A more fair comparison might be that all advertising sucks from an advertisers perspective... but we just didn't have a good way to measure it. In the world of

A more fair comparison might be that all advertising sucks from an advertisers perspective... but we just didn't have a good way to measure it. In the world of Nielson and print the only consistently measurable ads were brand ads - and brand awareness had a loose correlation across businesses with revenue. There was no way of rigorously testing whether individual customers propensity to purchase a good from a given business was actually tied to any of the brand awareness ads that were being purchased, or customer's brands they had heard of for trust reasons after deciding on a purchase, or if customer's simply didn't care about the branding. Bear in mind, any negative datapoint that indicates customer's didn't care could always be taken as a sign that the "brand" had to be improved. Not that the ads were worthless. Now on digital any brand exercise, direct pay per conversion, or other form of ad gets attributed to downstream revenue, and we're quickly discovering which half of the marketing budget isn't working.