Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.
And you can use the exact same methods today on digital channels to see exactly how efficient your ads are, without tracking or invading the privacy of anybody. But companies trust Meta and their sales department instead...
The scam in online advertising is far more sinister;
Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested.
This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboard cannot change itself to always be showing an ad that can be claimed as a conversion to every single user.
The newspaper ads could not change to ensure that you saw an ad that matched what you were about to purchase.
>There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago
Weren't those people the exact ones who came up with "Half of ad spend is wasted but we don't know which half"?
Targeted and online tracking based advertising has fundamental information asymmetry problems that fuck over everyone but Google and Meta.
If this theory were true companies would see no revenue impact from ad buys on Meta. Then they would stop buying, and Meta would go out of business. You need to face the facts here that no matter how much you hate Meta, it isn't a scam.
Companies will falsely attribute positive revenue impact to whatever sales channels they are using, including Meta. The option would be for dozens of people having to admit that they made a mistake and wasted money on ads which didn't work. It's 2025, people would rather let their company bankrupt than admit they made a mistake.
Why do you think there is no revenue impact? I would assume there is. Companies should have a good idea how much. That is also why companies should care about scams - if ads on meta lose value they lose.
The comment I was replying to implied that targeted advertising is a scam that finds people who were going to buy anyway and then advertises to them. If that were true, there would be no revenue increase because all the customers would have bought anyway.
oh. That makes sense. so long as other people see the ads that shows up in the stastics. Though companies should be pushing back on google doing that. (Though it may be they were going to buy but the ad influenced where which is worth the price)
What the adds really do is target people who are going to buy a certain category of product anyway, and then advertise the specific product made by the company that buys adds. It's hard to convince someone to buy something out of the blue. Much easier to convince them to buy a particular brand of something they were going to buy anyway, which is why targeted ads are so valuable.
