[papeda]

There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

[koheripbal]

3) Companies are learning that Ads that don't appear to be Ads, which also happen to reinforce customers' existing belief system, is a great way to lower their emotional guard and inject a positive product injection. The future of Native Advertising [1] is bright. So many examples already... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year

[nicbou]

Add to that all kinds of affiliate marketing being passed off as legitimate recommendations.

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[ocdtrekkie]

User targeted advertising maybe moves the needle 4%. The reason people believe it's so key is that adtech companies need businesses to believe it's vital since they're the only companies with enough user data to do it. That 4% figure came from an independent study, I believe a Google-backed study claimed it had a 50% impact.

Remove that and smaller ad companies can sell ads based on the content they're displayed next to. A reasonable "targeting" method which doesn't require tracking users at all. Sites could partner directly with advertisers for similar effectiveness at a drastically lower price.

[fauigerzigerk]

>Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

That's unlikely. Spending on advertising doesn't appear to change much as a share of GDP:

https://www.galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm

[rm445]

Probably spend differently. Because both of your points are kind of true: the future is online, but money spent up to now hasn't necessarily got results. Pure wild speculation, but I suspect that some of the metrics that drove advertising AND content onto the big beasts of the current Internet were gamed or fraudulent - it will be interesting to see if any big scandals happen.

[rdiddly]

I sure hope so! But in all seriousness I don't think those two points conflict per se; they both say, "...advertising is not very worthwhile..." which kind of nails what's going on. The ground under our feet has changed. The audience by-and-large is fragmented, jaded, fickle, fed up, and has no money.

Fed up for the last 5 years hearing about scandal after scandal, outrage after outrage...

Fragmented for about the last 5-10 years, ever since we figured out the "long tail" and how to cater to everybody's unique interests. There is no longer anything approximating a place where everybody goes/is; hence there's not even a consensus anymore about what reality is, which is a related & tangential issue.

Has no money, well that's more of a continuum... either you do or you don't, but every year a larger number of people don't, and are too broke to be in the market for whatever product.

Jaded with advertising in general ever since probably the Boomers were in their 20s, and moreso when Gen X were teenagers.

Jaded with online advertising ever since the 90s when it became clear ads were going to follow us into what everybody thought was going to be a new online world.

Fickle since the dawn of time.

[bobthepanda]

this has always been the problem with advertising.

the old chestnut goes, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.