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What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

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Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#51

Post by rch »

stvswn wrote: post #16
moltensodium wrote: post #3

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them. I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online. Who are all…

But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads. This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.…

Actually, I'm aggressively looking for higher quality content that I can pay for, like (e.g.) nzz.ch for news. I was also a Google Contributor subscriber, before it required an opt-in for site operators.

What I would really like is to pay for the Google Feed (aka Google Now) on my Pixel instead of having to ignore the ads that have recently started to show up there.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#52

Post by hastes »

TekMol wrote: post #20

So 16 years ago it has been shown that advertising for your own brand name is worthless? Yet still in 2019, when I google for "Amazon" I see an Amazon ad? Color me skeptical. I doubt the marketing guys at the worlds biggest companies are that out of touch with reality. Would love to know why they do it though.

Increased click-through I guess, and because they have unlimited money.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#53

Post by rifung »

xmprt wrote: post #36
ngngngng wrote: post #8

> a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows. This article is awesome. In my free time I'm building an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages. No tracking of users. I'm hoping to allow people to host and run their own all inclusive self contained advertising platform for just a licensing fee. I also have a way t…

The weird thing about websites like YouTube is they do a combination of topic matching and user matching. Why bother with tracking users so extensively if you're going to just go ahead and demonitize videos that are "sensitive" content. Just place the ads in front of the audience regardless of what they're watching. At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long…

> At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long as they're getting the right target audience.

This isn't true?

Advertisers certainly do care. They don't want their ad dollars to be spent paying publishers for content that's controversial because it makes them look bad. It also has the potential to damage their brand.

This actually happened and is what led YouTube to lose a significant amount of ad revenue which in turn created the situation we have now.

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#54

Post by rifung »

moltensodium wrote: post #3

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them. I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online. Who are all…

I'm not sure what generation you're a part of but I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy. For example I've been shopping for beds and dont mind ads for brands I hadn't heard of. Some of them I would have bought had they been in my budget but this to me isn't so much a problem with ada in general as it is about as targeting.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#55

Post by magashna »

dageshi wrote: post #11
itronitron wrote: post #9

Just as Google won the search engine wars by helping people find what they are looking for, the e-commerce winners will be the companies that help people find what they want to buy (reliably and with confidence). Retail companies are blind to just what a shit-show their websites are (a lot of them even have ads in their online store). Any company that solves this problem for their sector will win it, and this is good…

Amazon more or less won didn't it? It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.

Moving more and more away from Amazon. If I especially like a product or company, I'll see if it costs about the same to buy direct and do that. I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#56

Post by ACow_Adonis »

cameronbrown wrote: post #48
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is literally the content I'm reading that you claim no one would produce without ads, and it's unsupported by ads. And again (I feel like a broken record on this site), that's a totally inaccurate history of the internet. Content arrived first, THEN the advertising companies arrived.

Hacker News is not mass media. Plus don't forget Y Combinator funded many ad-based platforms. HN isn't free either.

A fair point.

So I see two takeaway questions: would we be fine/better off without mass media funded by advertising(it's obvious what my answer to this would be since I don't generally listen to it or watch it, though I acknowledge it going away won't likely happen).

And the second, would content we like to consume/ be worthy of consumption be produced anyway, and my contention is that it would still, just like it did in the past and continues in the current (some free, some paid for), as can be seen in the history of books, early internet, street art, leisure, bloggers, hobbyists, cinema, documentaries, etc.

There might be a third point of mine, which is that we're actually suffering from a glut of content and competition for eyeballs: so to me, worrying about that content disappearing is a bit like worrying about dying of thirst while drowning in a freshwater lake.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#57

Post by shantly »

stvswn wrote: post #16
moltensodium wrote: post #3

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them. I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online. Who are all…

But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads. This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.…

> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?

Meh. The best online content's fully paid, donationware (Wikipedia), or simply free. 100% of the ad-supported stuff could go away tomorrow and my quality of life would suffer not at all. Hell, might go up. Meanwhile spyvertising-paid "free" services & software are sucking the air out of the room for paid and open-source alternatives (and protocols—god is that ecosystem bad for protocols) alike, for a variety of things I might like to buy or use or contribute to.

I don't get the "but think of what the Web would look like without ad money!" doom & gloom. It'd be fine. Go ahead, outlaw them. I do not care even a little.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#58

Post by SaberTail »

From the article:

> Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing.

I've seen this play out at places I've worked. After raising a funding round, marketing sold the leadership on letting them burn the lion's share of it, even though launching new marketing campaigns was never on the list of reasons we initially went out to raise money.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#59

Post by magashna »

rifung wrote: post #54
moltensodium wrote: post #3

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them. I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online. Who are all…

I'm not sure what generation you're a part of but I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy. For example I've been shopping for beds and dont mind ads for brands I hadn't heard of. Some of them I would have bought had they been in my budget but this to me isn't so much a problem with ada in general as it is about as targeting.

If I'm diving into buying something like a bed, I'm never looking at regular advertising. I'm trawling through forums and old message boards, looking at sites that do direct sales, reading reviews, looking at pictures, going to an actual store to touch and see a thing. Advertising is a skewed view of something I want to buy where they try to convince me it's 110% beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. It's not, never will be. I just want something that's about 80% there and to confidently know it's good enough.

Re: What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

#60

Post by kristianc »

magashna wrote: post #55
dageshi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon more or less won didn't it? It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.

Moving more and more away from Amazon. If I especially like a product or company, I'll see if it costs about the same to buy direct and do that. I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.

> I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.

If coupons and discounts are the best the competition have to offer, then Amazon doesn’t have too much to worry about.

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