Comment by Hugsbox
3 hours ago
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital...
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
> Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses?
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.