[jgurewitz]

These articles typically come in the form of, I was paying for my brand name when I was number one on organic search. I wasn't validating any of my other ad spend, I stopped and didn't see any negative impact, therefore advertising doesn't work/is a scam.

As someone who's worked in the industry a while, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs generally but when people extrapolate that this means all advertising is bs it's just not true. Fundamentally business orders should track results from their ads the same way they look at impact anywhere else in their business.

[totalview]

Someone who runs a startup here. Marketing has become so congested on the same platforms that most people are becoming “sign blind” to all of it. Anything squeezing my boarders on my mobile or desktop sites just causes my eyes to look for the “X” button. Older clients I work with in large industries don’t trust or click on any of it, and their company blue coat filters stop you if you accidentally do.

Marketing isn’t all bad. But if your answer to spreading the word about you product comes down to spending money on banner ads, pop ups, or anything else that would annoy you away from looking at your own product…

[squeaky-clean]

I used to work in airfare marketing systems, one of our biggest sellers was Instagram ads with prices inserted into the ad graphic hourly. I have no clue what kind of person sees an ad for "cheap flights to {destination}" and then clicks the ad and impulse-buys their tickets, but they exist. A surprisingly high number of them.

[autoexec]

Mentally ill people do it. Manic episodes in particular lead to lots of impulsive buying of things like plane tickets. Algorithms can target their ads at people with mental illnesses and exploit them while giving companies plausible deniability. Algorithms can even predict when a manic episode is coming on.

If they have enough data on a person, data brokers can easily classify people by mental illness and deliver their information to those looking to target people with specific conditions like dementia. Not nearly enough oversight or regulation on this stuff.

[teachrdan]

I've never heard this theory before. I wonder how much prepper grear -- survival food, weapons, etc. -- was sold to people who were algorithmically detected to be clinically paranoid.

[Workaccount2]

I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram. I don't know about plane tickets, but his apartment was full of random shit he bought off his feed. Just alone he was probably covering the bandwidth cost of his entire town.

[sammalloy]

> I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram.

No lie, Insta knows what I want to buy before I know, and it’s very scary. I’m not an impulse buyer by any stretch of the imagination, but their advertising is some of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere on the internet.

[Spooky23]

Instagram knows nothing about me, i saw the ads for the Canadian metal top the other day.

They are the modern version of home shopping network. They make a fortune out of lonely people buying random shit.

[girvo]

That should not be surprising considering who owns them and how much data they have on us.

[lostlogin]

If you could find a few of these people, being a middle man for advertising campaigns targeting them would be one sleazy side business.

[whimsicalism]

This is already a thing.

To be honest, any of the advertising schemes being dreamed up here in the comments section of HN are already a thing.

[ebiester]

It's people like me who had it on their to-do list and it was a reminder to do it later.

[saiya-jin]

Yeah but you didn't do it via the ad if I understand correctly. I would never ever do that, regardless of the price or any other fact. As mentioned above, I never click on them by principle, same as I never watch TV programs full of ads. Firefox with ublock origin blocks 95% of ads, for the rest I see if there is quick X to remove them or ignore them hard. If its too annoying I leave the page and go for competition.

The best ad could theoretically achieve with person like me is that I would go to ie skyscanner and check current situation.

[aidos]

You’re not the general public. Most people don’t even use ad blockers. Those of us on HN are a different breed in that regard.

Also, even clicking it and then returning later works for the advertisers.

[Retric]

Half of men aged 16-24 use ad blockers, so it’s not uncommon either.

[swores]

If you end up buying a ticket you found in skyscanner on the same device then they'll (often) attribute, or partially attribute, that sale to the ad view even if you didn't click (obviously only if you aren't adblocking or if they're getting around your blocking).

[bjelkeman-again]

But I think people at HN are the exception to how ads are used.

[eloff]

Offer me a great price to anywhere warm in winter and I'd be one of those impulse buys.

[janesvilleseo]

If this was part of a retargeting campaign it would probably be a good audience too.

[stevage]

I think I have clicked that kind of ad. The situation would have been, I was thinking of booking tickets to X, I don't want to pay more than Y, sure I'll click and see if your tickets are as cheap as you say.

