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You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Entire business are built on testing the effectiveness of online advertising, and providing that as a consu

by soared 5y ago

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Entire business are built on testing the effectiveness of online advertising, and providing that as a consulting device to brands. Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. Nobody is confusing correlation and causation. These are rigorous studies completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study, and showing positive outcomes where they do not occur would be hugely detrimental to their business. And to your point, realizing advertising does not work happens all the fucking time. I see it literally all the time. It’s why you run studies. Then you take your budget, move it somewhere else, and run a test to see if it’s effective. Every major brand does it this way.

kcplate 5y ago
> Every major brand does it this way This is not completely accurate in my experience. Some brands do, particularly emerging brands. However, I can assure you there are a few major established brands that I could drop on here (but cannot due to NDAs) that everybody on HN regardless of their location worldwide would recognize. If I was to tell you the inner workings their marketing operations you would be surprised at the lack of measurement and analysis they actually perform on campaigns. The words “indiscriminate carpet bombing and assume the enemies are dead” are probably the best analogy I can think of to describe their efforts.
- soared 5y ago
  I suppose it’s probably worth rephrasing as every major brand I’ve worked with, in that case :). Unfortunate to hear that but I guess not surprising
  - kcplate 5y ago
    Honestly I think after you reach a certain point of brand awareness your marketing becomes just about maintaining name saturation and letting brand loyalty and affinity do it’s thing. Watching it in action is strange to people like me that put a great deal of value into measuring campaign value. As much as I am critical of the approach, I can’t really says it’s a bad strategy, as these are brands that had worldwide reputations long before I became involved and most of my involvement was pretty narrow to a specific product or product vertical.
    - notfromhere 5y ago
      It's true. At some point you do hit the maximum brand awareness, and after that point, you're just paying to stop your competitors from doing the same.
anothernewdude 5y ago
> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. No, which is why advertisers are theatre. Many large businesses have entirely halted online advertising and found little effect, but much saved money.
it_does_follow 5y ago
> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. It's fairly known in the industry (worked in a range of different ad-tech/marketing companies for around a decade), that more or less this is what makes Nike happy. > They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study. This is a bit naive. Same is true for home appraisers, funny how it always works out that the house appraised for just over what you offered (even in insane markets). This issue is you might get paid this time for being honest, but you won't get paid again. > completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. I'm both of these. Saying that "adtech is bullshit" is absolutely too reductionist but you are wildly too naive about the reality of the industry. Take A/B testing as an example. I've helped people run A/B tests for many years. I establish rigorous testing setups, make sure people understand confidence in the results, distribution of possible outcomes, etc. I'm honest in my work and so are the people running the tests. But the truth is that A/B test on customer populations are not controlled experiments. One thing that literally no one in the industry does is go back and review the results of the past years A/B tests. The reason why? People don't really want to know. However, it's obvious these results can't be quite right because teams will run 10 A/B tests in a year, each claiming a 5% improvement in conversion, but clearly you don't see this cumulative impact of a >60% increase in conversion over time. No one want to know this though, because knowing this helps nobody. Nobody is outright lying, but nobody wants to ask. The one time I worked outside of adtech but saw a problem where model results were almost entirely random noise I got in huge trouble for pointing this out. Same is true across the board in the adtech world. Someone else recommended "Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang" and I very strongly recommend that you read this. It's very well researched and was so inline with my experience that I found it so obvious as to almost be dull.
lvs 5y ago
You seem really defensive about all this. The question at the top of the thread was a little too binary. But the notion that advertising is overvalued would not surprise me at all, nor would it surprise me that many in here depend for their livelihoods on it continuing to be overvalued.
youngtaff 5y ago
And then there's the example of P&G, or Unilever or some other FCMG company that stopped advertising and saw no change in their business Bob Hoffman's take on advertising e.g. Advertising for Skeptics, is well worth reading - he's an ex-adman who thinks the ad industry and particularly the personalised ad industry is full of shit When you look at the online ad industry it's reasonably clear that the people who are making the money are the ad tech companies and not the advertisers
- xapata 5y ago
  Coca-Cola's advertising is so good, the sugar water literally tastes better if you know it's Coke, compared with a blind taste test.
  - mcv 5y ago
    So their advertising influences taste, but does it actually influence sales?
    - notfromhere 5y ago
      The basis for every DTC brand is paid advertising. Advertising definitely works, especially in B2B contexts when you can directly track activity to a sale. But there's definitely marginal returns on it once you saturate your market.
watwut 5y ago
Honestly, after lifetime of working in companies on capitalist market, the theory that they/we make decisions based on rigorous studies strikes me as unplausible. So does the idea of effective neutral third party. I have seen how consultants work too.

