Facebook invented metrics to valorize non-clicking ad impressions as brand value
Evidence
During the 2010s, Facebook found a few answers to this problem. First, it invested heavily in developing metrics to convince advertisers that its advertisements were valuable even though people weren’t clicking on them. A well-funded “Measurement and Insights” Department endeavored to prove that Facebook was creating brand awareness, even without conscious notice of ads, let alone clicks. Its head, Brad Smallwood, would tell advertisers that “99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw but did not interact with ads,” claiming to prove “that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.” In this way, Facebook left much of the hard selling to Google, or The Huffington Post, while itself posing as heir to the MacManus tradition of branding. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1008
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘99 percent of sales from people who did not interact’ claim is a landmark of the attention economy — connects to Wu’s earlier MacManus branding chapters and to the reader’s surveillance-capitalism thread. — connects to: Click-through pricing shifted ad value from views to measured engagement — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 258; Web metrics incentivized traffic and clickbait over prestige and quality
- DEEPTHINKING: Facebook’s rebranding of non-interaction as value collapses the causal logic of advertising: the economic case for ads becomes unfalsifiable in principle, since value is claimed precisely where no measurable response exists.
- QUESTION: Smallwood’s ‘99 percent’ claim — is there independent verification of this number, or was it a self-serving metric invented to fit the product?
- ADDENDUM: Directly supports the branding-vs-direct-response split in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay’s cousin theme — how industries retrofit metrics to justify their business model.