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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

If the ads are in any way related to conversions, the data comes home to roost very, very quickly.

Ad spends are measured and results are tracked.

The value of those ads is a function of how far the needle is moved.

It's only when the needle can only be loosely measured can this go awry. For example, in a brand awareness campaign, it's sometimes hard to measure effect.

If FB was reporting '80% viewed' when it was '20%' then it's basically fraud.

What some guy says at a conference about 'the future of ads' is almost irrelevant, people are saying things all the time, and even if companies were to allocated more budget there ... they should see the results for themselves and adjust.

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Yeah, time viewed is really only a vanity metric that only someone building a campaign with no direct result at all would look at.

The kind of big business campaign just blowing money on branding is probably getting an even worse return on TV.

Time viewed is not a vanity metric for a brand awareness campaign (fyi those a 'real things'), or even an indirect campaign say for a movie launch where a 3 second view is not the same as a 25 second view.

If you're launching a big film like Avengers, a 25 second view is a like a 'soft lead' and you can correlate that to how many tickets you're going to sell.

Brand awareness is much more intangible, but they are in the end real things.

But yes, the softer metrics are massively abused by agencies, and in-house marketing teams trying to justify spend, hires etc..

Weirdly, so much of the 'conversion' stuff is utter crap, like ads for 'photos of Jet Fighters' or 'actresses with and without makeup' where they jam 40 ads on the screen each time. It's this kind of crap that really ruins the internet.

I wonder if, when setting CPMs , the advertisers apply blindly the returns from TV advertising to online.

Brand awareness campaigns are measured (and billed) by impressions, not by "average length of video viewed," which was the metric that Facebook lied about.

No, brand awareness campaigns can by run using either images or videos (or any other medium), and if the campaign is video based, then '% video completion' is a fundamentally critical metric.

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