[dotcoma]

It works very well for the HUGE players who sell it, Google, Meta, Amazon and not many more.

It can help a small advertiser get a small number of customers to try out their offering.

It does not and will not create brands. If you disagree, please tell me about brands created by “Internet advertising” in the current century.

[zetanor]

Advertising isn't just B2C, it's also B2B. The companies that make everything you buy (from the food you eat to the electrical wires you install in your walls) needs raw materials and machinery to produce anything. While there's trade shows and good ol' fashioned handshakes and whatnot, one of the main ways to sell B2B is just camp the top Google result spots by giving Google a lot of money to be the first result for the names of business inputs (or the names of your competitors, if you want to be cheeky).

When you hire a non-technical purchaser, when production line 13's full-body discombobulator breaks and the maintenance guy says "we need a new full-body discombobulator", the purchaser has no idea what a "full-body discombobulator" is or who makes it but they'll Google "full-body discombobulator" and they'll click [Buy Now] on whatever link shows up so that production line 13 can continue printing half a million bucks an hour.

[satvikpendem]

Gymshark, Warby Parker, Casper, Liquid Death, Olipop.

Many 21st century consumer brands have been built by internet advertising. Seems like you do, based on your comment about your book, but in general I feel like many people who say stuff like the comment above don't actually work in marketing or startups, particularly non-tech physical goods based ones, or have even run their own ads on these platforms.

[dd8601fn]

Dollar Shave Club.

I didn’t need their product/service, but I only remember them a million years later because their original ad swept across the internet like wildfire.

[cwnyth]

I've never seen an internet ad for any of these. I saw a physical ad for Casper once.

I think it's safe to ask for a citation for this claim.

[dotcoma]

I second your request.

I don't live in the US. I am familiar with Warby Parker and, to a lesser extent, with Gymshark and Liquid Death, but it needs to be proven that they became well known thanks to online advertising.

I have no idea who/what Casper and Olipop are, to be honest.

[satvikpendem]

How can one "prove" it? I don't have access to their ad account, only what the founders and executives say publicly. Gymshark for example grew with influencer marketing on Instagram and TikTok and then having their own ads and media on said platforms. These companies are all well known case studies and have many sources online with a simple search.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Arsenis-2/public...

[satvikpendem]

It is trivial to find them online, just search the company name and then "ads". I assume you don't go on TikTok or Instagram or if you do you aren't part of the target market to be served these ads.

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...

https://adlibrary.com/brands/gymshark

[cwnyth]

The fact that they have online ads does not mean that they became big because of them. That's that the original claim was.

[satvikpendem]

Sure, but in this case they did, they are well known case studies in the world of direct to consumer marketing.

(PDF warning) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Arsenis-2/public...

[cwnyth]

The paper says that influencer marketing was new in Gymshark's case. It doesn't claim that this works repeatedly. Was it lightning in a bottle, i.e. Gymshark got lucky because it was early, or is it a consistently smart strategy?

[compounding_it]

The goal of advertising is to hammer you with the same content again and again until your brain associates something with the product. Like shampoo associated with what you see everyday in the advertisement.

However in order to do this, whether you are selling or buying, you have to have the scale. And the scale of big players is now too big to compete.

And even if you do, your infrastructure will run on any of these big companies who can do anything to your traffic to keep their business and later pay fines for unethical practices that are minor compared to the profits.

[hackthemack]

That is sort of the inferred conclusion of the podcast, it is a bit of a racket by the big players.

[dotcoma]

I wrote a very short ebook on the subject some 10 years ago, 15 Questions About Online Advertising.

It should be available for free on Apple Books, Google Books, Kobo etc, or for 0.99 on Amazon.

[marcosdumay]

Ground News?

Anyway, Google, Meta and Amazon don't sell the king of ads that make brands. But there exist branding ads on the internet.

[dotcoma]

> But there exist branding ads on the internet.

Which ones, for example?

[marcosdumay]

There are plenty of people out there publishing all kinds of content that will announce your company if you contact them and they like what you do.