
P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads - kawera
https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-g-cuts-more-than-100-million-in-largely-ineffective-digital-ads-1501191104
======
jsemrau
This reminds me of my experience with Google Adwords. My target was to
increase signups for travellers to selected cities looking for 'events
nearby'. So, I selected my cities and customer segments and had a limit set of
30 Dollars / day. Regularly, I paid for 2-5 Dollar more per day than my max
price. I reduced the price to actually match my max price, but this would as a
result out-price me of the relevant keywords. In addition, it never brought
the clicks they charged me for. Yes, I was tracking the other side of it as
well. I believe there is a whole world of click-fraud with Google and Facebook
in this which noone is tracking. I am looking forward to a world where Silicon
Valley is tackling the 'hard' problems of this world again (Space/ Marine
Exploration, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, etc) rather then the
optimization of click bait.

~~~
michaelvoz
Perhaps rather anecdotal, but this is why I joined Uber, and did not take my
Facebook or Google offers. It feels nice to work on tech that directly impacts
lives and how a persons day flows. As opposed to, as you correctly put it,
optimizing click bait.

~~~
nostromo
If Google or Facebook were gone tomorrow, I'd definitely notice. If Uber was
gone tomorrow, I'd use Lyft.

~~~
samfisher83
You could use bing. Its about 90% as good.

~~~
JBReefer
DuckDuckGo has been fantastic lately, and the bang system keeps me from using
anyone else.

------
jshelly
In my own personal experience, I can honestly say I've never "intentionally"
clicked on an ad in the past 20+ years I've been on the internet. I will say
I've certainly looked at ads in magazines, billboards, tv commercials (before
tivo) and even those small planes pulling banners at the beach.

I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does
surprise me is why its taken this long to figure that out.

~~~
zippergz
I almost feel like there are two factions. I'm pretty similar to you. I have
clicked on ads a handful of times, but it's very rare. However, I have worked
in jobs where I had visibility into the metrics, and I have seen internet ads
be EXTREMELY effective. Not in terms of clicks (which could easily be
accidental or fraudulent), but in terms of people clicking and then
purchasing. People aren't going to "accidentally" click and then give us
money. And I've seen many campaigns where we were getting huge ROI in terms of
actual dollars. So there are clearly lots of people out there who do click on
ads and take action. I think the problem comes when you're using an
intermediate metric like clicks or impressions to measure success. You have to
measure the actual outcome you are trying to drive, like purchases or
subscriptions. Of course, with CPG, that's a lot harder to do. And I'm not
convinced that pure brand advertising is any easier to measure online than it
is offline.

~~~
pbiggar
Not only are there definitely people who click ads, but there are people _like
us_ who click ads.

All the dev tool companies run ads! CircleCI runs them, but the dozen or so
other dev tool companies where I know the founders or early hires also run
ads. You would think given comments like this on HN that they would be
useless, but we all run the numbers. The numbers say that not only are they
effective, but that usually we should run more of them.

It's like when people here say "oh I hate talking to salespeople". Yet,
salespeople make the world go around.

~~~
tjoff
Or, they just don't have the slightest clue...

"Everyone is doing it, must be good."

I believe this summarizes the ad industry quite well:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysKyHXXtYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TysKyHXXtYQ)

~~~
pbiggar
Did you not read my comment? If you did read my comment, why would you write
this one?

~~~
tjoff
Thought it was pretty clear that I didn't buy into yours.

I guess you could rephrase your comment as this: People who run ads believe
ads works.

As an outsider that is not very convincing.

~~~
nkurz
_People who run ads believe ads works._

Even then, I think you are being too generous. The stricter criterion is
something like: "People who run more ads believe they will personally benefit
from running more ads."

