Wow, it's free to advertise on Facebook?! So they are giving away ad space and the time and resources to create and maintain a digital plan? You still need staff to make the marketing and advertising – now it's just a different skill set. The only thing that should have gone out the window was the media buys.
The traditional media buys are EXPENSIVE. Digital media is less expensive, and it works. I'm sure P&G didn't mean it to read this way, but rather the person that wrote the article doesn't understand much about either industry.
Oh, now there are 1,600 new people on the job market with out of date skills. Guess we are getting a new batch of social media experts soon!
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P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook
CEO wants to put the brakes on his $10 billion ad budget.
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+Lynette Young Good point about the spin on this. It still requires time and resources to use digital media successfully, but probably much less than traditional media. Unfortunately, the skills aren't exactly the same. I'm always amazed at the number of marketing people I meet who are disinterested in learning about social. I fear they are limiting their shelf-life.
<ducking, so as not to be overwhelmed by the incoming swell of experts> 🙂
soooo nise
How did you not know? P&g are you that far behind?were you still on MySpace?
yes i no dear
+Lynette Young I guess they expect to replace those staffers with auto-response bots?
1600 marketing execs? maybe that was the problem from the start, especially for a company that shells out big bucks to Madison Ave.
With all due respect, it seems a bit reactionary, both in the recent jump in ad budget and in this latest move. Any good marketer will tell you that there is no silver bullet in reaching your audience. Social is an important cog – but just one of many cogs – in the big marketing wheel. And yes, Facebook, etc. are more efficient media buys compared to TV, for example. But because frequency to your message has had to increase due to the proliferation of messages competing for consumers' attention, marketers have to be in front of their targets more relevantly and in more parts of their increasingly complex lives. It is a confluence of strategically driven and relevant (there's that word again) integrated marketing communications tactics that drive success and you need smart marketers to lead the charge. Perhaps P&G is just shifting the weight of their budget into the more efficient social sphere, so I hope that this decision is based on metrics and strategy. But that still does not take the sting out of so many people being out of a job.