I'm kind of annoyed by how many videos on YouTube are just ads

[Krokodile]

A ton of videos I come by now are sponsored by some company or other, and they're plugging a product. Sometimes they do it blatantly which I guess is more honest at least, while often it's veiled as a "product review" or the video topic is unrelated to the product or brand but those make it into the video somehow. People don't like ads and I think banners and such have gotten less lucrative due to adblockers so now this native advertising is all over YouTube. There are times when I find this particularly annoying, such as when I'm looking for an honest review of something and I can't be sure whether I'm getting a real opinion or not.

[saberopus]

I don't really see any videos like that, but I'm also not searching YouTube for product reviews. Sorry it's all ****ed up, god dammit, Kroko.

[Krokodile]

You don't even have to search for product reviews to get this. Most videos I see aren't product reviews anyway and I'm not going to rely on YouTube videos to tell me how good something is, it's just that sometimes it's nice to see moving image of the product (such as the sunglasses and the videos relating to that which prompted me to start this thread).

I'm not saying you've been outsmarted by YouTube because I know you to be a very smart man, but I bet you've seen native advertising on there sometime and didn't know it.

[Krokodile]

and I'm not going to rely on YouTube videos to tell me how good something is

This kind of contradicts part of my opening post, come to think of it. Just pretend it doesn't, I guess. I meant I'm not going to rely on such a video alone, partly because it's sometimes hard to weed out the native ads.

[Reverend Jones]

you know what really grinds my gears? Unboxing videos. I sometimes suffer through them because I want to see what a piece of hardware looks like before I order it, but goddamn, I don't care what kind of styrofoam it's encased in! I even less care to see a video stream of the kind of person who would make an unboxing video....

[Jon`C]

Sponsored content happened because adpocalypse happened because Google is a bad company because advertising is a scam.

[Reid]

Sponsored content happened because adpocalypse happened because Google is a bad company because advertising is a scam.

What are you talking about? Advertising is based on modern pseudoscience psychological science. We now know with mathematical precision how people shop. We can predict within a reasonable degree of certainty (sigma hacked to < 0.05) what people will buy! It turns out that this isn't useful for advertisers if you bombard someone with ads, there's a slight positive correlation with their likelihood to buy your brand (sigma < 0.05).

We know you compete on margin, Charmin, but can you also pay us more next time?

[Reid]

And Amazon generally.

[Jon`C]

Apparently the reason Amazon so aggressively advertises products you've already bought is because their training data didn't distinguish defective/exchange returns and reorders from original purchases. So it's a lot worse than I thought. I'd assumed Amazon's bots just weren't able to tell that you've already bought something. They know. But it turns out that, according to their model, someone is e.g. most likely to buy a toilet seat within a few days of buying a different one.

[Jon`C]

So here’s the thing. They aren’t even wrong. I can’t even guess how many people actually buy toilet seats in their lifetime instead of just using whatever the builder or landlord installed, so whatever the defective rate for toilet seats is, it’s certainly more likely that someone who buys one will buy another than the general population. So if you make make toilet seats, advertising to someone who just bought one is your best and really only direct marketing opportunity.

Is advertising working? Well, sorta. Amazon/Google makes money. The company that placed the ad makes money they wouldn’t have made otherwise. So from that perspective, yes, it’s working. But it’s also not adding anything.

[Reid]

Apparently the reason Amazon so aggressively advertises products you've already bought is because their training data didn't distinguish defective/exchange returns and reorders from original purchases. So it's a lot worse than I thought. I'd assumed Amazon's bots just weren't able to tell that you've already bought something. They know. But it turns out that, according to their model, someone is e.g. most likely to buy a toilet seat within a few days of buying a different one.

Damn, if they were modeling a PDE for class that'd be a D grade failure.

[Reid]

So here’s the thing. They aren’t even wrong. I can’t even guess how many people actually buy toilet seats in their lifetime instead of just using whatever the builder or landlord installed, so whatever the defective rate for toilet seats is, it’s certainly more likely that someone who buys one will buy another than the general population. So if you make make toilet seats, advertising to someone who just bought one is your best and really only direct marketing opportunity.

Is advertising working? Well, sorta. Amazon/Google makes money. The company that placed the ad makes money they wouldn’t have made otherwise. So from that perspective, yes, it’s working. But it’s also not adding anything.

Advertising advertisement is definitely one of the best advertisement campaigns ever.

Interesting about the toilet seat though, I guess if you manage a few buildings then it makes sense that you'd be targeted for **** like "light switch plates".

[Jon`C]

The problem is, when the bootlickers and techbros step in and "um actually" to defend advertising, they usually say something like: it's adding value to the economy because it's informing people about products that they need but didn't know existed. Like, I need a new toilet seat, and here's Amazon to the rescue telling me all about this indestructible toilet seat that also checks your prostate or whatever. But Amazon's not actually doing that. They're advertising perfect substitutes. On purpose. There's no value added, there's no extra utility. Just a nudge to reorder the basic Kohler if I got unlucky and bought a defective one.

