Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker once famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Despite the promises of the past two decades, digital still faces the same issue.
Through Atlas and the people-based layer that powers it, facebook is able to identify and measure where most waste comes from basically from exchanges and banners.
This was possible testing out a buying platform in Atlas last year. During that test, the platform was plugged into a number of the usual exchanges and bought across several formats with two major takeaways: More ads were delivered to real people with accuracy and only two ad formats delivered significant value: native& video.
Based on those findings, FB began to dig into the ads that came through LiveRail. And shut off the low quality ads with over 75% removed from the volume coming from the exchange by turning off publishers circulating bad inventory into Liv-eRail.
This experiment left to ponder if to bury quality(which is industry-prevalent), or focus solely on building a product in a mission to help marketers deliver and measure true business value? Choosing the latter, as value is the better and longer-term view.
That decision allowed to look even closer at where true business value comes from. In addition to native and video, it was found that a growing percentage came from mobile. US digital ad spend tells the same story.
However, many marketers still choose to deliver and measure their ad campaigns using desktop-first tools that are not built for a cross-device world — and they’ve got the wasted spend to show for it.
With Atlas, which is built for cross-everything ad serving and measurement, it can help every mar-keter see where their “Wanamaker waste” lives.