[drdaeman]

> They don't know this?

Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don't even realize yourself".

And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.

The king is naked, though.

[nine_k]

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc.

Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can correlate.more sources inside FB.

[anon25783]

You occasionally click on "relevant" ads? I'm really curious why you would do that? Personally, I'll go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy anything referred to me by an ad, on the grounds that advertising is a vile and parasitic industry.

[nine_k]

I relatively often click on ads for new electronic musical instruments, even though I rarely buy them. These are just interesting things to see, some actually novel.

I sometimes click on ads about things related to IT and programming, if they mention something novel and important, just to be aware of the landscape, and what potential competition are pushing.

I see ads relatively rarely though, because I run uBlock Origin. So the ads I see are usually placed in context with some care, not just randomly tucked on to an unrelated webpage. Most of the ads are really poor, as I can see if I use an unprotected browser.

[jerrre]

Not OP but presumably they click a relevant ad because it is relevant...

[Sander_Marechal]

> If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them.

I've done the math on this for a few small companies. I an thoroughly convinced that this is just not true for many companies. The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.

[jklinger410]

> The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.

This is a simple test. Turn off all of your ads for a year, compare against the previous. Write a blog post about it, destroy the industry.

[nine_k]

This has been done, in a way.

Some time in 1980s Coca-Cola decided that they have enough of an iconic status, and they don't need as much advertising on expensive large surfaces. They prudently lowered such advertisement a bit, and checked. Shockingly, they noticed a decline in sales. They reverted to the old policy.

[pcthrowaway]

If everyone in the world pays once for a product that doesn't work, you still get rich. They don't need repeat business, when they control they narrative. If they want to promote results touting the benefits of buying G-Ads, they can.