Does Digital Advertising Actually Work? (freakonomics.com) 95
"This week's Freakonomics podcast goes into depth at asking if digital advertising actually works," writes Slashdot reader Thelasko:
Economist Steve Tadelis [a professor at U.C. Berkeley's business school] was interested in answering that question while working for eBay. So, when eBay, in planning to renegotiate their deal with Bing, turned off their brand-keyword advertising, it created a natural experiment.
TADELIS: "We could measure visits and we could measure purchases and we could see whether there was any drop in clicks and purchases. And — not surprisingly — all the search that was taken away from the ads just ended up coming for free through the organic search. Because right below the ad was the free link to eBay. Once we had those results, I went to the chief financial officer of eBay North America and showed him the analysis, to which he responded, "Okay, you guys were right."
There's a little more to it than that... TADELIS: One of the lessons we learned from the experiments at eBay was that people who never shopped on eBay, they were very much influenced by having eBay ads for non-brand keywords. You know, "guitar, "chair," "studio microphone." And if eBay would be able to better target ads to customers that are not frequent customers, that's where you would get the real bang for the buck.
But the podcast ultimately raises the question whether the $123 billion-a-year digital advertising business has been misguided by bad information. The professor/economist cites the time one of eBay's advertising consultants tried to out-jargon him (after he'd dialed into a call from a landline) by tossing out the phrase "Lagrange multipliers." So, I replied by saying, "Well, we all know that the Lagrange multipliers measure the shadow values of constraints in an optimization problem. So, it would really help me if you explain to me, what is your objective function and what are your constraints?" After a short pause, and this is where I have to take my hat off to the founder of that consulting company, he immediately responded with the only and best answer he could give, which was, "Steve, are you driving now? Because I can't hear you. You're breaking up."
TADELIS: "We could measure visits and we could measure purchases and we could see whether there was any drop in clicks and purchases. And — not surprisingly — all the search that was taken away from the ads just ended up coming for free through the organic search. Because right below the ad was the free link to eBay. Once we had those results, I went to the chief financial officer of eBay North America and showed him the analysis, to which he responded, "Okay, you guys were right."
There's a little more to it than that... TADELIS: One of the lessons we learned from the experiments at eBay was that people who never shopped on eBay, they were very much influenced by having eBay ads for non-brand keywords. You know, "guitar, "chair," "studio microphone." And if eBay would be able to better target ads to customers that are not frequent customers, that's where you would get the real bang for the buck.
But the podcast ultimately raises the question whether the $123 billion-a-year digital advertising business has been misguided by bad information. The professor/economist cites the time one of eBay's advertising consultants tried to out-jargon him (after he'd dialed into a call from a landline) by tossing out the phrase "Lagrange multipliers." So, I replied by saying, "Well, we all know that the Lagrange multipliers measure the shadow values of constraints in an optimization problem. So, it would really help me if you explain to me, what is your objective function and what are your constraints?" After a short pause, and this is where I have to take my hat off to the founder of that consulting company, he immediately responded with the only and best answer he could give, which was, "Steve, are you driving now? Because I can't hear you. You're breaking up."
No (Score:5, Informative)
n/t
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said this before here, it depends on how you're measuring. Does it work to pay the bills for the people who deploy it? Definitely. Does it work for the people buying it? Probably not. Or at least, the benefit is likely nowhere near the cost.
I realized this about spam about 20 years ago. You pay someone to send 1m spams, and everybody deletes that shit. You get nothing, the spammer gets a small pay-day.
But 1 out of those 1 million people saw that spam and was like, "damn, it must work or they wouldn't do it", and they pay for 10m spams to be sent for their scam, product, or business. And 10m of those spams get trash binned, but 10 more people say, "if it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it".
Spam, bulk mail, digital advertising, and the like don't need to work. They just need to convince some other people that they do, so they keep funding it. It might not work for any individual except the sender, but as long as there's a new fool every week who's got some cash to burn, it will keep going.
