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There is a lot of anti-ad sentiment here but as someone who runs ads on google and Facebook for clients, I find that google and Facebook have leveled the playin

There is a lot of anti-ad sentiment here but as someone who runs ads on google and Facebook for clients, I find that google and Facebook have leveled the playing field in some respects for small companies. Now I can definitively show a client that they pay me X dollars per month and my ads for them generated X*5 revenue for them that month. The attribution for these platforms is quite robust, and if you know what you’re doing you can produce positive ROI even on small budgets. Previously when advertising was done on an awareness basis (billboards, newspapers) small advertisers might be shut out of the market because advertising is expensive and they can’t reliably say whether their ads are working. I work mainly in the health/wellness space and I’m able to effectively target people who will be legitimately interested in the services the companies we represent sell. There seems to be this idea that advertising is “shoved down our throats” and while I certainly agree in some cases, people who buy from our clients are buying because the products or services improve their lives in some way and they only buy because they want to. I think that google and Facebook (whatever your feelings on their other practices) do provide an unprecedented avenue for small businesses to find customers efficiently and profitably.

ianamartin 9y ago
Yeah, but the thing is that you can't show that. There's no possible way you can show that. Because it isn't true. So whatever you are making up to show that is really just a big lie. And it feeds the anti-ad hatred that also doesn't exist here.
- Declanomous 9y ago
  I'm confused. Are you saying he can't show that online advertising has leveled the playing field, or that he can't show that conversions attributed to his ads make 5 times the money it costs to employ his services?
- clay_the_ripper 9y ago
  Do you mean that I can’t show that my ads produce positive return? Or that I can’t show that my clients are able to advertise in a way that wasn’t possibly before? Of course my experience is anecdotal, but I assure you that both of the above are true (for myself and for my clients, and for many others in my business)
  - odonnellryan 9y ago
    Can you email me? ryan@luma.im
  - moat 9y ago
    Clay please email me as well T@Moat.vc
- tyler_larson 9y ago
  Seriously? What are you talking about? Have you ever used online advertising before? The fact that you can show it, the fact that you can point directly from any specific ad campaign to the exact set of results it generated, is literally the whole point of what makes online advertising so valuable.
tinokid 9y ago
"health/wellness space and I’m able to effectively target people who will be legitimately interested" Let's get more specific. Would targeted fat shaming on behalf of unscrupulous doctors peddling various bariatric procedures fit this description? That was my first thought.
- clay_the_ripper 9y ago
  Certainly not. And I wouldn’t take on a client that wanted to do that because it’s unethical. Not to mention Facebook doesn’t provide obesity or anything close to that as a targeting criteria. We advertise for a lot of yoga studios for example. We also advertise yoga teacher trainings etc. I guess I just want to point out that not all advertising is unscrupulous. My clients do business honestly and sell something that is highly valuable that people want. If people click on my ads, I know that they are buying an experience or product that they will enjoy. Not to say there’s not a lot of shady stuff going on like you describe, because there absolutely is. And believe me I am more against it than anyone because it makes every one of us who do business honestly and promote other businesses who do the same look bad.
  - tinokid 9y ago
    >not all advertising is unscrupulous That's a strawman. But even if the businesses you work for are decent, they are nevertheless in competition, a "race to the bottom" if you will, with unscrupulous ones. And even if the consequences of a hypothetical overhyped-but-mediocre yoga class are not dire, there are many products for which this is not the case (smoking, skydiving, sugary drinks, surgery, etc).
    - clay_the_ripper 9y ago
      If you’re saying that are participating in a capitalistic marketplace, then yes that’s true as it is true for every business in the United States. Putting our feelings about the system in place aside, people still want things, and businesses have missions besides a profit motive. Not all of them, again I’m speaking only for myself. I had a conversation with the founder of a yoga school, one of our clients, and I told him that we could raise our prices a little bit because they were having some cash flow issues and their prices were far below market. This is one of the oldest, best and most reputable schools in the world. And he said “no, I know we could but that’s not why I started this. I like to keep it cheap so people can afford to come here”. His mission is not profit driven. Sure, he has to make money to keep the place open, pay teachers etc. But his mission is to get more people doing yoga. Whether you think yoga is a worthy cause or not is besides the point. Facebook and google are hugely important for him so people can find out about their offering. I know this guy is an outlier, but I think it’s an important thing to remember that good people out there are doing good things with the power of Facebook ads.
