[redelbee]

What if this article is missing the forest for the trees a bit? In my experience performance advertising is almost always paired with awareness advertising. The latter makes you aware of the brand/product/whatever then the former nudges you to act/buy/whatever.

So if you’re buying or even just evaluating performance ads without considering the bigger picture you might come to erroneous conclusions.

Take the Lego Movie example from the article. The $65 million movie is no doubt an awareness play. Could you make the case that you should also increase your performance budget to help capture more of the demand you just generated with the movie? Or should you just hope that people go from the movie theater to buy Lego unprompted? Is it worth it for Lego to advertise to people who walk out of the theater and search for “Lego Batman set” or whatever? I think so, even though evaluating such branded search campaigns individually might make them seem inefficient.

It seems very easy to dismiss the performance advertising as a scam when you evaluate it in a vacuum. As noted in the article it’s important (and very difficult) to understand the incremental outcome of any channel or campaign. That incrementality includes awareness campaigns.

After more than a decade in advertising and marketing I am now more than ever unwilling to accept simple or definitive answers to highly complicated questions. At best I hope that we can unwind some of the overall complexity so we can have a chance to trust some of those definitive answers.

[Closi]

The problem is it's not what's sold on the tin - the promise of pay per click advertisement is often that you can track the results of your spend more easily, and also that it can get buyers at the time they are searching for a sale. The article seems to contradict those two points at least.