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Somebody always brings this point up so it might as well be me this time - but does advertising work at all, particularly online advertising? I refuse to belie

Somebody always brings this point up so it might as well be me this time - but does advertising work at all, particularly online advertising? I refuse to believe I'm some kind of one of a kind special snowflake, but whenever I wanna buy something cheap or disposable, like food, socks etc. I just see it and buy it. On the other hand when I'm looking for something I'm planning to get a bit more mileage out of, like a laptop, a pair of headphones or a cordless drill, I usually read the reviews and buy the product I think is most appropriate for me, not what the ads show.

QuantumGood 4y ago
Some products or services primarily exist through ads. We ran local events, and eventually advertised them. Once we ran ads, we had to upgrade our conference hotel reservations on average from 3 rooms to 12 or so.
cryptoegorophy 4y ago
It works. It works a lot better than you think. My biggest mistake was relying on organic traffic. Once I switched to paid ads business went 10x. Don’t assume everyone is like you, you are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Majority people follow ads that’s why it still exists.
- amelius 4y ago
  Ok, but it works for the wrong reasons. I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest information. It works against the main argument in favor of the free market: not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget.
  - bolt7469 4y ago
    Tracking users with online advertising is actually a good thing for economic efficiency. People tend to see more relevant products, and are able to allocate their resources to products that better meet their needs. The best ads aren't lying to people.
    - amelius 4y ago
      How is that true if the "best" ads are still paid for by companies who might not sell the best stuff? Ads just try to drive up sales. This is something we don't need given current energy/climate issues. There are better ways of bringing supply and demand together. Several decades ago we had yellow pages, and they worked fine. I'm sure in the internet age we can come up with an even better system that doesn't involve user tracking and/or distracting ads.
      - therealdrag0 4y ago
        Many people don’t care about optimizing for buying the best of its kind, they are just interested in something interesting/useful. Ads relevant to interests is more efficient than ads not relevant to interests.
      - ripper1138 4y ago
        Several decades ago we had TV as well. Im not sure yellow pages are better than internet ads.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Only if your measure of efficiency is more things bought and sold. An efficient economy would do the same work with the fewest goods moved the shortest distance possible. What we have is the opposite of that. You go to the store today and there's a plastic can opener that will break in 2 years and came from parts sourced half a world away instead of the metal one your grandfather has been using for the past 75 years and was stamped in a building downtown using steel also smelted downtown with ore from within the region.
  - najsudhsis 4y ago
    Yes.
  - delecti 4y ago
    The free market has always been a fantasy. There has never been perfect information, and there never will be.
  - Fernicia 4y ago
    Many people still seem to have a very narrow, Mad Men-esque view of advertising.
  - ripper1138 4y ago
    There are plenty of great products that have to advertise because advertising introduces consumers to new products they didn’t know existed.
- granshaw 4y ago
  Mind elaborating what’s your general business and which ad platforms worked for you? I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative filtering. Suppose I could’ve tried some more…
sidvit 4y ago
A lot of the reviews are subject to the same advertising practices. Astroturfing on Reddit in particular has become especially egregious
huitzitziltzin 4y ago
This is a great question and one which is quite difficult to answer. One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015. The original title was something like: “on the impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising.” Just getting enough data to reject the hypothesis “this ad campaign did nothing” is extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on this topic and has written papers based on his experience at Yahoo. Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from Econométrica in… 2014? They turned off all of eBay’s keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving $50 eBay million dollars or so. Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn’t to say they don’t work! But it’s a challenging scientific question.
- CryptoBanker 4y ago
  That experiment simply means their ads don’t work
  - huitzitziltzin 4y ago
    Very true. That’s part of my point. It’s a hard question! It is not correct to assume that advertising works. We don’t know.
  - asdff 4y ago
