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This is the same myths that everyone in advertising propagates.

Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

The "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

pretty sure YouTube ads are directly trackable though -- if someone clicks it and funnels through to a checkout process and pays, they have a direct report of how much they spent on the ad versus how much they made directly from that ad.

YouTube in-video sponsorships are a different beast admittedly; however there is still some basic tracking through use of promo codes (Use code JOHN15 for 15% off). They can see a report of how much they spent on ads that mention JOHN15 and how many sales included that promo code -- if sales vs ad spend are significantly positive, it becomes simple math to determine how much more to spend on ads, or to discontinue them.

I suppose your point though was that it's not possible to track the negative sentiment generated by the ads (people who get annoyed and decide to avoid your company at all costs). That is true, but companies who rather go down the path of something trackable than an unknown shot in the dark.

You're spot on with "go down the path of something trackable". The next step is they assume everything they tracked represents all data for all possible outcomes. It can't.

> For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company.

I can't immediately come up with a scenario in which all of the following is true:

1) The ad-viewer is repulsed by the ad

2) The ad is repulsive for reasons unrelated to your product/company's actual characteristics (otherwise they weren't a potential customer anyway)

3) This accounts for a significant portion of ad viewership (otherwise it's not relevant)

4) There is no social/media backlash (that would make the issue visible)

5) There is a significant positive ROI anyway (that's the only motive to continue that advertising campaign, which is required to sustain both negative and positive effects of the ad)

Is not the modern internet and widespread usage of ad blockers that exact scenario?

Take a person that hates being advertised at, a persona that is growing. This person meets all of your criteria. Multiply this person across the internet.

When this person sees an ad, regardless of company or content, they are repulsed because they hate ads. This person likely runs an adblocker so when an ad gets through, they are even more angry. If this person sees this product in the store, they will avoid it.

Take a common example of Coca-Cola. Their ads are everywhere. This person would instead buy the store brand cola even though it has not been advertised at them.

> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.

Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

> Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

My guess is that those people are the most susceptible to their influence. Even when you know the tricks being employed to manipulate you, it doesn't always make the manipulation less effective. It's like an optical illusion where you know what you're seeing is wrong, but you still can't stop seeing it.

It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.

Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.

It's as simple as "if ads didn't work, YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al wouldn't exist"

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;)

But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.

What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.

Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.

Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

much of it is measurable, and the measurable part gets acted on. that's part of why they give the sponsorship a special link or code with a discount, if people sign up with that link they track it, and probably attribute the revenue/profit from that sign up to that advertising campaign. If more profit is generated from that link than it costs the company for the sponsorship (including the cost for the time of the employees working in marketing), the company continues that advertising campaign. it doesn't measure everything though yes, but is enough to seem likely to me that online advertising campaigns do work

also i would propose that you should spend $100 on advertising (including cost of time reaching out to people etc) to generate $100.10 in profit(not revenue) if the return comes fast enough. you can estimate the opportunity cost of spending that money by seeing what interest rate somebody would loan you money for, if that .10% ROI is more than the interest rate on the money, then it's worth doing, even though it's only $0.10. then if you do need to do something else with the money you can take out that loan. I guess it might be harder to calculate opportunity cost of your employees time since it might take a while to hire more employees, but you can estimate that based on their hourly salary. also hard to calculate opportunity cost of your brand reputation from doing more advertising. and yeah hard to calculate opportunity cost of your own time but you can just estimate a hourly rate and good enough. most of the math is clear though and companies go on that. (disclaimer: i am not an expert on any of this)

>Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising

This isn't true. Some ads really are about education and product awareness. If a new product comes to the market, how is anyone going to find out about it if there's zero advertising? Word-of-mouth can be useful at times, but that only works when someone's already bought and tried the thing, so how did they find out about it?

But yes, for many, many products and services (like Coca-Cola), everyone who hasn't been living under a rock already knows about it, so that advertising isn't strictly necessary. The point of Coca-Cola ads isn't to make you aware of it, it's to keep it in your brain, and to establish some kind of emotional connection in your brain when you hear or see Coca-Cola, to make you more likely to buy it when you have a choice. Basically, that type of advertising could accurately be called "brainwashing", or "psychological conditioning".

I think it's entire reasonable to be disgusted by the latter form of advertising, while not being completely opposed to the former. An ad that says "hey look! We just invented this handy new gadget that'll make it much easier to fix your bicycle when it breaks on a long ride! Click here to see how it works." isn't so objectionable to me, unlike most other ads.

The problem, however, is most ads are total BS, and there's really no practical way to filter out only the ones that 1) aren't brainwashing, 2) aren't for crap I don't need and would never need or want, 3) aren't for something that's really a scam, and 4) aren't plainly obnoxious and irritating, so I have to resort to using ad-blockers, which block all ads.

I really kinda miss the old Google search, where they used to put some small, text-only ads on the side, that were directly related to whatever you were searching for. Those were actually useful: search for "fix bike chain" and you might see an ad for a tool to fix bike chains, for instance. Sometimes you'd find something new and useful that way. And if you didn't, it was just some easily-ignored additional text on the side, not flashing colors, videos, pop-ups, or other attention-stealing BS.

Have you actually ran any Google or Facebook ads? I have, for my target market, and I made more money in return than I spent on ads, so obviously it works, by definition of these companies existing, independent of whatever the companies say themselves.

Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.

But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.

I think, I need to think it more through.

Why do you think so many things are not measurable?

It's very hard to poll or measure things to within a fraction of one percent with most audiences. But that's not what's needed for advertising. And in marketing you probably don't care about that - it's in the noise. You do care of "significant" changes and you can of course measure both positive and negative influence.

Even negative influence in people who aren't yet customers, or have never heard of your company, and (preferably) have never seen your ad. For example through a polling survey. Funny enough, such a poll is probably an effective ad campaign in itself in some cases! You can also measure opinion strength about advertising in general. It's more nuanced than you think. Which unfortunately leads marketing departments to commit atrocious injury to good taste. Agreed there.

> No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

Of course not, and yet they spend far more than that, to good (measured) effect.

> I (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

I agree with that, but precisely because of how effective they are on manipulating people into consuming and wasting their time.