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by nobody_nowhere 1076 days ago
There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate.

You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.

Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
3 comments
nobody_nowhere 1076 days ago
People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny.

And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.

Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.

When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.

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somsak2 1075 days ago
>it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.

super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate

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prepend 1075 days ago
> you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.

I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.”

If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive.

I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.

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jfengel 1076 days ago
What happened to Kraft Heinz?
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nobody_nowhere 1075 days ago
They cut advertising by 40% and lost a boatload of market share https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2019/03/06/the-kraft-hei...
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kjkjadksj 1075 days ago
That is a poor comparison because its not a comparison with a single variable changed. Kraft and Heinz went from two independent companies to a single one controlled by new ownership engaged in organization-wide cost cutting. The world also did not stand still over that time, it probably also changed in many ways.

Its probably impossibly to conclude with any confidence that the results were simply due to cuts to the ad budget, cuts to the budget and cuts to operations, or simply cuts to operations. Ads are also not commodities. An ads effectiveness is also not the result of pure spend, cheap ads can be very effective and expensive ones can also not be effective and vice versa.

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HWR_14 1075 days ago
What happened to Kraft Heinz? I assume they are still doing very well.
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