There's a lot more collusion going on here as well. I work in the ad measurement/ad tech industry; it is rife with misaligned incentives. Ad measurement compa

There's a lot more collusion going on here as well. I work in the ad measurement/ad tech industry; it is rife with misaligned incentives. Ad measurement companies have no incentive to accurately report the incremental sales (i.e., that which would not have happened, had the ad not aired) of the ad they are measuring. Why not? Because their clients, the marketing function at the advertiser, don't get their bonuses paid based on the accuracy of the measurement firm's work product. They get their bonuses (and ultimately salary) based on the success of their marketing efforts. If a company like mine reports that an ad on TikTok for Dran-o didn't sell any Dran-o that wouldn't have been sold anyway, Dran-o's marketers will just find a different ad measurement company. Furthermore, as a platform, TikTok has to prove to potential advertisers that TikTok is a good platform on which to place ads. So TikTok also has no incentive for accurate measurement. So, what does a company like mine do? Juice the numbers. Because the company leadership is judged not on accuracy of measurement, but profit. It's a lot like the bond rating agencies that lead, in part, to the 2008 housing crisis, getting paid by the people whose homework they were grading. This is an entirely true story, btw. Apparently if you advertise Dran-o to kids on TikTok, you get something north of a $2.00 ROI. Completely ridiculous. In another anecdote, we measure advertising on YouTube. Google would only let us implement changes to our measurement software if they "improved" the software. (Again, I don't mean accuracy. Neither did Google.) How do you solve this? Well, you can start by letting the CFO at the advertiser own the ad measurement responsibility. The CFO actually has incentive to understand if the marketers are just pissing away money. The shareholders do too. Perhaps there's also room for an industry watchdog, paid for by advertising platforms and advertisers, that certified the practices of measurement companies? Anyway, shareholders are getting fleeced. All so the Valley can rake in beaucoup bucks at the expense of shareholders. With the added benefit of a layer of surveillance apparatus suffusing the internet. Fun times! There's actually a lot of scholarship on how advertising's effects are a lot lower than the ad measurement and advertising industry thinks they are. (Go figure that the people who profit from advertising think it works.) Freakonomics Radio episodes 440 and 441 are a good place to start, for those who are interested.