Tom Denford and David Indo of ID Comms: Facebook gets it wrong again
On this week’s #MediaSnack we look at the continuing case of Facebook’s measurement mess ups. This time some nifty journalism and analyst work reveals that Facebook’s audience tools are claiming to reach significantly more people than exist in nine major countries.
The over-claim is especially acute in the “hard to reach” and expensive young demographics of 16-34.
The most baffling aspect is that at a time when Facebook needs to build trust and integrity and is under pressure from major advertisers to open its tools to external verification, it continues to be making basic errors.
The impact could be felt not on how much advertisers pay but on how much cash planners allocate to the platform in total. Tom and David argue that planners should have learnt not to accept Facebook’s own reach data. Facebook’s track record for accurately marking its own homework is poor.
They say the agency community should be holding a major vendor to better account.
On this week’s Good Week Bad Week, Tom and David celebrate the amazing earn out of the four founders of Adam & Eve, the agency bought by Omnicom five years ago. The A&E chaps pocketed a cool £110 million in total for their agency.
It’s also a good week for Campaign Magazine, which shifted from a weekly to a monthly, with an impressive first edition.
However, it’s been a bad week for fans of a simple life as Apple launched too many new phones to think about. The company also probably left themselves open to major criticism and competition by just obsessing about adding features without evidence that people are actually asking for them.
Tom and David fear Apple may have finally stopped listening to their users so it’s not a good week for those keen to keep feature fatigue at bay.