Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by disgruntledphd2 3617 days ago
Definitely. This is a part of my professional life, so I get exposed to these issues all the time. TV, in particular, tends to be measured in very strange ways by DR advertisers because they appear to believe that advertising was invented along with the click, by Google (really Overture, but hey).

To be fair to offline, you can get a pretty good read on store sales as a function of advertising if you do geographical splits. Its modelled, and statistical, but there's definitely nothing wrong with that.

I think the online problem is harder because its so easy to measure clicks that people focus entirely on them without considering other approaches, whereas with offline its hard to get any measure, so people are willing to try different things.