Now, if it works even a little, it gets even worse. Because now the people who spent money on it have both belief and some evidence, and even if the finances don't work out that's a dangerous, addictive combination.
Coke, McDonald's, General Mills a/b testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and even much smaller companies do something called "a/b testing". They run one ad in one market, or one media outlet, and run a different ad elsewhere. They then measure the results. They have professional statisticians who compute exactly what effect an ad has vs another ad or no ad.
They aren't spending billions of dollars on ads because they don't work.
There's a reason Coke is the real thung and Billy Bob soda is sold in three convenience stores in North Dakota. It's not because Coke tastes so much better.
Re:Coke, McDonald's, General Mills a/b testing (Score:5, Informative)
The podcast is an interesting listen. Basically the argument in favour of advertising working is exactly that: all these companies wouldn't be spending half a trillion on advertising if it didn't work.
The eBay study was interesting. They were *very* resistant to doing an advertising vs. no advertising test. They had consultants who did something like that and showed that advertising provided a good return on investment. But they were correlating heavy advertising versus lighter advertising. It turned out that they advertised more heavily at times that they knew sales were higher: before Christmas, father's day, etc. The marketing professor interviewed asked the consultants how they corrected for that effect and they said something something transformation something. When he asked them pointed questions about it, the CEO had a cell phone malfunction.
Doing good studies is hard. And in this case there are half a trillion reasons why someone might not want to do too good of a job. A proper study conducted with eBay ended up showing that their advertising was 1/10 as effective as they thought, giving it a pretty hefty loss, rather than the positive ROI they assumed.
Re:Coke, McDonald's, General Mills a/b testing (Score:5, Insightful)
The ebay example is interesting indeed, but we must caution making generalisations from it. They said it themselves, they show up organically in search results for products. A lot of service / retail industries do. Quite often powered by search algorithms you end up with free locally relevant algorithms too. E.g. search for "bars" and I get a map with a list of bars in my area and the top link a tripadvisor page listening the best bars in my city.
The same does not necessarily apply to a product. Searching for guitars and ending up ebay is great, but what happens if you are a small guitar manufacturer? Paying to be at the top of the results may be the only chance you have as the search results overwhelmingly favour guitar shops, not brands.
The same applies to the GP's spam claim. Sure the idea of providing a spam service is just to convince people that it works, however that in itself is not evidence that it doesn't. You just need to look instead to direct beneficiaries: e.g. Nigerian scammers. Spam doesn't need to work to sell the spam business, but Spam does need to work for Nigerian scams to be worth while, and considering we still see them and we hear plenty of stories of people falling for them you can by extension say that not only does the scam work but the method of delivery does as well. At least in that case.
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There were quite a few other examples as well. And the previous episode looked at TV advertising, where reasonably controlled experiments came to much the same conclusion.
One of the issues with a lot of business theory is that it linearizes everything. Your marketing department might report a 5% ROI on advertising but, even if they actually had a decent estimate, that can't possibly be correct. If it were, you would immediately be advised to invest infinite money in ads.
A bit of advertising might be valuabl
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Was that the "Gruen Transfer"? There was a show about that in Australia.
Host (dickhead), two regulars, and two guests.
Both regulars were professionals in the marketing/advertising industry, and so were most of the guests, but they had a smattering of guests from related fields - psychologists, statisticians, etc.
What I found interesting was the two regulars. One was old-school, and he BELIEVED! Marketing and advertising were GOD! His statements were all in support of conventional or traditional marketing. P
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Freakonomics. It's an American podcast about economics from the author of the book by the same name.
I also have bad associations with certain companies that advertise too much. Unsolicited e-mail is a great way to get your otherwise legit company associated with penis pill purveyors. And when your ad appears on a page that's crammed full of clickbait "Mom's weird trick" stuff, well, you are the company you keep.
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A proper study conducted with eBay ended up showing that their advertising was 1/10 as effective as they thought
Though only because the organic search results just below the paid results also pointed to eBay. To me this says that getting your site to show up at the top of a Google search is very effective, regardless of how you do it. The easy but expensive way is to bid for ad space. How hard or expensive the other way is... dunno. There are certainly plenty of SEO firms who will take every dollar you want to throw at them, but it's hard to say what your ROI will be.