This ****'s straight out of the parable of the broken window. Amazon: "I sent a broken toilet seat to your customer. Now, pay us more money, or that customer will switch to Mayfair"

[Reid]

https://www.decisionanalyst.com/whit...effectiveness/

Heh, this **** is so incredibly damning to advertisement:

The advertising industry, as a whole, has the poorest quality-assurance systems and turns out the most inconsistent product of any industry in the world...

In our experience, only about half of all commercials actually work; that is, have any positive effects on consumers’ purchasing behavior or brand choice. Moreover, a small share of ads actually appear to have negative effects on sales. How could these assertions possibly be true? Don’t advertising agencies want to produce great ads? Don’t clients want great advertising? Yes, yes, they do, but they face formidable barriers.

Unlike most of the business world, which is governed by numerous feedback loops, the advertising industry receives little objective, reliable feedback on its advertising. First, few ads and commercials are ever tested among consumers (less than one percent, according to some estimates). So, no one—not agency or client—knows if the advertising is any good. If no one knows when a commercial is good or bad (and why), how can the next commercial be any better? Second, once the advertising goes on air, sales response (a potential feedback loop) is a notoriously poor indicator of advertising effectiveness because there is always so much “noise” in sales data such as competitive activity, out-of-stocks, weather, economic trends, promotional influences, pricing variation, etc. Third, some of the feedback on advertising is confusing and misleading: agency and client preferences and biases, the opinions of the client’s wife, feedback from dealers and franchisees, complaints from the lunatic fringe, and so on.

When I think about advertising campaigns like Sega's successful early 90's campaign, it seems to me that their campaign hinged on Nintendo's slow movement and failure to respond more than the ads being so catchy they worked.

Though I guess even I still remember the slogan, but it's one of those things that if the competitors responded to it deftly then it would have lost effectiveness fast.

[Reid]

The problem is, when the bootlickers and techbros step in and "um actually" to defend advertising, they usually say something like: it's adding value to the economy because it's informing people about products that they need but didn't know existed. Like, I need a new toilet seat, and here's Amazon to the rescue telling me all about this indestructible toilet seat that also checks your prostate or whatever. But Amazon's not actually doing that. They're advertising perfect substitutes. On purpose. There's no value added, there's no extra utility. Just a nudge to reorder the basic Kohler if I got unlucky and bought a defective one.

This ****'s straight out of the parable of the broken window. Amazon: "I sent a broken toilet seat to your customer. Now, pay us more money, or that customer will switch to Mayfair"

Heh, if "value added" is their only argument.. well, they don't even have an argument.

[Jon`C]

But game theory. You have to advertise. Not because it's proven effective, but because your competitors are running ads and it might be.

[Reid]

https://digiday.com/marketing/advert...-work-anymore/

I see you all scrambling to bring up your latest “engagement” numbers. But each and every one of those numbers is based on a different “formula” than the next one. It’s all skewed — sometimes completely made-up — bull****, and you know it. “Clicks” mean nothing. “Views,” even, mean nothing. “Engage” with that.

Native advertising (and other branded content) doesn’t work — nobody remembers the brand. In one survey, two-thirds of those who recalled seeing a native ad remembered absolutely nothing about it, and 95 percent of them didn’t remember who the sponsor was.

Two years ago, The Atlantic asked a “dangerous question”: Does Internet Advertising Work at All? Short answer: probably not! Long answer: nobody knows. Nobody. Not even your Ad Tech Daddy, “Big Data.” This includes all Facebook ads and Google search ads: All of them are very likely useless. And nothing’s changed about that answer in 2016.

Goddamn, any investigation into this at all shows how futile it is.

True story, back in the beginning of this decade I agreed to design a website for someone I knew. They paid me for the website and commissioned me to maintain and arrange advertisements. They paid for Google AdSense space. ~$1000 later, and IIRC around 5k displays, the guy got 1 call, from an old friend who remembered his name and called to see how he was doing.

They kept getting mad at me, insisting the site must not be working. I continued to send them the Google AdSense data, said they were being seen but I couldn't do anything to fix engagement. They eventually terminated the relationship, which I expected.

Learned three* valuable things: one, never do web development, the sorts of people who will hire you are retarded. Two, advertising doesn't do **** and is a huge money sink for no reason. Word of mouth >>>>> everything else.

* third is, if you think a venture will go south, voice it. I guess technically speaking I made money, but the client's idea was obviously not going to work (custom auto parts in a recession-striken area, you dumb?). In retrospect I should have insisted the idea would not work and they would only lose money.

[Krokodile]

I feel like advertisers know the effectiveness of word of mouth and try to incorporate that into their campaigns. I can't think of any examples and I'm sure they fail compared to the natural emergence of the phenomenon.

[Reid]

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I always understood word of mouth to be exactly the brand recognition you can't generate from any kind of campaign, only from the quality of your product or service. So the natural emergence is exactly what I mean to say.

[Krokodile]

That makes sense.

