[nobody_nowhere]

There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate.

You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.

Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.

[nobody_nowhere]

People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny.

And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.

Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.

When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.

[somsak2]

>it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.

super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate

[prepend]

> you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.

I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.”

If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive.

I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.

[jfengel]

What happened to Kraft Heinz?

[nobody_nowhere]

They cut advertising by 40% and lost a boatload of market share https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2019/03/06/the-kraft-hei...

[HWR_14]

What happened to Kraft Heinz? I assume they are still doing very well.