executesorder66 9y ago
> There seems to be this idea that advertising is “shoved down our throats” For me it's not that ads are being "shoved down my throat". Even 'unobtrusive' ads are fucking annoying. They are a waste of space and bandwidth. I have never bought anything because of an advert. If I want something, I search for a variety of competing products, compare the prices and features etc. and then choose the one that best suites my needs. Showing me a product that exists, will never make me want to buy it. That information is completely useless to me. If I want something I will go look for it. It mustn't find me, and then assume I want it, because then I will hate it. Please know that the more advertising I see for a product, the less likely I am to ever do business with your company. If you want my business, just provide easily accessible and clear information about all your products/services on _your_ website.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  Ah, this so much. I don't care about bandwidth unless on mobile (where all the advertisement makes usual browsing semi-unusable experience even with uBlock origin). But - when I look for something, I go for series of reviews in well-known webs, forums, then amazon reviews, then product tech specs pages from manufacturer till I +-understand the domain. Did you notice anything ad-supported in my list? No, it's not there. In fact, if I see a lot of adverts on the product in that category, it tells me company probably spends tons on marketing, which inevitably means product is subpar than similarly priced, less advertised products. And opinions of many users aggregated mean so much more to me than some more or less intrusive adverts. I went recently through experience of figuring out some used hi-fi components to have some cheapish hi-fi setup (never ever done it before). Luckily this is niche market, so no bad advertising experience (which is a rare experience). Proper companies like B&W or Marantz don't need any advertising, community knows who's who and how good the products are. But this ain't something advertising people want to hear, and maybe it doesn't represent general population's mindset and behavior.
- ethbro 9y ago
  I understand parent commenter (who I agree with) and I are outliers, but the utility of advertising to me boils down to one comparison. advantage of product discovery << lying and inappropriate product suggestion noise I appreciate the discovery aspect has some value (to customers), but I'd assert that it's always less than the latter two detractors
FatalBaboon 9y ago
I find that there is often a problem of quality in products advertised. It may be products floating in Amazon searches because of fake reviews, sites with great SEO, and most ads online really.. none of those correlate to quality of product. Then entire point was to make finding things easy, but I find that advertising just makes that harder. In September I was looking for a Volleyball club in Paris for people in their 30s, as I wanted a fixed team with whom I'd share interests. My searches failed me horribly. Google and Duckduckgo mostly fed me news articles, competition stuff and some big club websites. Then my local mayor's office site had a totally out of date page, and did not list clubs closeby but outside its district. Eventually I went to a local sports fair to meet up with clubs, but almost none of them offered adults teams, because that's typically a young people's sport. I the end, I did find a place for me, by talking to people at the mayor's office, and random players at the fair. And often when I look for an object, it takes a very long time because quality products rarely float above the rest. It's excrutiating. So now I hate advertising, and I hate ratings. They are noise designed to mess up with human psychology.
- clay_the_ripper 9y ago
  Yes this is a big problem. Particularly for google searches. Now that there is so much money at stake for being the top of google results, the best information often gets buried because the people who stand to make the most money have the biggest budgets and are able to spend thousands on SEO. I’m not really sure what the solution is. Google has become “the internet” for billions of people and its utility for finding information has gone down (in my opinion) not up. Now everything at the top is sponsored, or a big aggregator like TripAdvisor or yelp. As someone who works in advertising I try to do my part by only taking clients that I trust sell something quality and do business with integrity. I could make a lot more money if I just sold anything and everything. I know people that market tobacco products on Facebook, for example. Those contracts are extremely lucrative, but I simply could not feel good about promoting those products. I would not be able to do what I do (from a moral standpoint) if I just advertised for everyone. I enjoy what I do because I am able to promote people and companies that do something positive. There are a lot of scammers in my business, and I was tired of watching the least honest people get the best results (because they can afford top agencies) and the smaller clients actually doing something positive get screwed by dishonest marketing people.
wastedhours 9y ago
Heartily agree! The major upside of conversion tracking and auction advertising on the business end is enabling smaller businesses to compete. One of my personal highlights was an AdWords campaign was where one conversion delivered 14x ROI for the entire campaign, even though we were a small player - if we couldn't attribute that, getting sign off would've been nearly impossible.

