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Exactly, all this does is prove they never knew how to run ads to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performa

Exactly, all this does is prove they never knew how to run ads to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.

tomrod 4y ago
> they never knew how to run ads to begin with This feels like a no true scotsman. I have doubts that the vast majority of digital advertising platforms do anything other than clutter websites, waste bandwidth, annoy people, and pay a small slice of tech employees. I'm open to seeing research on the topic (and I am pretty sure there is some), but what I've read is that most advertising has insufficient statistical power, thus confidence of advertising outcomes being anything but random flukes is low.
- bduerst 4y ago
  >This feels like a no true scotsman. It's not though. Appealing to effeciency is not an appeal to purity, which is what a no-true scotsman is. A no true scotsman in this regard would be more along the lines of redefining advertising to not include any activities that OP described, i.e. OP wasn't doing true advertising. GP is not doing that here, because GP is acknowledging that OP is doing advertising, but doing it poorly.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    It felt like one because the original comment puts anyone who doesn't willingly support advertising claims as not knowing how advertising works. The classification creates a false dichotomy whose classification is "only a group that does not know advertising would do X." These are hallmarks of a no-true scotsman.
  - yen223 4y ago
    I like that this comment has no-true-scotsman'd the idea of no-true scotsman.
- tetsusaiga 4y ago
  I appreciate your thoughtful criticism of this. The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start, and would have known much earlier whether they were getting a return on their investment. If your only way of measuring advertising results is to "turn it off", you're just flying blind, and one can't expect success with a (lack of) strategy like that. That said, you are not wrong that a meaningful percentage of advertising is being run with similarly insufficient statistical power, and to that I would say those businesses are also incorrect, for the most part. I delineate because at some point, say when you're Apple or Microsoft, you are so big that "brand awareness" advertising takes over performance advertising. For the most part though, I'd say those aren't the types of businesses we are discussing in a context like this one.
  - cj 4y ago
    > The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start Part of the problem is your brand keywords will typically show up as being one of your best converting keywords.
    - staticautomatic 4y ago
      A problem in what sense?
      - jefftk 4y ago
        It's a problem in that those keywords are some of the places where you are at least likely to be generating counterfactual conversions: most of that traffic was probably coming to anyway.
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      A phenomenon which reminds me of the canonical survivorship bias story. In WWII they conducted studies to determine where the bullet holes where on aircraft which returned from bombing sorties, in order to determine which parts of the aircraft required armour. It took a statistician to point out that they actual needed to armour those places where they rarely saw damage on returning aircraft, as those parts are most likely the parts where being hit caused the aircraft to not return at all. Sometimes it requires a bit of a leap of imagination in order to resolve these things.
- jklinger410 4y ago
  It's funny to me that everyone has a "take" on advertising, and yet 99% of the successful B2C brands, including multi billion dollar international ones, continue to advertise. Every platform that starts as ad-free gets pressured to allow ads and most of them acquiesce. It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't? Maybe it's that getting your product in front of the right people at the right time has immense value. And many platforms have opened up spaces for you to attempt to do that if you pay them for the space. Maybe paying for the wrong space at the wrong time is a waste of money. Maybe determining the right place and time to get in front of people is a skill as well as an entire profession. Maybe that entire profession can't be reduced to an absolute binary of does it work or doesn't it. Just some thoughts.
  - taeric 4y ago
    To be fair, many of the most expansively marketed companies pretty much exist for the sake of marketing, it seems.
    - jklinger410 4y ago
      What is the benefit of them funding an entire industry of marketers if none of it works?
      - taeric 4y ago
        Depends what you mean by "doesn't work." Though, I suppose it often matters what you think of as marketing. Is it marketing for Coke to license their image to shirts and other products?
  - dazc 4y ago
