3 ms·

Advertising is a virus. It will take over all ecosystems.

arresin 2y ago
If it wasn’t effective it would go away. Enough people out there are actually clicking on these things to be profitable. Who are they? I’ve literally never clicked on an ad in my life. I’m pretty sure no one I know has also (I hope) so who are these people clicking and paying.
- ryanianian 2y ago
  Even if you don't click it, you still receive the message. A big part of marketing is repeating the same thing over and over again in multiple forms so it sticks with you long enough to inform a purchasing decision.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    I have so many things lodged in my brain from TV adverts in the 1990s, I'm confident that I make purchasing decisions skewed by those. Ultimately in a fight between a trillion dollar brainwasher and me, I'm going to lose.
- 93po 2y ago
  go ask anyone who uses tiktok or instagram regularly, literally everyone woman/femme person i know who uses either platform has bought stuff off of it before
- beepboopboop 2y ago
  I don’t think OP is saying it’s not effective. It can be a virus and effective. The point is more about the consequences.
- drawkward 2y ago
  As someone who worked in the ad measurement space for over 15 years: we have no idea what is effective. Advertising measurement is a morass of misaligned incentives. The marketers at a company that buys advertising do not get their bonuses because of effective, accurate ad measurement. They get their bonuses because their advsrtising "worked". How do they know it worked? By hiring a third party wo uses statistics to estimate an almost entirely unobservable thing: how many widgets were bought that would not have been bought in the absence of advertising. Well guess what, there are many vendors that offer these "measurement" services, and when you debut a provably more accurate measurement methodology than your prior one, but the results are lower than the less accurate one? You lose business to companies that give better (i.e., higher) results. This is easily solvable: ad measurement should be accountable to the CFO and not the CMO. The CFO cares if advertising wastes money; the CMO gets their bonus if the advertising "worked". A few years ago, Freakonomics Radio [1, 2] had a very good 2-part overview of recent ad research done by the University of Chicago [3] and other academics. Their research, which is divorced from the same misaligned incentives I cited above found that ad effectiveness is vastly overstated. At that year's advertising research industry conferences, where some of the academics were invited to speak, they were pilloried by the research heads at some of the biggest people in the ad research industry. It's all super fucked. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising-has-been-overstated https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising... I'll add a little more: the vast majority of statistical tools used in ad measurement are basic basic things that have zero hope of extracting causal relationships between ad exposure and behavior. Even many of the more advanced tools have issues with the fact that advertising is usually targeted in one way or another, thereby creating a bias in your test group. Add to that the fact tbat advertisers commonly time their ad spending with times of peak seasonality or big sales, thereby creating all kinds of endogeneity problems gor a would be statistical researcher. Third, consider the walled gardens: so much advertising happens in them that it is nearly impossible to get a full view of whether your control group is truly unexpsoed to advertising. Fourth, there are vast difficulties in linking online behavior to brick-and-mortar purchase outcomes. Finally, consider the notion that the advertisements qnd advertised products themselves change quite frequently: the results of one ad study are not necessarily applicable to future behavior. As i said: we really have no idea beyond very basic notions what truly works and what doesn't. Some advertising very likely works; others very likely dont.
  - arresin 2y ago
    I appreciate the insight. What would you say works? Also do you have a blog? I would like to read more about this from an insider's perspective.
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
Isn't it a subset of the problem of "excessive, continuous profit maximization is a virus", and advertising is just one obvious manifestation of it? Maybe we need social ventures along the entire stack of hardware, software, and cloud platforms? And then group buys for licenses to and streaming of media?
nh23423fefe 2y ago
Rational agents offer information hoping to persuade their counterparties?!?!
- drawkward 2y ago
  if it were an offer, then i could choose not to be exposed to it.

If it wasn’t effective it would go away. Enough people out there are actually clicking on these things to be profitable. Who are they? I’ve literally never clicked on an ad in my life. I’m pretty sure no one I know has also (I hope) so who are these people clicking and paying.

ryanianian 2y ago
Even if you don't click it, you still receive the message. A big part of marketing is repeating the same thing over and over again in multiple forms so it sticks with you long enough to inform a purchasing decision.
- ta1243 2y ago
  I have so many things lodged in my brain from TV adverts in the 1990s, I'm confident that I make purchasing decisions skewed by those. Ultimately in a fight between a trillion dollar brainwasher and me, I'm going to lose.
93po 2y ago
go ask anyone who uses tiktok or instagram regularly, literally everyone woman/femme person i know who uses either platform has bought stuff off of it before
beepboopboop 2y ago
I don’t think OP is saying it’s not effective. It can be a virus and effective. The point is more about the consequences.
drawkward 2y ago
As someone who worked in the ad measurement space for over 15 years: we have no idea what is effective. Advertising measurement is a morass of misaligned incentives. The marketers at a company that buys advertising do not get their bonuses because of effective, accurate ad measurement. They get their bonuses because their advsrtising "worked". How do they know it worked? By hiring a third party wo uses statistics to estimate an almost entirely unobservable thing: how many widgets were bought that would not have been bought in the absence of advertising. Well guess what, there are many vendors that offer these "measurement" services, and when you debut a provably more accurate measurement methodology than your prior one, but the results are lower than the less accurate one? You lose business to companies that give better (i.e., higher) results. This is easily solvable: ad measurement should be accountable to the CFO and not the CMO. The CFO cares if advertising wastes money; the CMO gets their bonus if the advertising "worked". A few years ago, Freakonomics Radio [1, 2] had a very good 2-part overview of recent ad research done by the University of Chicago [3] and other academics. Their research, which is divorced from the same misaligned incentives I cited above found that ad effectiveness is vastly overstated. At that year's advertising research industry conferences, where some of the academics were invited to speak, they were pilloried by the research heads at some of the biggest people in the ad research industry. It's all super fucked. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w... [3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising-has-been-overstated https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising... I'll add a little more: the vast majority of statistical tools used in ad measurement are basic basic things that have zero hope of extracting causal relationships between ad exposure and behavior. Even many of the more advanced tools have issues with the fact that advertising is usually targeted in one way or another, thereby creating a bias in your test group. Add to that the fact tbat advertisers commonly time their ad spending with times of peak seasonality or big sales, thereby creating all kinds of endogeneity problems gor a would be statistical researcher. Third, consider the walled gardens: so much advertising happens in them that it is nearly impossible to get a full view of whether your control group is truly unexpsoed to advertising. Fourth, there are vast difficulties in linking online behavior to brick-and-mortar purchase outcomes. Finally, consider the notion that the advertisements qnd advertised products themselves change quite frequently: the results of one ad study are not necessarily applicable to future behavior. As i said: we really have no idea beyond very basic notions what truly works and what doesn't. Some advertising very likely works; others very likely dont.
- arresin 2y ago
  I appreciate the insight. What would you say works? Also do you have a blog? I would like to read more about this from an insider's perspective.

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

Isn't it a subset of the problem of "excessive, continuous profit maximization is a virus", and advertising is just one obvious manifestation of it? Maybe we need social ventures along the entire stack of hardware, software, and cloud platforms? And then group buys for licenses to and streaming of media?

nh23423fefe 2y ago

Rational agents offer information hoping to persuade their counterparties?!?!

drawkward 2y ago
if it were an offer, then i could choose not to be exposed to it.