9 ms·

I always hear about how online advertising has a lot of data to show how effective it is. I've always been skeptical of that, but I have no evidence either way.

I always hear about how online advertising has a lot of data to show how effective it is. I've always been skeptical of that, but I have no evidence either way. This seems to show that it wasn't working for this company. I really wonder how many companies are actually getting anything for their money. Does anyone know of any data either way?

jonathanjaeger 9y ago
I can't speak for advertising in general, but I do performance marketing on Facebook for clients and if it's not profitable we don't get budget. It's profitable for us (we're in the middle doing the arbitrage) and presumably profitable for them, or at least the clients of ours who are doing the measuring with their call centers, ROI, etc. How I wish all the brand dollars that are probably wasted stopped advertising and making our clicks so expensive, ha!
icelancer 9y ago
We're doing well but our annual ad spend is like any of those company's lunch breaks at best. I imagine profitability analysis doesn't scale well, plus you run into more and more bots / fraud as you spend that kind of money.
mediaman 9y ago
When people say ads are ROI trackable, they are referring to ads that have specific monetizable actions, such as buying a product. There's definitely some advantage there. However, most big ad spenders engage in "brand" advertising, where the goal is building brand recognition to influence decisions at the future point of purchase decision rather than driving a purchase decision at the point of viewing the ad. I don't see what measurement advantage an online ad brings for this type of advertising, and I see many reasons why it would be inferior to, for example, TV, which can more fully capture a viewer's engagement than a side banner ad.
- mozumder 9y ago
  And the internet is probably the worst outlet for brand-building. Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills?
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Indeed. I once saw an ad on a local online news site (~1M daily visitors) that was a full-border (around the news stories) shock pink commercial for a diaper brand. And all the news stories were about a horrible terrorist attackvthat just happened with pretty awful images. It's a juxtaposition I will never forget, and I can't honestly believe they ever sold a single diaper more.
    - JetSpiegel 9y ago
      The "joys" of keyword matching. "Children killed in terror attack" matches "children", ergo diaper ads.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills? Because they want to reinforce the notion that wearing Calvin Klein will make you strong and manly and help you attract beautiful women? I'm sure your general point makes sense but I'm really not seeing your example.
    - mozumder 9y ago
      > I'm sure your general point makes sense but I'm really not seeing your example. The goal in fashion is to make people appear more attractive, not to make them appear unattractive.
    - bedhead 9y ago
      Because that's where you spend your time. The advertisers are ultimately going to go where consumers' attention is...they don't have much of a choice.
- shostack 9y ago
  Not all ads are banner ads, and TV spots are no guarantee you'll have people's attention (not to mention you know less about who those people are). There reason advertising is hard to measure despite lots of data is that the data isn't always accurate and doesn't always tell the whole picture. When you do advertising for a big brand, things are even harder to measure than direct response advertising. Viewability is a problem, but attribution is an even bigger one because your tracking to the end purchase is missing many key data points. Hope that helps clarify a bit.
  - mkagenius 9y ago
    I do not understand why it’s hard to see at least the end result. Before switching on the ads and after switching on the ads. I am sure a company as big as proctor and gamble has at least a team of people who are dedicated to gather the end to end metric. Then where’s the gap?
    - ACow_Adonis 9y ago