    > 'It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?' Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean? Those companies paying for clicks to 404 pages or 'this item is out of stock', etc? Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying? I get your point but I wouldn't assume big companies always know what the are doing when it comes to advertising. Sometimes they employ lots of people and some of those people don't actually have a clue what they are doing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jgurewitz 4y ago
  If you spoke to any growth marketer worth their salt at any D2C company they will have incrementality testing and split tested traffic to prove without a shadow of a doubt that advertising works. The real challenge is scaling without losing efficiency.
civilized 4y ago
Oh, don't worry, those of us with a stats/research background know just how sloppy the data and arguments are.
dylan604 4y ago
>It never ceases to amaze me This comes across as an arrogant view point. Would you know how to take off the heads of the engine in your car and rebuild it? No? Wow! I'm amazed that you'd have no idea how to do something that isn't your direct line of work. People running small businesses that are so wanting for ad buys to work for them don't spend years honing their performance advertising skills. They don't even spend time looking it up to know it's a thing (first time I've heard this phrase myself). They see all of the advertisng they are subjected to about why buying ads is important, and so they start where they can. Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services? Condescension for the sake of patting yourself on the back is just gross.
- dangerface 4y ago
  > why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it. Advertising works when its targeted but most businesses see advertising as just trying to shout as loud as possible. They take this theory and shout at every one they meet hoping this will convert them to a customer and are amazed when shouting at people has the effect of driving them away rather than pulling them in. They come to the conclusion that advertising doesn't work not that its there technique, they shouted so loud and at every one how could anyone possibly shout louder or at more people? and when they stopped shouting sales went up! obviously advertising doesn't work.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it. All that sounds like to me is that the company providing OP's posited "non-insulting services" would just need to make sure they're marketing their product correctly and demonstrating value properly.
mcv 4y ago
Advertising is definitely a lot more complex than simply: spend more money on it -> sales go up. When tobacco ads were banned, tobacco companies started making more profit, because they had to spend less on advertising. Turned out their advertising was mostly to steal customers from each other, and didn't really lure in new users. So the ban actually helped them.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Short-term, yes. Long-term, I think no? Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so That's one hypothesis. Another is that we've known for ages that tobacco smoke causes disease[0] since[1] > Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year and the world finally woke up to that. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects/ https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects... [1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87 https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jjulius 4y ago
>It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is. Yikes, that's incredibly unfair and arrogant. It's amazing to you that, because most people don't have to actually employ performance advertising, they don't know what it is? That someone whose passion is cooking, and decides to open a restaurant, might not have that advertising knowledge? That someone - in the case of the OP - whose focus is writing software that helps research an automotive vehicle's life history, might not know everything you do about advertising? C'mon now.
- tetsusaiga 4y ago
  No you're right, as someone who takes these things seriously, I should hold myself to a higher standard than to paint in such broad strokes. Thanks for checking me there. Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective: I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge. But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like. Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    Fair, and I appreciate your honest response! Life needs to see more positive discourse like this. :)
dleslie 4y ago
I would love to see solid evidence that advertising for an established product is meaningfully effective at increasing revenue beyond the cost to produce it.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
As someone who has run ads across a variety of mediums, online and offline, some products benefit from being in the public consciousness, others dont. Identify which products or services benefit from certain types of advertising will help enormously otherwise its just throwing good money after bad. The OP's point 1 fails to recognise the filter bubble though, I think some SEO companies capitalise on this, but it simply works like this, if you keep googling your website, Google will eventually make it one of the top links in the result for YOU, not anyone else and for some website owners/companies, thats enough for them, and it doesnt bring in any more sales or revenue.

