| I sometimes say something vaguely like #2. And it doesn't conflict with #1. The argument is this: - A lot of advertising is effective, and a lot the effectiveness boils down to lies, manipulation and general dishonesty. - Ad attribution - i.e. tracing how much money spent on what advertising resulted in how much profit and when - is a hard problem. It's easy to make mistakes with it, and it's also easy to lie and not get caught. - Most people involved aren't exactly experts in statistics. That's especially true for small businesses, which don't have money or institutional expertise to hire talent just to evaluate their ad spend. - Which means people trust they aren't being bullshitted by the very industry that specializes in lies and manipulation. I've seen this play out in real life myself; I vividly remember working next desk to social media marketers who were clueless at maths. They'd take the numbers and graphs from Facebook's panel, write up stories that made these numbers always sound like everything is going perfectly, and send such reports to the customers who were even more mathematically clueless, and thus incapable of verifying whether the numbers and the story presented add up. The way I see it: some advertising is effective sometimes, but you don't know which one is effective and when, it's mighty hard to figure that out, and the advertisers have every incentive to confuse the issue for you. (Note that they'll also happily confuse the issue for themselves, too. The industry consists of a lot of players building their products and services on top of each others' products and services; there's a lot of competition happening, and there's plenty of incentive to use the same advertising tactics within the industry as outside.) |