It most certainly isn't. I think there's a bias on HackerNews to default to hating on ads, but they can be very powerful. I'm certainly biased because I do it f

It most certainly isn't. I think there's a bias on HackerNews to default to hating on ads, but they can be very powerful. I'm certainly biased because I do it for a living, and the evidence I can offer is certainly anecdotal but I've run ROI positive campaigns based entirely off facebook and twitter ads. In fact I've done advertising for a $1,000,000+ grossing product where 98% of downloads could be directly contributed to an ad we ran while remaining ROI positive. I don't entirely dismiss your point though. I think the large scale buying of billions of impressions is certainly broken. Big advertising agencies have taken to just throwing tons of ops people at the problem. I think the real shift, and the pioneering ways forward are going to be a combination of social ads that are highly segmented, and then what I call "digital experiential" This: http://sortieenmer.com/ http://sortieenmer.com/ is a good example of what I mean. Basically, buying banner ads really efficiently aren't enough anymore. We need to be creative again and be better about segmenting our audiences to make ads relevant again.