How to Kill Your Content Marketing Impact

You strive to build a relationship of closeness and trust with your target audiences through your content strategy. Great. But you're also doing programmatic advertising. You notice the contradiction.

Most of the convictions you acquire in the course of a lifetime come from a dialectical reflex: you know what you're struggling with before you even suspect what you'll never have to struggle with. And I confess: my convictions about the meaningfulness of content marketing have also been shaped by looking at an environment in marketing where horror and horror build up in places. One of my horrors is the tendency of some segments of this industry to want to cover up ethical issues with mere technology - and get away with it time and time again.

The miraculous increase in impact

Here we go again: I just finished reading a book with the telling title "Adscam." In it, U.S. marketing rebel Bob Hoffman describes the damage caused by a technology that is touted by shrewd media strategists as the solution to maximizing the impact of digital advertising, while triggering hard Bible miracle vibes, as we semi-Bible believers know from the story about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes: "Then Jesus took the loaves, said the prayer of thanksgiving, and distributed to the people as much as they wanted; he did likewise with the fishes. When the crowd had been filled, he said to his disciples, 'Gather up the fragments that are left over, so that nothing will spoil!" That, dear readers, is: Programmatic Advertising - only the pleasant feeling of satiety of the crowd is likely to be missing in that case.

72 million data points

After all, the principle is simply explained: instead of advertising on a website you select, your ads appear on thousands of websites that you don't know and some of which you would probably personally refrain from visiting: Fake News slingers, conspiracy theory bubbles, extremists. Most importantly, you're tracking users across thousands of sites, while the technology behind it is busy collecting data that you have very little direct access to. In his book, Bob Hoffman cites a study according to which there are already 72 million data points for every average 13-year-old child on this planet.

Loss of value

Should the morally solid foundation on which you undoubtedly stand now waver for a moment, you may think: cool, that's tracking dreams after all. But pause, noble reader: there is nothing cool about it. First, I'm still convinced that surveillance and tracking should be the privilege of the floppy hat industry, not some advertising sweatshop. Second, if you get involved in Programmatic Advertising, you'll find that your money goes through hyperinflation along the strange exploitation chain of merchants and sometimes obscure middlemen. Hoffman, for instance, calculates in "Adscam" that you get just 3 cents of advertising value for a U.S. dollar investment. And third, even though the Programmatic People like to tell you that the targeting required for this type of digital advertising will drive user comfort and thus love for your company to truly immeasurable heights, love withdrawal is the more likely outcome. According to a Pew Research survey in the U.S. cited by Hoffman, 81 percent of users surveyed said that the risks resulting from data collection outweighed the personal benefits for them. And not to mention, you'd have to be a big believer in programmatic to assume that as the user:in clicks through the Web, he or she will think to themselves, "Oh, how delightful, there's that much-loved banner again, inviting me to buy that ironing board again that's been sitting in my laundry room for three weeks."

Decide

Content marketing is now nothing more than the ideal antipode to Programmatic Advertising. When you do content marketing, you know where your content is placed at all times - mostly on your own platforms, after all. You don't track users across the Internet. You hopefully don't collect clandestine data, but exchange data for added value in the case of gated content. And presumably, by the time your content is published, it will also have passed through fewer begging hands than your ads do with Programmatic Advertising.

Here are my recommendations for a good read:

This Much I Learned: Bob Hoffman on marketers’ indifference to ad fraud

Listen to Bob Hoffman talk about ad fraud and programmatic advertising.

FTC Issues Orders to Social Media and Video Streaming Platforms

Now the FTC is also stepping in to better understand and quantify the impact of ad fraud.

Preventing Digital Ad Fraud: Best Practices and Tips

How to recognize ad fraud and what measures you can take immediately.