Facebook had a bad 2018 when it came to trust and privacy, leading to a growing chorus of calls for people to delete their accounts. On Monday, renowned tech journalist Walt Mossberg tweeted that he was quitting Facebook at the end of the year, for example.
But top marketers aren’t joining the movement. Instead, they say they’re giving Facebook time to work on solutions and will continue to put their ad dollars toward the platform. Why? Because the priority for most marketers is a return on advertising spend. And despite its privacy problems, Facebook continues to deliver plenty of it.
When asked if she still stands by Facebook and its leadership, Publicis Media chief digital officer Helen Lin acknowledged that there were a “number of vulnerabilities” this year but said the company has been working to address those issues.
“Still there is more work that needs to be done. We continue to work with them and all our partners on solutions in the best interest of our clients and consumers. We all want these platforms to be healthy, flourishing environments for users and the businesses on them,” said Lin, who is a member of Facebook’s client council.
“We believe we’re more of a force of good in engaging their thought leaders, rather than pulling spend. Facebook fundamentally wants to do the right thing. If it’s guilty of anything, it’s their naivety,” Clorox CMO Eric Reynolds told Digiday earlier this month. “If we just pull spend, we’re not engaging them. Right now, they are responding to those types of conversations, but if that doesn’t work, we can try money.”
That sentiment is quite unlike the backlash in 2017 against YouTube, where some big spenders paused their ads on the Google-owned video platform. YouTube’s challenges were fundamentally different to those facing Facebook, however, in that marketers were directly and negatively impacted by having their ads appear next to content from terrorist organizations on YouTube. While Facebook also deals with problematic content on its platform, recent scandals have primarily related to privacy weaknesses across its service, which marketers are far less concerned with than the protection of their brands when it comes to unsafe content.
Discussing platforms broadly regarding brand safety, not Facebook in particular, Bank of America’s Lou Paskalis said that pulling money isn’t a “black and white option” in a story for the latest issue of the magazine. We agonize about it on a daily basis. We used to give it a thought twice a year. But it’s become front and center of every decision we make. It doesn’t bode well for long-term partnership and co-development because everything is case by case and the next incident could very well affect what we do.”
