At first internet advertising was a no-brainer. Agree to host ads, get revenue to keep your site afloat, make a profit, expand. Fine. But now we’re inundated with ads to the point people are turning off. Hell, there are ads I’d be happy to see, but I never will because I’ve blocked them with a Pihole and Ublock. The vast majority of people aren’t doing that, but are they actually buying the advertised products and services?
Guess I can’t get my head around the logistics. Seems like all the money in the world is available for advertising, but are these companies actually seeing a return on that investment? Reddit’s basically bots advertising to bots, and the stock market rewards them handsomely. Nobody involved is stupid, they know this is happening, yet companies are still throwing money around. (Someone will relate this to the AI bubble, but it’s not really the same thing.)
There was a great article posted here about how 40% (?) of ad views are bots. (If someone can find it, that would be great!) The issue came up to the author because he was tasked with finding out why the advertising spend wasn’t getting expected sales. The number of clicks didn’t jive with sales results. The advertiser was seeing some ludicrous clicks vs. sales that was 1/10th of what it should be.
And companies are paying for these dismal results?! Think of a time where you were responsible for results at a company. If your spent $X on a thing, and didn’t get at least $X dollars back, you would back off that spend or your boss would pull the plug. (Sure, marketing often takes time to get a foothold, I get that.) That’s how capitalism fucking works. And for all the bitching about capitalism, the players don’t seem to be doing that thing. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Is internet advertising a sort of bubble? Doesn’t seem to be as it just keeps going.
Ad companies often mark their own homework. Sales directors are more often gobshites than scientists. Competition doesn’t really drive out inefficiency very well, or very quickly.
Sales directors are more often gobshites than scientists.
Obligatory:
https://fatherted.gifglobe.com/scene/?id=4vy9TDObYPorfeckin feck, gaerruls , erse
Advertising creates a presence. They don’t think any one ad is going to convince you to buy it, and they know that after watching the ad enough times, it’s not going to get any more convincing, but when you are in need of their services, you’ll be looking at their brand and a competitor, and odds are, if price and everything else are the same, you’ll buy the brand you recognize.
Psychological safety in play ^^ humans are animals, we trust what we know, fear what we don’t. All of marketing is geared to that simple fact
Well, there’s reasonable animal fear in terms of dangers and potential dangers, but when you’re talking about products? I’d think that curiosity is more common in such scenarios. Then again, maybe I’m once again overestimating sapiens.
Fear may be better said as “the unfamiliar”, but unfortunately I’m confident in this point haha. Did a psych degree, and basically our reptilian brain (fight/flight/flee centre) makes those snap decisions based on previous experience (familiar: friend or unfamiliar: foe/unknown). We can relatively easily override it (e.g. curiosity about the newest swiffer), but if we don’t know to do that, our brains default to “oh I’ve heard of that one before, is friend”
Well, I don’t know what you’re doing with that spinach over there, but yeah, makes sense to me. We have a natural bias towards the familiar & repulsion towards the unfamiliar, even in trivially-important matters, no doubt much like other advanced life on the planet. #2 on Maslow’s Hierarchy, I guess.
And a new ad for the thing you’ve already bought can reassure you that you’ve made the right choice. Going forward, you’re more likely to stick to that brand and for adjacent products.
IIRC that’s the whole point of luxury car commercials during half-time breaks. 99% of watchers can’t afford one, but the ad is there to remind the owners of that very fact.
Both your question and the answers are a sign of a healthy (oblivious) detachment from advertised society, IMO. Advertising works. Not to you, because you have the mental infrastructure to not want it to work. The right kind of advertising would work on you too, it’s probably just not profitable.
This. It’s amazing to watch normal people operate. It’s like they think the universe must be showing them the ads for some profound reason
Oh people know they’re being sold and watched, it is just that many can’t resist in a very literal sense, because they have stressors that outweigh lost (seemingly theoretical) freedom by manyfold.
Also stressed ppl are better consumers. Less critical thought, more impulsive behaviour to alleviate anxiety
To answer your second question. Companies are expected to spend $1 trillion on advertising in 2025.
For the first question, it is pretty complex. You can break it down into some topics though and it is more manageable.
Types
Ecosystem
SEO
Criticism (good stuff starts at 10:00)
I think what’s happening is that each individual company has a positive ROI on ads in the sense that they would lose more than a dollar in sales if they spent a dollar less on ads, but collectively the ROI is probably smaller than one: if all companies would cut their advertising budgets in half they would all be better off, as they would keep their sales roughly the same.
So adverting is less about sales volume (people don’t necessarily buy more things when they see more ads) but about market share (you get a bigger piece of the cake). Classic prisoner’s dilemma.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you’re in a bubble.
Go outside, talk to people, friends, family, especially of different generations. Even people I know that I consider much more “tech savvy” than average have no clue about ad blockers or how to begin using them.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you’re in a bubble.
Nowhere near the majority, but also not a “fraction of a percent.”
I was about to say, even without actual data to back it up, big companies are going out of their way to try and evade and block ad-blockers, and that costs man-hours to design, so obviously it’s not a negligible number if they have decided its worth trying to pursue.
It is a fraction of a percent. ⁶⁰/₂ is a fraction.
I’m pretty sure they meant it as a colloquial, not a strict mathematical expression.
Google cooks the books on ad sales and after being found out it makes a lot more sense on the actions they are doing now with their other products that ads we’re propping up.
You guys have ads on internet ?
Never seen one in 13 years .
I generally post variations on this when similar questions come up:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2025+marketing+technology+landscape&iar=images
The companies on the edges are all about marketing adtech firms to companies with money to convince them to spend it on digital marketing.
Ads are actually pretty incredible. If no one knows your brand, all it takes is money to tell em. It’s like a short cut compared to having a good product and word of mouth.
Its essentially like a cold call, but you know the audience is at least generally interested in your topic because of targeting. All that data that is being taken and sold from you, is being sold to avertizers.
Pay Google for getting on search on Google and youtube.
Pay meta to get ads on Insta and Facebook.
If you spend $500 to sell a $3000 product, it’s a no brainer. Ita basically printing money when it works. So yeah, companies are paying when the results match. But also when they are testing the waters to see if its worth it to them.
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