World Advertising News

By Davia Temin and Ian Anderson

But on social media, originality in advertising actually has found a new canvas, a new playground to explore. And the profession itself is being redesigned in real time.

Just as television was a disruptive force for print advertising, so social media is shaking up the entire ad industry - providing us with some best and worse examples of how to leverage the medium.

Proctor & Gamble stated earlier this year on an earnings call that they had altered their advertising mix to devote almost 35% of their advertising budget to social media... even though they were not specific about what is working best for each brand. Or as the old saying goes, I know that only 30% of my ad budget is working, I just don't know WHICH 30%...

In an earlier article in our "10 More Don'ts of Corporate Social Media" series, "Don't Confuse 'Thought Leadership" with "Branded Content' or 'Native Advertising.' " we discussed the broad range of paid "content" on social media, some more persuasive, creative, and transparent than others. Now we would like to explore the migration of advertising to social media: what is working, what is not, what does the future hold, and what are some examples of the most original, and the most creative advertising out there today.

Audiences are simply not paying attention to banner social media advertising. And these ads are not having direct impact on sales.

Viewers have become de-sensitized, or purposefully determined to block out advertisements and content that doesn't interest them, or that they find intrusive. Study after study confirms that "click-through rates" on internet ads are just 0.01%, and that 4 out of 5 users (80%) have never even bought a product because of a Facebook ad.

A service called EyeTrackShop has been literally studying where readers' eyeballs focus on web pages. They have found that users familiar with social media - especially younger users who have grown up with the websites - rarely look at advertisements in the sidebars, much less click on them, and make a purchase.

Last year, General Motors, went as far as to pull their paid advertising campaigns from Facebook all together (Facebook is the only major social media site with sidebar ads) in favor of using Facebook purely for free advertisement through their branded company page.

Some marketers do persist in sticking to this form of social media advertising - either because they do not what should supplant it, or they feel that it still has some benefit to their organization.

Regardless, sticking to older forms of social media advertising not only can waste money and viewer goodwill, but adversely affect whatever ROI metrics are used to determine effectiveness. And, if companies don't begin to innovate in their online advertising, they run the risk of falling behind their competitors as a result.