3 ms·

This is anecdotal but I feel it's much more common than we talk about: when I was in ad tech, I saw first hand how advertisers would spend money on impressions

This is anecdotal but I feel it's much more common than we talk about: when I was in ad tech, I saw first hand how advertisers would spend money on impressions for the sole purpose of being able to report to their higher-ups how many impressions and click they got. Particularly for brands where conversion attribution was difficult to impossible. The media agencies spending on be half of the brand also have virtually no reason to NOT spend ad dollars on fraudulent clicks and impressions - again, they're just trying to get paid. And of course the publisher doesn't care if the impressions are fraudulent. Basically, there is a very large rigged economy in ad spending that both sides perpetuate for their own good.

ghaff 9y ago
There's definitely some truth in that. For all sorts of promotional spending (think things like tradeshows as well) there is a whole system that depends on the belief that spending money on whatever activity is a good idea. "Events are a waste of marketing dollars. We shouldn't ever sponsor them." said no event manager at a company ever.
wils1245 9y ago
I remember the first time I actually got raw logs of where my ad agency’s impressions were ultimately going. It was just so blindingly obvious that it was all a waste. I came to the same conclusion you did. You’d have to go several layers up into the client’s org to find anyone with incentive to do anything but tell the most optimistic story they could. That old agency is still around, surprisingly. My best guess is that whoever is actually holding people accountable for the money spent just has a number in mind that sounds reasonable, and has no expectation of seeing evidence that it’s well spent.
tboyd47 9y ago
Yes - but in order for something to be rigged it has to be rigged "against" someone, and I believe that someone is the consumer. Advertisers and publishers benefit, but the consumers see intrusively targeted, annoying ads everywhere they go. Ad blockers have re-balanced the equation in favor of consumers (at the expense of publishers), but publishers are resorting to video because it's easier to force someone's attention the more passive they are, even though that defeats the entire value proposition of digital marketing for many places, which is higher user engagement/tracking... Maybe the most profitable and effective way to do advertising is still direct sales, but call me old-fashioned.

ghaff 9y ago

There's definitely some truth in that. For all sorts of promotional spending (think things like tradeshows as well) there is a whole system that depends on the belief that spending money on whatever activity is a good idea. "Events are a waste of marketing dollars. We shouldn't ever sponsor them." said no event manager at a company ever.

wils1245 9y ago

I remember the first time I actually got raw logs of where my ad agency’s impressions were ultimately going. It was just so blindingly obvious that it was all a waste. I came to the same conclusion you did. You’d have to go several layers up into the client’s org to find anyone with incentive to do anything but tell the most optimistic story they could. That old agency is still around, surprisingly. My best guess is that whoever is actually holding people accountable for the money spent just has a number in mind that sounds reasonable, and has no expectation of seeing evidence that it’s well spent.

tboyd47 9y ago

Yes - but in order for something to be rigged it has to be rigged "against" someone, and I believe that someone is the consumer. Advertisers and publishers benefit, but the consumers see intrusively targeted, annoying ads everywhere they go. Ad blockers have re-balanced the equation in favor of consumers (at the expense of publishers), but publishers are resorting to video because it's easier to force someone's attention the more passive they are, even though that defeats the entire value proposition of digital marketing for many places, which is higher user engagement/tracking... Maybe the most profitable and effective way to do advertising is still direct sales, but call me old-fashioned.