[baybal2]

It is, better to say, a sunset for the industry as such.

Digital ads had the most wow effect at the time of google's text ads and Internet yet not being a general demographics' thing.

Back then, they were able to show numbers, but not now.

First generation internet users were mostly highly technically literate, high income professionals. Now, the user ratio has reversed.

You can argue that putting efforts to find a needle in a haystack was still paying off when the majority of needles were of incomparably higher marginal value than they are now: consumer goods clicks, say, are lower value than commercial equipment sales clicks, yet you still have to put an equivalent or greater effort to datamine somebody to make them buy an accursed face lotion even if the number of face lotion buyers is 1000 times bigger.

This is a tragedy of the Internet ad industry. There is a finite amount of eyeballs, and the amount of companies with a substantial money wanting to sell you a face lotion will always eclipse the amount of companies who market unique, relevant, specialty products one may actually be actively looking to buy.

[pmcgrathm]

>This is a tragedy of the Internet ad industry. There is a finite amount of eyeballs, and the amount of companies with a substantial money wanting to sell you a face lotion will always eclipse the amount of companies who market unique, relevant, specialty products one may actually be actively looking to buy.

It has little to do with having a large amount of money to spend on ads and more the level of severity of the problem your product solves for the 'eyeball.'

Humans have some needs that are greater than others, and ad dollars spent at alleviating pain or providing for those needs will always get at the most eyeballs. Entire industries - born online - have developed around capitalizing on solving for these needs.

I need money - Predatory loans and credit card offers. I need to be skinnier - Nutraceuticals (Dr. Oz), weight loss, vitamin crazes. I need to be beautiful - Skin care, facial lotions. I need to be less lonely - Online dating, pornography.

The list goes on. The point is - there are more people looking to be skinny, beautiful, rich, and married with children than there are people looking for 'commercial equipment sales.'For now, and until targeting gets smarter and consumers opt to share more data about themselves, those products will win the majority of ad clicks.

We'll get there. (eye roll) Maybe decentralization is the way? :). I'd love to give the Google/FB duopoly a kick in their 'walled garden.'

[soared]

I don't understand your critique:

>unique, relevant, specialty products one may actually be actively looking to buy

This is because the number of people who buy normal lotion is 1000x the number of people who buy unique specialty lotion. Why would the advertising be different than the market?

>First generation internet users were mostly highly technically literate, high income professionals. Now, the user ratio has reversed.

The internet reached the masses - how is that a negative for advertisers? They have more people to advertise to.

>yet you still have to put an equivalent or greater effort to datamine

This isn't true. For lotion you buy lotion related keywords, for commercial equipment you need in-depth research about those products, use cases, industry terms, and the queries people use.

[baybal2]

>This is because the number of people who buy normal lotion is 1000x the number of people who buy unique specialty lotion. Why would the advertising be different than the market?

No, I can't imagine anybody randomly buying a random face lotion online, and I say that as somebody who did a stint in adtech for a few years with access to "crown jewels" of a major advertising brokerage conglomerate. People barely click on FMGC ads even if being force fed, I would've shown you the digits if not for NDA. Their purpose is impressions, even if they are not explicitly billed on PPM basis.

The lion share of ad inventory of any tier 1 ad vendor are for "stuff people buy in Walmarts," and yes the total revenue from FMCG ads is mind boggling and defies any attempt at rational understanding.

Even if the sole point of an ad is to keep the product on top of somebody's mind, it will be of very very little payoff to an advertiser. Though, one can reason that a gigantic big fat FMCG co. bathing in cash can still easily afford doing so even if is patently stupid. This is because even if their bang for buck is approaching zero, it is still better than none for them.

>This isn't true. For lotion you buy lotion related keywords, for commercial equipment you need in-depth research about those products, use cases, industry terms, and the queries people use.

I counter your argument. In both cases, the adtech efforts needed to sustain a barely functioning campaign eclipse all other hurdles. Extreme targeting is the key - even if it sucks, it sucks less than investment in almost anything else including £1k per hour big name marketing consultants.

How it looks on technical side: huge effort at industrial scale purchasing of "cubes" - huge databases of cookies with their statistical and fuzzy logic data from thousands of companies, including the black hat scene. Other than cookies, analogous data come from email list vendors, IMEI/phone number db vendors, vendors of stolen contact lists, search histories, GPS data and etc. All of this is barely enough to for a sustained campaign for F500 FMCG.

[rhizome]

putting efforts to find a needle in a haystack was still paying off when the majority of needles were of incomparably higher marginal value than they are now

Was this back when Google included the referrer URL with each needle?

[baybal2]

Partially due to that too