ianamartin 9y ago

Yeah, but the thing is that you can't show that. There's no possible way you can show that. Because it isn't true. So whatever you are making up to show that is really just a big lie. And it feeds the anti-ad hatred that also doesn't exist here.

Declanomous 9y ago
I'm confused. Are you saying he can't show that online advertising has leveled the playing field, or that he can't show that conversions attributed to his ads make 5 times the money it costs to employ his services?
clay_the_ripper 9y ago
Do you mean that I can’t show that my ads produce positive return? Or that I can’t show that my clients are able to advertise in a way that wasn’t possibly before? Of course my experience is anecdotal, but I assure you that both of the above are true (for myself and for my clients, and for many others in my business)
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  Can you email me? ryan@luma.im
- moat 9y ago
  Clay please email me as well T@Moat.vc
tyler_larson 9y ago
Seriously? What are you talking about? Have you ever used online advertising before? The fact that you can show it, the fact that you can point directly from any specific ad campaign to the exact set of results it generated, is literally the whole point of what makes online advertising so valuable.

tinokid 9y ago

"health/wellness space and I’m able to effectively target people who will be legitimately interested" Let's get more specific. Would targeted fat shaming on behalf of unscrupulous doctors peddling various bariatric procedures fit this description? That was my first thought.

clay_the_ripper 9y ago
Certainly not. And I wouldn’t take on a client that wanted to do that because it’s unethical. Not to mention Facebook doesn’t provide obesity or anything close to that as a targeting criteria. We advertise for a lot of yoga studios for example. We also advertise yoga teacher trainings etc. I guess I just want to point out that not all advertising is unscrupulous. My clients do business honestly and sell something that is highly valuable that people want. If people click on my ads, I know that they are buying an experience or product that they will enjoy. Not to say there’s not a lot of shady stuff going on like you describe, because there absolutely is. And believe me I am more against it than anyone because it makes every one of us who do business honestly and promote other businesses who do the same look bad.
- tinokid 9y ago
  >not all advertising is unscrupulous That's a strawman. But even if the businesses you work for are decent, they are nevertheless in competition, a "race to the bottom" if you will, with unscrupulous ones. And even if the consequences of a hypothetical overhyped-but-mediocre yoga class are not dire, there are many products for which this is not the case (smoking, skydiving, sugary drinks, surgery, etc).
  - clay_the_ripper 9y ago
    If you’re saying that are participating in a capitalistic marketplace, then yes that’s true as it is true for every business in the United States. Putting our feelings about the system in place aside, people still want things, and businesses have missions besides a profit motive. Not all of them, again I’m speaking only for myself. I had a conversation with the founder of a yoga school, one of our clients, and I told him that we could raise our prices a little bit because they were having some cash flow issues and their prices were far below market. This is one of the oldest, best and most reputable schools in the world. And he said “no, I know we could but that’s not why I started this. I like to keep it cheap so people can afford to come here”. His mission is not profit driven. Sure, he has to make money to keep the place open, pay teachers etc. But his mission is to get more people doing yoga. Whether you think yoga is a worthy cause or not is besides the point. Facebook and google are hugely important for him so people can find out about their offering. I know this guy is an outlier, but I think it’s an important thing to remember that good people out there are doing good things with the power of Facebook ads.