      One big part of the problem is whether that team (if they exist at all, and that's a big IF) works for the marketing department and whether they have an inherent conflict of interest. In my experience as a data scientist working along-side some marketing people, most of the performance measuring, if it was ever done, was total psuedo-science. It was almost universally done either by people aligned with the actual marketing or who actually worked on said marketing effort. Not only is there the universal mantra of "Don't ever come to a finding which says that your team and effort fails to contribute value to the company", but lets say that you actually are a data scientist and you really are independent and you come to a conclusion that your multi-million dollar marketing campaign is doing sweet f all. This will generally be despite 6 months of presentations from the marketing team about how great it was, and probably several bonuses/pay reviews. And now you're not only fighting a civil war in your company, you're doing it against multiple people with millions of dollars in budget, who have been proclaiming their success, and who's entire career has been based upon appealing to peoples guts to give them high paying jobs and big budgets. Good luck with that fight... Rule 37 of professional analytics in big companies: be VERY careful before turning your analytical eye inwards into your own companies' hierarchy/practices...
- wybiral 9y ago
  I think they'd get a bigger bang for their buck by paying "influencers" and personalities than by paying those companies for placement.
  - yellow_postit 9y ago
    Influencers like Logan Paul and PewDiePie? They have their own brand safety issues.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      Don't go blindly throwing money at random YouTubers, but yes if you can find social media influencers who aren't morons like these two then it's probably more effective than ad placement.
      - wastedhours 9y ago
        There's quite a lot of conflicting reports about the effectiveness of influencers. It really does depend on the campaign/product - I think a lot of companies are going to get burned by throwing cash down that well as they do with the advent of any new channel.
      - hnal943 9y ago
        I don't know, don't you think that the population of morons in the pool of social media influencers is disproportionately high?
        wybiral 9y ago
        It depends. I watch plenty of maker/electronic/mechanic channels on YouTube and having them recommend a product to me would definitely be more effective than putting an ad on social media or between videos.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Influencers like SmarterEveryday or SameerReviewsRunningShoes
- cerved 9y ago
  It depends on where the purchase is made and how identity is tracked. You could have a more complicated attribution model that doesn't rely solely on the last interaction, like using clock/view-through windows. However you also have the problem of identity tracking. The simplest way is cookie tracking but this had cross device and IRL problems. You can use services like Facebook or Google top track identity across devices, even in store purchases if you track data well enough. Problem in both cases is that the data collection and analyses becomes increasingly complex and inefficient. However this data is a lot more sophisticated than what you could achieve in old media. On the other hand it's up to debate whether the ads themselves are efficient in the digital medium. Personally, I believe far too many advertisers obsess over ROI without having a clue how to do proper attribution modelling. This leads to everyone trying to grab that last interaction dollar, clickbaiting, creating a divisive environment and this is why we can't have nice things.
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    One of the major issues I'm coming up against at the minute is the view through window though. When combined with a multi-channel strategy, and retargeting, view throughs can just inflate numbers, masking true effectiveness. I've lived my life doing digital advertising work, but if I turned off 3/4s of ours tomorrow, I'd be loathed to pin my cap and predict volume would drop by that. Interestingly, I've seen a lot more focus on different attribution models recently, I think people are finally asking the questions now it's been ingrained in a lot of teams for a few years.
- baxtr 9y ago
  I think the whole of concept of “brand advertising” is fundamentally flawed. A brand is a set of values that is delivered consistently and repeatedly. You can’t build a brand by showing pictures of happy people (or whatever else) with a nice copy. People just don’t care and won’t listen. PS: I’m not referring to actionable ads, but mere advertising to boost brand awareness etc
