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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 advan

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.
- ghaff 9y ago
  While I don't disagree with your basic point, you need to get out more if you think owning guns/hunting automatically equals "right-wing" in much of the US.
- cmpxchg 9y ago
  Why did you have to throw in a random criticism of hunters? The article is referring to "extremist" content. In many places in the U.S., hunters are among the most effective conservationists at the local level.
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

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.
ghaff 9y ago
While I don't disagree with your basic point, you need to get out more if you think owning guns/hunting automatically equals "right-wing" in much of the US.
cmpxchg 9y ago
Why did you have to throw in a random criticism of hunters? The article is referring to "extremist" content. In many places in the U.S., hunters are among the most effective conservationists at the local level.

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