Consider this: what if Donald Trump had been assassinated?
It was only six months ago that Trump was shot in the ear during an election rally. Two inches to the right and he would have died. When we create a world in which one person can have so much individual power, two inches is massive: it’s the difference between an entire society lurching from stability to chaos.
Or, in the case of social media, the difference between content moderation and Community Notes.
If Trump could not run for presidency, it’s not hard to imagine an alternate reality in which the Democrats would have won re-election after defeating Trump’s useless number two, JD Vance.
Would Mark Zuckerberg have dared announce Meta would eliminate content moderation on Facebook and Instagram if the incumbent party was heading into another four years?
Taking in the trash
Last week was a strange moment because, despite being widely expected, Meta’s announcement still managed to shock.
There are two reasons for that.
It confirmed that, now the tone has been set by Facebook, Instagram and X, there is no hope of social media being reformed into a mainstream media environment where content can be trusted and media value can be fairly compared with other channels.
You can’t compare user-generated trash (and the vast majority of it is trash) with professionally created articles, pictures and video.
Even Zuckerberg’s announcement video was laughable. His argument essentially boiled down to: Despite earning billions in profits every quarter, we can’t fix the problem we created and profit from so, hey, let’s make users do it for us for free. Stay good out there!
Again, user-generated trash.
It would have once been necessary for a public company CEO to answer tough questions when announcing a big strategic decision. But there has been no interview with a journalist and apparently no impact on Meta’s share price.
Bending the knee to a Don
The mealy mouthed address also cemented Zuckerberg’s place in Trump’s family of tech plutocrats.
Advertising is now dominated by the five families of social media, video-sharing, ecommerce, display and search. They don’t need to play by established industry rules like joint industry currencies or trade associations.
This intrepid gang is led by Elon Musk, who turned Twitter into a sewer, and flanked by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has entered his Citizen Kane phase of billionairedom.
Earlier this month, a Washington Post cartoonist resigned because an editor would not publish a drawing of Bezos and other US oligarchs kneeling before Trump. “We’ve done that story already” was the official explanation because, as deceitful public figures worked out long ago, algorithms love novelty to drive “trends”. Nothing to do with being owned by Amazon, then.
And because digital media has accelerated the demand for new content to fill every single minute, the cost of lying has become very cheap indeed.
The price is right… or is it?
For better or worse, the market should be the best judge of which media should succeed and fail.
Advertiser boycotts are pernicious and should be avoided in a democratic society. Plus, they suck at achieving anything.
But the advertising market doesn’t work properly if brands make poorly informed decisions. Namely, should advertisers continue investing in Facebook and Instagram now on a risk-adjusted basis?
“The dirty secret is that [Meta and Google] don’t drive a lot of net new customers,” connected TV adtech provider Viant’s co-founder Chris Vanderhook wrote last week. “You see that when you run a holdout experiment on those platforms with a control group. You might get more sales out of the same customers, but you don’t get a lot of net new customers. You’re reaching the 5% of people who are already in market for your product.”
That’s a big deal because Google and Meta, along with Amazon and now TikTok, have hoovered up all of advertising’s growth in the last 15 years by offering devastatingly simple buying tools for small businesses that can’t or won’t afford agencies.
Agencies themselves are in danger of irrelevance as advertisers buy direct on digital platforms — this means greater risk is being shouldered by brands, because they lose an agency’s collective buying power and expertise on what “good” on a media plan should look like.
The risk that advertisers are taking on, by dealing directly with “walled gardens” that play by their own rules, should be reflected in the price they pay. Advertisers need to properly build a brand-safety risk premium into their media investment decisions.
Otherwise they’re paying too high a price for too risky a product.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.
This post was originally published on here