Also, you could try being eBay, which has the ad
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The paid search results study is where they started. It goes on from there.
I don't remember what Google calls it, but paying to advertise to people who've explicitly searched for you sounds pretty stupid. Not surprised that one is a complete loss. It's also not super surprising that paying for ads on a search that's explicitly for your competitor also gives poor results (something else they looked at). But general ads vs. no ads experiments also yielded much smaller effects than the marketing departments as
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I don't remember what Google calls it, but paying to advertise to people who've explicitly searched for you sounds pretty stupid.
AdWords. And it's only stupid if you can actually get that high in the organic results.
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If I search for "eBay" and eBay isn't high in the search results ("organic", lol), no matter how big eBay is, then Google has jumped the shark.
I just searched for the mom and pop burger joint up the street. Top hit, second is Yelp. Same with a sushi place I went to once on the other side of the country. I guess Google hasn't totally sold out.
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Companies like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and even much smaller companies do something called "a/b testing". They run one ad in one market, or one media outlet, and run a different ad elsewhere. They then measure the results. They have professional statisticians who compute exactly what effect an ad has vs another ad or no ad.
They aren't spending billions of dollars on ads because they don't work.
There's a reason Coke is the real thung and Billy Bob soda is sold in three convenience stores in North Dakota. It's not because Coke tastes so much better.
Economics isn't my field, but my first thought is to wonder how repeatable the sampled results are. I assume that the hope is that the ads in the two markets is the only significant factor. Intuition would suggest that such a hope is unlikely.
Unfortunately, statisticians and spammers share one thing in common in this endeavor. Their main motivation is job stability. As someone in a different thread mentioned, spammers don't need their spam to be demonstrably effective for job stability. Likewise, stati
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> Likewise, statisticians are only needed when the analysis is not obvious, so whatever they conclude cannot contradict intuition because there is no intuition.
Coke doesn't taste a billion times better than Bob's soda.
It has a billion times as much advertising.
It sells 82 billion times better. There's your intuition.
With all the money invested, advertising science is probably the single most thoroughly understood science there is. Saying advertising doesn't work is like saying chemistry doesn't work, or
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> Likewise, statisticians are only needed when the analysis is not obvious, so whatever they conclude cannot contradict intuition because there is no intuition.
Coke doesn't taste a billion times better than Bob's soda.
It has a billion times as much advertising.
It sells 82 billion times better. There's your intuition.
Exactly. I agree. Everyone agrees. That's why no company would call in the statisticians to analyze this issue.
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Network effects are indeed a thing. However, "people drink Coca-Cola brand because people drink Coca-Cola brand" is circular and doesn't explain why people drink THAT brand.
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Companies like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and even much smaller companies do something called "a/b testing". They run one ad in one market, or one media outlet, and run a different ad elsewhere. They then measure the results. They have professional statisticians who compute exactly what effect an ad has vs another ad or no ad.
I encourage you to read or listen to part 1 [freakonomics.com] of this podcast. Basically, these companies tend to do research that isn't well controlled. Therefore, it's impossible to tell if the advertisements are working. The statisticians are all paid out of the advertising budget, so they have incentive to provide results that show ads work.
They aren't spending billions of dollars on ads because they don't work.
This argument comes up many times in the course of both episodes, yet there is no other evidence that it does work... It's the old case of, "this is the way we've always done it,"
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The spam gets deleted without being consumed by the target.
The advertisement exposes both the brand and the product to the target, even if they quickly click "skip ad"
Not everyone has an ad blocker.
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Most content consumed today is done so from a digital online context. It is the dominant content distribution platform. Advertising comes in all forms, not just in banner ads but in this article itself a PR=B$ production to diminish the harm of saturation advertising driving overconsumption on a planet threatened with catastrophic climate change. Whilst I agree targeting advertising is a failure, digital advertising is not, for the majority of content consumption, that is all there is and a whole bunch of r
Wholesale brainphising works and destroys (Score:5, Interesting)
This starting branch is SOO naive. Just finished a largish book on the mathematics and programming packages underlying the topic. Yeah, I know that Slashdot 2020 responds TL;DR, so I'll try to keep it simple.
