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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>“It’s only been a few days, but we haven’t seen any deterioration on our performance metrics,” Ms. Lemkau said in an interview on Tuesday.

The ephemeral "brand awareness" provided by most advertising takes more than a few days to fall off. Chase isn't going to get someone to open an account just because they saw a banner ad, their goal is to familiarize people with their name so that when someone wants to open a bank account Chase seems like an option. People are not going to forget about Chase bank...

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Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that the editor didn't kill this story.

The cynical thought would be that this story exists to encourage other big brands to be more choosy in the sites they advertise on, and what better site to advertise on than the NY Times?

NT's editorial line these days is to push for stories without much peer review if I trust how poorly most of their features are written.

This! With a well focused product, you may get customers on very small but focused websites. Also on most ad networks, on which site, the user is matters less and less due to heavy user tracking.

Other key facts:

> Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet, she said. An impression is generally counted each time an ad is shown.

I take that to mean that the tail didn't cost very much, and didn't increase ad visibility very much.

I think it's the exact opposite - the CPM didn't change, so the tail is just as expensive, at least the way Chase was using it.

OK, I see that. They were spending on stuff that produced few impressions.

> The ephemeral "brand awareness" provided by most advertising takes more than a few days to fall off.

Marketing metrics in general move slowly: think weeks, months, or even longer for significant moves. A lot of short term moves are noise generated by imperfections in sampling, particularly with daily collection. This applies regardless of the metric: awareness, consideration, affinity, penetration.

I don't know what she means specifically by "performance metrics", but it would be a pretty poor showing for the CMO of a global company to expect significant moves in any marketing metric over the span of a few days. I'm therefore guessing she means something else - like impressions, clickthroughs, or sign-ups - and that the article is simply of poor quality.

I'm straying off topic here, but generally the only time marketing metrics make significant moves over a short period of time is if something major happens that hits the news or goes viral. Even here it may only be changes in media metrics, such as buzz, that aren't reflected by changes in more substantive areas.

E.g., I can see a gigantic spike in negative buzz for KFC in the UK in late February 2018 because they ran out of chicken nationwide (I kid you not). I can also tell you that whilst over the next several months their penetration dropped by a few percent (significant at the levels we sample), no long term harm appears to have been done to their business: penetration quickly returned to its pre-crisis levels.

The reason nothing has changed could at this stage be attributed to the fact that it's too early, or simply that nobody cares Chase has stopped advertising: they're so ubiquitous it doesn't matter.

And if you're still looking for more reasons why this isn't news, this might be the killer: it's pretty well understood that you're going to get a different response to online advertising depending on where you place it. Some sites simply give you more return than others on your advertising investment, and the differences can be stark. I'd bet Chase has limited their ads to the 5000 sites that give them the best ROI so, again, no surprise that nothing has changed.

How do you measure brand awareness? It’s certainly either bullshit or trivial to measure.

For me, "brand awareness" comes from news coverage, not ads. I know that ads are biased, so I ignore them.

LOL, news coverage of corporations (except for covering some public scandal) is heavily biased as well. In this particular case, the source of the article is Kristin Lemkau, the bank’s chief marketing officer. So keep trusting the "unbiased" news. And guess what: you might think you ignore ads. You do not.

OK, so I don't "ignore ads".

I actively avoid seeing them. I use ad-blockers, and have for over a decade. When I commonly read print media, I used to go through first and tear out all the ads, seeing them as little as possible, and pasting blank paper over the ones that had desired text on the other side.

When driving, I avoid looking at billboards, just as I avoid looking at oncoming lights at night.

I also don't trust news coverage. I especially don't trust favorable news coverage, because that's often advertorial. That does create bias I know. And if I'm actively interested in something, I read a variety of media, from different countries.

> When I commonly read print media, I used to go through first and tear out all the ads, seeing them as little as possible, and pasting blank paper over the ones that had desired text on the other side.

To each his or her own, I guess. Do you close your eyes when venturing outside as well? Also, as I am sure you are aware, much of what you read has been pitched and influenced by PR agencies: that’s what they do. When you read about a product in some publication, that product didn’t just randomly find itself as part of a story, a PR firm helped get it there. I might suggest that you might be a bit naïve about how advertising, media and PR work. You can’t escape it even if you think you are.

I know all that. I don't trust reviews, because >90% of them are advertorials. You can often detect that by searching for key phrases, and then finding them in press releases.

I don 't close my eyes outside, no. But I do trash ads, whenever I can. Back in the hardcore days, I carried stickers with moisture-catalyzed adhesive. Once those suckers cured, sand-blasting was the only option. Now I just carry black markers ;)

The irony here is that, it seems, ads are having a bigger impact on your life than if you weren’t taking these steps.

So does gravity.

Most people, probably including you, don't have conscious control over their awareness of things.

Sure. And I do make an effort to stay conscious of how my awareness is changing, what's been influencing it, what agendas may be involved, and so on. I don't take my consciousness as a given. It's just something else to be questioned.

You might be surprised at just how much news is little more than slightly rehashed press releases.

Yes, I know that. I didn't mean that sort of "news". I meant the results of insider leaks, prosecutions, fines, vulnerability discoveries, investigative journalism, and so on.

The most believable sense in which brand awareness is a thing is in the number of people who are passively aware that your brand exists. For example, if you wanted to visit a grocery store, you probably could think of a list of stores in your area that you might want to go to. If I were going to build a new store, I would want to put myself on your mental list of stores, so that if you ever needed something I was selling you would know to visit. That's more or less the quintessential example of advertising. It's also easy to measure in an objective way, because any given individual has either heard of Tesco or hasn't.

There's a spectrum of marketing that ranges from "how can I communicate the existence of my cheese spray product to fans of Cheese Whiz," to "how can I get every American to spray cheese wiz directly into their mouths three times a day as a meal substitute." Techniques for doing the first are about as well tested as Newton's laws, but techniques for doing the second are virtually guaranteed to be a scam where you're the mark.

The thing brands get most excited about is "spontaneous" or "unprompted" awareness. E.g., I ask you a question such as "Thinking about womenswear retailers, which names come to mind?"

Brands want to appear on that list of names, and the closer to the top ("top of mind") the better. Of course, for most brands the aspiration to be top of mind is ludicrous since there can be only one. For UK womenswear that one is Next and, barring the company suddenly going under (possible but not likely), it ain't changing any time soon.

Prompted awareness, when you're presented with a list of brands and asked a question to elicit your awareness of them, is much less valuable because if you see anything often enough on the high street you're going to remember it when prompted.

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