But it does, lots of smart people spend lots of money on it and recoup their investment. People spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how impressions drive sales. Do you think no one measures ROI on ads?
Advertising companies spend a lot of time and money convincing industry companies that ads work and that their ROI can be measured. In reality you cannot attribute a particular instance of someone seeing an ad to a specific purchase except in the case of a click-through online purchase, which I think is a pretty small portion of sales.
Serious question: What are you basing this "reality" on?
I'm really trying to understand why you think this is all fake. We can and do measure ads pretty accurately. Attribution is far from perfect but aggregated against a large audience who's exposed to ads vs a control group, and with tracking all the way down to conversions, we can see there is a difference.
My company works with Nielsen to certify and double-check our results as well as numerous other partners that only do attribution which is why our clients trust us.
It's not impossible. It's done everyday and it's backed by science, technology, data and results.
I simply give no weight to your assertion that it isn't fake, because I haven't seen any convincing, independently researched evidence of that, and because your livelihood depends on convincing people that it isn't fake. Your clients trust you, and that's why they're your clients. I don't trust you, and that's why I'm not.
I think that modern advertising is based on faulty, outdated psychological theory and that all the statistics you can come up with to demonstrate otherwise are tainted because the studies are all funded by ad company dollars.
But it does, lots of smart people spend lots of money on it and recoup their investment. People spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how impressions drive sales. Do you think no one measures ROI on ads?