Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable and there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective.
You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.
>Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
Guess that's why we need those brightest minds of our generation on the problem, as the saying goes, right?
That sentence gives me extreme Matthew McConaughey-in-Wolf of Wall Street vibes. After seeing you wrote that, I immediately assumed you very likely work in advertising. Sure enough...
I have no clue whether anything you've written there is accurate or not. Either way, this whole thing and this whole industry just looks, sounds, and feels gross and intrinsically empty. I get a much better and more wholesome feeling from the cryptocurrency industry, even.
If the greatest minds of society are going for the easiest payday perhaps they are not really our greatest minds. Perhaps they are the smart ones by cashing in but the great minds with the great ideas they are not.
Ad-tech involves big data, lots of volume, and tons of innovation and interesting challenges. There's usually a good paycheck too, because there are lots of companies that need smart people to work on the above.
Greatest minds? Maybe there are some, you'll find them everywhere. But I'd worry that the greatest minds are toiling away in academia chasing grants or working on things that they don't want to work on.
In the paraphrased words of Don Draper (Mad Men character), nobody grows up wanting to be in advertising. It just kind of happens.
And then, there is a good chance our generation's Tesla or Einstein or Mozart currently herds livestock in the Mongolian desert and will for all their life.
There are hucksters in every industry, and if you ask me, crypto has some next-level hucksterism.
The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
A lot of companies offer that service, some more effective than others.
But yes, I started an ad-tech company that supports indie news publishers. Before that, I was offered a great gig at Yahoo (when it was still kind of cool) where I got into it. I honestly didn't seek it out but I guess I liked it enough to stick with it.
>There are hucksters in every industry, and if you ask me, crypto has some next-level hucksterism.
It's certainly hard to compare entire industries apples-to-apples. The worst parts of the cryptocurrency industry are definitely worse than the worst parts of the advertising industry. However, I personally feel like in an "average", "net", or "expected value" sense, advertising may be worse. But maybe it isn't; either way, all I was trying to say is I really just don't like advertising or ad tech, and I wanted to use a rather extreme comparison to viscerally convey that. (Perhaps a little like a kind of "bullshit-industry" analogue of Godwin's law - my comparison was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bad faith, basically, but also kind of not, because I do like some aspects of cryptocurrencies while I like zero aspects of advertising.)
>that supports indie news publishers
Sure, and maybe someone else could've started one that supports starving children. (The originally posted article similarly mentions that one of their reasons for working on ads is "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give".)
These all feel like cop-outs to me. I could significantly support independent creators or starving children by running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, but it still doesn't make it positive on net. The difference is that you and the article author simultaneously say that you feel like the work is inherently positive, too, which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
So I absolutely don't think you're at all behaving knowingly unethically; just unknowingly. I think part of the issue here is that it's generally only a tiny bit unethical, so it takes a lot for it to add up to being a-lot-unethical, and humans (including myself) usually aren't so good at perceiving these potential cumulative effects when they're upstream of it all.
>The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
At the same time, I can't not acknowledge this. How can I fault a small business owner for wanting people to know they exist? There's some cognitive dissonance of my own, here. And at the moment I'm resolving the dissonance by disliking the advertising and ad tech industries rather than disliking businesses who place ads. (As long as the ads they place aren't annoying, deceptive, or malicious in any way.)
Maybe my opinion on all this will eventually shift a bit, though, because a lot of it's certainly more emotional than logical. At a very deep, subjective level, I just strongly dislike advertising and everything about it. It gives me nothing but negative feelings. Most of the cryptocurrency industry gives me negative feelings, too - but the industry as a whole doesn't give me nothing but negative feelings. Some part of it gives me neutral or positive feelings.
> which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
Not to get off track, but ultimately it's a subjective position. I could easily take the view that anyone working for Facebook is actively helping erode the privacy of internet users. Or, that anyone working for Google is furthering its anticompetitive agenda and stifling innovation on the open web.
Without my platform, there are some towns and cities across the US that wouldn't have a local news outlet or reporter to follow local government and uncover corruption. I have case studies on my website where the publishers say it themselves.
From someone else's point of view I could be deluded, but from my standpoint, I'm doing something very positive. I don't think someone has to actively seek out the most cynical perspective on their line of work.
> there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective
Can you provide some pointers to that data (as the parent did for the contrary position)? Forgive me, but it seems you work in advertising, so I'm not sure if you're the most unbiased person to assert something like this without evidence.
With most advertising mediums, you can only show correlation.
But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers).
In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend.
There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media advertising. We have not promoted these businesses in any other way (no SEO, no trade shows, nothing).
I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical.
Actual words, from one of these friends: "wow. That is like a money printing machine."
Consider for a second: how many advertisers that are actually succeeding are going to publicly call attention to their success? Would you?
The only hint is Facebook and Google's revenues. They go up, and I am one of the people who makes their revenues go up.
"I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical."
I'm not publishing a paper in the comments. This is HN. Regardless, you cherry picked one aspect of my comment, and it's very hard from my perspective to see that it was done in good faith.
I'd like to be proven otherwise, so, here are my key points, which you didn't contend with:
-> It's possible to completely isolate the effect of advertising spend, thereby making the effectiveness (or not) measurable.
-> I pointed to growing revenues on Google/FB's platforms, two platforms which make isolated measurement feasible.
In terms of _externally_ verifiable facts, that's the best I'll be able to give you.
The rest, you (and others) have to take on a/ good faith b/ using basic logic, that I'm telling the truth.
> Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable
Yes, I believe this is true. But also, I've heard that payouts per impression are going down precipitously. Desperate news sites are chock full of heavy ads because each impression pays less and less. Popular Youtube channels increasingly run their own integrated promotional content instead of depending on youtube ad revenue which keeps falling, even as viewership rises.
It's reasonable to suspect that as ad performance becomes perfectly measurable, payouts to content creators will asymptotically approach zero, because most ads don't work. Consumers spend most of their time looking at ads that don't work at all. That the occasional well crafted and placed ad does work isn't much consolation.
Ad network CPMs are seasonal, but I agree that it's a race to the bottom there. Ad networks (including Google's) are designed to maximize profit for ad-tech, not the publisher. The publisher/creator is always the last on line to get paid.
Direct sold digital advertising (OG, cutting ad networks out) is a different story.
Imagine, for example, that HN said they would auction off a single ad slot beneath the navbar to the highest bidder for the year.
How much do you think that would command? Do you think there could be sincere branding value (and actual performance) for the advertiser? I think it could be worth north of 1MM just to promote open jobs at a company.
If it was a clean, tasteful ad, and it was simply to support the cost of running HN, I'm pretty sure most of the audience would put up with it.
The common perception of digital advertising is network advertising. But the type of advertising that is the least annoying and most beneficial to both the advertiser and publisher is direct sold.
For user acquisition you are completely right, however for the incrementality of purchases and sales, this is highly questionable and needs to be measured on case by case basis.
You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.