Ideally (and occasionally) this means that ad buyer believes the company as a
whole will benefit from the advertising. But even if this belief is real, if
the influence or income of the decision maker correlates positively with
increasing spending on ads (and decreases with cutbacks) it can be difficult
to distinguish belief from reality.

~~~
sundvor
All this talk about "belief" like it's religion or something. It's reasonably
feasible to get hard, scientific numbers that prove the effectiveness of
advertising spend. Ie tracing click throughs vs conversion rate.

------
bryananderson
I formerly worked as a digital influencer across the usual list of content
platforms.

One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational
company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to
marketing.

I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of
digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't.
They have no idea how to.

When trying to measure the impact of marketing upon sales, teasing the signal
out of the noise is almost impossible to do with confidence, especially for
huge companies running many campaigns at any given time. I suspect this is
true for all advertising, not just influencer marketing.

With few truly reliable metrics, marketers fall back on conventional wisdom.
For a long time, conventional wisdom has been that you have to pour a ton of
your marketing budget into digital or you're being left behind.

A change in that conventional wisdom seems to be afoot. I saw it as a digital
content creator - ad revenues per view have been declining for a while now.
Aside from the short-term panic over ads appearing next to extremist content,
there might be something more long-term that's changing in corporate marketing
strategy.

It's hard to see how this, and not a challenge from a new startup, is not the
greatest threat to the success of Google and Facebook. Their business is
digital advertising. If spending in that field declines, it's probably rough
times ahead for those giants.

~~~
chokma
Do you mean digital influencer in the sense of social influencer? The latter
can be measured quite well, depending on the method.

Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts
allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that
social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge
following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebrity posting about
a nice pair of shoes. Those sold out within minutes, and the shoe company's
store page crashed due to the unexpected demand. So it can work, but like most
things in marketing, if everyone does it, it won't work for most.

~~~
mattzito
I think you're overestimating how well social influencers can be measured.
It's true, you can measure clicks to a landing page, one per influencer - but
that's relatively annoying administratively, and only measures clicks, not
sales. Plus, that counts on your influencer actually following instructions
and using the custom landing page URL, which is harder than you might think.

If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxury brand, most of your sales are in-
store and hence attribution due to influencers becomes incredibly difficult.

What many companies I've seen do is attempt to measure organic reach through a
variety of internal or external scoring mechanisms, and using engagement as a
proxy for reach. So a beauty influencer posting a screenshot of her travel bag
with your brand tagged would have comments, likes, reshares/regrams measured,
and then have that scored as some sort of an effectiveness index.

~~~
redmattred
Its can be pretty straightforward if you run your campaigns through a software
platform. The way we (mavrck.co) do it is we do outreach for a campaign,
screen the influencers based on their engagement rates/relevancy, have
influencers connect their instagram/facebook accounts to our platform,
generate individual tracking links for each influencer, ingest their posts via
API, and measure the comments/likes/clicks/conversions with our analytics.

~~~
mattzito
Wouldn't that qualify as operating an ad network on instagram, something that
is explicitly forbidden via the instagram terms of service?

"Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous,
aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker, influencer
network, or other advertising or monetization-related service."

------
wyc
Bob Hoffman at the Ad Contrarian called this in January:

"P&G To Online Ad World: We've Had Enough" \-
[https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/p-to-online-ad-
wor...](https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/p-to-online-ad-world-weve-
had-enough.html)

Digital advertising is rife with (what should be considered) fraud.
Advertisers feel as though they are getting fleeced, and the advertising
middlemen reap massive margins. The accountability isn't where it needs to be;
there are websites that hide ads under other ads, still reporting displays for
all ads per page load. I suspect moves like this one will help the ecosystem
change for the better.

~~~
0xbear
Yeah, but it's not like traditional advertising is free of fraud either. You
can't even really pretend to measure the effectiveness of campaigns there. And
there's much more money in it.

~~~
red_admiral
> You can't even really pretend to measure the effectiveness of campaigns
> there.

I disagree - for something at the scale of P&G, you can bet that they're doing
a LOT of measuring for every campaign they run.

The article reads to me as if they're applying the same metrics to their
online ads that they use already for traditional campaigns, and finding little
impact.

