How much advertising does Grammarly need?

(Updated June 2019: For some reason this has become one of my most viewed recent posts. Shortly after I posted it, YouTube started varying the Grammarly ads it shows before videos. While Grammarly still seems to spend an inordinate amount of money in YouTube ads, at least the fact that YouTube now varies the videos makes it less off-putting. I'm not convinced that its recommendations, at least as shown in the ads, always make sense and the service has probably more of a future if universities pay for it rather than individual students. I still don't understand why I as a university professor - not a student -have to be shown such ads. But then the other day I was shown a YouTube ad in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish, so perhaps the message is that there is still much progress to be made in helping YouTube properly target audiences in customized video ads.)

I admit it: at home I sometimes like watching YouTube videos when I need to take a break from grading. Not too long ago I noticed I keep getting over and over AND OVER the same Grammarly advertisement. Grammarly is a "cloud-based English-language writing-enhancement platform" (according to its Wikipedia description) positioning itself as a "writing assistant" improving proofreading but also targeting plagiarism-detection. Its business model falls within the class of freemium models, where a watered-down version is available for free and a full version is available at a fee, sometimes paid by universities for their students.

The monthly subscription rate is of $30/month, while longer subscriptions lead to smaller prices (for instance the annual subscription of $140/year is equivalent to about $12/month). Frankly, when I see the extreme prevalence of Grammarly ads on YouTube, I have to wonder how much money they have to spare to spend such egregious amounts on advertisement. When does it all become too much advertising, i.e., a signal that a company is desperate for market growth?

At least vary the ads, for heaven's sake. This is becoming almost a joke. 95% of the time I see the very same ad on YouTube. ("If you write anything, you need to get Grammarly!" says the cheerful co-ed sitting on a sofa before the first 5 seconds are up and I can skip the ad.) The other 5% of the time I see the one other ad they seem to have, which starts with a stressed-out young co-ed trying to write a paper late at night. I guess cheerful co-eds did better than stressed-out co-eds in beta testing. What a surprise.

Why don't companies realize it makes them look desperate when they inundate the market with the very same ads? It just signals they don't think the product can do well with the average amount of advertising they'd spend on other products. Frankly, they'd be better off using some of the money they spend on such intense advertising to give some students access to the full version of Grammarly and encourage them to tell their friends. When I read through some of my students' essays, it looks like quite a few SMU students don't yet know they can have access to a watered-down version for free. Maybe in the not-so-distant future, business professors will use Grammarly as one of their cases of how not to run an advertising campaign, unless the goal is to look desperate and faintly ridiculous.

Comments

[plus.google.com/111303285497934501993]

This may not be (entirely) Grammarly's doing. YouTube is a Google property, and I'm pretty sure Google decides which ads you see. They try to do this using clever analytics about your interests, of course, and sometimes they get a bit fixated. I've had Google show me the same add for a product multiple times (consecutively), even after I've already bought it. Perhaps Grammarly should consider changing up their ads periodically, but Google should mix things up better.

[Aurelie C. Thiele]

Thank you for your comment! If Google thinks I'm interested in Grammarly, it is sadly mistaken. And those ads show up when I'm home (I don't watch videos from work (!)), so the only way it'd figure out I'm affiliated with a university would be because I sometimes have my email or the course management software (both sites ending in .edu) open in the same web browser.

All that talk about artificial intelligence, and Google can't even tell it's been showing me the same ad I don't care about dozens and dozens of times.

You're right that Grammarly may not be aware that its marketing budget is being used to show the same one ad to the same customers again and again. It must still represent a sizable amount of money and I'm impressed they found the cash given that they operate on a freemium business model. It's hard not to get the impression they are throwing money at advertising to generate a critical mass of users, and it's even worse if their money is being wasted on the same viewers, and viewers like me who don't even want Grammarly.