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Comment by chrisdinn | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that the overwhelming majority of digital ad formats just don’t work. Does anyone who works in digital ad tech genuinely believe that these formats work? I have been here for the last ten years and have come to believe they do not, certainly not comparable like traditional linear TV or print in their heydays.

There are exceptions. I think Google search ad works so well it’s eating the product. I think YouTube’s TrueView is great for modern brand advertisers (safety issues aside). But by and large, banner ads, forced video pre-rolls, etc don’t work. The negative message of the format offsets any message you try to convey.

Yes, fraud is a part of this. But I think a lot of this evidence looks the same as if none of their targeted, performance-based advertising was doing anything at all, beside really weak branding.

Genuinely interested to hear from people who disagree.

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Instagram ads for millenials are like flies to honey in my anecdotal experience. So many of my peers buy their furniture, dress shoes, clothing, water bottles, watches, dog leashes, pretty much everything in their lives from seeing some like-aged person use that thing on an instagram ad (and the product usually being pretty cheap). It blows my mind how successful these dime a dozen drop shipping companies based on instagram are with millenials and gen z, and buying like this will only be more normalized in the future as more people know someone who got something nice from that instagram ad.

Yeah I've noticed I've even been drawn to something because of the mindless scroll to that's pretty neat, the button to buy it is right in front of me.

I suspect this really only works for more novelty things like clothing that are cheap enough to enough to impulse buy and of interest to image conscious people.

>It blows my mind how successful these dime a dozen drop shipping companies based on instagram are with millenials and gen z, and buying like this will only be more normalized in the future as more people know someone who got something nice from that instagram ad.

Especially with stay-at-home orders due to the pandemic, everyone (well, not everyone... but hyperbole) now has their own drop shipping brands operated out of their basements, all selling the same cheap products off of AliExpress. Will consumers catch on to what is going on? Do they even care?

Facebook and IG ads work. I agree that display network ads do not.

Ya for sure. I was a Googler so my examples were biased, these aren't the only ad formats that work but there are fewer than most people (even in ad tech) realize.

Yep, even FB "audience network" ads suck and are fraud ridden. Newsfeed is a fundamentally great format for ads.

However I have not logged into FB in six months because the actual content in my newsfeed is so toxic. I wonder if this will cause things to change, although it seems unlikely.

I last logged into FB in 2017... never going back.

Mobile devices tend not to have adblockers, so exposure might be a lot higher.

Also, the only ads I've clicked are mobile ads. I've even installed apps via ad before - I've never once purchased an item from an ad online (but I've also run an adblocker for a decade).

Ads certainly "work" by some metric, and some definition of "work", but I think the metric and definition is unclear.

I think CTD ads (click-to-download) are one of the exceptions. It's a great format for some cases, eg games. For game devs, trust that yours is addicting enough that you can safely show your users a competitor's game knowing they'll come back to you. For players, you were looking to play a game anyway and maybe you want to try something new. Click, download and play that instead.

The only ads I click on are mobile ads, and that's because many times the X to close them is too small. Other times the ad is jumping around my screen and it steals my fingerpress.

> overwhelming majority of digital ad formats just don’t work

Doesn't it? It may have miserable conversion rate, limited target audience but it apparently is commercially viable. People would hardly spend money on sending e-mail spam in 2020 if it didn't work.

I thought that at first. But like the original post points out, Uber was spending a lot of money, not just in absolute terms but in percentage terms, and it wasn't working for them.

There's an allure to making something measurable and setting goals against it. Often, those goals take on a life of their own. That's what I am suggesting happened here, I guess.

if you read the twitter thread we see that uber was spending 10x more money than they should have on ads simply because they weren't auditing where their money was going towards.

so there's evidence that people (incl uber, a market leader) do indeed spend money on ads even when it does nothing

I got 0.66x, as in $100M out of $150M. I likely missed something. Where did you see 10x?

$100M was labelled "fraud" in this example, but there was more waste uncovered in the remaining $50M that didn't get that label.

Mobile games run on this. They have a target user acquisition cost and spend based on that. It seems to work for some very profitable companies. People shouldn’t try to over read into this. Businesses can’t run on irrationality for very long

Indeed. Mobile games. Perhaps the people who play mobile games probably would click an ad of another alike game or otherwise related content. They usually aren't mindful enough to prefer finding and choosing exactly what they need over just clicking an ad.

How do we not know that the spam is sent out by one sucker after the next that go until they realize it is not worth it?

Digital advertising is super effective for mobile ftp games. It is not a question if they work, it’s a question if the game can earn enough to justify the cost. Companies in that space have a super smart team of economists and data scientist constantly checking when a mobile app is worth advertising.

Someone in this thread said no one has proved to them that digital ads are ever worth it. My experience is that when they are you don’t want to advertise it to potential competitors or the people who carry your ads.

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