executesorder66 9y ago

> There seems to be this idea that advertising is “shoved down our throats” For me it's not that ads are being "shoved down my throat". Even 'unobtrusive' ads are fucking annoying. They are a waste of space and bandwidth. I have never bought anything because of an advert. If I want something, I search for a variety of competing products, compare the prices and features etc. and then choose the one that best suites my needs. Showing me a product that exists, will never make me want to buy it. That information is completely useless to me. If I want something I will go look for it. It mustn't find me, and then assume I want it, because then I will hate it. Please know that the more advertising I see for a product, the less likely I am to ever do business with your company. If you want my business, just provide easily accessible and clear information about all your products/services on _your_ website.

saiya-jin 9y ago
Ah, this so much. I don't care about bandwidth unless on mobile (where all the advertisement makes usual browsing semi-unusable experience even with uBlock origin). But - when I look for something, I go for series of reviews in well-known webs, forums, then amazon reviews, then product tech specs pages from manufacturer till I +-understand the domain. Did you notice anything ad-supported in my list? No, it's not there. In fact, if I see a lot of adverts on the product in that category, it tells me company probably spends tons on marketing, which inevitably means product is subpar than similarly priced, less advertised products. And opinions of many users aggregated mean so much more to me than some more or less intrusive adverts. I went recently through experience of figuring out some used hi-fi components to have some cheapish hi-fi setup (never ever done it before). Luckily this is niche market, so no bad advertising experience (which is a rare experience). Proper companies like B&W or Marantz don't need any advertising, community knows who's who and how good the products are. But this ain't something advertising people want to hear, and maybe it doesn't represent general population's mindset and behavior.
ethbro 9y ago
I understand parent commenter (who I agree with) and I are outliers, but the utility of advertising to me boils down to one comparison. advantage of product discovery << lying and inappropriate product suggestion noise I appreciate the discovery aspect has some value (to customers), but I'd assert that it's always less than the latter two detractors

FatalBaboon 9y ago

I find that there is often a problem of quality in products advertised. It may be products floating in Amazon searches because of fake reviews, sites with great SEO, and most ads online really.. none of those correlate to quality of product. Then entire point was to make finding things easy, but I find that advertising just makes that harder. In September I was looking for a Volleyball club in Paris for people in their 30s, as I wanted a fixed team with whom I'd share interests. My searches failed me horribly. Google and Duckduckgo mostly fed me news articles, competition stuff and some big club websites. Then my local mayor's office site had a totally out of date page, and did not list clubs closeby but outside its district. Eventually I went to a local sports fair to meet up with clubs, but almost none of them offered adults teams, because that's typically a young people's sport. I the end, I did find a place for me, by talking to people at the mayor's office, and random players at the fair. And often when I look for an object, it takes a very long time because quality products rarely float above the rest. It's excrutiating. So now I hate advertising, and I hate ratings. They are noise designed to mess up with human psychology.

clay_the_ripper 9y ago
Yes this is a big problem. Particularly for google searches. Now that there is so much money at stake for being the top of google results, the best information often gets buried because the people who stand to make the most money have the biggest budgets and are able to spend thousands on SEO. I’m not really sure what the solution is. Google has become “the internet” for billions of people and its utility for finding information has gone down (in my opinion) not up. Now everything at the top is sponsored, or a big aggregator like TripAdvisor or yelp. As someone who works in advertising I try to do my part by only taking clients that I trust sell something quality and do business with integrity. I could make a lot more money if I just sold anything and everything. I know people that market tobacco products on Facebook, for example. Those contracts are extremely lucrative, but I simply could not feel good about promoting those products. I would not be able to do what I do (from a moral standpoint) if I just advertised for everyone. I enjoy what I do because I am able to promote people and companies that do something positive. There are a lot of scammers in my business, and I was tired of watching the least honest people get the best results (because they can afford top agencies) and the smaller clients actually doing something positive get screwed by dishonest marketing people.

wastedhours 9y ago

Heartily agree! The major upside of conversion tracking and auction advertising on the business end is enabling smaller businesses to compete. One of my personal highlights was an AdWords campaign was where one conversion delivered 14x ROI for the entire campaign, even though we were a small player - if we couldn't attribute that, getting sign off would've been nearly impossible.