COMMENTARY

Brands Aren't Leaving TV For Facebook, Google

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

A screaming headline on CNBC.com says: “If Facebook and Google don’t fix their problems, advertising execs say they could go somewhere else.”

Where exactly?

So far, even with all that advertisers know -- in terms of brand safety -- they are still buying Facebook and Google, by the billions of dollars.

Will they go back to traditional media -- TV, radio, print, newspapers, and outdoor? Not exactly.

While money has come back, and brand safety issues continue, prospects for ever-rising digital media ad revenue remain.

For all the tangential discussions about how media dollars have moved back to TV over the last several years, the upfront TV ad market -- being one key indicator -- really hasn’t seen much growth. It still hovers around $20 billion for prime time, with the overall TV marketplace pretty stagnant in the $70 billion arena.

Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, has a more realistic approach: Fix Facebook and Google’s issues and keep those ad dollars where they are. This would seemingly build on what Google and Facebook are doing now — hiring thousands of “human monitors” to inspect content.

Pritchard is among many who believe these platforms still work, overall -- maybe not entirely for big brand, wide-reaching marketers needing scale, but definitely for mid-size and especially new direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketers.

P&G’s Pritchard talks up the fact that we have a “civil” editorial TV environment. So why can’t we have a “civil” internet environment? (That said, it is arguable that some 24-hour TV news networks are less-than-civil.)

What many would like to know: What is the “spillage” factor? How much do marketers now account for the possibility that their messages could end up next to hateful, white supremacist, misogynistic, or sexually explicit content, for example?

Sure, those numbers are very small. But it is still the wild west in the mainstream -- as well as the frontiers -- of digital media.

If marketers are getting good key performance engagement and sales indicators in this less-than-perfect media platform, perhaps some consumers know better. They may give marketers a pass because something doesn’t seem right.

Does this extend to traditional TV advertising? Nope.

However, virtually everyone who engages with digital media -- consumers, businesses and marketing executives -- has heard of the word "hack."