that make infomercials uploaded on YouTube the “epic poems of video ads?”) In any event, bumper ads are intended to drive incremental reach and can be purchased on a CPM basis through AdWords. And Google is really pushing those ads as supplements to TrueView or Google Preferred campaigns. “In early tests,” Lupei writes, “Bumpers drove strong lift in upper-funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration. We also see that Bumpers work well to drive incremental reach and frequency when paired with a TrueView campaign.”

Blocking The Source

The IAB’s Dave Grimaldi savages network-level ad blocking in a column for Ad Age. His attack focuses on the lack of user choice when a telecom like Digicel or Three strips out ads through a partnership with Shine or another ad blocker. “Although there is an opt-out mechanism, by using Shine, Digicel is indiscriminately blocking ads for all customers by default, without offering a real choice or any transparency into their actions.” In a response, Shine falls back on the ad tech and fraud bogeymen. “The IAB leadership … would be best served by focusing on the true ‘bad actors’ – those ad-tech companies that draw in consumers, without their choice, into $7.2 billion of ad fraud in the U.S. this year alone.” Read that.

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