    How do you know your ad even worked and you didn't just correlate performance of your ad campaign with some confounding factor(s) you will never be able to account for? you aren't testing for a mechanism here, just whether certain other metrics changed favorably over the campaign period and you make assumptions about the cause. you have no idea if the ad converted or not. how may times are you repeating your ab testing and with what sample size? are you running simulations too so you understand what a successful campaign would even look like based on your sample size? are you underpowered or underdetermined? probably only the most careful advertisers are thinking about these things, and I really wonder how significant the results look after doing these sorts of things.
grok22 4y ago
When you "see it" and if you not going just by cheapest price, one of the things you might go by is "familiarity" (for products in the same space that are similarly priced). That "familiarity" which introduces a sense of "maybe it's good" because you've seen it mentioned many times is sometimes introduced by the advertising of the product you constantly see as you go around the Internet. All that happens prior to you actually buying the product.
bolt7469 4y ago
particularly online advertising Online advertising is far, far better than other forms. Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads. what the ads show A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a person's mind.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thrdbndndn 4y ago
Not only it works in general, it probably works on you more than you think it does.
yodsanklai 4y ago
This is true of regular advertising too: many people think they're immune to it. Corporations wouldn't spend billions if it wasn't effective. That being said, I tend to agree with you in the sense that I never buy the obscure products that are recommended to me on FB/Google. On the other hand, I think paying YouTubers to promote products is super effective. People are extremely receptive to influencers recommending products, esp. when it doesn't seem like advertising.
- n8ta 4y ago
  Corporations don't make mistakes. Corporations run ads. => Ads are not mistakes. Not sure I buy the first premise of this argument.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Corporations wouldn't spend billions on advertising/marketing for no returns. The problem is we have no idea what works. Every single experiment says it does _something_ and that's as far as we’ve gotten.
  - yodsanklai 4y ago
    Corporations do make mistake, but probably not consistently spending billions of dollars for no gain. For instance, Coca Cola spends 4 billions per year [1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-advertising-spending-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-adverti...
- pydry 4y ago
  If 60% were immune corporations would still spend billions on it. I suspect a lot of people are immune but also a lot of people are very susceptible.
delecti 4y ago
Having worked in ads, yes. People click through and purchase, and in numbers sufficient to make the whole ordeal make sense. Granted I worked in ads at Amazon, on their platforms (Kindle and retail), and for items sold on Amazon, so they were winning no matter what happened. The sellers were doing good too though, with many repeat customers, and not enough inventory to satisfy them all.
siquick 4y ago
I worked at one of the worlds biggest travel search companies. The guy who was in charge of PPC for our region reckoned that if they turned off Google search ads then the company would lose 70% of revenue. It’s probably even worse now that Google has taken over the SERPs for anything travel related.
damontal 4y ago
Saw an ad for True Classic shirts on FB and ordered some and really like them. Same for my solo stove. My first thought when asked if online ads work is “No. Of course not. I just ignore them.” But then I remembered these purchases.
sircastor 4y ago
What I find most amusing is the amazon and brand ads I see on Facebook. Amazon is trying to sell me dental office equipment, or specialized restaurant tools, and a dozen other things that few outside of a particular area of expertise would remotely consider. It’s bizarre.
naet 4y ago
The hacker news audience is definitely in a minority demographic of highly tech literate people. You may not always realize it, but just by being in this community and participating in our discussions you are miles ahead of many other people. While we may identify and scroll past all sponsored google results (or even use adblockers or custom host files to block certain actors, etc) most other people are not at the same level of computer sophistication and won't necessarily do the same. Ads get clicked a lot.
kumarvvr 4y ago
It works sometimes. Just like any other form of advertising. As an avid internet user, my mind is automatically turned off to ads on any content I see. I also blindly ignore the YT ads and focus only on the skip ad button. Strangely, I also ignore the audio, it just doesn't register. However, If I am researching to buy a product or service, I keep getting shown ads about it everywhere I go to, so I do click on some ads.
bee_rider 4y ago
I thought I was basically immune to ads. Well, other than the "customers were also interested in" ones on Amazon that come up specifically when I'm already looking for a particular type of product. That of course has the opportunity to be exceptionally well targeted. But I did notice a couple I'd fallen for. I happened to see Harry's Razors and Tommy John underwear in a store. They are heavily advertised on podcasts -- go to the online shop, the host will say, put in the code, get it shipped blah blah, your face and/or balls will feel nice. Somehow as a result they'd gotten into a mental niche in my brain as "things that would otherwise require jumping through annoying hoops to get," so when I saw them in a store, I ended up grabbing them. Because getting them otherwise would have been annoying. Yes in retrospect I recognize how silly this thought process was. The razors I've been using for a while. They are basically fine I think -- which is to say, you only really notice is a razor is really shitty, and they aren't, so I'll call that a win. Just got the underwear recently, no notes yet.
