P&G Credits Marketing Efficiency For Strong Sales; Facebook Wrongly Blocks Some Ads

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Marketing Diet

P&G’s marketing cuts haven’t caused the sky to fall. On the contrary, the CPG giant and world’s largest advertiser, which cut its marketing budget by 6% this year, saw net sales grow 4% to $16.7 billion in Q3, its strongest rate in five years. P&G is being more efficient with its marketing spend, according to CFO Jon Moeller, who said the brand’s reach and frequency were up despite a decrease in total spend. “The total marketing spend required to achieve that reach and frequency, and deliver that growth and market-share gains, was down,” he said. Ad Age has more.

Midterms Misstep

Facebook mislabeled and removed dozens of advertisements from US businesses, nonprofits and universities targeted to minority groups, USA Today reports. Major brands like Chipotle had ads removed from the platform for using the words “Latino,” “hispanic,” “African-American,” “women” and “LGBT.” These ads were accidentally flagged by either humans or machines as Facebook starting stepping up its political ad monitoring system in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. “At the scale that we are doing this, there are going to be mistakes,” said Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management. “We rely on a combination of machines and humans. Sometimes machines make mistakes. Sometimes humans make mistakes. Sometimes both.” More.