This is a by product of Programmatic Advertising. If you can't get your demand sold direct you have to go to less reputable publisher sites.
P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
221–230 of 282 posts
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I almost feel like there are two factions. I'm pretty similar to you. I have clicked on ads a handful of times, but it's very rare. However, I have worked in jobs where I had visibility into the metrics, and I have seen internet ads be EXTREMELY effective. Not in terms of clicks (which could easily be accidental or fraudulent), but in terms of people clicking and then purchasing. People aren't going to "accidentally"…
But it is an open question of incrementality -- did you just cannibalize a sale from a different, possibly cheaper, channel? How much lift did you actually get? That's the problem I've seen in the digital ad space -- lift is either hard to measure, or ignored completely. Causality to the sale is assumed on the ad.
What's "lift"?
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only are there definitely people who click ads, but there are people _like us_ who click ads. All the dev tool companies run ads! CircleCI runs them, but the dozen or so other dev tool companies where I know the founders or early hires also run ads. You would think given comments like this on HN that they would be useless, but we all run the numbers. The numbers say that not only are they effective, but that usua…
Or, they just don't have the slightest clue... "Everyone is doing it, must be good." I believe this summarizes the ad industry quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysKyHXXtYQ
Did you not read my comment? If you did read my comment, why would you write this one?
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#224I formerly worked as a digital influencer across the usual list of content platforms. One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to marketing. I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't. They have no idea how to. Whe…
Do you mean digital influencer in the sense of social influencer? The latter can be measured quite well, depending on the method.
Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebrity posting about a nice pair of shoes. Those sold out within minutes, and the shoe company's store page crashed due to the unexpected demand. So it can work, but like most things in marketing, if everyone does it, it won't work for most.
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#225In my own personal experience, I can honestly say I've never "intentionally" clicked on an ad in the past 20+ years I've been on the internet. I will say I've certainly looked at ads in magazines, billboards, tv commercials (before tivo) and even those small planes pulling banners at the beach. I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does surprise me is why its taken this long to figure…
As a counter example, I click on ads fairly often, probably once a month on average. However it is only for rather niche products or rather niche companies. I've discovered a handful of companies that have gotten my money this way over the years, many of which I probably would never have heard of otherwise.
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop violating the guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879917 and marked it off-topic.
You wrote guidelines! (But still the only way to find out about them is to violate a few. Ex post facto.)
[deleted]
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop violating the guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879917 and marked it off-topic.
You wrote guidelines! (But still the only way to find out about them is to violate a few. Ex post facto.)
If you continue to post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, we will ban you.
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markets and competition should prevent this outcome. Unless we're not in a competitive market situation, in which case regulators can step in.
How would markets prevent this? The only party interested in adblocking is the consumer, who isn't the supplier nor the customer of ads. Now, if there were some real alternative to ads; but nobody has found that yet. I suppose regulators could create that alternative, but that doesn't seem politically likely for the foreseeable future.
Any browser provider that has a different business model than ads?
For example, Safari.
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the amount of stupid ads I see I sometimes click one when I see something that is remotely interesting (dev tools etc), hoping to train googles AS (Artificial Stupidity) to serve me more relevant ads. (No, I'm still happily married and I cannot figure out why a company that sits on my personal email and most of my internet searches for the last 15 years cannot figure that out. Especially as I have even configur…
I can't figure out why Zillow thinks I'd be interested in houses in Palo Alto. They regular send me emails about houses they think I might be interested in, and they are in the Palo Alto area. The only reason they have my email address was because I made an account so I could claim my house on Zillow, so they know exactly where I live, and that is 850 miles from Palo Alto.
They can target based upon income level and job. You being you means that if you went to the Palo Alto region you would find very similar people.
Re: P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
#230I formerly worked as a digital influencer across the usual list of content platforms. One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to marketing. I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't. They have no idea how to. Whe…
Do you mean digital influencer in the sense of social influencer? The latter can be measured quite well, depending on the method. Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebri…
I think you're overestimating how well social influencers can be measured. It's true, you can measure clicks to a landing page, one per influencer - but that's relatively annoying administratively, and only measures clicks, not sales. Plus, that counts on your influencer actually following instructions and using the custom landing page URL, which is harder than you might think.
If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxury brand, most of your sales are in-store and hence attribution due to influencers becomes incredibly difficult.
What many companies I've seen do is attempt to measure organic reach through a variety of internal or external scoring mechanisms, and using engagement as a proxy for reach. So a beauty influencer posting a screenshot of her travel bag with your brand tagged would have comments, likes, reshares/regrams measured, and then have that scored as some sort of an effectiveness index.