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    I think it does work. Although I consider myself pretty "immune" to advertising I know I am not. I do not buy off-brand toothpaste or store labeled coke. I do buy detergent I have seen in advertising and so on. All this while knowing that some TESCO detergent would be probably perfectly fine.
    - Veen 9y ago
      Detergent is one of the areas that I am “brand immune” because there’s really no difference in cleaning power between a cheap bleach you can buy by the gallon and branded cleaning products that are orders of magnitude more expensive. The same is true of many health and beauty products: same stuff, different branding. Then again, I’ve spent lots of money on Apple products because there’s something I value associated with that brand.
      - matt4077 9y ago
        There actually are meaningful differences in detergent: pricier brands contain all sorts of things besides soap, such as proteases and lipases (proteins that break down proteins and fats in foods and other dirt of biological origin), or colouring agents. It's not enough for me to make a difference, considering I don't spend much time in dirt. But if I had children, I'm sure I'd try different brands.
  - babuskov 9y ago
    > People just don’t care and won’t listen. Not consciously. But when you get into a store and want to buy a shampoo or toothpaste, you are more likely to buy a brand you have heard of than something completely unknown.
- stevenicr 9y ago
  While I think it's great that so much tracking is possible, I need to point out that many things can skew that as well. eg - person A is going to get onto walmarts site and buy 2 things. They do a G search and click the first result and purchase 3 things. You could track that and attribute 3 items sold to a specific ad at a specific time, person, all that. However that person was going to buy 2 of those things anyways, had no intention of clicking an ad, only thing the ad did was displace an organic result further down the page and waste money. I've done ads for years (not a big time high tech company) - but enough to see they can work, unfortunately they seem to work for a short while, I'd say about one year - then you end up paying for clicks for your repeat customers who are actually looking for you, not looking for generic "good past near me". There comes a point where saving the money on your click budget is actually a bigger savings than the 20% spend's effectiveness gain in profits. For some types of businesses / some campaigns / your results may vary, yada yada. Sadly much of the ad inventory and display is completely wasted. How many people see a display ad for something they just bought? We have been preying upon ignorant companies and ignorant consumers who can't really tell what a sponsored search result is and what the heck organic result means, and what is a url bar? More things like this. It's sad really.
  - robgurley 9y ago
    Plus, you have marketing agencies that spend the majority of their clients' ad budgets on branded keywords. Of course your ad campaign seems effective when you're displaying ads to people specifically searching for your company name. At some point, agency cannibalization of their client organic results crosses from inefficiency to straight up fraud.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      What happens when you search for Walmart (or some product where Walmart is the organic top result) and Target gets the ad spot above the organic result? Should Walmart let that go without bidding?
      - stevenicr 9y ago
walshemj 9y ago
Much more that traditional display adverts I saw a Kfc Add on a road leading out of town which makes no sense. There is a lot of mostly wasted advertising brought for the nebulous "Brand"
- Zarath 9y ago
  And look now you remember KFC and now just told hundreds/thousands of people on the internet about KFC.
  - nkozyra 9y ago
    I always find this a dubious and unsupportable metric for advertising's efficacy. How that translates into dollars is what matters and I think the hand waving of "any publicity is good publicity" has long been a way for marketing folks to avoid talking about measurable results.
    - fphhotchips 9y ago
      Sure, but I was just thinking about what I want to eat for dinner and you've just added KFC to the potential list. The emperor may not be wearing his full regalia in this regard, but he's certainly not naked.
- nl 9y ago
  If you had kids and do road trips you'd know exactly how unwasted that ad is.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    when your 20 miles away from the town with the next KFC?
