Adalytics made headlines again with a new report showing how Forbes had been screwing advertisers big time.
Many ad geniuses thought for years that ad campaigns they were buying from Forbes were running on Forbes website - but they weren't. You see, in online advertising nothing is what it appears to be.
Instead many ads were running on a bullshit look-alike MFA (made for advertising) website Forbes had created. But the advertisers were paying Forbes regular ad prices.
Why would Forbes do this? According to The Drum, "While a reader on Forbes’s primary domain usually encounters between 3 to 10 ads throughout an article, viewers of www3.forbes.com (the MFA site- BH) might see over 200 ads during a single page view."
You don't have to be an MBA to figure out that putting 200 ads on a page yields a lot more cash than 3. And you don't have to be a CMO to figure out that a page with 200 ads and no audience is a world class waste of money.
The advertisers conned by Forbes were not clueless idiots from Cheap Charlie’s Discount Plumbing Supplies, these were clueless idiots from Microsoft, Disney, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz, Oracle, Fidelity, Marriott, Ford, United Airlines, Omnicom, Publicis, Havas, IPG, Dentsu, and GroupM. Along with hundreds of other, ya know, "sophisticated" and "agile" marketers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "The finding shines a light on the opacity of the digital-ad market, where brands frequently have to play whack-a-mole to keep their ad budgets from being wasted."
The WS Journal also reported that, "All six major ad-agency holding companies—WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic Havas and Dentsu -- bought ads that ran on that site. Those brands and ad-holding companies either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment." Lots of integrity there.