[Nimitz14]

In europe casually flying somewhere is fun, cheap and very accessible if one works remote (or one can just go for a weekend). Not everyone plans things in advance.

[faangiq]

More likely is misattribution.

[squeaky-clean]

Nope, we only did attribution if you clicked the ad and purchased on a device with the same facebook cookie within 24 hours. Our other ad services probably had misattribution errors and the instagram stuff still outperformed them by like 10x.

[jgurewitz]

Law of shitty click through rates. https://www.google.com/amp/s/andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitt...

The best marketing comes from strong value props in an area people are open to hearing them. The magic of Facebook (and Google although now less so) is the ads are extremely relevant, to people who are open to hearing them.

The backlash against ads is because they work, when done properly.

[joshstrange]

> most people are becoming “sign blind”

It's to the point now that I sometime miss content that I skipped over because I thought it was an ad. The worst case of this is opening a news article about something that happened on video and all I want to do is watch the video. Is it the top video? Rarely, I scroll right past that and look for something in the body. More than half the time it's a video that's in a tweet (thankfully easy enough to pick out) but sometimes I have to look closer at what I dismissed as an ad to find out if it's what I'm looking for. What's infuriating is when I go back to the top video, hit play, sit through an ad, then I get some generic news or computer-generated-type reading/text of the article in video form.

[whimsicalism]

> Older clients I work with in large industries don’t trust or click on any of it, and their company blue coat filters stop you if you accidentally do.

A small but significant proportion do click on any of it.

[bduerst]

It also sounds like this person's startup is B2B, which has an entirely different set of advertising strategies than something consumer focused.

Anything that involves clicks (display, search, social) are typically not the most effective advertising tactics when your buying decision makers number so few, but that doesn't rule out other advertising activities.

[grantsch]

B2B early stage companies selling a high ticket service/product need to be focused on sales activity.

Ads are a distraction. It's the seemingly easy way out but there's no way out of selling early stage.

[whimsicalism]

You use ads in B2B to build leads, then you follow up with marketing/sales. Certainly you wont get a conversion with display ads, but on certain providers they can help feed into the start of your funnel.

[Spooky23]

Maybe. I’ve seen some pretty sophisticated campaigns targeting my employer, from local NPR underwriting to print and event sponsorship, all targeting a half dozen individuals.

End of the day, the salesman and his relationships closed it. The marketing consultant made a lot of cash though.

[grantsch]

I'm sure it can help in conjunction with sales. Of course it can augment other activity.

[renewiltord]

Agree in general but you can also construct a quick Account-Based Marketing approach using the input data that you use to construct a prospect list. Outsource the actual campaign and you can have that run in parallel to your sales work.

[jgurewitz]

Agreed. The more SMB your product is the closer the chance ads will work, but further up the size and ACV scale and you are simply wasting your time until you become a brand name in your domain.

[groby_b]

If that's your business plan, you should take a long hard look in the mirror though.

[no_wizard]

would you say so called "influencer" / "creator" marketing is more valuable nowadays as a result? Getting people behind you who have a trusted audience seems like the only way to combat this problem, I just don't know that its a serviceable business per se?

[grumbel]

I think that depends a lot on how that marketing is actually done. Just having an influencer read an ad text or insert a prerecorded segment feels just as annoying as regular ads, sometimes even more as there is no Skip-button or adBlock that can make it go away quickly.

Actual products reviews, even when they are not all positiv, on the other side I find extremely effective. Same for behind-the-scenes video that show you how a product is made and tested. As what an ad should ideally do is really just show me that the product exist and what it can do. That's all I care about and that's what most regular ads completely fail at.

Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.

Trust is important, but you don't just gain that by having popular influencer read your lies, you gain that by not lying in the first place. Few companies seem to realize that.

That said, I am a sample size of one and other people will make purchase decisions differently.

[boogies]

> there is no Skip-button or adBlock that can make [sponsorship segments] go away quickly.

There is! https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[EricE]

>Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.

This! It's all about the basics!

[hi_im_miles]

Trust is the biggest thing missing from most forms of advertisement. I know I will gladly check out a product that a YouTuber I enjoy recommends, but banner ads/prerolls/TV ads/etc feel like a scam reel.

