It turns out people don't really search for most of the things that are out there to sell - cola, soap, milk, chocolate, candy, fuel. Yes some people do search

It turns out people don't really search for most of the things that are out there to sell - cola, soap, milk, chocolate, candy, fuel. Yes some people do search and research these things but compared to the number of people who buy these categories (aka category penetration), the # of people searching is vanishingly few. It turns out that in other categories, a LOT of people search for things but very few buy them. About 1.5 million luxury cars are sold in the US in any given year but you could bet the number of searchers would be in tens to hundreds of millions. So the Google data works for some businesses which are in the Goldilocks zone when it comes to search behaviour (ie. It's a product that just the people who wamt to buy will actively research before buying) but for many other businesses - especially the ones with giant marketing budgets, search is just hygiene cost, not a business driver - ie. spend enough so your competitors don't appear as the first results in search ranking. At the scale of many businesses (especially the ones in the first paragraph), broad demographic segments (and yes TV!) turns out to be a very efficient way to build a brand and yes you can also selectively augment with other data based marketing. For other businesses (think niche cosmetics brand) paid word of mouth (aka influencer marketing) and pushing the paid word of mouth content to more people who are likely to be have the same interests (eg. Follow fashion bloggers) turns out to be hugely efficient and relevant and that's something Facebook excels at.