Using our personal information they are now able to identify hundreds of personal buttons for each potential sucker. They don't worry about the people who are too hard to brainphish. They just want to identify the easy marks and push the right buttons. They are succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of old-fashioned pre-tech advertisers. And each day they are accumulating more personal data and finding more psychological buttons to push and testing new ways to push more buttons. Sometimes they are selling soap or toothpaste and sometimes they are selling fake news or political candidates.
It was never about fooling all of the people all of the time. But some of the people really can be fooled all of the time.
My latest amusement is to watch for the places where they are targeting me. For example, recommended news stories. For a while it was frightening to see how accurately they were hitting on my interests, but lately I've started feeding them a fair amount of BS about my interests and it's possible that they are already losing their laser focus. Still a lot of near misses, but not as accurate as they used to seem. Playing the MEPR card sideways?
Or maybe they've detected that's what I'm up to and they are just playing along? Or this way lies madness?
Re: No (Score:2)
Re: No (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly right.
Amazon has 22 years of my buying history.
In 22 years has amazon ever offered me an ad or discount on something I actually want or am looking at? Nope not once.
Prime day sucks. It is almost always crap products. Or amazon branded products.
Facebook I block every advertiser I see. Why? Because they all suck.
At my company we spent 2 years refining organic search results and then stopped spending money on digital ads. Our omline sales went up. Spend the money fixing your organic search results and it will be better for you.
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Why should we believe you rather than conclude you work in the industry? Of course the brainphishermen will deny everything.
My primary evidence that you're not speaking accurately is my own experience with Amazon, which was about that long ago. When I saw the accuracy of their targeted responses I stopped doing business with Amazon and pretty sure I never will.
Re: No (Score:4, Funny)
"amazon branded products"
Want to take down a dictator? Just send him a big gift of Amazon branded electrical products!
Within a week, the dictator's ruling compound will just be a smoldering ruin, and he and his henchmen will be dead, electrocuted, scarred like Two Face from Batman, missing hands and fingers, etc...
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All of a sudden I have a new found respect for the USA arming 3rd world militias. "Amazon Choice AK47, the gun you will only need to use once!"
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Anyone who remembers the internet ads back in the early days of it will remember the flashy banner ads that filled the screen. Then advertisers started to use strobe lights to get you to look. A lot of us got a real negative impression then, it's one of the reasons I use adblockers today and really don't see ads. When I do they usually are 30 second must watch first that cause me to click off the tab.
So much this. Pile on to that malicious ads carrying malware payloads. That's why I run adblockers on each and every browser and device I use
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No, advertising has very little with getting people to buy things they really don't need.
It's first about getting people to buy your thing/service for their need, instead of other company's thing/service. This is where the small brands play.
First they need to know your thing/service exists. How can they know? You advertise it. Some companies have pre-existing relationships with people where they know they exist already (like eBay), so they don't care about that. Many companies you've never heard of and thus
Can you hear me now? (Score:2)
Good...
Doesn't work very well here (Score:2)
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So is directed advertising. Google elies extensively on it, and so do many retailers who advertise products they sell. This sometimes gets very pecular: I'm old enough that I recently had some kidney tests, and I suddenly received a _flurry_ of Viagra ads. Erectile dysfunction is common for men with kidney issues, and selling off the patient lists to Viagra and other "masculine aid" vendors seems to be obvious directed marketing. It's annoying, and potentially lethal if misused, especially when someone alre
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Like real-estate agents ... (Score:5, Interesting)
A successful real-estate agent is one who is good at selling himself, at getting the exclusive listings. Sell houses is secondary, easier, and less time-consuming.
The main purpose of an open-house is often to recruit new sellers. (Agents don't care if you are not really interested in buying!)