- torginus 4y ago
  That's a fair point - but please note that the ads that have influenced your behavior have nothing to do with online advertising. I'd assume you bought those things because you lend a higher degree of credibility to the podcasters' recommendations than TV ads or side banners. These ads have nothing to do with the high tech $300B AI and data driven ad industry mentioned in the post, there were sponsored segments on radio talk shows more than half a century ago.
makeitdouble 4y ago
“advertising” is not just the obvious obnoxious youtube preroll ads and flashy popups. Sponsored products, in content product placement, adjusted and paid ranking, it takes so many more forms. Also a lot of people won’t be able to make the distinction between an ad entry and an organic entry in a listing. I’ve mistakenly hit ads, and might be hitting some here and there without realizing it, and I would bet you do too. That’s part of why legit businesses have to buy ads for their own product to avoid having a competitors eating up their result page and getting all the misplaced hits.
typon 4y ago
What I've personally noticed is that for people like us ("special snowflakes"), the ads still work but at a subconscious level. When you are evaluating products in your "research" phase, you aren't doing a completely unbiased analysis. You have picked up brand names and products in the background as you browse the internet and when it comes to making that 50/50 call in the end, you will likely go with brands that you subconsciously trust. There's another way where ads work which I call "incessant bombarding". I would not have heard of Vrbo if they didn't have a massive campaign on Youtube where almost every video I watched for 3-4 months in 2022 had a Vrbo ad on it.
firecall 4y ago
All Advertising works. It's just a question of ROI! Of course you have to qualify Advertising as being a persuasive Ad' shown to an audience that may purchase your product at some point! What constitutes an Ad' is also open to some debate, but you get the general idea!
aglavine 4y ago
I sometimes want it to work more on me. There was a promotion like 25% off on Thermomix. For a week only. I wanted one, but I naturally distrust campaigns that urges yoi to buy in a short time. Now it is like 25% more expensive.
- atom058 4y ago
  33% more expensive I was compelled to note this. I'm Sorry.
SheddingPattern 4y ago
When you research a new product, on what platform is it the review hosted and do the reviewers make a living out of reviews? I believe that that the line between advertising and reviews are increasingly blurred
throwaway2214 4y ago
most of people on hackernews experience very different internet than the rest of the world, due to adblocks, pi holes, netflix, paid youtube, etc... most web pages are up to 60% ads, search results are almost all ads, tv is mostly ads google with their "answering question" thing has thought people to just trust it and click on first results, most of which are ads ads, cookie banners and privacy popups cover easily most of the page, especially on mobile.
ijidak 4y ago
I've spent thousands on ads and have overall made 5-13x in ROI. I can say that my bad ads get less sales than my good ads. My good ads consistently work, my bad ads don't. So, ad copy matters. However, a good advertiser accepts that not everyone is a good ad target. You may not be a good target for advertising. I would say, I'm not a good target. Some people are very moved by advertising. Others are not. The 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of the profit in advertising probably comes from 20% of the target population for a given product. I've learned that it's better to think of good advertising as just a form of communication. A great ad is factual information that answers questions customers have, and provides urgency. An ad might contain some fluff, but to really sell it usually needs to state explicit, accurate facts, in easy to understand language. There is a lot of bad marketing from people that think they can make an ad just because they're a hip or a cool person, or they have an eye for color. Those ads can be egregiously bad. Just as some marketing sites are all fluff no substance, but sold to unsuspecting business owners, the same happens with advertising. But the key idea is that, for certain products, good ads sell "enough" to the target audience to be very lucrative. A great book on this topic is "Ogilvy on Advertising." Specifically, the first chapter.
philjohn 4y ago
You may not be a special snowflake, but you're not exactly common either I'd wager. During lockdown I found several fantastic butchers who decided to launch a delivery service to reach more people through ads on Facebook. I'm still a regular customer. For things that are available in a supermarket, brand advertising is better, for smaller businesses operating online, ads do indeed work.
dustinmoris 4y ago

