Advertising manager here - The real problem is that not enough companies pay attention to the results they are getting from their ad campaigns. Most big companies just dump money into a lot of different campaigns without putting in place strict measurement procedures. So this puts the ethical ad seller at a major disadvantage. Currently you have companies spending tens of millions of dollars on digital ads each quarter and only looking ad metrics like cost per click or cost per impression. So they are judging the effectiveness of the ad campaign on metrics the ad seller provides. They are not putting in place effective checks and balances.

Why you ask? Because if the huge companies buying ads wanted to actually measure everything it would be extremely time consuming and expensive. It is a lot easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and just go with the flow.

So small companies with small budgets are actually a lot better at measuring results in most cases. Also online only businesses are a lot better at it. Measuring the offline impact of online ads is very hard.

But the bulk of ad dollars are spent by huge companies with huge bureaucracies. So game theory says you need to capture those dollars to win.

Source – I’ve been doing digital marketing for the last 12 years at a variety of companies.