Exactly, all this does is prove they never knew how to run ads to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is.

tomrod 4y ago

> they never knew how to run ads to begin with This feels like a no true scotsman. I have doubts that the vast majority of digital advertising platforms do anything other than clutter websites, waste bandwidth, annoy people, and pay a small slice of tech employees. I'm open to seeing research on the topic (and I am pretty sure there is some), but what I've read is that most advertising has insufficient statistical power, thus confidence of advertising outcomes being anything but random flukes is low.

bduerst 4y ago
>This feels like a no true scotsman. It's not though. Appealing to effeciency is not an appeal to purity, which is what a no-true scotsman is. A no true scotsman in this regard would be more along the lines of redefining advertising to not include any activities that OP described, i.e. OP wasn't doing true advertising. GP is not doing that here, because GP is acknowledging that OP is doing advertising, but doing it poorly.
- tomrod 4y ago
  It felt like one because the original comment puts anyone who doesn't willingly support advertising claims as not knowing how advertising works. The classification creates a false dichotomy whose classification is "only a group that does not know advertising would do X." These are hallmarks of a no-true scotsman.
- yen223 4y ago
  I like that this comment has no-true-scotsman'd the idea of no-true scotsman.
tetsusaiga 4y ago
I appreciate your thoughtful criticism of this. The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start, and would have known much earlier whether they were getting a return on their investment. If your only way of measuring advertising results is to "turn it off", you're just flying blind, and one can't expect success with a (lack of) strategy like that. That said, you are not wrong that a meaningful percentage of advertising is being run with similarly insufficient statistical power, and to that I would say those businesses are also incorrect, for the most part. I delineate because at some point, say when you're Apple or Microsoft, you are so big that "brand awareness" advertising takes over performance advertising. For the most part though, I'd say those aren't the types of businesses we are discussing in a context like this one.
- cj 4y ago
  > The reason I say this though, is because if they knew how to run ads properly they would have been tracking their results from the start Part of the problem is your brand keywords will typically show up as being one of your best converting keywords.
  - staticautomatic 4y ago
    A problem in what sense?
    - jefftk 4y ago
      It's a problem in that those keywords are some of the places where you are at least likely to be generating counterfactual conversions: most of that traffic was probably coming to anyway.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    A phenomenon which reminds me of the canonical survivorship bias story. In WWII they conducted studies to determine where the bullet holes where on aircraft which returned from bombing sorties, in order to determine which parts of the aircraft required armour. It took a statistician to point out that they actual needed to armour those places where they rarely saw damage on returning aircraft, as those parts are most likely the parts where being hit caused the aircraft to not return at all. Sometimes it requires a bit of a leap of imagination in order to resolve these things.
jklinger410 4y ago
It's funny to me that everyone has a "take" on advertising, and yet 99% of the successful B2C brands, including multi billion dollar international ones, continue to advertise. Every platform that starts as ad-free gets pressured to allow ads and most of them acquiesce. It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't? Maybe it's that getting your product in front of the right people at the right time has immense value. And many platforms have opened up spaces for you to attempt to do that if you pay them for the space. Maybe paying for the wrong space at the wrong time is a waste of money. Maybe determining the right place and time to get in front of people is a skill as well as an entire profession. Maybe that entire profession can't be reduced to an absolute binary of does it work or doesn't it. Just some thoughts.
- taeric 4y ago
  To be fair, many of the most expansively marketed companies pretty much exist for the sake of marketing, it seems.
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    What is the benefit of them funding an entire industry of marketers if none of it works?
    - taeric 4y ago
      Depends what you mean by "doesn't work." Though, I suppose it often matters what you think of as marketing. Is it marketing for Coke to license their image to shirts and other products?
- dazc 4y ago
  > 'It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?' Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean? Those companies paying for clicks to 404 pages or 'this item is out of stock', etc? Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying? I get your point but I wouldn't assume big companies always know what the are doing when it comes to advertising. Sometimes they employ lots of people and some of those people don't actually have a clue what they are doing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jgurewitz 4y ago
If you spoke to any growth marketer worth their salt at any D2C company they will have incrementality testing and split tested traffic to prove without a shadow of a doubt that advertising works. The real challenge is scaling without losing efficiency.

civilized 4y ago

Oh, don't worry, those of us with a stats/research background know just how sloppy the data and arguments are.