    - rubidium 9y ago
      Um, yes. Never doubt the memory of kids when it comes to food.
scoggs 9y ago
Through my most recent ~3-4 contracts I've come to confidently realize something I'd always suspected: companies that are in a market where advertising and marketing are just expected when comparing what competitors do is the majority of reason why so many dollars are budgeted in that direction. I don't complain to anybody who has a say in my workload or paycheck, of course, but I often find myself conversing with peers about how ridiculous it all seems and feels. That conversation rarely changes, either. Then getting into the amount of money allocated when it comes to "Keeping Up with the Joneses" for companies competing in pharma, healthcare, or any health related field really racks my brain, especially with pharma. In the United States there is no way to purchase pharmaceuticals online. We aren't making any e-Commerce-type products. The target audience is being fed information that looks better suited for scientists, doctors, and lawyers as opposed to who we and our customers imagine / intend. At some point it feels like it's being created to cover asses more than help sell product. I see things like case studies and the like but I imagine that even those are flubbed in order to mask the truth: nobody really knows if the work we do or the end result our customers seek is moving the meter in any direction at all.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Through my most recent ~3-4 contracts I've come to confidently realize something I'd always suspected: companies that are in a market where advertising and marketing are just expected when comparing what competitors do is the majority of reason why so many dollars are budgeted in that direction. I don't complain to anybody who has a say in my workload or paycheck, of course, but I often find myself conversing with peers about how ridiculous it all seems and feels. That conversation rarely changes, either. Well, if marketing in a given field is genuinely a waste of money then eventually a competitor should be able to enter the field and beat the incumbents by spending less on marketing. There are some fields where the cheap generics win out, but there are others where they don't.
  - annabellish 9y ago
    The efficient market hypothesis kind of falls over in the real world, though. There's _many_ fields where it isn't trivial or even possible for new competitors to just arise from nothing.
IAmGraydon 9y ago
I spend in the tens of thousands of dollar range on digital advertising every month. It’s very easy to measure ROI if your goal is to get someone to buy something on your website. If your goal is to promote a brand or get someone to take action in the real world (go to a store to make a purchase, for example), things get a bit more difficult. This has always been the case with all forms of advertising, however, and digital is still far easier to measure than traditional shotgun approaches like TV, radio, print, etc. If a company is finding digital advertising to be inefficient then they should cut it, but it begs the question - what IS efficient for them? In my experience, the efficiency of digital simply can’t be touched.
- bonestamp2 9y ago
  Yes. Coupons are a popular way to gauge in store action, but they have a very low redemption rate and they're far more expensive than digital.
- mijamo 9y ago
  Many channels can be more efficient than digital. When I did advertising for after sale services for cars, the most efficient channels were physical mail, then radio, then specialized magazines, and then digital. Main reason was demographics and lack of focus in digital (very hard to convey a message that is not super basic).
- 8bitsrule 9y ago
  " If your goal is to promote a brand" As a shopper, I know damned well that brands mean nothing these days. Here's my deal: Make a great product, promote it enough so that I know it exists, is something I really need and will last, and - after I test that with experience - I'll promote your brand for free. The deal is off once you're bought by some Org only interested in milking the brand dry.
mobilemidget 9y ago
The ones that do it on their own data do. The ones that must buy it from 3rd party data miners, have significant 'startup' costs. Have to admit, its not 'fully online' but, with their webshop and customer card registration for in shops, its all one datapool if you ask me. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

