3 ms·

just out of curiosity, what are some specific advertising techniques that work consistently?

gesman 7y ago
Brand awareness ads. Pretty much it’s irrelevant what you say about brand ‘X’ as long as you bombard gullible observer with ‘X’. Then buying ‘X’ would be more familiar choice for millions than buying ‘Y’ or ‘Z’.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  I'm not saying you are wrong but brand awareness ads are, if I'm reading correctly, exactly the kind of wasted ad money the parent was talking about. They are the cluster bombs of the advertising world. I think the Parent was actually advocating surgical PPC management of the style patio11 has written about extensively.
  - godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
    Branding is a moat. There's a reason Coke and Pepsi spend hundreds of millions on branding ads and I am sure they know there is a ROI there.
    - tomaszs 7y ago
      Brand campaigns are good if you use vast multichannel campaign to make people remember your product. I dont need to say it is extremely expensive but works. Other reason to use it is when you dont want to be screwed by fake clicks, and are 100% sure people will find your product anyways and buy it.
- morgosmaci 7y ago
  And that was half of this post, the blog was as much about using their new product to track this problem as it was about finding the problem. Kudo's to solving a problem you find while making the product.
jyu 7y ago
No specific tactic works forever. There is no "1 weird trick." You need to set up your advertising and sales funnels to track as prospects become customers, and continually experiment on the message and the channels. This is where most startups start and a lot of them get it wrong. If you have boatloads of VC money, you can run a lot of bad experiments until you hopefully hit paydirt. Paydirt is +ROI ad campaigns on a large targeted demographic. Then you treat this audience like a goldmine. At first it's easy to mine and pick up gold nuggets in river beds. As the easy pickings disappear, you'll find yourself investing in increasingly more expensive machinery and infrastructure to continue mining operations. As you've extracted most the gold, look for byproduct like copper, silver, etc (in startup terms, introduce ancillary products and services). As you hit one gold mine, keep prospecting other areas (distribution channels like display ads, native ads, social media, etc). If you end up a multi billion dollar unicorn with tens of millions in ad budget, targeted direct ads no longer move the needle like they did when you were a startup. Now for the Director of Marketing to justify increasingly larger compensation, he needs to increase his ad spend and starts whispering about spending money on ads that have no direct correlation to the bottom line. This is called brand advertising. Hint: If an early stage startup spends more budget on brand advertising than direct marketing, run. Effective advertising is matching the product/service with some problem, on a specific channel of eyeballs, with a specific message. There are tons of new channels popping up every few years (think google, facebook, instagram, youtube, twitch, pinterest, wechat, stackexchange, hn, reddit, etc). There are millions of permutations but you have a finite ad budget. The magic is deciding how to show what to who.
- antpls 7y ago
  For the "how" and the "what", in the future, I bet ads platforms will ask you to write an long essay about what you sell, and they will automatically generate many different ads with GPT-2 (probably in real-time, to mix some content of whatever the viewer is browsing at the same time), and everything will be automatically A/B tested, segmented, adjusted, etc with reinforcement learning. Even better, no need to write an essay about your services or products, Google already know everything about it by scraping your website, so just point to the URL, and done
- nkkollaw 7y ago

Brand awareness ads. Pretty much it’s irrelevant what you say about brand ‘X’ as long as you bombard gullible observer with ‘X’. Then buying ‘X’ would be more familiar choice for millions than buying ‘Y’ or ‘Z’.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
I'm not saying you are wrong but brand awareness ads are, if I'm reading correctly, exactly the kind of wasted ad money the parent was talking about. They are the cluster bombs of the advertising world. I think the Parent was actually advocating surgical PPC management of the style patio11 has written about extensively.
- godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
  Branding is a moat. There's a reason Coke and Pepsi spend hundreds of millions on branding ads and I am sure they know there is a ROI there.
  - tomaszs 7y ago
    Brand campaigns are good if you use vast multichannel campaign to make people remember your product. I dont need to say it is extremely expensive but works. Other reason to use it is when you dont want to be screwed by fake clicks, and are 100% sure people will find your product anyways and buy it.
morgosmaci 7y ago
And that was half of this post, the blog was as much about using their new product to track this problem as it was about finding the problem. Kudo's to solving a problem you find while making the product.

jyu 7y ago

No specific tactic works forever. There is no "1 weird trick." You need to set up your advertising and sales funnels to track as prospects become customers, and continually experiment on the message and the channels. This is where most startups start and a lot of them get it wrong. If you have boatloads of VC money, you can run a lot of bad experiments until you hopefully hit paydirt. Paydirt is +ROI ad campaigns on a large targeted demographic. Then you treat this audience like a goldmine. At first it's easy to mine and pick up gold nuggets in river beds. As the easy pickings disappear, you'll find yourself investing in increasingly more expensive machinery and infrastructure to continue mining operations. As you've extracted most the gold, look for byproduct like copper, silver, etc (in startup terms, introduce ancillary products and services). As you hit one gold mine, keep prospecting other areas (distribution channels like display ads, native ads, social media, etc). If you end up a multi billion dollar unicorn with tens of millions in ad budget, targeted direct ads no longer move the needle like they did when you were a startup. Now for the Director of Marketing to justify increasingly larger compensation, he needs to increase his ad spend and starts whispering about spending money on ads that have no direct correlation to the bottom line. This is called brand advertising. Hint: If an early stage startup spends more budget on brand advertising than direct marketing, run. Effective advertising is matching the product/service with some problem, on a specific channel of eyeballs, with a specific message. There are tons of new channels popping up every few years (think google, facebook, instagram, youtube, twitch, pinterest, wechat, stackexchange, hn, reddit, etc). There are millions of permutations but you have a finite ad budget. The magic is deciding how to show what to who.

antpls 7y ago
For the "how" and the "what", in the future, I bet ads platforms will ask you to write an long essay about what you sell, and they will automatically generate many different ads with GPT-2 (probably in real-time, to mix some content of whatever the viewer is browsing at the same time), and everything will be automatically A/B tested, segmented, adjusted, etc with reinforcement learning. Even better, no need to write an essay about your services or products, Google already know everything about it by scraping your website, so just point to the URL, and done
nkkollaw 7y ago