[hguant]

This is huge. There's a YouTuber I've been following for a stupidly long time, and if he recommends something, or even is sponsored by someone, I'll check them out. Same thing with acoup.blog - if there's a book recommendation there, I'll check it out in a heartbeat. Why? Because they've spent a long time developing trust with their audience. The YouTuber has been absolutely brutal about products, and has been extremely open about how people have tried to influence him one way or another when he's doing reviews. The author of acoup.blog has similarly put a lot of work in establishing his bonafides, so when he says a work is good or important, I know what he means by that.

[lotsofpulp]

I trust YouTubers (or whatever celebrity) even less than banner ads.

I know a pharmacist on Instagram that quit being a pharmacist and started hawking health supplements in between semi useful posts, mixing bullshit with truth and trashing the credibility of their qualifications.

[p1necone]

I'll trust a product that a youtuber I like organically recommends. But I'd still not trust anything they "recommend" in a sponsored ad slot.

The only way you can (legally) pay for the former as a business is indirectly, via investing money into making a decent product rather than advertising.

[jgurewitz]

There's a fun model I built once upon the level of monetization versus trust building activities a given YouTuber/influencer should do maximize monetization over any given time period. You can model the decay in audience trust per monetization.

[UnpossibleJim]

I have clicked on more banner ads (though few) about products I didn't know about, than I would ever be swayed by an "influencer", which is the new term for celebrity shill.

Pop ups, however, have made me NOT buy products I would have otherwise be interested in, lol. But I'm a spiteful person.

EDIT: I take some of that back, maybe. I do look at car experts on YouTube, and listen to their opinion. I guess they might be considered "Influencers". I was wrong.

[Beltiras]

It depends. I play MTG Arena. There's a slew of overlay apps that give you access to extraneous information. Best advertising dollars I've seen spent are Jim Davis's plugs of Untapped.gg. Not only is he using the app himself, he raves about it all the time. He's worth every penny they pay him. Tossing money blindly at influencers just because they have a following is not a good strategy, you still have to validate that it's a proper way of getting the right eyeballs on your product.

[WYepQ4dNnG]

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that people are actually "influenced" by influencers. I have never trusted anyone and anything. When it comes to spend MY MONEY I do my own research, period.

[liber8]

I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not. Assuming it's not, unless your "own research" consists of actually buying a wide swath of competing products and testing them against each other, then at some point you are indeed relying on "influencers", whether those influencers are Consumer Reports, Amazon reviews, your parents/neighbors/friends, etc.

[WYepQ4dNnG]

I might trust Consumer Reports, parents/neighbors/friends but not some random dude on youtube...

[godshatter]

When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are. You get a feel for who is a normal Joe that gained an audience because of their passion for a topic and who is just someone following trends trying to gain follower just to gain followers. You also get an idea of whether or not they really know what a vpn is.

If I see a product I've never heard of before advertised to me by someone I trust to some degree, I'll check it out. I almost never buy because I have years of shields built up to stop myself from buying crap at the drop if a hat, but there are occasions where I will buy if I like the product enough after researching it. Those times are rare, though.

I don't watch videos from most people who could be described as "influencers", though. Mostly small creators who have an interesting take on something and are passionate about it.

[dfxm12]

When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are.

And you get an idea of their tastes & whether or not you share the same tastes. Back in the day, if Siskel & Ebert gave a film two thumbs up, I would probably go see it. Not because they were on the TV, not because of some credentials they may or may not have had, but because over time, I've found out that I generally liked the films they gave two thumbs up, and life is too short to "do my own research" on all the movies playing this weekend.

Of course, this doesn't mean I would go out and buy a car if they were in the commercial for it, but I might have thought about getting a movie related product they hawked (microwavable popcorn? Special edition VHS/DVD? I dunno...).

[nonameiguess]

What does your research consist of? When Steve from GamersNexus posts a video of him benchmarking a bunch of different cases with temperature gauges and the exact same internal hardware and workloads to tell me which one cools the best, I can try to independently reproduce those results myself, but that requires purchasing all of the cases, so there is no gain there. If he turns out to have been lying, I lost the money anyway.

[krapp]

>I have never trusted anyone and anything. When it comes to spend MY MONEY I do my own research, period.