~~~
sgt101
Agree that they are measuring, but determining the cause and effect of each
campaign is very hard. Sometimes ads have a clear impact, but those are cases
that no one argues with. Mostly advertisers simply say (in effect) we got your
message out, and there was an impact. If the low/high uptake was due to the ad
or to the quality of the product or to the weakness of competitors - well no
one can say.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>well no one can say. //

P&G must have the most and best data on the planet. By now they can probably
say with a pretty high confidence interval.

~~~
halflings
That's not a real argument though.

Just assuming that they have a magical way to solve attribution for
traditional ads because they're a bit corporation. If they did have that, they
could just use the same tools on digital and report fake clicks and bots to
Facebook and Google to get reimbursed. (Google at least refunds all
impressions and clicks that were later detected as being fraudulent)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The sort of data they have would macro-, that's not telling you if any
particular click is fake.

~~~
shostack
Correct. We're likely talking econometric/MMM modeling which likely tells them
at the channel level what is or is not working, but they may not have enough
data for that at the campaign level or lower.

------
ameister14
I've worked in and around marketing/advertising for the last 6 years in
different capacities and have found that the emphasis on audience hyper-
segmentation and retargeting to the exclusion of other methods is the single
biggest piece of bullshit out there. Targeting people based on what they are
apparently interested in vs. places they go that reflect those interests
doesn't give better results and can turn off your customers. It sounds cool to
marketing teams and it works to get you contest entries, but it doesn't
usually translate to more conversions than a well managed campaign would give.

If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more
likely to buy them; I bought the thing already. Advertising mattresses to a
person on a mattress review website, though - that works. Of course, that's
harder to do.

~~~
lithos
Still getting TONS of car advertising, after I bought one 8 months ago (when I
see it).

seriously car ads are what pushed me to JavaScript off by default since their
ads are almost as rude as porn ads. Even the normal advertising reset trick of
"open all in new tab" on a folder with a dozen cloud/server hosts didn't swap
out advertising to their normally sane ads.

~~~
willhslade
Can you elaborate on the reset trick? It's new to me.

~~~
lithos
Cloud providers, web hosts, and similar all provide pretty acceptable ads on
average (soundless, videoless), while also tending to be a high bidder.

So sometimes I would use the open all option on a bookmark folder that I
shoved a bunch of providers in. Just to have those ads show

------
WalterBright
As an ad exec once said, "half the money we spend on advertising is wasted.
The trouble is, we don't know which half."

~~~
jansan
Well, I just found out which half I wasted on Google AdWords. I had a campaign
targeting the US. It was much less effective than I had expected, and just
yesterday I found out why: There is a little option in advanced settings that
lets you decide if you want to display your ads to users "in your targeted
countries", or "interested in your targeted countries". The second is the
default option, and if you do not change it, it will display your ads in
Belarus, India, Turkey and wherever, altough you have an US-only audience. I
got lots of calls from the Adwords sales team, always trying to tell me how to
spend more money on Adwords. Nobody every pointed at the wrong setting,
although they had all my settings and campaigns clear in front of them. I have
the feeling that Google owes me a few thousand dollars.

~~~
sumoboy
Plenty of reporting available that would have identified keywords and geo
performance stats. Adwords seems easy enough but it's pretty complex to get
things done right.

------
manigandham
This isn't really a qualitative judgement against advertising so much as what
happens in large mature industries as waste and inefficiency and perverse
incentives pile up. Look at any government/military over-spending for similar
effects.

P&G is one of the largest advertisers on the planet using hundreds of agencies
with thousands of vendors with millions of placements across digital media,
managed by thousands of people trying to make themselves look good and get
that bonus. This is a typical cycle of cleaning house.

The industry itself _is_ slowly getting better and will eventually fix many
problems through technology and regulation but there's still a very long way
to go for that.

------
colbyh
A couple of things going on at once - it's hard for old guard companies to
compete in digital marketing because consumers are being trained to buy based
on reviews, price, and delivery times more than brand. And when you're
spending $100M/quarter over a dozen brands all digital marketing is going to
be brand marketing.

It also raises a question about conversion being a lagging indicator here.
It's possible after a few more months of lower spend they will start to see
consumers pulling back.

