181–190 of 372 posts
A very easy way to break this argument is to not look at huge known companies like eBay and Amazon, but brand new companies 1-2 years old that have grown almost entirely by online ads. Eventually word of mouth kicks in, but there are plenty of smart operators that built their entire brand and revenue off of ads. Works best in online direct to consumer brands.
A very easy way to break this argument is to not look at huge known companies like eBay and Amazon, but brand new companies 1-2 years old that have grown almost entirely by online ads. Eventually word of mouth kicks in, but there are plenty of smart operators that built their entire brand and revenue off of ads. Works best in online direct to consumer brands.
Bob Hoffmann, very influential figure in advertising (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/) likes to point out that there were not that many companies which built their strong brand with online advertising only.
OK, he is old and grumpy dude and he dislikes online ads, but this is a fair point. Once company becomes big enough, it strives to buy a Super Bowl ad spot. And we are well into 10 years of internet being mainstream media, but how many brands were built online only? Not that much, and I'm saying it as "online ads work", kind of guy.
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Hi this is the author of the article. You're just making the exact mistake this article is about: you assume people who click on your ad and then buy something, bought something BECAUSE of your ad. From the article: "Suppose Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons…
Hi Jesse, I saw a lot of youtube channels and reddit posts discussing how to optimize their ad spend (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6feWOsbLs ) In the video the person starts a new online store and shows how he measures his return on advertising investment. It seems to be a pretty direct correlation between his ad spend and his increased sales. How do you match up your thoughts on advertising with th…
Hardly any of that applies to a small store with no brand awareness, since there is little/no of the "would have clicked anyway" mentioned in the article.
Another problem with measuring can be the competition. Building/Changes brand awareness (incl relative to competitors) takes time and seems unlikely to possibly be fully measured in a short experiment. Especially if the competitor currently doesn't run ads... but you not betting for them anymore might change the price and thus calculation for them.
> 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…
> topic matches ads Or, how about letting the publisher specify keywords they want to attract? I 'd love to have some control on which ads show on my site and do my own tests. If you have setup the tracking right, the advertisers have nothing to lose
> 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…
>advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages Is your unique prop breaking ad blockers? Because category/contextual advertising is not new.
Great to see an article like this. This subject is almost suspiciously under-researched by journalists. There 's definitely something rotten in the promises that internet advertising has become somehow more effective. If that were true, wouldn't businesses notice? Wouldn't they spend a bigger part of their revenue on ads ? Wouldn't that return even bigger ROIs? Yet businesses spend roughly the same for over a century…
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/internet-trends-report-201... Please review page 22 to see that there has been a significant shift towards digital advertising since 2010.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel_Soloveichik/publ...
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> Retail companies are blind to just what a shit-show their websites are shit-show or not, when I'm buying something online I strongly prefer buying directly from the company's website over using sites like Amazon. My purchasing pattern goes like this: I want something, I search (using DDG) the web for what companies offer what I want, then I go through the companies websites to decide on where I'm going to make my p…
That could be hundred of small sites. Don't you mind giving your personal info and card details all over the place?
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.
It's funny, I tried the same experiment and saw no ad. Also tried ebay, no ad. I wonder how they're preventing other people from bidding that search term up.
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I agree that advertising as a whole might be a bubble. In fact, my next piece is about TV advertising which is arguably worse. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273476 I do think it's more accepted in traditional advertising that we just don't know how well it works. In digital advertising there is a grand illusion of measurement.
I disagree. Most of the people I grew up with today know that it’s Miller time, that sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t, or that coke is the real thing. They learned that from TV. Online ads? They don’t trigger anything for me. They either need to deliver information contextually, deliver preferred placement for something I’m already looking for, or be deceptive.
True. I acknowledge here that anecdote is not a synonym for data, but I will offer that despite those phrases having been seared into my brain for most of my life, I don't actually drink Miller, eat Almond Joy or Mounds, or drink Coke.
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> I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light Proxying ads through as first-party content? If you really are invested in making them work ethically, consider these ground rules: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
I find, as a consumer, I disagree with the text only requirement. Videos are certainly off limits as a nuisance. However images convey a lot of information very quickly, and can be visually "skipped" in a way text cannot. When presented an ad for protein powder alongside my workout diets article, I want to see what it looks like. The presentation of the product is an important factor in whether or not I pursue it. It…
I agree, and I think that's part of why I disagree so hard with you on the primacy of images.
I mean, i'm not saying that a preference for text vs. a preference for pictures is objectively right or wrong, it's just a really good example of your aforementioned alignment of brand values between the content provider, the brand doing the selling, and the consumer. pictures are a way of associating your brand with values, but eschewing the (possibly extraneous) extra data in that picture, you are also associating your brand with a set of values.
I am also a consumer of protein powder... but you are way better off appealing to me with text. Ingredients, (tell me what the stuff is made of, and don't add any sweeteners) purity (Test for heavy metals or the like!) and then price are probably the attributes you want to bring forward, if you are trying to sell me a protein powder, approximately in that order. If you instead show a nice picture of the can or have a model preparing some in your ad, I'm going to see that, at best, as an irrelevant distraction. (again, I'm not saying those are the objectively most important attributes of a protein powder, but if you want my protein powder budget, that's how you get it; At a cultural level, the more I feel you focus on the things I care about and the less you focus on things I see as irrelevancies, the more I feel you align with my values.)
I mean, I'm not saying that pictures are good or bad in general, just that advertising with pictures and advertising with text have very different cultural connotations, and that advertising with text only can be a striking alignment with a consumer's values.
