Marketers Will Need to Rethink the Role of Digital Platforms

What if it was never going to last? More than three decades have passed since the first banner ad appeared on a website. Digital wasn't just a new frontier, it was a place that experienced stratospheric year-over-year growth—and the unspoken expectation was that growth would continue forever. That expectation makes sense when you consider how the web became a bigger part of our lives; with every passing year, millions more people got online. As the number of connected swelled, it only seemed logical that digital advertising would continue to expand. But then, things changed. It's hard to put an exact date on precisely when the mood shifted. Was it when the digital ad market largely coalesced around a handful of super-giant tech companies? Was it when privacy legislation and consumer attitudes changed, and the practices that were once routine became verboten? Or was it when the strategies that once delivered results started to disappoint? Like any complex situation, the answer to the question is a combination of all those things, plus several others I couldn't mention within the confines of an introduction. The point is, the ad industry is desperate. It has no new ideas, and no magic tricks up its sleeve. The missing impact If you search for the term "declining efficacy of online ads," you will come across an article from 2024 warning about how Google Ads no longer deliver the performance they once did. Elsewhere in the results, a 2023 op-ed declares, "Digital advertising is dead. Good riddance." I spotted another article from 2022 making the same case, as well as a blog from the World Federation of Advertisers outlining ways of "reversing the decline in advertising effectiveness." And that is before we get to the mountains of anecdotal data from sites like Reddit and Twitter, where marketers bemoan the increasingly ineffectual platforms that swallow their budgets without driving conversions. "Google has finally lost it. $694 for one unidentified click today," screams one post from late 2024. Another post asks, "Just how much of a scam are Google Ads???," citing one conversion over a six-month period when the company spent $3,000. On social media, things are especially bleak. According to one study, spending on social media advertising declined from 17% in spring 2023 to 11% one year later. This was the lowest level seen in seven years. The study—authored by Northwestern University professor Koen Pauwels—points to a few reasons, but arguably the biggest is that marketing decision-makers aren't convinced that social media delivers much. While companies like Meta have detailed profiles on their users and their interests, its data becomes much more threadbare when it pertains to activity beyond the platform. Meta tells you what brands you have engaged with, but not which ones you have bought. That ambiguity—combined with a few other factors, like consumer advertising fatigue and the crowded nature of social media advertising—shows why many marketing leaders believe social media has a middling impact on their company's bottom line. Paradoxically, the companies at the heart of this dissatisfaction are doing fine. We haven't quite reached the point where there is mass pullback from digital advertising. For those companies that decide to limit their online marketing spend, there are likely others—particularly smaller businesses and startups—that will start advertising through search and social for the first time. These new entrants, I imagine, are what's maintaining the status quo. I also believe the digital advertising industry sees the writing on the wall. They can't be blind to the growing unhappiness of their customers. And so, I believe that the industry will try to distract with gimmicks and fads designed to convince advertisers that these platforms aren't as decrepit as they seem—that there is still life in the industry yet. Digital advertising's dead cat strategy The Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby is most notable for the creation of the "dead cat strategy," wherein you deliberately say something shocking or provocative so people's attention is turned to that as opposed to a misstep or failure. It's the equivalent of throwing a dead cat on the table at a dinner party; people start talking about the dead cat, not the fact that the chicken is overcooked. What does that look like in the digital marketing world? Take Facebook: Over the past decade, it has made subtle (and eventually unsubtle) tweaks to the newsfeed algorithm so that content from the person's immediate network is buried under a deluge of "recommended posts," all with the aim of increasing engagement. Now it's taken things a step further by expanding the definition of what it considers to be acceptable content, while also eliminating its fact-checkers. Perhaps Zuckerberg knows that political content—especially the most contentious political content—drives engagement, which, in turn, will increase the number of ad impressions and clicks on his platform. I imagine Elon Musk had the same idea with X, although in his case it completely backfired, driving away the large blue-chip clients with the biggest budgets, leaving only drop-shippers and those touting get-rich-quick ebooks. You can make a similar case about Google's generative AI results that now appear at the top of almost every search result. You might think that this is Google's way of helping the end user—even if the generated text is, far too often, complete nonsense. Alternatively, it's a way for Google to position itself as not just the through point to information, but rather the source of information. The little boxes of AI-generated text sit right at the top of the page, just above the adverts; often, the two are the only things you will see when the page finally loads. A cynic would suggest that Google has engineered this to disincentivize people from clicking user-generated content, while encouraging them to click on the links where it receives money. And yes, I am a cynic. The reek of desperation extends to the industry writ large, particularly when it comes to the breathless promotion of AI, and especially AI agents. The implicit suggestion is that these new products will be the silver bullet that changes everything and starts pushing ROAS metrics in the right direction. Trust me, they won't. The marketing industry has been using AI for years now—it handles the low-level stuff that naturally lends itself to automation. And, at least for the moment, there is no evidence that AI is capable of tackling anything more complex. Recognizing the problem It's time to recognize that these platforms—the ones which we have relied upon for the past two decades or more—have become rotten. Their cost has gone up without any uptick in campaign performance. While these companies tout their "innovative" breakthroughs, releasing features and products that nobody asked for, they seem impotent at addressing some of the most endemic flaws within their products. Nearly two decades after Google paid a $90 million settlement over claims that it didn't do enough to protect advertisers against click fraud, click fraud remains a major problem. (Detecting fraudulent traffic? Gee, that sounds like something AI would be really good at.) We can hope that these companies have a Lazarene revival and start resembling healthy, functional businesses. Or we can accept reality: We have what we have. It's time for marketers to think critically about the role digital will have in their campaigns going forward. The smart ones, in my opinion, will be those that recognize the value of traditional advertising mediums—the ones that value human creativity and thought over AI gimmicks. And, most importantly, the ones that refuse to be distracted by the dead cats on the dining table.

Voice

Marketers Need to Rethink the Role of Digital in Campaigns

The platforms have become rotten, and ad companies are getting desperate

Chris Gadek

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