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Comment by nixos | Hacker News Reader

>And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken

That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s

well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend.

But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements

The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.

"I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898.

Yet it's still going, more than a century later.

Or in other words, "Nobody was ever fired for suggesting they buy from IBM."

In the absence of alternatives, marketing money goes to advertising.

I don't disagree with your comment, but wouldn't you agree that the last thirty years have introduced an unprecedented technology environment for tracking ROI on advertising? It seems clear that a lack of incentives, not abilities, is what keeps this racket afloat. For that reason, I'm not so certain that it will be allowed to continue forever. Once advertisers get a taste of real ROI metrics, they'll drop the hand-waving platforms overnight. Biggest market opportunity of our age?

As someone from outside the ad industry, what are you referring to ? Just tv brand advertising ,or something else ?

Mathematically I don't know if it is possible to eliminate all returns from ad spend market wide. Then again, negative interest rates should have been impossible.

Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.

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