[shostack]

Fully agree with your view on the DR side of things. There are obviously questions as to the incremental lift of a given view-through conversion (especially for campaigns where the vast majority of conversions or VTs).

However branding campaigns definitely can work, they are just hard as hell to measure somewhat accurately without LOTS of budget, fancy software, focus groups and statistical modeling. You need a large amount of data to notice the needle moving, and that just isn't always feasible.