Can I politely suggest that you share with us the holes you see in the arguments and how you see them? Whether or not Rand is any good at what he does or says will be clear by your expert disassembly of his arguments.
- Calling performance marketing platforms a scam (repeatedly, both in the title and in the narrative) doesn't explain how those same performance marketing platforms are carrying the majority of traffic acquisition in most of the B2C companies that went public this year (and practically all of the DTC ones). Calling into question the accuracy of measurement is one thing. Calling it a scam is wrong and designed to rank on HN rather than to be reflective of the true value of those platforms.
- As I pointed out in my original post, all you have to do is use incrementality studies and 98% of the criticism instantly goes away. Rand implies that you have to do your own studies (by eg, following Avinash Kaushik's methodology) which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you if you reach a certain spend limit, or 3rd parties will as well with no spend limits. Also, from experience, this really becomes an issue once you spend meaningful amounts on two platforms at the same time. His rant on this subject has an iota of truth and a whole lot of sensationalism mixed together, and overall leads to wrong conslusions.
- He conflates "paid search" with "all performance marketing platforms", including "paid social." It would have been helpful to point out that the challenges with branded terms are entirely isolated to paid search and have nothing to do with paid social.
- My favorite sensationalist tactic: frame a strong accusation as a question. This way you get the clicks, but you can still cover your ass by linking to resources that with enough research would allow the reader to answer the question with a "No." But in lieu of that research, the implication is that the answer is a "Yes." You'll see this tactic used by less reputative media sources, and I was disappointed to see Rand do the same.
I could go on but hopefully this will suffice.
Your other points I think relate to scale. No advice can be universal, and if you read the article as absolutist, your take makes sense. If you read it as "hey, your mix is likely wrong", a lot of the criticism fades.
I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. The Lego movie example is a really good one. I think it is probably good this happened, as a lot of creativity was performative (how do I win an ad award/impress my peers) and not about increasing sales, but we've perhaps shifted the balance too far, and there is likely some areas with good ROS that are now better bets.
Ecommerce example: every year the CPMs go up and your paid margin goes down. But every year you have a larger email list, so the balance of paid to unpaid shifts.
General example: every year you get more of the late-stage employees who care less and less about your company. But every year you can afford to pay for more layers of management, which will keep an eye on the underperformers.
This list goes on and on... The headwinds are driven by external forces, whereas the tailwinds end up working out based on your specific execution of the opportunities that present themselves to you. This is where an experienced operational team can make a huge difference.
> I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing.
You absolutely cannot rely on performance marketing forever. It's a shot in the arm until you have reached enough [fill in whatever you wnat] so that you can leverage that momentum to reach the escape velocity. So it's not good forever, but it's a great catalyst.
So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money?
Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term strategy, or do you think instead it might be better to report out the most accurate results possible?
Long-term strategy? https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-allowed-fraud-hacke...
There's literally a team at Facebook (Marketing Science), part of who's job is to tell advertisers what actually works and often, this can lead to them telling advertisers to spend less.
And this is an incredibly smart business strategy in that FB know (from experiments et al) that their platform works, and if they can show incrementality, then advertisers will invest more in the platform.
In game theory terms, it's a good strategy for a repeated game, which advertising definitely is.
My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data.
That's not really an argument. You wish that a responsible/public company wouldn't do that but we have seen much dumber behavior.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
However, if you are a new entrant/small business this is not the case, because nobody has ever heard of you.
As an example, look at TikTok. They spent insane amounts of money on FB ads to get as many installs as possible, but I'd suspect that they don't do this anymore because they've got enough brand equity that it doesn't make as much financial sense.
1. P&G didn't turn off that spend, it shifted it to other marketing platforms.
2. Chase didn't change its marketing spend, it just concentrated it from 400k sites to 5k sites.
3. Uber found out that their agency was committing fraud and AFAIK the case is still being litigated.
I hate being that guy, but check the links. Those reporters really must have an agenda or something (or are just struggling to get the clicks, so they need to make a story out of nothing).
Unsurprisingly, those people are wrong and marketing works.
I do think things are better in some sense today. But it is a hungry beast, marketing. Oh, and lies and statistics.