Missed this.
Okay, so here's the thing about advertising: It's all a lie. It's all just magical thinking. The whole advertising industry from the beginning up until about 2 thousand and Google was built upon the fact that it was impossible to conduct a double-blind study to determine the efficacy of an advertising campaign. So what company executives would do is, well, if sales increased at some point after your ad campaign started, you'd assume the sales increase is due to advertising. It's the same rigor of thought that says, my kid got autism after being vaccinated, so vaccines cause autism. Or my cancer was cured after I drank a ton of fruit juice, so fruit juice cures cancer. It's nonsense. It's magical thinking.
Actual evidence suggests advertising works in one situation, and that's when your brand is competing against many competitors with limited product differentiation (for example, deodorant or dish soap), and the viewer is young/hasn't been fixed on another brand yet. That's it. And even in these situations, the data is spotty. Like the Old Spice Man advertising campaign; that **** went viral, kids were sharing those videos with each other voluntarily. But did that wild popularity lead to increased sales? Evidence suggests the campaign did nothing. And if an enormously popular campaign like that isn't able to attract customers to your brand, nothing will.
And this is where Facebook comes in. Facebook gives you the tools to carefully tune your campaign to target a specific audience, up to and including race and religion, which I'd think is pretty much begging for a ****in' huge lawsuit but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. More than that, Facebook lets you tune the campaign enough that you can... A/B test it.
So guess what happens now, ****os?
That's right, you find out that advertising doesn't work. Despite having a laser focused campaign that narrowly targets exactly the kinds of people who need and want your product, you are able to get convincing evidence that your campaign does nothing.
And, well, then you have the fraud. Facebook basically got caught billing customers for clicks that didn't happen, although they had some excuse ready. Google does all kinds of adwords ****ery, mostly to avoid paying people who host ads. This is the kind of shady **** you gotta do, though, when your whole empire is based on something that doesn't work.