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This kind of rhetoric is problematically naive. Advertising effectiveness is often vague, but it also works well in many circumstances. It takes a certain kin

This kind of rhetoric is problematically naive. Advertising effectiveness is often vague, but it also works well in many circumstances. It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing, and that if only they listened to HN/Reddit they could save so much money and make the world a better place. The issue here is to what extent G has manipulated their own auctions for their own benefit, and what kind of anti-competitive actions the relationship with FB amounts to.

jqpabc123 5y ago
Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives. "Problematically naive" is assuming the cost is justified without any such evidence. Amazon's ad business is currently growing at a 70% annual rate by simply displaying ads based on search words --- probably because searching on their site is an overt expression of interest in making a purchase.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives It really isn't. You can (maybe) justify a 2X premium on th basis of higher ad effectiveness due to superior performance. The rest of that margin comes from having the largest (by far) marketplace, which forces more buyers to bid against each other (raising ad costs), and more sellers to undercut each other (lowering publishers' ad revenues), in order to participate.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  I happen to to agree with you, but this demand for proof is untenable and doesn’t promote good discussion. Any such proof would be guaranteed insufficient, as macroeconomics are by definition reductive and summary in nature, and the last thing we need is to nitpick econ to death in this thread.
jeromegv 5y ago
In every discussion about advertising you typically get a comment similar near the top that tells us that advertising never actually works. For a lot of us working in a related field, we know it to be false, there’s plenty of online business that rely on online ads and are profitable. Yes they are invasive to your privacy. Yes some of them fake their effectiveness. Yes to all of that. But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all and we all bought into a giant scam is just not rooted in reality.
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all ... Ok, so I guess it's a good thing that no one actually said that.
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
>It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing And yet they don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28724806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28724806
- jollybean 5y ago
  Oh gosh, please understand that none of this is new to anyone who works in the industry. Everyone knows how fuzzy it is. Everyone knows the scheming from the VP Marketing, to the Agencies, to the Exchanges etc.. But we also know when it works, and when it works well. The more experienced marketers have an intuition for how all the various different marketing activities combine to form a synergy. And how it gets disproportionaly harder to do in a low cost way, to the extent that large, fat, profits exist that can be extracted. But that's no different than any other part of a company. P&G could drop 1/2 of their White Collar workers and probably figure out how to get along just as well. Union workers in Auto Plants have benefits that put them way ahead of what they'd have otherwise, but they have the power to extract it. Governments pay out to 'no bid contracts' - and especially lawyers - considerably more than they have to. Every sector of every industry is making sausage, the issue is to highlight the actually illegal stuff, and put some legal parameters around it. Google bidding on it's own auctions is a problem. Google's control over adjacent parts of the value chain is a problem. Google's metrics, if they were fabricated, that's a problem. But bad marketers that spend too much on ineffective campaigns, that's not a legal problem.

jqpabc123 5y ago

Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives. "Problematically naive" is assuming the cost is justified without any such evidence. Amazon's ad business is currently growing at a 70% annual rate by simply displaying ads based on search words --- probably because searching on their site is an overt expression of interest in making a purchase.

webmaven 5y ago
> Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives It really isn't. You can (maybe) justify a 2X premium on th basis of higher ad effectiveness due to superior performance. The rest of that margin comes from having the largest (by far) marketplace, which forces more buyers to bid against each other (raising ad costs), and more sellers to undercut each other (lowering publishers' ad revenues), in order to participate.
floatingatoll 5y ago
I happen to to agree with you, but this demand for proof is untenable and doesn’t promote good discussion. Any such proof would be guaranteed insufficient, as macroeconomics are by definition reductive and summary in nature, and the last thing we need is to nitpick econ to death in this thread.

jeromegv 5y ago

In every discussion about advertising you typically get a comment similar near the top that tells us that advertising never actually works. For a lot of us working in a related field, we know it to be false, there’s plenty of online business that rely on online ads and are profitable. Yes they are invasive to your privacy. Yes some of them fake their effectiveness. Yes to all of that. But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all and we all bought into a giant scam is just not rooted in reality.

jqpabc123 5y ago
But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all ... Ok, so I guess it's a good thing that no one actually said that.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

>It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing And yet they don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28724806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28724806

jollybean 5y ago
Oh gosh, please understand that none of this is new to anyone who works in the industry. Everyone knows how fuzzy it is. Everyone knows the scheming from the VP Marketing, to the Agencies, to the Exchanges etc.. But we also know when it works, and when it works well. The more experienced marketers have an intuition for how all the various different marketing activities combine to form a synergy. And how it gets disproportionaly harder to do in a low cost way, to the extent that large, fat, profits exist that can be extracted. But that's no different than any other part of a company. P&G could drop 1/2 of their White Collar workers and probably figure out how to get along just as well. Union workers in Auto Plants have benefits that put them way ahead of what they'd have otherwise, but they have the power to extract it. Governments pay out to 'no bid contracts' - and especially lawyers - considerably more than they have to. Every sector of every industry is making sausage, the issue is to highlight the actually illegal stuff, and put some legal parameters around it. Google bidding on it's own auctions is a problem. Google's control over adjacent parts of the value chain is a problem. Google's metrics, if they were fabricated, that's a problem. But bad marketers that spend too much on ineffective campaigns, that's not a legal problem.