A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours. The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding peo…
Online ad has negative effect. I never trust products or services that are showed up in online ads.
In this case, it was the slightly less worse case where the ad was meant to be informative instead of manufacture consumption. If you were looking for a gym that met this criteria in this locality, finding information about this particular gym would have been limited to people willing to go through several pages of search results, or looking through specialized indexes, or just happen to be walking past the storefront on the way to the bar or gun shop next door.
This was the exact use case that online advertisers invent to justify that they're not all bad, and they failed to come through.