Could be worse. Steve Levitt has a story about working out ad spend causality and actively ignoring the truth[1]:
> LEVITT: And they said to me "[...] One time we hired this summer intern and his job was to do the newspaper inserts for Pittsburgh, and the guy was so incompetent that he just didn’t do it. And when the C.E.O. found that out, he said, ‘If you ever do that again, you’re all fired.’
> LEVITT: So, I said to them, “Well, O.K. But when you looked at the results, what happened to the sales in Pittsburgh when you were dark for a month?” And they called me back about a week later and they said, “You’re not going to believe it. We looked at the data in Pittsburgh, and we saw no impact on sales when they didn’t do any inserts for a month.” I said, “Oh, my God, that’s amazing! O.K., so when can we get started?”
> LEVITT: They said, “Are you crazy?” It was almost if they found out they didn’t work, it was far worse for these people than it was not finding out it didn’t work. Because then they had to explain why for the last 15 years they had been wasting $200 million a year. So, they were happy to just live in a world in which as long as there were ads in every market, every Sunday, life was good.
[1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/