by soared 5y ago

kcplate 5y ago

> Every major brand does it this way This is not completely accurate in my experience. Some brands do, particularly emerging brands. However, I can assure you there are a few major established brands that I could drop on here (but cannot due to NDAs) that everybody on HN regardless of their location worldwide would recognize. If I was to tell you the inner workings their marketing operations you would be surprised at the lack of measurement and analysis they actually perform on campaigns. The words “indiscriminate carpet bombing and assume the enemies are dead” are probably the best analogy I can think of to describe their efforts.

soared 5y ago
I suppose it’s probably worth rephrasing as every major brand I’ve worked with, in that case :). Unfortunate to hear that but I guess not surprising
- kcplate 5y ago
  Honestly I think after you reach a certain point of brand awareness your marketing becomes just about maintaining name saturation and letting brand loyalty and affinity do it’s thing. Watching it in action is strange to people like me that put a great deal of value into measuring campaign value. As much as I am critical of the approach, I can’t really says it’s a bad strategy, as these are brands that had worldwide reputations long before I became involved and most of my involvement was pretty narrow to a specific product or product vertical.
  - notfromhere 5y ago
    It's true. At some point you do hit the maximum brand awareness, and after that point, you're just paying to stop your competitors from doing the same.

anothernewdude 5y ago

> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. No, which is why advertisers are theatre. Many large businesses have entirely halted online advertising and found little effect, but much saved money.

it_does_follow 5y ago

> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”. It's fairly known in the industry (worked in a range of different ad-tech/marketing companies for around a decade), that more or less this is what makes Nike happy. > They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study. This is a bit naive. Same is true for home appraisers, funny how it always works out that the house appraised for just over what you offered (even in insane markets). This issue is you might get paid this time for being honest, but you won't get paid again. > completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. I'm both of these. Saying that "adtech is bullshit" is absolutely too reductionist but you are wildly too naive about the reality of the industry. Take A/B testing as an example. I've helped people run A/B tests for many years. I establish rigorous testing setups, make sure people understand confidence in the results, distribution of possible outcomes, etc. I'm honest in my work and so are the people running the tests. But the truth is that A/B test on customer populations are not controlled experiments. One thing that literally no one in the industry does is go back and review the results of the past years A/B tests. The reason why? People don't really want to know. However, it's obvious these results can't be quite right because teams will run 10 A/B tests in a year, each claiming a 5% improvement in conversion, but clearly you don't see this cumulative impact of a >60% increase in conversion over time. No one want to know this though, because knowing this helps nobody. Nobody is outright lying, but nobody wants to ask. The one time I worked outside of adtech but saw a problem where model results were almost entirely random noise I got in huge trouble for pointing this out. Same is true across the board in the adtech world. Someone else recommended "Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang" and I very strongly recommend that you read this. It's very well researched and was so inline with my experience that I found it so obvious as to almost be dull.

lvs 5y ago

You seem really defensive about all this. The question at the top of the thread was a little too binary. But the notion that advertising is overvalued would not surprise me at all, nor would it surprise me that many in here depend for their livelihoods on it continuing to be overvalued.

youngtaff 5y ago

And then there's the example of P&G, or Unilever or some other FCMG company that stopped advertising and saw no change in their business Bob Hoffman's take on advertising e.g. Advertising for Skeptics, is well worth reading - he's an ex-adman who thinks the ad industry and particularly the personalised ad industry is full of shit When you look at the online ad industry it's reasonably clear that the people who are making the money are the ad tech companies and not the advertisers

xapata 5y ago
Coca-Cola's advertising is so good, the sugar water literally tastes better if you know it's Coke, compared with a blind taste test.
- mcv 5y ago
  So their advertising influences taste, but does it actually influence sales?
  - notfromhere 5y ago
    The basis for every DTC brand is paid advertising. Advertising definitely works, especially in B2B contexts when you can directly track activity to a sale. But there's definitely marginal returns on it once you saturate your market.

watwut 5y ago

Honestly, after lifetime of working in companies on capitalist market, the theory that they/we make decisions based on rigorous studies strikes me as unplausible. So does the idea of effective neutral third party. I have seen how consultants work too.