~~~
disc
Perhaps it's possible that digital marketing is not all that effective for
commodity items?

I admit to having brand preferences for laundry detergent and garbage bags,
though I like to believe (perhaps wishfully) they are a result of first-hand
and family experiences.

~~~
tomjen3
My algorithm for that kind of stuff is what is cheapest in the store I am in?
I think that is what a lot of people do.

~~~
rorykoehler
Often it's a false economy. Dish detergent for example... the more expensive
stuff is often far thicker concentrate and lasts many times longer than the
cheap stuff.

~~~
Symbiote
I assumed they meant the cheapest among similar products, e.g. choose the
standard brand on the BOGOF offer this week.

------
AndrewKemendo
Honestly, I'm waiting for the internet advertising apocalypse wherein
retailers cut digital ad spending because ROI is too low - and only advertise
on Facebook or other sites with super targeting.

That would effectively kill a good chunk of internet services.

[1] [https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-
marketing/marketer...](https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-
marketing/marketers-frustrated-with-digital-advertising-roi/)

~~~
marssaxman
I would be very happy to see that happen. I miss the old, useful, social
internet.

------
elorant
I have to admit that at a deeper lever I'd love if advertisers get the fuck
off of the web. I don't have a problem with advertising per se but the way
it's used today hurts the medium in so many ways. Sites are bloated with ads,
journalism is riffled with native advertising articles, malware is mainly
spread through infected ads and on top of that we have a legion of companies
out there which are collecting every kind of personal information imaginable
without permission or any kind of regulation. Enough is enough.

~~~
riffraff
The trouble is: given how much of the web relies on advertising, how would
things fare once ads are gone?

~~~
petra
When i use Google news , there's so much waste in web journalism: a million
journalists rewriting the same article, and often a useless and low quality
article, at that.

So maybe there's a better way.

~~~
gaius
_So maybe there 's a better way._

There's a reason those articles are so bad
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/06/robo_journalism_goo...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/06/robo_journalism_google/)

~~~
petra
This isn't the reason(although it could add to it). This is for local news,
not the stuff we are talking about.

------
surferbayarea
Hopefully a step in the direction towards cleaning the internet from the
blotch of online ads. Make the internet a place to learn again and an open
platform where people and businesses can exchange ideas(and data), not the
silo'ed short-term profit-mongering mess it has become.

~~~
cyrusshepard
I agree that would be amazing. Sadly, for every big advertiser that cuts back,
a million others are willing to fill the void with a slightly smaller bid in
order to gain exposure and eyeballs on their product. And publishers will sell
it to them to keep the lights on. And yet, prices go up year after year on
increased competition. Google's profit was up 29% last quarter on stronger ad
sales, and Facebook was up 71% over last year. A race to the top, or the
bottom?

------
bkj123
Not sure what we can get from this article as there are so many variables...
What "digital" spend was cut: paid search? online video? paid social media?
brand vs. product oriented?

What was the impact of non-marketing drivers like distribution, price, promo,
competition, and the economy?

What was the impact of (new) ad creative?

Maybe take it as they are under pressure to cut expenses and cutting
marketing, digital and likely non-digital, certainly helps.

~~~
ThomPete
I don't think it really matters. The reality is that the Ad space is ridden
with fraud, poorly performing networks, platforms and methods and I believe we
will see an increase of companies dropping spending in digital advertising or
at least consolidate around what works and internalize their ad buying (which
has been done by ad buyers who literally rip customers off in the fees they
take compared to the value they deliver)

------
madetech
Some of the responsibility for the failure of this should fall on the
marketing managers and their lack of knowledge on what decent online
advertising looks like.

I worked in AdLand for a while and remember the agencies impressing clients
with bullshit results and pure vanity metrics.

Nothing about actual business results, just another thing marketing managers
were seen to need to do.

~~~
jon-wood
When I worked for an ad agency I was specifically told not to add event level
tracking to campaign sites because we knew engagement was awful. We could
easily give the client some great vanity metrics on things like number of
visits but the moment you dug into conversion rates it all went to shit.

------
hyperpallium
Online works better for PR, "astroturfing", manipulation of fundamental
attitudes and opinions than for explicit ads.

Buy some reddit, facebook and twitter accounts, and with the right
consultants, you will move the world.