QuantumGood 4y ago

Some products or services primarily exist through ads. We ran local events, and eventually advertised them. Once we ran ads, we had to upgrade our conference hotel reservations on average from 3 rooms to 12 or so.

cryptoegorophy 4y ago

It works. It works a lot better than you think. My biggest mistake was relying on organic traffic. Once I switched to paid ads business went 10x. Don’t assume everyone is like you, you are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Majority people follow ads that’s why it still exists.

amelius 4y ago
Ok, but it works for the wrong reasons. I.e., people buy stuff they wouldn't buy if they got honest information. It works against the main argument in favor of the free market: not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget.
- bolt7469 4y ago
  Tracking users with online advertising is actually a good thing for economic efficiency. People tend to see more relevant products, and are able to allocate their resources to products that better meet their needs. The best ads aren't lying to people.
  - amelius 4y ago
    How is that true if the "best" ads are still paid for by companies who might not sell the best stuff? Ads just try to drive up sales. This is something we don't need given current energy/climate issues. There are better ways of bringing supply and demand together. Several decades ago we had yellow pages, and they worked fine. I'm sure in the internet age we can come up with an even better system that doesn't involve user tracking and/or distracting ads.
    - therealdrag0 4y ago
      Many people don’t care about optimizing for buying the best of its kind, they are just interested in something interesting/useful. Ads relevant to interests is more efficient than ads not relevant to interests.
    - ripper1138 4y ago
      Several decades ago we had TV as well. Im not sure yellow pages are better than internet ads.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Only if your measure of efficiency is more things bought and sold. An efficient economy would do the same work with the fewest goods moved the shortest distance possible. What we have is the opposite of that. You go to the store today and there's a plastic can opener that will break in 2 years and came from parts sourced half a world away instead of the metal one your grandfather has been using for the past 75 years and was stamped in a building downtown using steel also smelted downtown with ore from within the region.
- najsudhsis 4y ago
  Yes.
- delecti 4y ago
  The free market has always been a fantasy. There has never been perfect information, and there never will be.
- Fernicia 4y ago
  Many people still seem to have a very narrow, Mad Men-esque view of advertising.
- ripper1138 4y ago
  There are plenty of great products that have to advertise because advertising introduces consumers to new products they didn’t know existed.
granshaw 4y ago
Mind elaborating what’s your general business and which ad platforms worked for you? I have a broad-market/horizontal smb Saas and tried google ads to not much success. Was getting charged ~$3/click for quite irrelevant searches even after lots of negative filtering. Suppose I could’ve tried some more…

sidvit 4y ago

A lot of the reviews are subject to the same advertising practices. Astroturfing on Reddit in particular has become especially egregious

huitzitziltzin 4y ago

This is a great question and one which is quite difficult to answer. One place to start on the difficulties is an excellent paper by Lewis and Rao from the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015. The original title was something like: “on the impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising.” Just getting enough data to reject the hypothesis “this ad campaign did nothing” is extremely challenging. Lewis is a great producer of research on this topic and has written papers based on his experience at Yahoo. Another great paper is by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis from Econométrica in… 2014? They turned off all of eBay’s keyword search ads in some markets as an experiment. They found that they maintained about 95%+ of their business while saving $50 eBay million dollars or so. Beware confident assertions from people in the ad industry that ads clearly work. It is not so obvious that they do. This isn’t to say they don’t work! But it’s a challenging scientific question.

CryptoBanker 4y ago
That experiment simply means their ads don’t work
- huitzitziltzin 4y ago
  Very true. That’s part of my point. It’s a hard question! It is not correct to assume that advertising works. We don’t know.
- asdff 4y ago
  How do you know your ad even worked and you didn't just correlate performance of your ad campaign with some confounding factor(s) you will never be able to account for? you aren't testing for a mechanism here, just whether certain other metrics changed favorably over the campaign period and you make assumptions about the cause. you have no idea if the ad converted or not. how may times are you repeating your ab testing and with what sample size? are you running simulations too so you understand what a successful campaign would even look like based on your sample size? are you underpowered or underdetermined? probably only the most careful advertisers are thinking about these things, and I really wonder how significant the results look after doing these sorts of things.