So it is with the advertising industry. Their real business, their expertise, is selling advertising, not cars and baked beans.
Who knows or cares if those adverts work? But you can be certain those ad-men have accurate metrics on how much advertising they are selling!
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And on that note, the purpose behind job interviews is to have you do the scouting for recruiters ("Let's have an interview after the interview, where you can tell us what we don't know / can't afford the gas to find out...""Thanks for the hot tip on that last interview, guys. Turns out, they were looking for someone who wants to program macros for Excel...not really a programming job, per se, is it?"), or free consulting ("Yeah, that's the same solution we thought of for our DB / AJAX problem...thanks for
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Nope (Score:2)
Other advertising does not work either. People may remember product names, but they are not buying more of them.
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Advertisement are often for the flagship product that relatively few will ever consume, while they move 10000x as many 2nd and 3rd tier products. Check out our new 250 inch curved 32k display! Yeah they might only sell a thousand of them, but their brand is bolstered, the regular joe products will seem
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I am aware of that. There still is no conclusive evidence that advertising works. But a lot of people are earning their living with advertising and some are even getting filthy rich off it, so nobody is looking too closely.
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There still is no conclusive evidence that advertising works.
Tell that to the thousands of soda companies that didnt advertise.
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Tell that to the thousands of cereal companies that didnt advertise.
Tell that to the thousands of shoe makers that didnt advertise.
Did you know that even up into the 1980s, most towns had a local soda maker with a shop? There might be 6 such local soda makers left in the entire country, while a small handful had advertised and took over the entire market, wiping out thousands of companies in the process.
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Sure. That and buying up most of the others, and mass producing sugar water for much cheaper than a dude in a store can.
But yeah, it was *definitely* the advertising.
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Sure. That and buying up most of the others, and mass producing sugar water for much cheaper than a dude in a store can.
But yeah, it was *definitely* the advertising.
Pretty much. Methinks somebody here has no clue what "causality" means and how you prove it.
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc is strong in our monkey brains.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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But a lot of people are earning their living with advertising and some are even getting filthy rich off it, so nobody is looking too closely.
So by that measure it works fabulously well for the people selling advertising
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Going digital gave the advertising industry all the tools to discover show ineffective it is across all media. Click through rates have been stagnant at around 3% since the 90s, 6% is a monumentally successful campaign. They know who clicks and who doesn't, but are always arrogant and delusional enough to think the next method of annoying users will work.
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Well said.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
3% is the number of users who accidentally click because of reflow, touchscreens or other accident.
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3% is a really good success rate. My company once bound floppy disks of our product (trial version) into a PC magazine. We got less than 1% of people trying it, down from the 3% that's considered "good" for that kind of scheme.
As you might guess, the company was soon seized by its creditors.
Depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
'everyone' already knows that ebay exists and what they do, and don't need to be reminded of that on a daily basis. Millions of people will actively seek out the site or come across it organically anyway, but the same does not apply to Billybob's Widget Company. In the early stages of a company, advertising and getting word of mouth can very much make a difference.
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This was my first thought. I haven't listened to the podcast, but if I'm searching for 'used guitar' or whatever, I expect Kijiji, Craigslist or eBay to be at the top of the stack. Why would any of them advertise? Modern search algorithms will naturally bubble those sites to the top. The only time those ads would be of any use is if they WEREN'T eBay or whoever.
So then there's a question of whether or not eBay should buy ads to make sure no new used goods auction sites can pop up, because the marketing to g
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Household names are household names because they advertise all day. I'm pretty sure that Coca Cola is one of the most well-known brands in the world, but they advertise all day, every day, and they're not stupid for doing it.
I really want to believe that ads don't work, but this is a dark science that dates well before the advent of the Internet, TV, and even radio.
Branding adverts do (Score:2)
The only exception is ultra high profit industries, which is why you see so many ads for "bed in a box" type businesses; i.e. you're seeing $100 bucks worth of foam for $1000 dollars you can afford some ads.