jonathanjaeger 9y ago

I can't speak for advertising in general, but I do performance marketing on Facebook for clients and if it's not profitable we don't get budget. It's profitable for us (we're in the middle doing the arbitrage) and presumably profitable for them, or at least the clients of ours who are doing the measuring with their call centers, ROI, etc. How I wish all the brand dollars that are probably wasted stopped advertising and making our clicks so expensive, ha!

icelancer 9y ago

We're doing well but our annual ad spend is like any of those company's lunch breaks at best. I imagine profitability analysis doesn't scale well, plus you run into more and more bots / fraud as you spend that kind of money.

mediaman 9y ago

When people say ads are ROI trackable, they are referring to ads that have specific monetizable actions, such as buying a product. There's definitely some advantage there. However, most big ad spenders engage in "brand" advertising, where the goal is building brand recognition to influence decisions at the future point of purchase decision rather than driving a purchase decision at the point of viewing the ad. I don't see what measurement advantage an online ad brings for this type of advertising, and I see many reasons why it would be inferior to, for example, TV, which can more fully capture a viewer's engagement than a side banner ad.

mozumder 9y ago
And the internet is probably the worst outlet for brand-building. Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills?
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Indeed. I once saw an ad on a local online news site (~1M daily visitors) that was a full-border (around the news stories) shock pink commercial for a diaper brand. And all the news stories were about a horrible terrorist attackvthat just happened with pretty awful images. It's a juxtaposition I will never forget, and I can't honestly believe they ever sold a single diaper more.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    The "joys" of keyword matching. "Children killed in terror attack" matches "children", ergo diaper ads.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Why would Calvin Klein place their beautiful ad with Kate Moss next to photos of your right-wing friend's AK-47 collection and videos of his deer field dressing skills? Because they want to reinforce the notion that wearing Calvin Klein will make you strong and manly and help you attract beautiful women? I'm sure your general point makes sense but I'm really not seeing your example.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    > I'm sure your general point makes sense but I'm really not seeing your example. The goal in fashion is to make people appear more attractive, not to make them appear unattractive.
  - bedhead 9y ago
    Because that's where you spend your time. The advertisers are ultimately going to go where consumers' attention is...they don't have much of a choice.
shostack 9y ago
Not all ads are banner ads, and TV spots are no guarantee you'll have people's attention (not to mention you know less about who those people are). There reason advertising is hard to measure despite lots of data is that the data isn't always accurate and doesn't always tell the whole picture. When you do advertising for a big brand, things are even harder to measure than direct response advertising. Viewability is a problem, but attribution is an even bigger one because your tracking to the end purchase is missing many key data points. Hope that helps clarify a bit.
- mkagenius 9y ago
  I do not understand why it’s hard to see at least the end result. Before switching on the ads and after switching on the ads. I am sure a company as big as proctor and gamble has at least a team of people who are dedicated to gather the end to end metric. Then where’s the gap?
  - ACow_Adonis 9y ago
    One big part of the problem is whether that team (if they exist at all, and that's a big IF) works for the marketing department and whether they have an inherent conflict of interest. In my experience as a data scientist working along-side some marketing people, most of the performance measuring, if it was ever done, was total psuedo-science. It was almost universally done either by people aligned with the actual marketing or who actually worked on said marketing effort. Not only is there the universal mantra of "Don't ever come to a finding which says that your team and effort fails to contribute value to the company", but lets say that you actually are a data scientist and you really are independent and you come to a conclusion that your multi-million dollar marketing campaign is doing sweet f all. This will generally be despite 6 months of presentations from the marketing team about how great it was, and probably several bonuses/pay reviews. And now you're not only fighting a civil war in your company, you're doing it against multiple people with millions of dollars in budget, who have been proclaiming their success, and who's entire career has been based upon appealing to peoples guts to give them high paying jobs and big budgets. Good luck with that fight... Rule 37 of professional analytics in big companies: be VERY careful before turning your analytical eye inwards into your own companies' hierarchy/practices...
wybiral 9y ago
I think they'd get a bigger bang for their buck by paying "influencers" and personalities than by paying those companies for placement.
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  Influencers like Logan Paul and PewDiePie? They have their own brand safety issues.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    Don't go blindly throwing money at random YouTubers, but yes if you can find social media influencers who aren't morons like these two then it's probably more effective than ad placement.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      There's quite a lot of conflicting reports about the effectiveness of influencers. It really does depend on the campaign/product - I think a lot of companies are going to get burned by throwing cash down that well as they do with the advent of any new channel.
