I'm still dubious about the implication that digital advertisement is fundamentally broken. My issue is that the article doesn't demonstrate selection effects

I'm still dubious about the implication that digital advertisement is fundamentally broken. My issue is that the article doesn't demonstrate selection effects dominating over advertising effects for companies with no major brand identity. The examples cited to back the case - eBay (which is huge), "large" retailers in the case of Facebook ads, "major U.S. retailers and brokerages with millions of customers" per Lewis and Rao 2015 - are all established companies that have already received substantial presence. Where are the experiments that demonstrate selection effects dominating over advertising effects for companies with no pre-existing brand identity e.g. The Correspondent (sorry, I couldn't resist :P)? Second issue: the article demonstrates convincingly that brand-keyword ads are broken, which is great. But at the same time brand-keyword ads are not (to my knowledge as a former engineer at an SEO company, so it could be imperfect) the primary kind of keyword ads. A brand-keyword ad is when someone types in "eBay" and you get paid eBay links - but the majority of keyword ads (again, this is from memory) are targeted keyword ads e.g. someone types in "fur coat" and Macy pays Google to put a link to its "fur coats" pages. Equally interesting, multiple companies can pay for the same targeted keywords, meaning you can have multiple links pointing off to different sites on the same page. The pizzeria analogy explains why brand-keyword ads make no sense monetarily (someone searching for your brand specifically will find you anyway), but it falls apart for the targeted keyword space, where people are searching by items but not by brand. Given that much of SEO and digital marketing are target-based rather than brand-based, I'm not sold yet on the ineffectiveness of digital advertising overall.