How Global Brands Boycotting Facebook Ads Will Impact Marketers

Ray Wang July 6, 2020

Global brands such as Coca-Cola Company and Unilever are boycotting Facebook ads to support civil rights.

A group of advocacy groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change have created a #StopHateForProfit campaign and encouraged companies to pause Facebook ads and Facebook’s other social media advertising platforms during July 2020. The campaign urges Facebook to stop allowing hateful content or misinformation to be spread on Facebook’s platforms.

In the last few days at the time of writing this blog post, other brands such as Lululemon, MEC and Arc’teryx have also joined this movement.

This movement will have a global impact on advertisers, for better or worse. Here are four impacts we’ll see as a result of the movement:

1. Lower Cost-Per-Click

With some major brands pulling out of the Facebook advertising market in July, it’s likely that the cost-per-click for the industries that these brands are in will drop during that period. This decrease will provide a great opportunity for small-to-medium-sized companies to maximize their paid Facebook traffic since these companies can bring in more traffic using the same budget they’re spending prior to brands boycotting Facebook ads. If you’re a company that’s trying to make a post-pandemic comeback and Facebook and Instagram are suitable marketing channels for you, consider allocating more budget on Facebook and Instagram in July 2020 since you can get more bang for your buck.

2. Stricter Advertising or Content Guidelines

To take more concrete actions to remove hate speech and the spread of misinformation on its platforms, Facebook may release stricter advertising or content guidelines. The guidelines will be designed to prevent users or advertisers from posting discriminatory or hateful content. To enforce these guidelines, Facebook will likely use its artificial intelligence (AI) technology to scan media or text that users want to post and assess if the content is against Facebook’s guidelines. If the content violates the new guidelines, the content won’t be published.

While the guidelines will be effective for preventing discriminatory or hateful information from being posted on Facebook’s platforms, the guidelines may inadvertently prevent users from content that isn’t violating the guidelines. For example, a user who wants to post an image that isn’t discriminatory or hateful may not be allowed to publish the content because the image appears to violate Facebook’s guidelines from Facebook’s AI perspective. This issue will cause major user dissatisfaction.

3. Better ad placement

Since it’s likely that Facebook will take a strong approach to enforce anti-hate and discriminatory platforms, there will be less, if any, discriminatory or hateful content on Facebook’s platforms. This change will be beneficial to advertisers because we don’t need to worry about displaying our ads in a video that contains misinformation or hate.

The radical actions from global brands such as Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company will definitely help the marketing world move towards the right direction. The actions will also create potential benefits and inconveniences for advertisers. Only time will tell.

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