With the recent surface of the Cambridge Analytical scandal, Facebook is facing threats from Facebook users all over the world. Some of the people who already deleted their Facebook accounts include Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. Advertisers are not happy with Facebook either, and they are voicing their dissatisfaction. However, advertisers will always buy effective and successful ads. As long as Facebook still proves to deliver great results, advertisers are not going anywhere.
If you are not familiar with the current scandal, here are a few main points:
- Facebook Stock Price fell 14% over the course of a week from the day the scandal was discovered.
- Authorities are investigating the scandal, including the FTC and European government agencies.
- Brands like Commerzbank and Mozilla stopped their Facebook campaigns.
It is not definite what advertisers are doing next, but as stated above, as long as the ads deliver good results, Facebook Ads will still be utilized by brands and advertisers. This scandal is very similar to the Google scandal that happened this time last year on Youtube. In short, Google admitted that they allowed hate speech, neo-Nazi and other types of extremist contents on their platform. A lot of big name brands announced that they canceled their Google and Youtube campaigns as well.
Google admitted their wrongdoings and promised to work on fixing the problems. Shortly afterward, brands and advertisers were spending money on their Google campaigns again. The same principles will be applied here for Facebook’s situation: committing to fixing the problem will eventually fix it, and people will soon forget about this data scandal just like they did with Google last year.