...so you're "influenced" by whatever sources you research, which means, having reached any conclusion at all, you trust at least some of them.

[WYepQ4dNnG]

I trust my judgement based on all the information I have gathered. Then I check with friends and people that I trust, certainly not the random dude on youtube that ads the best blender 2022.

[pempem]

Thats a wonderful thing but I think you know its quite rare.

Influencing is nothing new though the medium change has allowed for a preponderance of people to become influencers to smaller and smaller networks, we've always relied on proxy information if only on where to start research.

It applied to the clothes we choose, the movies of which we might consume the trailers and then reject, the research we do. The universe of awesomeness and crap which we create as a species is multitudes larger than any person could just navigate via pure first order research.

We all need signposts. While I abhor marketing and think hard about how to avoid or reduce its impact on me, its just not fully avoidable.

[achenatx]

Have you never read something on here, then checked it out? What if paul graham recommends it?

I guarantee people have influence over you, just not the hipster influencers you are thinking of.

[extropy]

Your time and mental effort are limited. And your own research is not that effective in areas you have little working experience.

In my experience a lot of older people (40+) increasingly rely on advice/influencers to drive their product decisions.

[cute_boi]

Regarding doing own research I think this approach works for many products that are cheap to purchase. But, this approach fails badly when you have to purchase items that are expensive and one time purchase. How do I pick good washing machine? I can only purchase washing machine, or chimney, or smart TV only 1 time, so I can't do research unless I am determined to burn money.

I do agree with influences. These guys can sway people and make people to purchase ersatz product and has ability to do shenanigans.I think people should be cognizant while watching "influencers".

[seibelj]

Yeah but if you like Shaq and he tweets “hey this basketball is the best one I tried” then some fraction of his followers will just trust Shaq on the theory he wouldn’t hurt his reputation. Why not buy the Shaq ball?

[ipaddr]

Because he hasn't played in years and whatever ball he used was the official nba ball at the time. Most people would buy the official ball not a random ball.

If you are talking shoes then people will buy to be associated with that player.

[aaaaaaaaata]

because his last 80 products were kind of shit

[WYepQ4dNnG]

Because he ads that basketball because he is being payed to do so.

[jgurewitz]

Where do you do your research?

[whatshisface]

That's because you have the antibodies. The people who closely follow influencers and who do not realize what the influencers are doing to them, lack those antibodies. This is a sad time to be a person who browses the internet without any jadedness or paranoia.

[sillysaurusx]

Absolutely. I still subconsciously reach for NordVPN because of how good internet historian is at plugging it. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiccjfD_3pHAp-f3aNlf94BXW...

[aspenmayer]

Internet Historian made better content for his Nord ads than many creators make for their main content.

[dangerface]

Channel fit is a huge thing, if you are trying to sell a large ticket item like web servers via banners you are wasting your money, if you are trying to sell dog beds with banner ads on a pet forum you will be very profitable.

[squeaky-clean]

I was looking up vintage race car prices recently (like the kind I'd only dream of affording) and saw a banner ad for an individual selling a collection of his. I clicked the ad thinking it would lead me to a website and it was just a phone number that my phone asked if I wanted to call! No info on what cars he had for sale, just his personal phone number. I wonder if he's ever made a sale through those ads. I considered calling to see what would happen but it was 3am

[bromuro]

I actually don’t remember in my 25+ years on the internet to have ever clicked one of those ads. Now they are more invasive, as they appears masked as legit content - reddit, fb, instagram, and video games they force me to see ads.

I was so disappointed when apps added ads on the iPhone to ger money! Such a scam.

[tetsusaiga]

Exactly, all this does is prove they never knew how to run ads to begin with.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.

[tomrod]

> they never knew how to run ads to begin with

This feels like a no true scotsman. I have doubts that the vast majority of digital advertising platforms do anything other than clutter websites, waste bandwidth, annoy people, and pay a small slice of tech employees. I'm open to seeing research on the topic (and I am pretty sure there is some), but what I've read is that most advertising has insufficient statistical power, thus confidence of advertising outcomes being anything but random flukes is low.

[jklinger410]

It's funny to me that everyone has a "take" on advertising, and yet 99% of the successful B2C brands, including multi billion dollar international ones, continue to advertise. Every platform that starts as ad-free gets pressured to allow ads and most of them acquiesce.

