4 ms·

Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know c

Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.

ddevault 6y ago
>Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system. And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >it is not an egalitarian system. Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.
varispeed 6y ago
But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
  - danaris 6y ago
    I mean...sure, that's what they promise. But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize. Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      I mean, there's no good way to advertise on a site like Facebook or Twitter without user based personalization. Everything is a feed so there's not really discrete pages for various topics. And a large percentage of advertising is on those platforms nowadays.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Big spenders don't have access to the same tools you have. They use dedicated systems with more granular targeting and often have dedicated account managers that oversee the ads on particular platform.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      I mean, having used Facebook and Twitters ad systems the targeting is absurdly granular even if you spend no money. I doubt there's much advantage to being more granular in terms of actual ROI. Most of the big spender tools from what I understand are for the logistics of managing such large spend while bound by the rules of the parent company more than improved performance per dollar.

ddevault 6y ago

>Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system. And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.

marcinzm 6y ago
>it is not an egalitarian system. Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.

varispeed 6y ago

But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.

marcinzm 6y ago
>can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
- danaris 6y ago
  I mean...sure, that's what they promise. But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize. Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I mean, there's no good way to advertise on a site like Facebook or Twitter without user based personalization. Everything is a feed so there's not really discrete pages for various topics. And a large percentage of advertising is on those platforms nowadays.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Big spenders don't have access to the same tools you have. They use dedicated systems with more granular targeting and often have dedicated account managers that oversee the ads on particular platform.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I mean, having used Facebook and Twitters ad systems the targeting is absurdly granular even if you spend no money. I doubt there's much advantage to being more granular in terms of actual ROI. Most of the big spender tools from what I understand are for the logistics of managing such large spend while bound by the rules of the parent company more than improved performance per dollar.