My argument is that you are not alone: people in the industry don't have much else to go on either. Marketing performance is an incredibly confoundable variabl

My argument is that you are not alone: people in the industry don't have much else to go on either. Marketing performance is an incredibly confoundable variable. For example, I have heard one commercial at least 5 times in the last week: advertising open positions at McDonald's. Part of that very commercial stated that, "1 in 8 people have worked at a McDonald's." I am literally one of those people! How could anyone possibly measure the effectiveness of that commercial? Is it even meant to be effective at all? The overwhelming majority of advertising I see is from "household name brands". The notion I have heard is that the goal is not to introduce themselves to new customers, or even drive more traffic to their brand: it's to keep their status as a "household name". Do they do this because it is effective, or because they are simply big enough to afford it?