It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?

Maybe it's that getting your product in front of the right people at the right time has immense value. And many platforms have opened up spaces for you to attempt to do that if you pay them for the space. Maybe paying for the wrong space at the wrong time is a waste of money.

Maybe determining the right place and time to get in front of people is a skill as well as an entire profession. Maybe that entire profession can't be reduced to an absolute binary of does it work or doesn't it.

Just some thoughts.

[time_to_smile]

I'm very curious if you work in advertising/adtech, otherwise your "take" is no different than the ones you're criticizing.

I have worked on the data side of a pretty wide range of roles across the marketing/adtech spectrum for over a decade and think their is a lot of good reason to be skeptical of the claims of the advertising world.

Tim Hwang is also an insider in this industry and wrote an entire book (The Subprime Attention Crisis) on the issues with the current state of advertising. I work in a very different area from Tim (he's legal) but I can tell you that book almost bored me with how obvious all of his complaints where.

> It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?

I've seen the data that many of these companies don't. As many others have said, simply dismissing advertising as a "scam" is too extreme, however there are a lot of really big issues in the industry and extreme skepticism of the advertising industry is well warranted.

The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen. This same logic could be falsely applied to the pre-2008 financial crisis "if these ratings are so wrong then why are so many experts putting so much money in them?"

Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.

[jklinger410]

I work in advertising and know how the sausage is made. However I don't have equity in an ad agency, I don't profit off of promoting advertising. I participate in these conversations to help people understand. Also because they often piss me off.

> The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen.

The financial crisis was about companies making money, which they love to do. Advertising ad spend is about companies spending money, which they hate to do. Unless someone can explain why everyone wants to subsidize advertising agencies and ad platforms.

> Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.

Skeptical of what, exactly? If you use 3rd party impression and click tracking tools, attribution modeling software, and statistically significant testing, I am genuinely confused as to what there is to be skeptical of.

I think the people who say they know "how the sausage is made" and still hold skepticism of "the whole system" are maybe not as knowledgeable as they may think.

In good faith, I am definitely skeptical of a few things. Whether ad platforms are really trying to prevent spam. How 3rd party DSP audiences are built and why they think people are ok with using them having no idea how they are made. Whether or not apps and devices really are spying on people. Whether people are aware of what "privacy" means from an advertising perspective.

But I'm not skeptical about the users that come to my site or which marketing efforts are working or not working.

[gnicholas]

> The financial crisis was about companies making money, which they love to do. Advertising ad spend is about companies spending money, which they hate to do. Unless someone can explain why everyone wants to subsidize advertising agencies and ad platforms.

Advertising is certainly in the interest of the ad agencies, and the employees of companies whose job is to either manage outside advertising or develop/execute advertising in-house. It's possible there could be a company with a lean team of advertisers, doing just the type of work that makes sense. But within any organization, leaders want to have larger teams because it is seen as a marker of respect. It also allows a leader to command a higher salary.

I don't know if these forces are sufficient to have spun the entire advertising industry out of nothing. But I do know that there are significant forces looking to build up advertising both inside and outside of companies.

[hnaccount141]

I have no idea whether advertising works or not, but I see this "successful businesses do it, therefore it it works" argument applied to so many different things and it always baffles me. Besides not having much substance beyond an appeal to authority, I don't think I've ever seen an example of a company that doesn't engage in some number of financially wasteful behaviors with dubious or at least unquantifiable value.

[dundarious]

The vast majority of successful B2C brands are owned by companies like Unilever, or are Apple, etc. I don't think there's an easy comparison between the ad goals and spending of these companies and those of smaller B2Cs trying to get off the ground. Maybe your own justification is comparing Apples to oranges, pun intended, and besides the point.

[dazc]

> 'It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?'

Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?

Those companies paying for clicks to 404 pages or 'this item is out of stock', etc?

Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?

I get your point but I wouldn't assume big companies always know what the are doing when it comes to advertising. Sometimes they employ lots of people and some of those people don't actually have a clue what they are doing.

[importantbrian]

I agree with your broader point that you shouldn't just assume large brands always know what they're doing but other than the 404 example I'm not sure these are actually indications of companies not knowing what they're doing.

> Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?

I get that this can be annoying but plenty of companies do A/B tests and find that it works for them. I suppose it could mean they're just following some fad and don't know what's going on, but it doesn't have to mean that. This is especially true for companies that have long sales cycles or are in categories where lots of comparison shopping is common. Getting someone into your email funnel can be more important than anything else.

> Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?

Where else in the funnel would you have them apply their coupon? Maybe my perspective is different because we do a lot of offline advertising, but if someone comes into the site off of a print coupon they're going to expect to be able to put it in somewhere and get their discount. If we don't put it in the order flow they're either going to not purchase or we're going to get a lot of customer service calls from people trying to redeem their coupons.

[dazc]

Fair comment. I think we can agree there are case where such things can be used to great effect but that there also are businesses throwing money around and hoping something sticks.

One big mistake businesses make is seeing another business doing something and assuming it must be working. Which is one of the points the OP was making.

[chillacy]

> Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?

I've seen this type of thing improve conversion immensely at a startup I worked at, and it sets up the starts of a drip marketing campaign.

Many of these are the natural results of A/B testing and experimentation, which is why many companies arrive at the same result.

[jklinger410]

What is the opposite of argumentum ad populum? No one likes this thing because I do not like this thing.

[jklinger410]

I'm sure the executives at these big corporations would love to see stock prices go up if they could find a few extra million dollars per quarter in useless revenue negative activity that they could easily cut while having no impact on sales.

[dazc]

Many of these business go bust - so yes, maybe they should do just that?

[taeric]

To be fair, many of the most expansively marketed companies pretty much exist for the sake of marketing, it seems.

[jklinger410]

What is the benefit of them funding an entire industry of marketers if none of it works?

[taeric]

Depends what you mean by "doesn't work."

Though, I suppose it often matters what you think of as marketing. Is it marketing for Coke to license their image to shirts and other products?

[tetsusaiga]

I appreciate your thoughtful criticism of this.

The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start, and would have known much earlier whether they were getting a return on their investment.

If your only way of measuring advertising results is to "turn it off", you're just flying blind, and one can't expect success with a (lack of) strategy like that.

That said, you are not wrong that a meaningful percentage of advertising is being run with similarly insufficient statistical power, and to that I would say those businesses are also incorrect, for the most part. I delineate because at some point, say when you're Apple or Microsoft, you are so big that "brand awareness" advertising takes over performance advertising. For the most part though, I'd say those aren't the types of businesses we are discussing in a context like this one.

[Retric]

Tracking advertising effectiveness is ridiculously difficult and multiple people inside and outside your company are incentivized to overstate impact.

Statistical power for example assumes independence which can be very difficult. Great you spend X million to convince people to buy an AC in March, did you actually benefit or would those same customers want an AC as soon as the first heat wave hit? Spreading demand can be useful, but it’s also really easy to to draw false conclusions from statistics if you don’t understand the domain.

And that’s just one of the many pitfalls involved.

[tomrod]

You hit the nail on the head, for the record. Thank you!

[tomrod]

How do you know any strategy is attributable to success or failure without testing it?

Pre/post analysis may be temporally correlated but this isn't proof because you haven't captured a baseline comparison.

A/B and MAB testing are helpful but not magic bullets.

Shapley values (marginal impact) is a nice mathematical outcome to have for multitouch attribution but as usually implemented is only a single statistic and can be a fluke without additional testing.

[cj]

> The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start

Part of the problem is your brand keywords will typically show up as being one of your best converting keywords.

[VBprogrammer]

A phenomenon which reminds me of the canonical survivorship bias story. In WWII they conducted studies to determine where the bullet holes where on aircraft which returned from bombing sorties, in order to determine which parts of the aircraft required armour. It took a statistician to point out that they actual needed to armour those places where they rarely saw damage on returning aircraft, as those parts are most likely the parts where being hit caused the aircraft to not return at all.

Sometimes it requires a bit of a leap of imagination in order to resolve these things.

[tomrod]

Causal inference has made a lot of improvements since WWII, and "if" the advertising company knows what they are doing they run effective A/B or MAB testing; that said, statistical power is typically low because of insufficient sample size for individual companies.

