I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.
This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.
The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.
I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.
Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?
The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.
I thought the answer to that was a rather bland "by gobbling up even more information about everyone"?
Some highly useful data is hard to get directly or requires significant and/or stealthy spend.
Advertising isn't an inherent evil. You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise.
I advertised for one specific company. I worked in an industry that was pretty grey. Some parts of the business were vaguely predatory and others served a great public social need. More importantly, you had to have an actual reason to fill out our forms and follow through with us. We weren't just desperately trying to get any eyeballs. The work that I did very much did help people.
Also you're not going to get much mileage shaming people for what they do for a living. You being reductive doesn't really reflect reality either. I was much more than some marketer and yes, the problems were extremely intellectually stimulating, otherwise I wouldn't have been there.
That's better than I can say for most of the quants I worked with -- they were almost all just in it for the money.
It’s funny you say that, because I found all three literally by looking at reviews and not advertisements. Those 3 categories are perfect examples of industries where referrals are far more reliable than choosing which one had the best ad budget.
Companies pay third parties lots of money to curate their reviews and put them in contact with the reviewer to smooth things over.
I know that because that's the business I work in now.
Companies still have a problem of getting their reviews surfaced to the top of your search. They also have a need to give people the lowest-friction way possible to leave them a positive score when it's the best time in the interaction to do so. There are many large enterprises competing in this space specifically.
The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
You mean buying dishonest opinions? Is this supposed to wash "big" advertising innocent? Is this "helping people"?
> The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
And isn't this justifiably what everybody's scared of (and what we should oppose)?
That has no relationship to the paid shitstorm of ads on Google.
The overwhelming majority of all other reviews are either the Amazon variety (so a paid endorsement, usually) or from total cranks. People don't really often leave unsolicited reviews.
And it's a reasonable question. Thanks for asking.