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It is only going to get worse. A lot worse (Score:1)
The same applies here. I don't even have a driving license. Living in the middle of a city I really don't need one.
Amazon is even worse. They sling ads at you for stuff that you bought once, quite possibly as a gift yet still they come. They seem to think that just because you thought of something once (like 10+ years ago) that you are still interested in it now.
F*** them all.
That's why I've blocked all ads. Life without ads for crap that you don't want, can't afford and is of no interest to you is so much
DVR's And Adblockers Say No (Score:2)
Make ads illegal!
No (Score:1)
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But then who will pay for all those neat web sites? Google search isn't free.
The only warm and fuzzy feeling I get about all this advertising crap is that the only people who appear to be buying a bill of goods, so to speak, are the advertisers. eBay, Google (and others) who deliver marginally useful (at best) ads with their search results probably know full well that they are useless. And annoying to boot. But they don't care as long as the ad agencies keep dollars flowing their way. I, the customer, am a
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You, same as now?
Those sites need to be paid for. Right now we all chip in an advertising tax on every single thing we buy, which pays for the site, a massive advertising industry with all its artists and execs and scotch and ad men to swill it, and the pleasure of getting bombarded by ads.
Or maybe we could figure out a way to skip the enormous middleman and just pay for search services?
It sometimes works, video ads worst (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to admit, that I have at time clicked on ads I found online, and even bought things from them. From a variety of sites.
So from that standpoint, online advertising can work as it can help people find you.
The ones that work best have a very compelling product and a super-clear message as to why you would want it.
However I do think the entire online advertising industry is vastly overrated and the large, large majority of ads are either actively ignored, or if they appear with poor enough timing cause people to actively go out of their way to avoid a brand altogether.
I would say ads placed before and during videos are probably the worst in this regard as you really just want to watch a video and enter into the ads hostile to whatever message it's trying to convey. I think maybe once in a year I have actually let a YouTube ad play all the way through. Sponsored advertising, where they talk about a product in the middle of a video, I am way more open to and tend to watch some of before skipping. But for ads during a video I am just focused on when whatever the interrupting force will vanish.
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. But for ads during a video I am just focused on when whatever the interrupting force will vanish.
There are ads in YouTube? There are pre-roll ads? There are sponsored ads in the middle of a video? Really? Oh yeah, i remember those things; they were annoying. Well now that you've got me all upset about the past, so say "Hello" to my little friend: Sponsorblock [ajay.app].
This gets rid of the in-video ads, magically. You can tell it to play like normal (who does this?), show the length in the video bar, alert you for a manual skip, or automatically skip it. Guess which mode I have it on?
And I'm ever-so-n
Re:It sometimes works, video ads worst (Score:4, Insightful)
If I see an advertisement that did it's job I might take the route of getting to them through my normal routes. But clicking advertisements is just dumb. Never treat online advertisements as anything more than a flashing billboard.
BTW no advertisement has directly led me to buy anything. But I am the rare individual that carefully measures every purchase.
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Why would anyone click through an advertisement to buy anything? You can't trust where the link takes you.
True, but the counterargument is ease. If I have to manually go look for a thing I might not do it.
If I just want info I may not care where it takes me.
If I'm ordering from somewhere I've never ordered before, how would I even know what is real and what is not? May as well trust the ad...
Still you raise an interesting point, that trusting ads does have risks.
Obligatory (Score:3)
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
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Bad Ad placement is NOT == Digital Advertisement (Score:2)
Digital Advertisement is very effective, but you need to use goof analytics to understand what brings results and what is just money drain. Again, this is obvious.
Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
An advertising agencies job is to sell a company ads, not sell that companies' products.
In the early era of color TV there were many shows where one of the characters was a very honest advertising guy. That was intentional. The studio's clients were the ad agencies, not the viewers watching the tv and they needed to help ad guy's reputation. One of the oldest examples are some of the walk on characters of the Burns and Allen Show and the strongest example of this was Darrin in Bewitched who never did anything even slightly questionable.
