Spending online is on course for its first decline in 10 years. The fact that there’s been sustained growth over the last several years means there was always going to be an inevitable point where the intersection of digital market maturity and client budget size prevents continued share of growth. What’s different this time around, however, is the likes of Adidas appear to be reaching diminishing returns with digital advertising in terms of media allocation and impact. In 2016, Procter & Gamble said it had gone too far in targeting online users, for example. It’s no wonder some advertisers are re-evaluating where they buy ads online.īut those concerns are nothing new. Now, Adidas’ marketers compare performance and cross-channel lift.Īdidas’ case study is a microcosm of what appears to be a quiet discussion around the true efficacy of digital advertising, particularly in a world where fraud is rampant, privacy regulations make it harder to target individuals, there’s trickier tracking in the absence of cookies, and agencies have hidden agendas. It left the business reliant on last-click attribution and four attribution models - Google Last Click Google Custom, Adobe and Facebook.

Peel and his colleagues thought only performance drove online sales for the brand, when in fact, brand activity also played a part. In a nutshell, the advertiser discovered four years ago it had focused on return on investment and return on ad spend - metrics widely regarded as proxies for efficiency - at the expense of reach, penetration and broad brand building activity proxies for effectiveness. How Adidas’ marketers decided digital investments had gone too far was the crux of a talk media director Simon Peel gave at an IPA conference last week.

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