grok22 4y ago

When you "see it" and if you not going just by cheapest price, one of the things you might go by is "familiarity" (for products in the same space that are similarly priced). That "familiarity" which introduces a sense of "maybe it's good" because you've seen it mentioned many times is sometimes introduced by the advertising of the product you constantly see as you go around the Internet. All that happens prior to you actually buying the product.

bolt7469 4y ago

particularly online advertising Online advertising is far, far better than other forms. Marketers can tie individual sales to specific ads and improve ads by making them more like successful ones. This kind of specificity isn't possible with TV or print ads. what the ads show A good chunk of advertising is "brand awareness" not necessarily just selling one product. The point of brand awareness is to associate your brand with its brand values in a person's mind.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thrdbndndn 4y ago

Not only it works in general, it probably works on you more than you think it does.

yodsanklai 4y ago

This is true of regular advertising too: many people think they're immune to it. Corporations wouldn't spend billions if it wasn't effective. That being said, I tend to agree with you in the sense that I never buy the obscure products that are recommended to me on FB/Google. On the other hand, I think paying YouTubers to promote products is super effective. People are extremely receptive to influencers recommending products, esp. when it doesn't seem like advertising.

n8ta 4y ago
Corporations don't make mistakes. Corporations run ads. => Ads are not mistakes. Not sure I buy the first premise of this argument.
- solarmist 4y ago
  Corporations wouldn't spend billions on advertising/marketing for no returns. The problem is we have no idea what works. Every single experiment says it does _something_ and that's as far as we’ve gotten.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  Corporations do make mistake, but probably not consistently spending billions of dollars for no gain. For instance, Coca Cola spends 4 billions per year [1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-advertising-spending-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-adverti...
pydry 4y ago
If 60% were immune corporations would still spend billions on it. I suspect a lot of people are immune but also a lot of people are very susceptible.

delecti 4y ago

Having worked in ads, yes. People click through and purchase, and in numbers sufficient to make the whole ordeal make sense. Granted I worked in ads at Amazon, on their platforms (Kindle and retail), and for items sold on Amazon, so they were winning no matter what happened. The sellers were doing good too though, with many repeat customers, and not enough inventory to satisfy them all.

siquick 4y ago

I worked at one of the worlds biggest travel search companies. The guy who was in charge of PPC for our region reckoned that if they turned off Google search ads then the company would lose 70% of revenue. It’s probably even worse now that Google has taken over the SERPs for anything travel related.

damontal 4y ago

Saw an ad for True Classic shirts on FB and ordered some and really like them. Same for my solo stove. My first thought when asked if online ads work is “No. Of course not. I just ignore them.” But then I remembered these purchases.

sircastor 4y ago

What I find most amusing is the amazon and brand ads I see on Facebook. Amazon is trying to sell me dental office equipment, or specialized restaurant tools, and a dozen other things that few outside of a particular area of expertise would remotely consider. It’s bizarre.

naet 4y ago

The hacker news audience is definitely in a minority demographic of highly tech literate people. You may not always realize it, but just by being in this community and participating in our discussions you are miles ahead of many other people. While we may identify and scroll past all sponsored google results (or even use adblockers or custom host files to block certain actors, etc) most other people are not at the same level of computer sophistication and won't necessarily do the same. Ads get clicked a lot.

kumarvvr 4y ago

It works sometimes. Just like any other form of advertising. As an avid internet user, my mind is automatically turned off to ads on any content I see. I also blindly ignore the YT ads and focus only on the skip ad button. Strangely, I also ignore the audio, it just doesn't register. However, If I am researching to buy a product or service, I keep getting shown ads about it everywhere I go to, so I do click on some ads.

bee_rider 4y ago

I thought I was basically immune to ads. Well, other than the "customers were also interested in" ones on Amazon that come up specifically when I'm already looking for a particular type of product. That of course has the opportunity to be exceptionally well targeted. But I did notice a couple I'd fallen for. I happened to see Harry's Razors and Tommy John underwear in a store. They are heavily advertised on podcasts -- go to the online shop, the host will say, put in the code, get it shipped blah blah, your face and/or balls will feel nice. Somehow as a result they'd gotten into a mental niche in my brain as "things that would otherwise require jumping through annoying hoops to get," so when I saw them in a store, I ended up grabbing them. Because getting them otherwise would have been annoying. Yes in retrospect I recognize how silly this thought process was. The razors I've been using for a while. They are basically fine I think -- which is to say, you only really notice is a razor is really shitty, and they aren't, so I'll call that a win. Just got the underwear recently, no notes yet.

