It does not pay for advertisers to narrow their targets too much

Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest marketer, recently announced a change in the way it buys advertising on Facebook. It is cutting its spend on highly targeted ads and is increasing spend on ads that address much larger swaths of the potential audiences for its brands, which include Tide, Pampers and Gillette. Explaining this shift of emphasis, P&G’s global brand building officer, Marc Pritchard, said: “We targeted too much, and went too narrow.”