You could pool all ads together, but since each advertising company is independent you get into all kinds of weird path dependencies.

While I wouldn't claim to be an adtech practitioner, I did at one point help a few F500 work through conceptual models of multitouch attribution and other statistical issues. These are very nontrivial issues -- proving advertising effectiveness is very difficult!

[staticautomatic]

A problem in what sense?

[jefftk]

It's a problem in that those keywords are some of the places where you are at least likely to be generating counterfactual conversions: most of that traffic was probably coming to anyway.

[bduerst]

>This feels like a no true scotsman.

It's not though.

Appealing to effeciency is not an appeal to purity, which is what a no-true scotsman is.

A no true scotsman in this regard would be more along the lines of redefining advertising to not include any activities that OP described, i.e. OP wasn't doing true advertising. GP is not doing that here, because GP is acknowledging that OP is doing advertising, but doing it poorly.

[tomrod]

It felt like one because the original comment puts anyone who doesn't willingly support advertising claims as not knowing how advertising works. The classification creates a false dichotomy whose classification is "only a group that does not know advertising would do X."

These are hallmarks of a no-true scotsman.

[yen223]

I like that this comment has no-true-scotsman'd the idea of no-true scotsman.

[jgurewitz]

If you spoke to any growth marketer worth their salt at any D2C company they will have incrementality testing and split tested traffic to prove without a shadow of a doubt that advertising works. The real challenge is scaling without losing efficiency.

[jjulius]

>It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.

Yikes, that's incredibly unfair and arrogant.

It's amazing to you that, because most people don't have to actually employ performance advertising, they don't know what it is? That someone whose passion is cooking, and decides to open a restaurant, might not have that advertising knowledge? That someone - in the case of the OP - whose focus is writing software that helps research an automotive vehicle's life history, might not know everything you do about advertising?

C'mon now.

[tetsusaiga]

No you're right, as someone who takes these things seriously, I should hold myself to a higher standard than to paint in such broad strokes. Thanks for checking me there.

Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective:

I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge.

But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like.

Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.

[jjulius]

Fair, and I appreciate your honest response! Life needs to see more positive discourse like this. :)

[dylan604]

>It never ceases to amaze me

This comes across as an arrogant view point. Would you know how to take off the heads of the engine in your car and rebuild it? No? Wow! I'm amazed that you'd have no idea how to do something that isn't your direct line of work.

People running small businesses that are so wanting for ad buys to work for them don't spend years honing their performance advertising skills. They don't even spend time looking it up to know it's a thing (first time I've heard this phrase myself). They see all of the advertisng they are subjected to about why buying ads is important, and so they start where they can.

Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services?

Condescension for the sake of patting yourself on the back is just gross.

[tetsusaiga]

You are totally correct, thank you— I addressed this to jjulius above, since they pointed out the same thing. Sometimes one must be reminded not to be flippant on the internet, it's all too easy, and I don't want to be that person.

>Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services?

You're right. We all know the value of the person who makes complaints without offering solutions.

If anyone reads this and would like some honest help in this area, send and email to the address in the 'about' on my profile, and I'll try to point you in the right direction (It only looks sketchy because it's a forwarding address, I'm sure you understand.)

[dangerface]

> why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need?

That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it.

Advertising works when its targeted but most businesses see advertising as just trying to shout as loud as possible. They take this theory and shout at every one they meet hoping this will convert them to a customer and are amazed when shouting at people has the effect of driving them away rather than pulling them in.

They come to the conclusion that advertising doesn't work not that its there technique, they shouted so loud and at every one how could anyone possibly shout louder or at more people? and when they stopped shouting sales went up! obviously advertising doesn't work.

[dylan604]

>That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it.

That goes against the entire concept of the advertising agency though. If advertising is so important, why staff it out to a 3rd party when you could do it in house? If this in house thing was the way to go, why is Maddison Ave so powerful?

[dangerface]

Most businesses that take advertising seriously will have someone in house and then out source the specifics to specialists but the larger strategy is done in house. In the UK generalist agencies like av browne have been hurting bad the smaller agencies have been closing.

[jjulius]

>That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it.

All that sounds like to me is that the company providing OP's posited "non-insulting services" would just need to make sure they're marketing their product correctly and demonstrating value properly.

