The sportswear maker has stopped buying video ads on the social network amid concerns that people aren’t regularly viewing its ads.
Source: Sources say Adidas has paused its video ads on Facebook while it reviews their efficacy – Digiday
Just this morning I shared an old article on Influencer marketing and how the process is a slippery slope. For every Rihanna, you get a Young Thug jumping from Puma to adidas, or a Kendrick jumping from Reebok to Nike. This post isn’t about influencer marketing, but the discussion is the flip side of the same coin, content creation and how to reach your market is a branch on the same tree with influencer marketing. It would seem that a 20 Billion dollar a year company like adidas wouldn’t have any trouble connecting to its primary fan. The reality is that every brand, big or small, is faced with the growing popularity of social media and how it occupies the mind and time of every person with a phone. Every brand has to figure out how to get people to see what they are creating. Then they have to figure out how to convert a browser into a buyer.
What’s interesting however is that when you take a moment to research how people get to purchasing channels (Locations where you buy stuff) the numbers are fairly consistent across the board for engagement from social:
Brand website traffic: Search vs Social (search is traffic that arrives via Google, Bing or search engines, social is traffic that arrives via social media sites like Facebook or Youtube).
Nike.com traffic – Search vs Social: 45.35% vs 7.4%
adidas.com traffic – Search vs Social: 47.29% vs 6.9%
Under Armour traffic – Search vs Social: 40.39% vs 3.39%
Now within these numbers there is a deeper analysis available in regard to paid vs organic search and the same within social. What adidas has encountered however makes me wonder who they utilize in consulting and what exactly is their marketing department analyzing when they run campaigns.
I wrote an article years ago on Facebook. I even converted that article into a book about breaking away from social media called The 30 Day Project. In that book I was still at the height of my powers as a small business. I was entering a year where I did 700,000 dollars with ARCH so what I was saying carried considerable weight. Here is a link to that article named Further Proof of Facebook’s Faults:
http://cbpublish.com/2015/07/30/business-further-proof-of-facebooks-faults/
The Digiday article seems to be about 5 years behind my own research. I have at least 4 different posts discussing Facebook and how it works. We are at a time where brands are failing to understand “branding” in the new arena. Simply making people aware of you no longer carries the brand to the consumer. Slapping content all over the place does very little long term as trends are likes waves in the ocean, they rise, fall and riptides come out of nowhere to change everything in an instant. In other words social media strategies should begin to be placed into a category of temporary promotional solutions. if social is the strategy it will take constant investment and content creation because you lose the long term strategy aligned with the traffic source that is the best for every brand, search.
If you have a campaign that requires a lot of people to know about it immediately, then use social. If your goal is to build an audience via a consistent and long term strategy it’s going to take a lot more than a Facebook ad. In the article I wrote above I gave evidence of how deep the drop off is once a Facebook ad ends. The cliff to valley floor is Grand Canyon status. adidas was right to pause their campaigns as my research shows that their traffic as it relates to social is better generated through Twitter and Reddit. The 6%+ number from search shifts and changes quickly, but if they are investing in video the natural move of funds should go from Facebook to YouTube as Google is the primary search engine and YouTube videos are often indexed at a higher rate than any other platform.
The Digiday post is a good examination so take a second to click through on the source link at the top and read more.
