Hasta La Creative!

Data has been hailed as marketing’s holy grail for decades, a means to pinpoint even the smallest of audiences and efficiently deliver a message to those most likely to buy. But the news last week that Procter & Gamble is scaling back targeted Facebook ads — though not Facebook ads overall — raises a question over whether marketers might be optimizing marketing to death.

Key trends in marketing efficiency present a veritable recipe for diminishing media returns by increasing the risk of pummeling the same consumers too often with the same message. Major marketers have been looking to cut so-called nonworking creative costs by making fewer ads, using the savings to buy more media, targeting those media buys to heavy buyers and increasing spending on mobile to reach them.

But that cycle can burn out buyers. Though it wasn’t looking at Facebook, an Advertising Research Foundation study released earlier this year found that once a digital banner ad reaches the same person 40 times or more in a month, sales actually decline. The value of each additional impression starts to decline well before entering that negative territory, of course. This overkill actually rendered about a quarter of the viewable impressions in the study entirely worthless or counterproductive.

Continue reading at AdAge.com