~~~
tajen
For example, instead of spending millions on ads, write a story about "how
you're not going to spend millions on ads" and get noticed by a lot of wealthy
consumer in the prime pages of their Business Review newspapers.

------
joh-nan-drew
Marketing is the price you pay to get attention. All marketing is a hack for
attention. Being data-driven and figuring out the 1% of your digital ads that
are working, then capitalizing on them, is a hack. Using a unique marketing
distribution channel or method is a hack. Embedding the marketing into your
product is a hack. These are all "growth" hacks.

Cutting in front of the line is a hack to get your lunch faster, but if
everyone's doing it, the hack starts to lose effectiveness.

Not that digital ads today are ineffective, but I do think its methods have
reached notable saturation points.

~~~
teej
I think you're painting with too broad strokes by likening all marketing to
hacks. Marketing is more like finding alpha in a changing, inefficient market.
There are going to be short term and long term strategies that work. The only
guarantee is that things will change with time and those with more information
will beat those with less.

~~~
joh-nan-drew
That sounds right. I look upon the word "hacking" favorably and use it broadly
to mean something like "manipulating a system for a particular outcome" rather
than just This One Simple Trick, sorry if I wasn't clearer.

I like the guarantee. That's why hacking in the conventional sense today--
which needs constant awareness, involvement, adaptation, experimentation to
find out what works, non-codified intelligence, and dealing with the reality
of a system -- can beat the process du jour. It might become the new canonical
process if everyone else starts doing it.

Sometimes I feel like long-term or well-thought-out strategy is the hack in a
sea of self-proclaimed hackers who focus on useless wins and optimizations.

------
kfk
you can't track classic media ads roi that well for starters

they spend like 2 billion on ads, so all in this is a 5% cut

they sell all through distribution, so they probably can't match ads
performance and growth that well in general

~~~
smachiz
They spend $2.45B/yr, they cut $100M in one quarter. It's a 17% reduction
assuming they continue to not spend that $100M/quarter.

------
ikeboy
>After cutting back on certain digital ads, “we didn’t see a reduction in the
growth rate,”

>P&G, whose brands include Bounty, Crest, Tide and Pampers, spent $2.45
billion on U.S. advertising, not including spending on some digital platforms

So, even if digital advertising performed on par with everything else, it
would only affect the growth rate by 5% of the effect other advertising had.
Surely other factors contribute to variability at least enough that an overall
effect cannot be determined using this data?

------
vit05
"after finding that ultra-niche targeting compromises reach and has limited
effectiveness" “The bigger your brand, the more you need broad reach and less
targeted media,”

This is quite interesting. I see that other companies are cutting down on
agency spending as well and some are focused on having an internal agency. The
idea is to know the consumer and have a quick response to what is trending.
So, apparently, the information that Facebook provides is not enough to put
together a small niche group of people and say that they all would like that
product. Or, at least, not worth the dollar invested. But knowing who the
target consumer is, and building targeted advertising at it, but reaching a
larger population has a more efficient return. Even when it reaches people who
are not in the target audience of your product. Because it is a more general
campaign about something that is happening, it helps in building the brand.
And big companies care a lot about their brands and what people think about
them.

~~~
daveFNbuck
It's not about efficiency, it's about quantity. Let's say I profit $20 for
each customer my ad engages. If I reach 1000 people with amazing targeting and
get a 10% response rate, I'm making on average $2/person. If I broaden the
reach to 100,000 people and get only a 1% response rate, I'm making on average
$1/person.

Clearly, bringing in $1/person is less efficient than bringing in $2/person,
but at the end of the day you have $100,000 instead of $2,000 (ignoring the
cost of the ad for simplicity).

