[mochomocha]

> The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value.

I agree. The industry is (too slowly) moving towards measuring the actual causal effect of ads to remove the correlation/causation leap that has unfortunately been the norm. But it's much harder to implement given the very fragmented ecosystem, and big players in a monopolistic situation at this point have little incentive to do so.

In reality, it's not uncommon for the causal ad effect to be 10x smaller than the claimed correlational effect.