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> Obviously no company is going to brag publicly about shooting themselves in the foot by reducing advertising spend, so the only possible anecdotes that can ex

> Obviously no company is going to brag publicly about shooting themselves in the foot by reducing advertising spend, so the only possible anecdotes that can exist publicly are positive ones. Coca-cola did just that, testing the impact of reduced ad spend in various media markets. They noticed reduced market share as a result and publicized it. Information is valuable. If you’re doing a test presumably it’s worth whatever you’re wagering to get it. The supposition that it’s “obvious” that nobody would publicize this assumes everyone’s pathologically fixated on saving face and not, like truth or information.

unclebucknasty 5y ago
And there may be a number of other incentives for publishing the data, including being a publicly traded company that needs to explain blips on a quarterly report. Not to mention there's always a way to spin it: "experimentation with our channel priorities resulted in a temporary decline that validated our channel focus, blah, blah, blah". Likewise, several years ago a few large companies (IIRC, GM was one), announced that they were suspending millions of dollars of ad spend on FB because they weren't certain it was effective. I don't know what the net outcome of that was, but it seems not very different to admit, "we were spending millions, possibly with no results" than it is to admit a reduction in ad spend resulted in revenue losses. Point being, companies talk about this stuff all the time.