With the broad campaign, you still get the people you would have targeted with
the narrow campaign. So if you're going to do the broad campaign, you're
already done.

~~~
shostack
Don't forget to factor in agency costs and in house costs. People are
expensive and hurt margins. At that scale it adds up since I'm sure many of
their agency partners view them as a big brand advertising cash pinata

------
heliophobicdude
I'm sorry to be that person, but if others start pulling their digital ads
too, what effects with this have on the whole tech industry. Google and
Facebook, who both are the face of the industry, would most likely get most of
the blow. They both control over 77% of digital ad revenue [1]. Will that
scenario only hurt those two and other ad providers in isolation or will
investors reconsider tech company stocks as a whole?

[1] [http://fortune.com/2017/04/26/google-facebook-digital-
ads/](http://fortune.com/2017/04/26/google-facebook-digital-ads/)

------
JD557
Slightly relevant to the discussion, since P&G seems to have started make some
changes to their digital marketing strategy earlier this year (It seems to
have been a major change, since one of the companies actually had to shut
down).

[https://adexchanger.com/advertiser/pg-parts-audience-
science...](https://adexchanger.com/advertiser/pg-parts-audience-science-tees-
neustar-dsp-posse/)

[https://adexchanger.com/platforms/audiencescience-shuts-
door...](https://adexchanger.com/platforms/audiencescience-shuts-doors-less-
month-pg-client-loss/)

------
kartan
This is just one company. I worked for a big mobile games company, and their
main complaint was how expensive where ads nowadays. They used to pump
millions and get as many players as they wanted. Now you need to take a lot of
care on how you spend your money, as the return of investment is not
guaranteed if you pay too much.

If other companies follow suit, then we can talk about a more general issue.
Maybe it is just that their campaigns were ineffective because were not good,
or because their target users are not reached on digital ads.

------
olivermarks
It's not clear whether this is old banner programmatic ads that were cut, or
more sophisticated social data mined tracking. Assuming it was the former?

------
wslh
You can ask: if this is not working for P&G why will this work for you. I have
mixed experiences. If I am attacking a niche where the user will act
immediately after finding you exist then it works, if you are targetting a big
market with a lot of competitors it is not worth the money and time except you
discover new specific keywords.

------
Xyik
I work on an engineering growth team that focuses on large-scale digital
advertising and can say it does work, for the right business, in the right
context. You need a proper analytics team, engineering team, and experience to
do it right. Most people who buy online ads have no idea what they are doing.

------
nickhalfasleep
How many brands could just cut out the traditional or sales-based advertising
and go for quality and word of mouth growth like ANKER?

Nothing sells me on a product like a happy customer. I scroll past the adds
and related items on sites and dive right for the comments. Or just ask around
work for what people use for X.

------
raverbashing
It seems the issue is "overtargeting" of ads

P&G ads don't work like that. Their products appeal to a broad range of
people, same as their ads. Specialized targeting literally does nothing to
improve conversion (and keeping their product in mind)

~~~
dmurray
They sell a broad range of products, but not all of them appeal to a broad
range of people. They can surely improve conversion by marketing men's razors
to men and women's razors to women, for example.

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah but still, men and women "targeting" is basic stuff

What online ads allow you to target is "men between 28-32 from eastern Europe
who like Formula 1 and Classical Music"

------
jondubois
I think other companies might come to the same conclusion and also reduce
their ad spending.

