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Is your product that bad that you have to spend millions on ads just to get people interested in it? If I had to pay millions to shove my product in people’a f

Is your product that bad that you have to spend millions on ads just to get people interested in it? If I had to pay millions to shove my product in people’a faces because that’s the only way to get them to use it, I would reconsider whether my product should even exist.

pentae 8y ago
Nice ideology. I guess you'll need to stop using all your favourite products - wouldn't want to be a hypocrite, right?
cm2012 8y ago
Very few companies can get away with not having paid advertising. Likely, some of your favorite tech (and non-tech) products do a lot of it.
xkjkls 8y ago
Does Coca-Cola suck? They spend billions a year on advertising. Demand for different products is generated very differently depending on the product. Some things travel by word of mouth, some things don't.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Billions a year is their entire advertising budget, and a lot of it is print & TV advertising which is orders of magnitude more expensive than web. Not saying I agree with that either (I wish all advertising would just die in a fire), but it’s not as bad as the above. The comment I was criticising claimed they were spending millions a month on FB & Insta only, which seems astronomical and raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all.
  - soared 8y ago
    > raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all. How? Spending on fb/insta is no different than print & tv. Air BnB ads are probably 5x as effective on FB than on a billboard, how does that say anything about their product?
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      Print & TV ads don’t stalk me everywhere I go nor steal my personal information so I don’t mind. They are also vetted by the publisher to weed out bad actors so there’s a low risk of scamming. Web ads, on the other hand...
      - soared 8y ago
        None of that speaks to the quality of the product being advertised.
        Rjevski 8y ago
        Vetting by the publisher at least sets a minimum bar that isn’t there with web. I don’t see obvious scams, phishing or malware being advertised on TV or print, but I saw a lot of them back when I was on Facebook, and even reporting them didn’t do anything.
      - skinnymuch 8y ago
        What does any of this have to do with the how good or bad the advertised product is? Especially of the original poster?
danpalmer 8y ago
A budget of some number of hundreds of thousands per month is fairly common. People who work on multiple contracts like that are common, so people working on multiple millions of spend per month isn’t a strange thing at all. Most companies do paid marketing. I’d also suggest there are probably many things that you think of as general promotion (events, sponsorships, talks, community engagement, more) which are in fact brand marketing, and that for most companies brand marketing is an inefficient use of funds compared to performance marketing.
skinnymuch 8y ago
You realize that they are likely making a profit on that millions in spend. If the product is so bad, that normally wouldn’t be possible. You seem to have a very misaligned thought on why advertising occurs and why it works, especially for a relative small timer like the poster (since a couple million is a drop in the bucket for IG/FB).

pentae 8y ago

Nice ideology. I guess you'll need to stop using all your favourite products - wouldn't want to be a hypocrite, right?

cm2012 8y ago

Very few companies can get away with not having paid advertising. Likely, some of your favorite tech (and non-tech) products do a lot of it.

xkjkls 8y ago

Does Coca-Cola suck? They spend billions a year on advertising. Demand for different products is generated very differently depending on the product. Some things travel by word of mouth, some things don't.

Rjevski 8y ago
Billions a year is their entire advertising budget, and a lot of it is print & TV advertising which is orders of magnitude more expensive than web. Not saying I agree with that either (I wish all advertising would just die in a fire), but it’s not as bad as the above. The comment I was criticising claimed they were spending millions a month on FB & Insta only, which seems astronomical and raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all.
- soared 8y ago
  > raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all. How? Spending on fb/insta is no different than print & tv. Air BnB ads are probably 5x as effective on FB than on a billboard, how does that say anything about their product?
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Print & TV ads don’t stalk me everywhere I go nor steal my personal information so I don’t mind. They are also vetted by the publisher to weed out bad actors so there’s a low risk of scamming. Web ads, on the other hand...
    - soared 8y ago
      None of that speaks to the quality of the product being advertised.
      - Rjevski 8y ago
        Vetting by the publisher at least sets a minimum bar that isn’t there with web. I don’t see obvious scams, phishing or malware being advertised on TV or print, but I saw a lot of them back when I was on Facebook, and even reporting them didn’t do anything.
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      What does any of this have to do with the how good or bad the advertised product is? Especially of the original poster?

danpalmer 8y ago

A budget of some number of hundreds of thousands per month is fairly common. People who work on multiple contracts like that are common, so people working on multiple millions of spend per month isn’t a strange thing at all. Most companies do paid marketing. I’d also suggest there are probably many things that you think of as general promotion (events, sponsorships, talks, community engagement, more) which are in fact brand marketing, and that for most companies brand marketing is an inefficient use of funds compared to performance marketing.

skinnymuch 8y ago

You realize that they are likely making a profit on that millions in spend. If the product is so bad, that normally wouldn’t be possible. You seem to have a very misaligned thought on why advertising occurs and why it works, especially for a relative small timer like the poster (since a couple million is a drop in the bucket for IG/FB).