dylan604 4y ago

>It never ceases to amaze me This comes across as an arrogant view point. Would you know how to take off the heads of the engine in your car and rebuild it? No? Wow! I'm amazed that you'd have no idea how to do something that isn't your direct line of work. People running small businesses that are so wanting for ad buys to work for them don't spend years honing their performance advertising skills. They don't even spend time looking it up to know it's a thing (first time I've heard this phrase myself). They see all of the advertisng they are subjected to about why buying ads is important, and so they start where they can. Instead of making fun of people for not knowing something that they shouldn't need to know about, why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? Or at the least, be able to point people in the direction of where to get those services? Condescension for the sake of patting yourself on the back is just gross.

dangerface 4y ago
> why not corner the market by providing non-insulting services to get them the results they need? That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it. Advertising works when its targeted but most businesses see advertising as just trying to shout as loud as possible. They take this theory and shout at every one they meet hoping this will convert them to a customer and are amazed when shouting at people has the effect of driving them away rather than pulling them in. They come to the conclusion that advertising doesn't work not that its there technique, they shouted so loud and at every one how could anyone possibly shout louder or at more people? and when they stopped shouting sales went up! obviously advertising doesn't work.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >That market doesn't exist because it requires buy in from the business, businesses that see the value in targeted and performance driven advertising do it in house because its so valuable, other businesses just don't do it because they see no value in it and they see no value in it because they don't do it. All that sounds like to me is that the company providing OP's posited "non-insulting services" would just need to make sure they're marketing their product correctly and demonstrating value properly.

mcv 4y ago

Advertising is definitely a lot more complex than simply: spend more money on it -> sales go up. When tobacco ads were banned, tobacco companies started making more profit, because they had to spend less on advertising. Turned out their advertising was mostly to steal customers from each other, and didn't really lure in new users. So the ban actually helped them.

jefftk 4y ago
Short-term, yes. Long-term, I think no? Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so.
- logifail 4y ago
  > Tobacco advertising typically focused on making smoking cigarettes seem cool and glamorous, and banning the ads may well have been a large component of why it no longer seems so That's one hypothesis. Another is that we've known for ages that tobacco smoke causes disease[0] since[1] > Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year and the world finally woke up to that. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects/ https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/health_effects... [1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87 https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jjulius 4y ago

>It never ceases to amaze me how many people/businesses have no idea what performance advertising is. Yikes, that's incredibly unfair and arrogant. It's amazing to you that, because most people don't have to actually employ performance advertising, they don't know what it is? That someone whose passion is cooking, and decides to open a restaurant, might not have that advertising knowledge? That someone - in the case of the OP - whose focus is writing software that helps research an automotive vehicle's life history, might not know everything you do about advertising? C'mon now.

tetsusaiga 4y ago
No you're right, as someone who takes these things seriously, I should hold myself to a higher standard than to paint in such broad strokes. Thanks for checking me there. Allow me to rephrase from a more compassionate perspective: I don't expect any of these people to devote the type of effort that I have into this knowledge. But I do wish they knew this stuff, because with even a little bit of this knowledge, they could have the power to make their own restaurant/software shop/insert_small_business more successful than it otherwise could have been... which may even be the difference between them successfully running said business vs. having to take a job they don't like. Ultimately, it's a be the change you wish to see situation, I suppose.
- jjulius 4y ago
  Fair, and I appreciate your honest response! Life needs to see more positive discourse like this. :)

dleslie 4y ago

I would love to see solid evidence that advertising for an established product is meaningfully effective at increasing revenue beyond the cost to produce it.

Terry_Roll 4y ago

As someone who has run ads across a variety of mediums, online and offline, some products benefit from being in the public consciousness, others dont. Identify which products or services benefit from certain types of advertising will help enormously otherwise its just throwing good money after bad. The OP's point 1 fails to recognise the filter bubble though, I think some SEO companies capitalise on this, but it simply works like this, if you keep googling your website, Google will eventually make it one of the top links in the result for YOU, not anyone else and for some website owners/companies, thats enough for them, and it doesnt bring in any more sales or revenue.