We're in an advertising bubble just like the dot com bubble except this time
it's not stock prices that are frothy, it's the advertising revenue itself.

~~~
yuhong
I said before that printing money using basic income would only inflate it.
Ads are designed to increase consumption, and we have a debt-based economy.

------
chiefalchemist
Make ya wonder how many pre internet TV and print ads they would have sacked
if they had the ability to truly measure their effectiveness.

Ya also have to wonder how they got to $100,000,000 worth of ads before they
decided to pull back.

------
code4tee
Anyone that's ever taken a serious look at online advertising knows that the
elephant in the room is that most of it doesn't work. P&G is just the latest
large firm to call that out.

------
losteverything
Can anyone enlighten me on P&G cost cutting and board activity?

I've read they are "hurting" wondering if this is just cost cutting and not a
deep analysis of ad/$ performance.

------
Steeeve
It is very easy to waste big spends in online advertising. There are large
swaths of revenue absorbing points that are completely useless or nearly
useless.

There are also ways to do it effectively on limited spends. Just like anything
else, it requires effort.

With as many channels as there are, and as many people who have found a way to
avoid commercials, TV advertising is a shadow of what it used to be.

These days effective and valuable marketing, especially for large brands, is
hard work. No one vendor is a complete solution, and you have to consistently
experiment and determine what the best options are where your target customer
eyeballs happen to be landing in an ever-changing landscape.

Advertising in general is ripe for disruption.

------
mathattack
People spend more time on devices than TVs so advertising will follow in the
long term. In the short term it will take companies like this to force the
ecosystem to keep clean.

------
jgalt212
Does P&G have a substantial in house ad tech operation? They advertise so much
that they could probably start their own DSP and license its services to
others.

------
mtgx
Glad to see all of that advanced internet surveillance technology is being put
to good use...

So much for the argument that tracking is helping companies serve you better
ads.

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paulpauper
It seems like a lot until you consider that the total annual ad spend (just
for Google alone) in in the tens of billions

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RodericDay
I've often dreamed of coding up some kind of worm-virus, but instead of
stealing data or demanding ransom or corrupting storage, it would just install
uBlock Origin on infected computers.

Millions of infected people, with zero idea what an "ad-blocker" is, just
wondering where all the YouTube ads went. And then, hopefully after a month or
so of infection, companies realizing that their bottom-lines were unaffected,
pulling out of digital advertising altogether. Previously-thought-of-as-
invincible giant behemoths like Facebook and Google, just crumbling to dust
over a short span of time.

Just a dream though.

~~~
paulie_a
Personally I have grown so tired of analytics and advertising my personal idea
would be to build a plugin that doesn't block anything. But instead it simply
visits websites on random topics over time and clicks ads here and there.
Slowly degrading the data shitty advertising companies have and ruining ROI. I
am starting to do this manually and randomly clicking ads.

I honestly need to start doing that on facebook due to their new policy that
every 2-3 posts need to be some "suggested" garbage

Honestly I am burned out by the constant barrage of terrible ads on most
websites and social media in particular.

~~~
tomascot
If I'm not mistaken this exists for Firefox. Or at least existed at some
point, I guess something like that could get a lot of big players upset

~~~
a_imho
Adnauseam?

[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

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laythea
Back in the olden days where ads where more sparse, they would have so much
more impact. Nowadays after the awash of ads we have everywhere, companies are
collectively loosing their ability to make ads impact. (by logic, the more we
are exposed to it, the less effective it it).

Therefore they did it to themselves. They abused it, so that now people reject
them where they can, and it becomes less profitable. No sympathy from me.

~~~
prostoalex
Ads worked differently back in the days. A hiking site would accept
sponsorships by outdoor brands, basically copying the magazine model, where
the targeted audience gets served targeted ads with publishers inserting
themselves in the middle and collecting a fee.

The big brands have figured out that in cost-per-click (or any cost-per-action
model) retargeting delivers the best results, so if you go and search for
flights to Barcelona or some shoes, those flights and those shoes will follow
you around - there's a high probability that a click will lead to a purchase,
and it costs advertisers essentially zero if they're wrong, since you likely
won't click.

The Web ads industry thus turned into a raffle industry - ads for same flights
to Barcelona will turn up on outdoor enthusiast sites, CNN, Wired magazine,
ESPN, your local newspaper site, Facebook and whatever else you happen to
visit the next few days. In a raffle scenario the entity with the most raffle
tickets gets higher chances of winning, so publishers are locked in a war to
accummulate as many raffle tickets as possible with the hopes that one of them
will be a major winner, i.e. you finally buying those tickets to Barcelona and
those shoes on Zappos.

~~~
droidist2
I see this as positive in some ways. Previously most topics made a pittance
compared to the "mesothelioma attorney" kind of topics. So if your site wasn't
about one of these high-paying keywords, tough luck. Retargeting levels the
landscape a little.