It depends on quality and frequency (Score:2)
Digital ads that are randomly crowded together making the actual content hard to find...those don't work so well. But higher quality, well-placed, less cluttered digital ads can work. Duolingo is an example of a company that has done a good job with advertising. The ads are shown only at the end of each lesson, and they are often quite relevant.
How to shut people's ears off (Score:2)
"Lagrange multipliers measure the shadow values of constraints in an optimization blah blah blah blah blah zz..."
This is how the human mind processes things, at least when it comes to buzzword/jargon soup.
"Language multipliers". Yay. You're smarter than everybody for coming up with this phrase. You win the cookie I dropped on the floor this morning, champ.
Again, why do these morons get all of the attention while the people doing the hard work and thinking remain invisible?
Re:How to shut people's ears off (Score:4, Informative)
As usual, the slashdot summary is dogshit, but what the person in the article did was shoot down an idiot who was using the phrase "lagrange multipliers" as a buzzword without understanding what it means. He just asked the idiot to explain how "lagrange multipliers" applied to the problem at hand, to hilarious results.
This is, frankly, the correct way for technical people to respond to such questions, as I'm sure most of slashdot will agree. I hope he's doing well.
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And yes, lagrange multipliers are a general technique in mathematics but in econ they have a specific (and quite interesting actually) interpretation as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I have no idea what "language multipliers" are, but I suspect the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange was probably smarter than most of us in the field of mathematics, of which Lagrange multipliers are a legitimate part of. Though I suppose that just solidifies the outlook of 'people doing the hard work and thinking remain invisible'.
It was always a scam. (Score:3)
Everyone with half a brain uses an ad blocker. Either because he's one of us experts or because he knows one of us.
It is a fundamentally impossible business model, as in any case, the user's CPU is asked to betray the user. But he has total control over his own system. So he's always gonna stop annoying crap.
Back whem clicks were counted, the majority of clicks always came from internal testing and scripts that faked it, and of course accidential clicking. The rest was not even of fraction of a percent.
And reguar "show him something, in the hopes that it will sneakily manipulate him to make bad decisisons in our favor" advertisement only caught ad-blocker-less dumb people. The ones you do not want to represent all of us. (Now you know why many sites' recommendations and site changes are so bad: Because they do.)
Source: Worked for a big site, looked into the data and code. (Especially fun: Finding colleages artificially boosting their stuff with scripts from home.)
Lesson: Don't freakin lie (=advertise) to people. And don't freaking finance your business with it! Have a superior and/or unique product or service, and people will do the info spreading for you, all by themselves. Google should know. They got big that way.
Common sense (Score:2)
As an IT expert I get asked about this all the time, what is the best way to market online and for nearly two decades, yes 20 years, I've said the same thing. Get your organic search results first, people rarely listen.
Post-retro-advertising (Score:2)
Re: Post-retro-advertising (Score:2)
Call them on their B.S. (Score:2)
I really love that economist calling the sales guy on his bullsh*t. I've made feeble attempts at this myself when some sales guy was trying to pitch me on banner ads. Rather expensive banner ads, I might add. I asked him what the click-through rate was for other advertisers and the guy had no clue. That information is easily tracked and he should have had that at his fingertips.
That said, I've been wondering about digital advertising for very niche products. Things you didn't know existed but when you
Does advertising actually work? (Score:3)
No. (Score:2)
Does Digital Advertising Actually Work? (Score:1)
So what they are saying is... (Score:2)
The digital advertising business is most successful at selling the idea of digital ads to advertisers. Nog so much selling products or services to consumers.
It is a viable business model. Right?
This study tells us about one company, period (Score:2)
The study found that advertising the eBay brand with keyword advertising was ineffective. But that result is unlikely to be generalizable to all companies for a number of reasons.
eBay is already incredibly well known, especially among people who are active online. It shows up in popular culture; TV shows have done plots that involve it, it is mentioned in plays, and Weird Al Yankovic did a song about it. The company has no need for additional brand awareness among the online community.
eBay has very little d
Advertise Wisely! (Score:1)