[doctorpangloss]

This story is complex. If there was an obvious way for CMOs at major brands to distill this issue, such as a metric, they would do it. But instead, if they are brand advertising, they want a CPM that "looks right," and Google delivers that to them with garbage inventory. If they want pure return-on-advertising-spend, Google will show to people it knows will impulse buy, but the ads will be insanely expensive. You can't just arbitrage this as an ad buyer. Anyway, the agencies and media buyers in between the CMO and Google are aligned with Google, because they are paid a budget premium, so it's really their fault that they do not care about fraud.

My disclosure is: I make a purely interactive ad product that only appears in first-party inventory like in social media feeds. In my opinion this is a non-issue if you... Make ads people like.

Here's an example of a highly successful interactive ad creative: https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - per 1 million visits, the average engagement time was 65s. A typical video ad has a median of 0s of watch time, and 2.1s on average (hence 5s YouTube ads).

There's nothing new here. Even John Oliver will talk about ads people like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo.

At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

[yunohn]

I think HN is one of the least-informed places about ads/marketing. The vast majority of commenters here are reactionary and refuse to understand how things work. They also believe they’re completely immune to marketing, while commenting on a forum dedicated to the startup funnel.

Super cool interactive ad BTW!

[totallywrong]

> At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

There used to be great ads. Campaigns on TV and print media that people would talk about. That just doesn't happen online, and every single ad to me is, as you say, noise.

[Dylan16807]

I see a lot of talk about the current mcdonald's campaign. The game boy game got a ton of attention on HN.