[Gebohq]

Because we all know word of mouth raises all good products and services to the recognition they deserve, and nothing less than good has ever sold well because of traditional advertising campaigns.

[Jon`C]

Because we all know word of mouth raises all good products and services to the recognition they deserve, and nothing less than good has ever sold well because of traditional advertising campaigns.

Can you think of any less-than-good products that ever sold well because of internet-style ML driven direct marketing campaigns? I bought an iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit and magnetic project mat because they sponsored Linus Tech Tips. So, yeah, certain kinds of advertising/promotion absolutely do work, but they're clearly not all made equally.

[Jon`C]

Spoilers ahead, level 2 of this challenge is: can you think of anybody who switched laundry detergents because of a traditional media advertising campaign? Advertising for perfect substitutes how most micro courses introduce game theory. It's literally prisoner's dilemma.

So it's pretty well understood that traditional advertising campaigns won't move product. It's a brand development exercise, not a sales one. Slow burn. Product placement and sponsor spots work great for this, because you get to see entertainers interacting with the brand. Direct marketing is a total fail.

[Gebohq]

Of course not. I'm just tired of the idea that magical "word of mouth" is all that's needed to get good products sold, and that advertisers are dumb for doing any sort of marketing. There's a lot of crap that doesn't work, and a lot of crap that works but used dishonestly. As someone currently trying to market a project of my own, it's hard to market and it's a crapshoot what will both work and be ethical.

[Jon`C]

Of course not. I'm just tired of the idea that magical "word of mouth" is all that's needed to get good products sold, and that advertisers are dumb for doing any sort of marketing. There's a lot of crap that doesn't work, and a lot of crap that works but used dishonestly. As someone currently trying to market a project of my own, it's hard to market and it's a crapshoot what will both work and be ethical.

Except magical word of mouth is all that's needed to get products sold. The hurdle is its not predictable or repeatable, not that it doesn't work. Advertising campaigns are about burning cash to create magical word of mouth by getting the brand/product in the heads of influencers (influencers in an IRL sense, not in the more recent direct marketing sense).

And if you're trying to sell a luxury good, the news gets worse and worse for direct marketing because your most valuable demographics all have ad blockers installed. So it doesn't really matter how much money you spend on internet direct marketing campaigns, you aren't gonna reach the people you need to reach.

[Gebohq]

Except magical word of mouth is all that's needed to get products sold.

Despite what Field of Dreams might say, "if you build it, they will come" is not a realistic expectation, and "word of mouth" doesn't come out of a vacuum.

And to be clear, I'm not suggesting the sort of marketing as mentioned at the start of this thread, or most any internet advertising like the one you just mention, do the job. And the sort of marketing I currently do is the super-basic, super-personal sort fraught with its own huge failings at this time, not making ads to broadcast.

[Jon`C]

Despite what Field of Dreams might say, "if you build it, they will come" is not a realistic expectation, and "word of mouth" doesn't come out of a vacuum.

Agreed

[Impi]

Apparently the reason Amazon so aggressively advertises products you've already bought is because their training data didn't distinguish defective/exchange returns and reorders from original purchases. So it's a lot worse than I thought. I'd assumed Amazon's bots just weren't able to tell that you've already bought something. They know. But it turns out that, according to their model, someone is e.g. most likely to buy a toilet seat within a few days of buying a different one.

I heard that it's because of (at least in Germany) data protection laws. The sales people are not allowed to give the ad-people the info of whether someone actually bought the thing he spent so long looking at. So they are actually bombarding you with ads because they think they don't work.


It is a really big problem for advertisers that they cannot measure their success. Not even a consumer could realiably say if an ad was effective in guiding him to a purchase. Nobody knows.

I used to make the webshop for a retailer that dealt with parts for vintage British cars. The most realiable data point I could correlate with the sales numbers was the weather. I guess when the weather was sunny the people were more inclined to work on their beloved little old car. Our marketing guy told me that their strategy was simply to bombard the clients with ads so that we were not forgotten. Sounded silly because we were known to about 100 % of all potential clients in Germany. But still we constantly advertised in magazines and sent out new expensive catalogues to our existing customers.
And sent e-mail newsletters. And they were very aluring. Now we could actually pin our sales numbers to a specific newsletter campaign. We knew that rich Jaguar guys were more inclined to buy stuff than the poor Mini guys. We suddenly found out if some piece of advertising was doing well or not. So our glorious leader decreed that we shall no longer advertise in magazines. He figured that since all people already knew us there wasn't much point to it. And it seemed like he was right. Sales didn't drop off when we stopped advertising in magazines. Newsletters were doing well. We started advertising on Google. And everything was measured and the ads were effective.
Only about three years later could we see that although the ads were effective that overall sales have gone down. Not a lot each year but it started to get alarming. I couldn't tell if it was because of the missing advertising in the magazines or if it was just the economy. But something was off and all those Google ads and Newsletters couldn't do anything about it. Individual campaigns could be measured as being successfull. But overall we noticed a downwards trend. Unfortunately I don't know if things improved because I left the company. But it's only an anecdote anyway.