[mcv]

Advertising is definitely a lot more complex than simply: spend more money on it -> sales go up.

When tobacco ads were banned, tobacco companies started making more profit, because they had to spend less on advertising. Turned out their advertising was mostly to steal customers from each other, and didn't really lure in new users. So the ban actually helped them.

[jefftk]

Short-term, yes. Long-term, I think no? Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so.

[logifail]

> Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so

That's one hypothesis. Another is that we've known for ages that tobacco smoke causes disease[0] since[1]

> Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year

and the world finally woke up to that.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects... [1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87

[Terry_Roll]

As someone who has run ads across a variety of mediums, online and offline, some products benefit from being in the public consciousness, others dont. Identify which products or services benefit from certain types of advertising will help enormously otherwise its just throwing good money after bad.

The OP's point 1 fails to recognise the filter bubble though, I think some SEO companies capitalise on this, but it simply works like this, if you keep googling your website, Google will eventually make it one of the top links in the result for YOU, not anyone else and for some website owners/companies, thats enough for them, and it doesnt bring in any more sales or revenue.

[dleslie]

I would love to see solid evidence that advertising for an established product is meaningfully effective at increasing revenue beyond the cost to produce it.

[civilized]

Oh, don't worry, those of us with a stats/research background know just how sloppy the data and arguments are.

[nfriedly]

Yeah... I hate advertising for a few reasons, including aesthetics and warped incentives. But one of the big ones is that it works. It works on me. Even when I know I'm being manipulated, I can't entirely stop it.

[tomrod]

Surely this is only occasional.

I recall precisely one ad that caught my eye. I did not buy the product, but I liked it. It was for a men's watch after discussing with my spouse how I might need a watch at some point (Facebook is creepy that way, almost certainly monitoring microphone at the time, if not continually).

[nfriedly]

Well, I don't know about you specifically, but I think the average person is more affected by advertising than they realize.

[tomrod]

So folks assert.

[VBprogrammer]

When I think of online ads the first thing that comes to mind is patio11 and his blogs on Bingo Card Creator. If the profit from conversions is above the cost per click the you are printing money hats.

The difficulty is that to get there you have to carefully steward your own little flock of PPC campaigns in the same way that someone might pick stocks or a professional gambler picks a horse.

[fictionfuture]

I run analytics company and (off the record) we detect roughly 75% of paid traffic as bots, w 50% of the remaining in iframes

[chasebank]

What's your analytics company?

[evancoop]

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

- John Wanamaker

[charcircuit]

John Wanamaker died in 1922 long before the age of internet advertising where it became much easier to figure out which half it is.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

The pertinent question is what percentage of advertising is "BS".

We are still in the infancy of the internet and its one dominant usage, the www. It is possible people are overspending on, e.g., www and "in app" advertising because no one is sure what methods or amounts of spending are truly necessary, as "e-commerce" accelerates.

It is a similarly sad state of affairs when people extrapolate the success of some companies engaging in www advertising as a business to mean that current trends towards purchasing www advertising are all backed by objective, empirical evidence and will persist indefinitely. Looking at what has been revealed through litigation against Google and Facebook,1 it appears there is a substantial amount of opaqueness (non-transparency) required for these internet advertising companies to remain successful.

1 Not to mention what will be disclosed in the future.

[Lamad123]

Internet ads are garbage.. I would pay attention to a well-made radio or tv ad, but online ads just the scum of earth!! My eyes skip over embedded text ads and I don't have the patience to see a video ad.. Ad blockers take care of most of that!!! I don't know how this scam "industry" keeps getting away with robbing businesspeople who are supposed to be smarter than the rest of us!!! The only form of advertising I am kinda OK with and believe might work is those sponsored ads by youtubers or affiliate links and the like..

[_nalply]

The line between "You are an expert. If you pay for something useless, it's your problem, not mine" and an outright scam is blurry. If someone says that the industry scams their customers, I wouldn't say he is wrong. But of course it's not in the industry's interest to tell their customers to stop paying.

[z3ncyberpunk]

No, it's because all advertising really IS bs... Advertising is nothing but psychological seduction and manipulation. "You're Satan's little helper, kill yourself."