torginus 4y ago
That's a fair point - but please note that the ads that have influenced your behavior have nothing to do with online advertising. I'd assume you bought those things because you lend a higher degree of credibility to the podcasters' recommendations than TV ads or side banners. These ads have nothing to do with the high tech $300B AI and data driven ad industry mentioned in the post, there were sponsored segments on radio talk shows more than half a century ago.

makeitdouble 4y ago

“advertising” is not just the obvious obnoxious youtube preroll ads and flashy popups. Sponsored products, in content product placement, adjusted and paid ranking, it takes so many more forms. Also a lot of people won’t be able to make the distinction between an ad entry and an organic entry in a listing. I’ve mistakenly hit ads, and might be hitting some here and there without realizing it, and I would bet you do too. That’s part of why legit businesses have to buy ads for their own product to avoid having a competitors eating up their result page and getting all the misplaced hits.

typon 4y ago

What I've personally noticed is that for people like us ("special snowflakes"), the ads still work but at a subconscious level. When you are evaluating products in your "research" phase, you aren't doing a completely unbiased analysis. You have picked up brand names and products in the background as you browse the internet and when it comes to making that 50/50 call in the end, you will likely go with brands that you subconsciously trust. There's another way where ads work which I call "incessant bombarding". I would not have heard of Vrbo if they didn't have a massive campaign on Youtube where almost every video I watched for 3-4 months in 2022 had a Vrbo ad on it.

firecall 4y ago

All Advertising works. It's just a question of ROI! Of course you have to qualify Advertising as being a persuasive Ad' shown to an audience that may purchase your product at some point! What constitutes an Ad' is also open to some debate, but you get the general idea!

aglavine 4y ago

I sometimes want it to work more on me. There was a promotion like 25% off on Thermomix. For a week only. I wanted one, but I naturally distrust campaigns that urges yoi to buy in a short time. Now it is like 25% more expensive.

atom058 4y ago
33% more expensive I was compelled to note this. I'm Sorry.

SheddingPattern 4y ago

When you research a new product, on what platform is it the review hosted and do the reviewers make a living out of reviews? I believe that that the line between advertising and reviews are increasingly blurred

throwaway2214 4y ago

most of people on hackernews experience very different internet than the rest of the world, due to adblocks, pi holes, netflix, paid youtube, etc... most web pages are up to 60% ads, search results are almost all ads, tv is mostly ads google with their "answering question" thing has thought people to just trust it and click on first results, most of which are ads ads, cookie banners and privacy popups cover easily most of the page, especially on mobile.

ijidak 4y ago

I've spent thousands on ads and have overall made 5-13x in ROI. I can say that my bad ads get less sales than my good ads. My good ads consistently work, my bad ads don't. So, ad copy matters. However, a good advertiser accepts that not everyone is a good ad target. You may not be a good target for advertising. I would say, I'm not a good target. Some people are very moved by advertising. Others are not. The 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of the profit in advertising probably comes from 20% of the target population for a given product. I've learned that it's better to think of good advertising as just a form of communication. A great ad is factual information that answers questions customers have, and provides urgency. An ad might contain some fluff, but to really sell it usually needs to state explicit, accurate facts, in easy to understand language. There is a lot of bad marketing from people that think they can make an ad just because they're a hip or a cool person, or they have an eye for color. Those ads can be egregiously bad. Just as some marketing sites are all fluff no substance, but sold to unsuspecting business owners, the same happens with advertising. But the key idea is that, for certain products, good ads sell "enough" to the target audience to be very lucrative. A great book on this topic is "Ogilvy on Advertising." Specifically, the first chapter.

philjohn 4y ago

You may not be a special snowflake, but you're not exactly common either I'd wager. During lockdown I found several fantastic butchers who decided to launch a delivery service to reach more people through ads on Facebook. I'm still a regular customer. For things that are available in a supermarket, brand advertising is better, for smaller businesses operating online, ads do indeed work.

dustinmoris 4y ago