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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

"What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending."

This would make logical sense. BUT! it turns to not be the case. Larger accounts: Pepsi, Johnson&Johnson, Tmobile, etc tend to just take a massive budget and blow it on ads. They don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking. They just want to shove banners in front of people's faces before the quarter ends. What is nuts -- is that these large accounts (we used to call it dumb money) are almost all of the ad revenue. Accounts that care about click ROI tend to be low budget -- that is why facebook/google will push these people into self service ad portals.

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This is wrong to the point of being backwards (I've worked on building these systems). The most demanding clients from an ROI perspective are _always_ the biggest clients, since they're the the only players who can support an employee whose full time job is to care about this ROI. Seriously, look at the features of the ad portals - they're obviously built for major advertisers. Features are prioritized based on how much business they will bring in, thus large advertisers drive the product roadmap.

Small businesses care about ROI in the abstract, but are generally so time strapped just running their business that they barely have time to even set up attribution or measure ROI beyond "I spent this much and it kind of seemed like I got more business".

Nah, it’s true. Pepsi doesn’t care much about click thru rates on their banner ads.

click through rates != ROI

Pepsi cares about making you read the word "Pepsi" over and over until you buy one, but you don't buy them from pepsi.com, you buy them at every restaurant/store you go to.

That's true, because click-through rate is not at all a good measure of ROI.

Pepsi cares about sales rates of Pepsi products in $localRegion when they run an ad campaign in $localRegion.

Major multinationals are sophisticated enough to correlate their ad campaigns with product sales. And they have the resources to run numerous ad campaigns simultaneously in multiple regions and iterate on the campaigns that work. Smaller players are less able to do that, and are forced to rely more on metadata like click through rates because they can't see the bigger picture.

Yeah - apparently it's called brand awareness - you see the logo, that's enough.

Is that really true for Facebook ads? My feed contains relatively few ads from companies like Pepsi, J&J, T-Mobile, etc trying to do brand building. Most ads are from somewhat smaller companies trying to get me to buy a specific product right now.

Those brands usually try to connect with existing brands so events/people sponserships are more rewarding and global vs facebook ads who generally want you to click now while targeting a smaller segment.. the smaller the better

> Larger accounts [...] don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking.

Well, sure. They are going for brand awareness. There's an entire field of study around it.

Large accounts are not enough to keep FB and the like afloat. The small accounts do care about conversion rate, etc.

That highlights something I noticed about advertising - it is ironically meta in that what is needed is to convince the buyer that it is the source of their success.

Many have "totemic" advertising where they think slapping their name everywhere will be what gives them success when they are already well known and widespread enough that people wouldn't forget about them if they stopped advertising tomorrow. Brand awareness is a thing but it seems overhyped - especially when it forgets the downsides of obnoxious advertising.

If as the old joke the moon was painted a cocacola logo that would give brand awareness in perpetuity but it would piss off a lot of people rightfully.

Pissed off people are still more likely to buy that brand because to do otherwise would require a thought override. These ads speak to the subconscious your anger is more conscious and will ebb and flow.

It wasn't a joke and it was Pizza Hut, not Coke.

I started out working as a senior Facebook / social app developer at digital agencies. Saw it firsthand.

Agencies would hire me late in the process, when most of the campaign was specced out (as some silly app on a page). I saw many times that the campaign wouldn’t really be that viral etc. But the design had already been nailed down and it was my job to make it happen.

So what they would do is just buy 50,000 likes and maybe get some organic action. They showed the results, the guys at the brand showed the results to the giys upstairs, everyone seemed happy.

It was one of the things that made me realize current social media platforms were about fake or shallow online engagement, and gave me the impetus to start Qbix

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