[ToucanLoucan]

> I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered.

I mean, based on my interactions with marketing people, they often don't really know if much of what they've done has helped the business at all, and the majority of their work (apart from actually creating marketing copy and interacting with customers) seems to revolve around figuring out how to attribute booms in business to their previous campaigns while building plausible deniability for inevitable busts. Don't get me wrong, not ALL of it is completely incomprehensible: email and referrer links are pretty straightforwardly calculable in terms of their impact; but things like "brand awareness" campaigns are nigh impossible to actually gauge the impact of.

[ameister14]

I never understood why businesses accepted this. At least with digital marketing, it is possible to track pretty much everything and connect marketing campaigns with concrete results. It's actually not impossible to gauge the impact of a brand awareness campaign if you run the campaign properly using good principles of experiment design, especially if you associate it with keywords and track those or are using search ads.