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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a multi-billion dollar industry in which every entity involved has the ability to sink the entire thing, and simply stated, nobody does because they all make money from it.

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Marketing departments are burning money like mad. It's google and other brokers that make a ton of money.

I mean most ad-tech firms can be considered successes by Silicon Valley's standards, and why would the marketing departments of corporations blow the whistle? They're making money too, probably twice a week, direct deposited.

There's twitter and facebook ads in the san francisco bart system and I just don't fucking understand who in SF isn't aware of twitter and facebook or what they're about.

Are they just advertising the companies directly? There are cases where advertising even in a "saturated" area makes sense.

If FB feels like features like facebook marketplace or facebook dating are not reaching as big of an audience as they should, advertising to get the word out about those particular products the company offers is logical.

There's a difference between performance and brand marketing. Bart advertising by Twitter/ Facebook is mostly brand marketing (not really tied to anything). A lot of marketing is about reminding you that a company exists.

Despite concentrated effort, I have yet to be able to forget that Facebook exists. Brand awareness marketing for companies as ubiquitous as that seems like lighting money on fire for the sake of it.

Brand advertising doesn't have to be "did you know that Company exists"; it can be "you should like Company more because Reason"

What about Coca-Cola? They spend billions on advertising even though everybody already knows who they are. They want to seem current. No brand wants to be thought of as yesterday's news. Facebook advertises to remind people that they exist and to seem like they're just as hip as Tiktok.

This is an important distinction that the article doesn't cover. The article focuses on a specific subset of advertising. Brand awareness ads are even harder to measure.

You just described most of human endeavor.

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