To be fair to Verizon, they have not laid off a single person since March. The retrained 95% of their retail workers to be at home support agents and the rest are still working in their stores for issues that have to be solved in person.
So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.
I don't fault Verizon for cutting budget. It's absolutely the right thing to do. But if we weren't in the situation we're in they probably wouldn't be doing this.
The nuance between "we're going to stop doing business with Facebook because Facebook is bad" and "we have to cut budget from advertising and we chose to cut it from Facebook because Facebook is bad" is important.
It's convenient to do this now, but hard to believe that any of these companies would have done this at this kind of scale if they weren't backed into making cuts.
Sometimes things or people change. Something or someone that would have taken advantage of you before, learns its lesson and becomes trustworthy.
When it comes to things that you are bigger than, things which you can stop if need be, giving second chances is noble. But when it comes to things that are bigger than you, things you can't change at all, one chance is all they should ever get.
Verizon does not "respond [...] to public pressure," they just have a PR team that is leveraging some current narrative for their own benefit. They aren't changing, and they will never love you back.
Regardless of motivation, Verizon has clearly made a visible public action, which is what I was talking about and what speaks to the efficacy of the activist campaign against Facebook.
Headline: "Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott"
Root Comment: "Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business."
Parent Comment: "Why is it impossible that Verizon is responding, at least in part, to public pressure against Facebook?"
Your Comment: "I suspect you might not get an answer to this since it's not something anyone has actually said here."
I read this the way the parent commenter read it as well: everyone is explicitly avoiding the notion that Verizon may be doing this because they feel like that is best for their public image. What I can't tell is if you're asserting that no one will answer because everyone is coming up with other ideas that seem to avoid the obvious, or if you think the parent commenter is asking a baseless question.
Verizon's earnings are down something like 3% YTD from their guidance [0] and their stock price is down 10%. Fortune 500 companies do not prioritise doing social good over profits when their share price is down 10%. Too many people are losing too much money; these are numbers that are supposed to go up.
It is obvious Verizon is taking action in context of the Facebook boycott because they've told us that in a press release. But it is a very safe bet that the decision is made accompanied by data that says "Facebook ads have not been especially cost effective for us over the last 12-18 months" and was probably already a decision in the works prior to learning about the boycott.
There are ~8 billion people in the world. Corporate executives are the tiny fraction of that population who are both hyper-competent and hyper-motivated by money. They did not suddenly wake up this morning and decide to try and do more good in the world than they were yesterday, and the odds are bad that they made this call based on nebulous "oh there is a boycott this month we just realised Facebook is nasty" style considerations.
> I read this the way the parent commenter read it as well: everyone is explicitly avoiding the notion that Verizon may be doing this because they feel like that is best for their public image. What I can't tell is if you're asserting that no one will answer because everyone is coming up with other ideas that seem to avoid the obvious, or if you think the parent commenter is asking a baseless question.
I think at this point most (if not the vast majority) of people think it a baseless question. Not because they think that it's impossible that Verizon/Verizon employees/Verizon executives/etc care but because non-human legal entities have lost all benefit of the doubt and credibility over the last few decades. The dominance of shareholder primacy has all but guaranteed it.
Even if the decision makers or even the majority of Verizon cares about this issue now, natural executive/employee turn over guarantees that they will go back to spending money with Facebook as long as there is a financial incentive to do so - sooner rather than later.
I am as cynical about the behavior of large corporations as anyone. But you can never really know anybody's motivations, only guess them from their actions.
Verizon could be doing it because of ad budgeting reasons. Verizon could be doing it because of public pressure. Most likely, both benefits go into their cost-benefit analysis.
I just searched for Verizon on Google, and there was a Verizon ad, so they're still spending on digital marketing elsewhere. That Google ad is not even likely to be profitable considering Verizon owns all the organic links in the first page of results except for the Wikipedia result ranked fourth.
If they were cutting advertising spend due to the economy, it would be rational to cut unprofitable spend first. I'm inclined to take them at their word for why they cut Facebook spend.
The rate Google charges for ads is inversely proportional to click-through rate, so you pay less per click if your click-through rate is higher. In the case of a company bidding to advertise on searches for that company’s own name, it means that the company can win the bid with a lower offer than competitors trying to put ads there. You could say Google is extorting Verizon to pay up to prevent competitors from stealing customers. But regardless, it’s probably a good value proposition for Verizon to participate in the auction, because
competitors would have to overpay to beat them.
That they pay little doesn't matter. What matters is that it's above zero, which is what the clicks would cost without the ad, making them unprofitable.
The competitor argument for running the ad has two problems. The first is that no competitors are bidding for that keyword, and the second is that a competitor would already have to pay a lot to get top of page placement for a keyword they can't put in their ad copy.
Not sure why you think an ad wouldn’t work here. Sometimes customers are willing to switch to a competing product. If you can offer something better or cheaper they might want it. I’ve worked at a company where we at times bought Google ads for both our own product name and competitor’s names and made money.
> Not sure why you think an ad wouldn’t work here.
"no competitors are bidding for that keyword"
That itself is enough to make Verizon's ads unprofitable.
If you think that competitors would bid for the keyword without Verizon's presence, you'll have to explain why because with Verizon's presence, if nobody clicks on it, the cost is zero. There appears to be a gentleman's agreement between the consumer communication companies not to bid on each other's name, and if that's the case, bidding on your own name is flushing money down the toilet.
I've seen the food delivery case, where Blue Apron bids on "Hello Fresh" and offers a better coupon than for people searching for "Blue Apron." That isn't happening here.
Most companies don’t want their advertising associated with anything that will give them bad press. We saw the same thing with YouTube and “demonetization”.
It’s not they are ethical, it just doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint.
Their willingness to suspend advertising is also an indictment of the practically nonexistent competitive landscape in mobile providers in the US.
There just aren't good alternatives to Verizon for many people where T-Mobile/Sprint don't have good coverage. Switching between AT&T and Verizon is pointless for most plans.
So it makes sense that they would need to cut budget somewhere, since employees is not one of them.