When Should Brands Return to Facebook Advertising?

Facebook is halfway through a far-reaching advertiser boycott designed to last until the end of July, a standoff that could extend if the company doesn’t meet the organizers’ demands to clean up the spread of hate speech and misinformation on its platforms. It puts big-name brands participating in the boycott in a precarious position; there’s no easy answer for when they should return their ad dollars to those channels. Before they do, brands have to consider the demands of advocacy groups and regular consumers, as well as the risk of giving up the very targeting tools that are best used to reach them. And, of course, what Facebook ultimately changes to make the platform safer. It’s not usually this complicated for brands to balance their social interests with their ad spends, said Bridget Jewell, creative director at the Minneapolis-based agency Periscope. “Normally those things are aligned. If you, as a brand, have a cause and you want to support it with your dollars, usually it’s a very simple thing,” Jewell said. In this instance, she said, Facebook has put brands in a tough position. The Stop Hate for Profit campaign started as a simple ask: brands would cease spending on Facebook and sister company, Instagram, in July. Beyond pledging to join the effort, it gets more complicated. What has Facebook done? The campaign’s organizers, including the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP, were soundly unconvinced that Facebook had done anything to clean up its act amid the boycott after meeting with executives in a video conference last week. Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. González called the meeting “nothing more than a PR exercise” at the time and said the boycott would continue until Facebook took their demands “seriously.” [kickout id="4" label="ad spend awareness"] Facebook will be hard-pressed to get brands to return until it outlines an actual roadmap for change, said Jed Meyer, managing director, North America, at the media consultancy Ebiquity. “If there’s not something like that, I think it’s probably harder to want to go back until there’s something tangible that you can point to and say, ‘OK, they got it,’” Meyer said. In a statement to Adweek, Stop Hate for Profit said it has not decided whether to ask brands to boycott past July. The group said the boycott efforts created “more movement from Facebook than arguably ever before.” “We will continue pushing, and are confident [Facebook] will make more changes,” the statement continued. Facebook said it invests billions of dollars to keep hate of its platform, pointing to the ban of 250 white supremacist organizations and its regular transparency reports on content moderation. It also touted, as it had in the past, its initiatives to boost voter turnout. “We agree that we must fight hate and voter interference aggressively,” Facebook spokesperson Elana Widmann said in a statement to Adweek, later adding, “We know we will be judged by our actions not by our words and are grateful to these and other groups for their continued engagement.” While CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he will not make decisions based on revenue pressure, Facebook has already made changes during the boycott. At the end of June, Zuckerberg reversed course and said Facebook would label politicians’ posts that violated rules—similar to Twitter’s own policy. Earlier this month, Facebook agreed to a brand safety audit with the Media Rating Council, a nonprofit that certifies the reliability of audience measurement services. And Facebook and Instagram also banned ads promoting conversion therapy and booted hundreds of Boogaloo extremist accounts off the platform in recent days. But Facebook’s 89-page civil rights audit, which came out last week, said that while Facebook has made some progress, independent auditors “watched the company make painful decisions over the last nine months with real-world consequences that are serious setbacks for civil rights.” [kickout id="2"] Some brands’ demands are broad, if not vague. Nancy Smith, president and CEO of the ad consulting and measurement firm Analytic Partners, said many of the firm’s clients want Facebook to assure them it will work toward improving brand safety. “The goal is movement in a positive direction,” Smith said. Brands should consider whether their competitors are still advertising on the platform when deciding if they should too. “What Facebook has that so many other properties don't are the eyeballs—they have the reach,” Smith said. “So, unfortunately, if a competitor is going to spend in that channel, you're going to be at a disadvantage if you're not tapping into that.” [article_summary section="2"] Not all companies that advertise on Facebook are created equal and may not tangibly erode a big brand’s bottom line. Because Facebook delivers effective targeting at a relatively cheap price, it's especially hard for small and medium-sized businesses and direct-to-consumer brands to quit and stay off Facebook, especially if they have depended on those channels before. “So a month of that, when we’re talking about all the impact from Covid, that’s a big deal,” Jewell said. Brands’ response to Facebook Major companies such as Pfizer, Chobani, Clorox and Kimberly-Clark have not only said they are joining the boycott, but have also committed to not using Facebook’s ad tech, the Facebook Audience Network. In announcing they were joining the boycott, many C-suite executives used the public opportunity to condemn racism. "There is no place for racism in the world and there is no place for racism on social media,” as Coca-Cola’s chief executive James Quincey said in a statement. Other companies including Starbucks and Diageo took the campaign a step further and committed to boycotting all social media platforms, diverting those marketing dollars elsewhere. Mondelēz International is not advertising with Facebook this month but did not formally join the boycott campaign. Instead, it vowed to work with its partners and tackle brand safety. Specifically, Mondelēz said it wanted transparency, consistent removal of hate speech and better tools. “What we as an advertiser seek is visibility and tools, and I think that is really the area where we're looking for Facebook to improve,” Jon Halvorson, vp global media, digital and data at Mondelēz International, told Adweek. “How do you give us visibility and how do you give us the tools to manage things?” Were there ad dollars to spend anyway? Brands’ ad spends were already poised to change this year due to marketing cuts amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But these big-name companies have, comparatively, spent small fortunes on social advertising in years prior. During the first week of July 2019, for example, Starbucks, Best Buy and Target spent $1.68 million, $793,000 and $691,000, respectively, on Facebook ads, according to the analytics company Pathmatics. All three boycotted Facebook in July 2020. [kickout id="1"] Still, last year Facebook reported $17.4 billion in advertising revenue for the quarter ending Sept. 30. Most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small and medium-size businesses that comprise the lion's share of its 8 million advertisers. Companies such as Coca-Cola have huge ad budgets, and if they aren’t being spent on Facebook, that money could be reallocated to other media—or it could go back into the companies' pockets. With the economic downturn from the pandemic, many companies had already slashed ad budgets before the boycott. [article_summary section="1"] Meanwhile, with 11.1% unemployment, rising coronavirus cases and a presidential election around the corner, few people seem to be paying close attention to the whole ordeal. A survey from data intelligence firm Morning Consult, which polled 2,200 U.S. adults between June 30 and July 3, found that the majority of consumers—54%—had heard either not much or nothing about the boycott. With little leverage to alter Facebook policy, brands that joined the boycott can abandon the platform indefinitely, which could hurt their bottom line, or merely resume where they left off as though nothing happened, making their initial proclamations appear little more than performative—perhaps a convenient PR move at a time when they weren’t going to spend much on advertising anyway. (Or a distraction from boycotting companies’ own hazy records on racial justice.) “If companies go back on Facebook without tangible evidence that Facebook has made any of the changes they have demanded, they run the risk of looking weak,” said Debbie Millman, chair of the masters in branding program at the School of Visual Arts. “Further, they will look as if greed is more important than ethics. If advertisers are not committed to their demands when leaving Facebook, they shouldn’t even bother leaving.” Adweek reporter Andrew Blustein contributed reporting.