Comment by xp84

There are lots of ads that don't work, but I can tell you from experience that there are a lot that do. A company I worked for a couple jobs ago basically just added a new pretty color of a clothing item, then ran ads with models wearing it on Instagram (targeted to female, right age range and income level) and the resulting cost per conversion was way below our margin. It was incredibly easy. What made it work though was how the Meta algorithm understood which of the users in that broad filter was into stuff like we were selling, based on all their on-platform activity.

I suspect hackers are far tougher to target - it's kind of a special case.