    - hnal943 9y ago
      I don't know, don't you think that the population of morons in the pool of social media influencers is disproportionately high?
      - wybiral 9y ago
        It depends. I watch plenty of maker/electronic/mechanic channels on YouTube and having them recommend a product to me would definitely be more effective than putting an ad on social media or between videos.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Influencers like SmarterEveryday or SameerReviewsRunningShoes
cerved 9y ago
It depends on where the purchase is made and how identity is tracked. You could have a more complicated attribution model that doesn't rely solely on the last interaction, like using clock/view-through windows. However you also have the problem of identity tracking. The simplest way is cookie tracking but this had cross device and IRL problems. You can use services like Facebook or Google top track identity across devices, even in store purchases if you track data well enough. Problem in both cases is that the data collection and analyses becomes increasingly complex and inefficient. However this data is a lot more sophisticated than what you could achieve in old media. On the other hand it's up to debate whether the ads themselves are efficient in the digital medium. Personally, I believe far too many advertisers obsess over ROI without having a clue how to do proper attribution modelling. This leads to everyone trying to grab that last interaction dollar, clickbaiting, creating a divisive environment and this is why we can't have nice things.
- wastedhours 9y ago
  One of the major issues I'm coming up against at the minute is the view through window though. When combined with a multi-channel strategy, and retargeting, view throughs can just inflate numbers, masking true effectiveness. I've lived my life doing digital advertising work, but if I turned off 3/4s of ours tomorrow, I'd be loathed to pin my cap and predict volume would drop by that. Interestingly, I've seen a lot more focus on different attribution models recently, I think people are finally asking the questions now it's been ingrained in a lot of teams for a few years.
baxtr 9y ago
I think the whole of concept of “brand advertising” is fundamentally flawed. A brand is a set of values that is delivered consistently and repeatedly. You can’t build a brand by showing pictures of happy people (or whatever else) with a nice copy. People just don’t care and won’t listen. PS: I’m not referring to actionable ads, but mere advertising to boost brand awareness etc
- yoz-y 9y ago
  I think it does work. Although I consider myself pretty "immune" to advertising I know I am not. I do not buy off-brand toothpaste or store labeled coke. I do buy detergent I have seen in advertising and so on. All this while knowing that some TESCO detergent would be probably perfectly fine.
  - Veen 9y ago
    Detergent is one of the areas that I am “brand immune” because there’s really no difference in cleaning power between a cheap bleach you can buy by the gallon and branded cleaning products that are orders of magnitude more expensive. The same is true of many health and beauty products: same stuff, different branding. Then again, I’ve spent lots of money on Apple products because there’s something I value associated with that brand.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      There actually are meaningful differences in detergent: pricier brands contain all sorts of things besides soap, such as proteases and lipases (proteins that break down proteins and fats in foods and other dirt of biological origin), or colouring agents. It's not enough for me to make a difference, considering I don't spend much time in dirt. But if I had children, I'm sure I'd try different brands.
- babuskov 9y ago
  > People just don’t care and won’t listen. Not consciously. But when you get into a store and want to buy a shampoo or toothpaste, you are more likely to buy a brand you have heard of than something completely unknown.
stevenicr 9y ago
While I think it's great that so much tracking is possible, I need to point out that many things can skew that as well. eg - person A is going to get onto walmarts site and buy 2 things. They do a G search and click the first result and purchase 3 things. You could track that and attribute 3 items sold to a specific ad at a specific time, person, all that. However that person was going to buy 2 of those things anyways, had no intention of clicking an ad, only thing the ad did was displace an organic result further down the page and waste money. I've done ads for years (not a big time high tech company) - but enough to see they can work, unfortunately they seem to work for a short while, I'd say about one year - then you end up paying for clicks for your repeat customers who are actually looking for you, not looking for generic "good past near me". There comes a point where saving the money on your click budget is actually a bigger savings than the 20% spend's effectiveness gain in profits. For some types of businesses / some campaigns / your results may vary, yada yada. Sadly much of the ad inventory and display is completely wasted. How many people see a display ad for something they just bought? We have been preying upon ignorant companies and ignorant consumers who can't really tell what a sponsored search result is and what the heck organic result means, and what is a url bar? More things like this. It's sad really.
- robgurley 9y ago
  Plus, you have marketing agencies that spend the majority of their clients' ad budgets on branded keywords. Of course your ad campaign seems effective when you're displaying ads to people specifically searching for your company name. At some point, agency cannibalization of their client organic results crosses from inefficiency to straight up fraud.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    What happens when you search for Walmart (or some product where Walmart is the organic top result) and Target gets the ad spot above the organic result? Should Walmart let that go without bidding?
    - stevenicr 9y ago

