What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising? • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by squiggleblaz » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 10:40 AM UTC

rhlsthrm wrote: post #311

Iv wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification [citation needed] I am of the opinion that internet would be a much saner place if advertisement was purely and simply banned.

Then how would we be able to browse for free?

Sometimes, the same way we eat for free. [As a rule, we don't, but we have a much greater need for food than free internet browsing.]

Othertimes, the same way we breathe air for free. [Some things are too difficult to contain.]

Still other times, the same way we drink water for free. [Some things aren't really free though they feel like it. Instead, we pay for them at another point.]

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

#322

Post by d0mine » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

mlang23 wrote: post #315

What I notice is that internet advertisment is pretty selective, I dont know about effective... If your interests happen to diverge from mainstream just that bit enough, you can end up in a pretty much ad-free zone. I happen to watch a lot of conference recordings on YouTube, and most conferences dont monetize their channel (yet). But thats not the end of the story. Stay away from mainstream, and you get complete ad-…

> stay away from mainstream Joe Rogan's podcast has millions of subscribers and multiple ads per episode (not counting ads on various cuts/highlights from the episode) — are there more mainstream podcasts on youtube?

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

#323

Post by tomrod » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 10:48 AM UTC

davidedicillo wrote: post #281

tomrod wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other commentator identified, you work @ FB -- could you please provide the following three scatter plots to support or disprove your claims?: (1) Size of Company vs. ROA (2) Advertising Expenditure by Company vs. ROA (3) [Advert %] vs. ROA I hypothesize you'll see a rapidly decreasing return on advertising due to size, and would love to be proven wrong.

Not at FB anymore but I would assume your hypothesis isn't too far from the truth. It's also true that there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses that thrive thanks to online advertising.

The US currently has about 25M small businesses. How many of them use digital advertising? What testing is done to ensure their ROA isn't a waste?

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

#324

Post by mlang23 » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 10:58 AM UTC

d0mine wrote: post #322

mlang23 wrote: post #315

What I notice is that internet advertisment is pretty selective, I dont know about effective... If your interests happen to diverge from mainstream just that bit enough, you can end up in a pretty much ad-free zone. I happen to watch a lot of conference recordings on YouTube, and most conferences dont monetize their channel (yet). But thats not the end of the story. Stay away from mainstream, and you get complete ad-…

> stay away from mainstream Joe Rogan's podcast has millions of subscribers and multiple ads per episode (not counting ads on various cuts/highlights from the episode) — are there more mainstream podcasts on youtube?

Interesting, I dont see this. I used to watch JRE on youtube with my iPhone, and now consume the same channel via an Apple TV 3. I never got a single ad. I know that he is doing his own ads at the beginning of the show, but only in the podcast version. The YT JRE shows are completely ad-free for me.

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

#325

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 11:28 AM UTC

mlang23 wrote: post #315

What I notice is that internet advertisment is pretty selective, I dont know about effective... If your interests happen to diverge from mainstream just that bit enough, you can end up in a pretty much ad-free zone. I happen to watch a lot of conference recordings on YouTube, and most conferences dont monetize their channel (yet). But thats not the end of the story. Stay away from mainstream, and you get complete ad-…

So, how is Rogan funded? And what is he advertising? His Patreon? Product placement? Ideological placement?

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

#326

Post by pb82 » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 11:31 AM UTC

rhlsthrm wrote: post #311

Iv wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification [citation needed] I am of the opinion that internet would be a much saner place if advertisement was purely and simply banned.

Then how would we be able to browse for free?

If there is a medium for sharing content and communicating then it will be used. With or without monetization. The infrastructure is still funded because you pay for access and hosting. That being said, I don't believe that's going to happen. So uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and ever more aggressive blocking it is.

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

#327

Post by switzer » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 12:00 PM UTC

kposehn wrote: post #179

josephjrobison wrote: post #170

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.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

Agree. I have used the term "incrementality" to communicate the incremental benefit of a given ad compared to a control whereas the article uses "advertising effect". Measurement is also difficult because every ad platform grades their own homework (they each have analytics that attributes sales to their platforms liberally).

It is important for a brand to have their own attribution platform that measures incrementality as well as the relative contribution each ad exposure makes toward a given sale.

Both of these things are possible to measure. The problem is that the band of users that display positive ROI (when incrementality is measured) is so small that people don't believe the data.

Additionally, brand exposure is hard to measure and almost completely ignored in digital advertising. Over time I imagine that there will be more research in this area (beyond just measuring an in-view ad impression)

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

#328

Post by ryan93 » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #303

kposehn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

> Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. So advertising industries use people as guinea pigs to study the "real effect of their ad dollars". No ethics committee, no informed consent, nothing. Yet another reason to block all ads.

Hyperbolic.

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

#329

Post by rhys91 » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

The biggest ruse is Facebook convincing marketeers and agencies alike that three seconds counts as a video view. They justify this by saying people don't want to watch videos are attention deficit.

The truth is that very few people want to watch an ad. But if there's a strong enough value exchange with the consumer, they will. Just make effective content that's emotive, funny or offers utility.

Creatively, the impact of this is clients wanting ALL the messaging in the first three seconds of video content, which often causes the consumer to skip the rest of the content anyway.

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

#330

Post by jefftk » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #303

kposehn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof. Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their…

> Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences. So advertising industries use people as guinea pigs to study the "real effect of their ad dollars". No ethics committee, no informed consent, nothing. Yet another reason to block all ads.

If you can ethically do something (show ads) or not do something (not show ads) it's equally ethical to run an experiment where you do the thing some of the time and measure the effect.

Internet companies run A/B tests all the time, and it's not controversial.