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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?

#71

Post by soared »

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…

This largely already exists, but without the ethical non tracking thing.. which advertisers don’t care about.

Grapeshot Peer39 Etc

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

#72

Post by rch »

dorkinspace wrote: post #63
rch wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Google Now still not respect "I'm not interested" flagging? I've tried to use it many times, but I'll keep seeing the same stories I've marked as not interested. One easy example is any Marvel release. I'll say not interested in "move title". Then the same story will pop up in the Marvel category. I'll repeat the process for Marvel, and the same story will show up as entertainment, repeat until I close the app.

I've had good results from consistently tuning my feed over the last few years, particularly by excluding low quality sources altogether.

I have seen the phenomena you're talking about though. For me it might be a political scandal that I mark as uninteresting, which then shows up again under some peripherally related category.

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

#73

Post by hannula »

> "What frustrates me is there’s a bit of magical thinking here," Johnson says. "As if Cambridge Analytica has hacked our brains so that we’re going to be like lemmings and jump off cliffs. As if we are powerless.”

Probably not, but nevertheless their efforts to polarise thinking and support the formation of echo chambers have been quite successful. While selection effect has indeed been disregarded often, in the case of CA it actually amplified the outcome.

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

#74

Post by bryanmgreen »

SaberTail wrote: post #58

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.

I think that's a self-preservation tactic for many that often backfires.

Most non-marketing management people want immediate and huge results... which are both hard to quantify and impossible to get without overspending or having an insanely lucky idea that goes viral.

Naturally this leads to asking for a bigger budget and promising bigger results, then KPIs aren't met for X, Y, Z reasons, then they're forced to justify the spend, then they either get more budget or get fired and the cycle repeats. Marketing has too many intangibles, so marketers always feel a need to justify themselves out of fear of being an easy target.

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

#76

Post by jessefrederik »

davidedicillo wrote: post #17

Overstated. This article assumes that: - All online advertising is Google search - That brand search advertising is representative of the entire industry There are plenty of companies making double-digit ROAS (return over ad spend), especially direct response advertisers.

Hi, I'm the author of the article, and I don't assume all online advertising is Google search. I also cite research on display advertising (meta-study of 432 display experiments on Google): https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=2701578 And on Facebook advertising: https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/gordon_b/files/...

The problem with all online advertising is that there are huge selection effects, which are hard to correct for using conventional statistical methods. So you need to do experiments. And when economists do experiment, they find that advertising effects are so small that they are hard to measure.

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

#77

Post by jagged-chisel »

rifung wrote: post #53
xmprt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 YouTub…

> ... advertisers ... can't possibly care what video it's showing ...

I read this as 'advertisers don't care about the particular topic of the ad in general.' They don't care if you're watching a DIY home fixit video, or a coder streaming his working session, as long as you're a target for diapers and they're advertising diapers.

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

#78

Post by ethanwillis »

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…

> an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages

Reading this article I had the exact same thought that I relayed to a buddy of mine. I've built some conceptual search engines on top of LSA.. and my thoughts from the article about brand/keyword targeted advertising is that it doesn't get to the heart of it.

To increase the advertising effects, not just the selection effects, you need to go deeper. Drawing on the analogy from the article a smarter teenager handing out coupons wouldn't stand just anywhere or stand just in line at the store. He would say, okay this is a pizzeria. (Assuming they serve nothing else) The smart marketer should think "Maybe I should advertise at italian restaurants." The analogy doesn't really show the full depth, right? There are many products where you can get some really off the wall potential customers you wouldn't know how to reach based on concept search.

Factoring in "documents" that they're reading online back into the search engine for conceptually similar ads is a good idea.

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

#79

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

leoedin wrote: post #7

I've always wondered about those adverts for the website I'm searching for. If I type its name into Google, I'm already 100% committed to going there. Sometimes I click the advert (it generally depends how much I like the company). The other aspect of online ads that strikes me as ingenious but probably not sustainable is the way Google inflates the auction system with fake money. Anyone who's run a website will have…

It's a defense strategy. And it's necessary.

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

#80

Post by thendrill »

jameslk wrote: post #69

Sounds similar to this other bubble where we blindly pay software engineers to create and modify software but we don't know how much revenue those software features, refactors or bug fixes generate, if anything at all. /s

You are very correct. But what I always wonder. How long can this system perpetuate?
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