walshemj 9y ago

Much more that traditional display adverts I saw a Kfc Add on a road leading out of town which makes no sense. There is a lot of mostly wasted advertising brought for the nebulous "Brand"

Zarath 9y ago
And look now you remember KFC and now just told hundreds/thousands of people on the internet about KFC.
- nkozyra 9y ago
  I always find this a dubious and unsupportable metric for advertising's efficacy. How that translates into dollars is what matters and I think the hand waving of "any publicity is good publicity" has long been a way for marketing folks to avoid talking about measurable results.
  - fphhotchips 9y ago
    Sure, but I was just thinking about what I want to eat for dinner and you've just added KFC to the potential list. The emperor may not be wearing his full regalia in this regard, but he's certainly not naked.
nl 9y ago
If you had kids and do road trips you'd know exactly how unwasted that ad is.
- walshemj 9y ago
  when your 20 miles away from the town with the next KFC?
  - rubidium 9y ago
    Um, yes. Never doubt the memory of kids when it comes to food.

scoggs 9y ago

Through my most recent ~3-4 contracts I've come to confidently realize something I'd always suspected: companies that are in a market where advertising and marketing are just expected when comparing what competitors do is the majority of reason why so many dollars are budgeted in that direction. I don't complain to anybody who has a say in my workload or paycheck, of course, but I often find myself conversing with peers about how ridiculous it all seems and feels. That conversation rarely changes, either. Then getting into the amount of money allocated when it comes to "Keeping Up with the Joneses" for companies competing in pharma, healthcare, or any health related field really racks my brain, especially with pharma. In the United States there is no way to purchase pharmaceuticals online. We aren't making any e-Commerce-type products. The target audience is being fed information that looks better suited for scientists, doctors, and lawyers as opposed to who we and our customers imagine / intend. At some point it feels like it's being created to cover asses more than help sell product. I see things like case studies and the like but I imagine that even those are flubbed in order to mask the truth: nobody really knows if the work we do or the end result our customers seek is moving the meter in any direction at all.

lmm 9y ago
> Through my most recent ~3-4 contracts I've come to confidently realize something I'd always suspected: companies that are in a market where advertising and marketing are just expected when comparing what competitors do is the majority of reason why so many dollars are budgeted in that direction. I don't complain to anybody who has a say in my workload or paycheck, of course, but I often find myself conversing with peers about how ridiculous it all seems and feels. That conversation rarely changes, either. Well, if marketing in a given field is genuinely a waste of money then eventually a competitor should be able to enter the field and beat the incumbents by spending less on marketing. There are some fields where the cheap generics win out, but there are others where they don't.
- annabellish 9y ago
  The efficient market hypothesis kind of falls over in the real world, though. There's _many_ fields where it isn't trivial or even possible for new competitors to just arise from nothing.

IAmGraydon 9y ago

I spend in the tens of thousands of dollar range on digital advertising every month. It’s very easy to measure ROI if your goal is to get someone to buy something on your website. If your goal is to promote a brand or get someone to take action in the real world (go to a store to make a purchase, for example), things get a bit more difficult. This has always been the case with all forms of advertising, however, and digital is still far easier to measure than traditional shotgun approaches like TV, radio, print, etc. If a company is finding digital advertising to be inefficient then they should cut it, but it begs the question - what IS efficient for them? In my experience, the efficiency of digital simply can’t be touched.

bonestamp2 9y ago
Yes. Coupons are a popular way to gauge in store action, but they have a very low redemption rate and they're far more expensive than digital.
mijamo 9y ago
Many channels can be more efficient than digital. When I did advertising for after sale services for cars, the most efficient channels were physical mail, then radio, then specialized magazines, and then digital. Main reason was demographics and lack of focus in digital (very hard to convey a message that is not super basic).
8bitsrule 9y ago
" If your goal is to promote a brand" As a shopper, I know damned well that brands mean nothing these days. Here's my deal: Make a great product, promote it enough so that I know it exists, is something I really need and will last, and - after I test that with experience - I'll promote your brand for free. The deal is off once you're bought by some Org only interested in milking the brand dry.

mobilemidget 9y ago

The ones that do it on their own data do. The ones that must buy it from 3rd party data miners, have significant 'startup' costs. Have to admit, its not 'fully online' but, with their webshop and customer card registration for in shops, its all one datapool if you ask me. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...