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Comment by yourdonut | Hacker News Reader

What I find odd is that digital ads gives you much more clarity of impact than tv/radio/print ads. It also gives you more detailed cohort data so that you can learn from experiments and adjust your buys based on where the impact is. It's as if the P&Gs of the world woke up recently and realized they need to understand impact of their media buys in general.

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Ads offend me. They're an imposition, distracting, mind pollution. So I block them. And even when I see them, using a browser in a LiveCD etc, I pointedly ignore them.

Now maybe I'm unusual. Long ago, I did get used to an Internet without ads. And was sad when malware and ads started showing up. But given the increasing prevalence of ad blockers, I'm not that unusual.

So anyway, average view time of 1.5 sec for ads seems about right. Especially if that average includes lots of zeros.

Do you subscribe to any digital media as an alternative (or I suppose, as an alternative to the ad blocking alternative)?

I subscribe to some sites as my meatspace persona. But nothing so far as Mirimir, because there are no ways to pay anonymously.

usually, reactions like this are indicative of being more, not less susceptible to advertising.

case in point: LiveCD is a branded capitalization.

OK, so I get that the first "LiveCD" was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil. Maybe it was a brand, but Yggdrasil has been dead for over 20 years. And I had never heard of it before now.

Maybe I was innately more susceptible to advertising than most. And maybe that's why I've developed such extreme defense mechanisms.

Even before the Internet, I routinely ripped ads out of magazines, before reading them. Or added sarcastic commentary to ones with article copy on the back. And I remove logos from clothing and such.

You just reminded me! in high-school I bought a shirt which I liked, but I didn't like the logo emblazoned on the front of it. I unpicked the embroidered logo and wore it regularly. I had many people comment on that shirt, and I still own it 20 plus years later, but I still can't remember what brand it was.

Really high-quality stuff has no logos.

What you get instead is native advertising - news that are in reality ads, fake reviews, paid comments to social media, forums.. and all that jazz.

I wouldn't say "instead". It's very hard to find unbiased reports and reviews of new hardware. Almost everything is advertorial, either based on manufacturer copy, or heavily influenced by bribes. And that's been the case for decades.

But maybe we'll see more of that. Even so, if it appears on more than one site, blocklists could be maintained. Advertorial text in sites could also be detected and blocked.

Be careful where you place your attention. If you let it wonder people will distract with opinions and ideas.

It only gives you that clarity if you're getting the data unfiltered, though. As I read the article, the problem P&G was running into is that it was outsourcing the placement of its ads to third parties, meaning they didn't get access to the raw data on how those ads performed -- they only got whatever data the third party chose to share with them, packaged up however the third party chose to package it. That kind of relationship opens up all sorts of opportunities for the third party to fudge the numbers to serve their own interests, which is what it sounds like P&G decided was happening.

This is the best analysis I've seen so far.

> What I find odd is that digital ads gives you much more clarity of impact than tv/radio/print ads.

That really depends on what you are trying to sell. A SaaS? Sure. But when your job is influencing which candy bar people select in the supermarket, you stare into exactly the same informational void, until you apply the crude but tried toolkit of ad effectiveness measurements that has been developed for broadcast. The traditional answer to that kind of advertisement task has been to just use blanket media if you don't need much targeting or direct affordability. But when a sizable part of the market just does not expose themselves to broadcast anymore, that might be insufficient, no matter how much money you throw that way.

> But when your job is influencing which candy bar people select in the supermarket, you stare into exactly the same informational void

Is that necessarily true? Most supermarkets have a 'loyalty card' program which requires the shopper to provide her name, address and date of birth. The supermarket could sell all their data to Facebook, which would then have the fine-grained information needed to allow the candy-bar company to very effectively target their ads.

It might not even require a loyalty card - the shopper's credit card info or security camera picture might be enough to accurately link her to her Facebook account.

Or to put it another way: what is the viewability of the side of a bus? A digital campaign with the same stats would have serious complaints.

I think it's lamar that frequently runs spots that say something like "if you see it/it works!"

Clear channel has an equally stupid ad

My own personal opinion is that most of the time ads don't work.

They're noise that might, at BEST, bias the result of a decision I was already willing to make. (IE: I know I'm going to go somewhere for lunch and MAYBE an ad makes me pick one place over another.)

Really I see ads being useful only in three categories:

    * Reminding a prospective customer your store exists
    * Reminding a prospective customer what you sell
    * Getting a customer to crave something you can provide.

The first two are generally good, however they don't really need to be done all that often. Once someone knows a service exists they'll likely return for more if they liked and need more of that service.

The last one is arguably amoral. Encouraging (needless or extra) consumption and trying to make someone dependent on the ad buyer for happiness. It also sounds a lot like what drug dealers do.

Even that third category, if a product was adding actual value or quality, needn't be done that often to reach effective saturation.

> bias the result of a decision I was already willing to make

Literally the definition of advertising

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