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Comment by totalview | Hacker News Reader

Someone who runs a startup here. Marketing has become so congested on the same platforms that most people are becoming “sign blind” to all of it. Anything squeezing my boarders on my mobile or desktop sites just causes my eyes to look for the “X” button. Older clients I work with in large industries don’t trust or click on any of it, and their company blue coat filters stop you if you accidentally do.

Marketing isn’t all bad. But if your answer to spreading the word about you product comes down to spending money on banner ads, pop ups, or anything else that would annoy you away from looking at your own product…

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I used to work in airfare marketing systems, one of our biggest sellers was Instagram ads with prices inserted into the ad graphic hourly. I have no clue what kind of person sees an ad for "cheap flights to {destination}" and then clicks the ad and impulse-buys their tickets, but they exist. A surprisingly high number of them.

It's people like me who had it on their to-do list and it was a reminder to do it later.

Yeah but you didn't do it via the ad if I understand correctly. I would never ever do that, regardless of the price or any other fact. As mentioned above, I never click on them by principle, same as I never watch TV programs full of ads. Firefox with ublock origin blocks 95% of ads, for the rest I see if there is quick X to remove them or ignore them hard. If its too annoying I leave the page and go for competition.

The best ad could theoretically achieve with person like me is that I would go to ie skyscanner and check current situation.

You’re not the general public. Most people don’t even use ad blockers. Those of us on HN are a different breed in that regard.

Also, even clicking it and then returning later works for the advertisers.

Half of men aged 16-24 use ad blockers, so it’s not uncommon either.

I couldn't believe this, but then I did some Googling. I found this PR post: https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

I'm not sure how accurate are these figures (it is an obvious "SEO" booster PR post acting like a blog post), but they are way higher than I expected. Even if it was even 25%, I would be shocked. It seems pretty sophisticated for the average user to install an ad blocker. I wonder how they distinguish men and women.

When I watch average people "swipe" on the metro, I am always shocked by the amount of adverts on their screen. How can they see or do anything? And some of the apps like Instagram (with doom-scrolling auto-enabled) continuously interrupt users to show them video ads that cannot be skipped. (I see the same for "free" games.) Ugh. Who are these people/zombies!?

But I think people at HN are the exception to how ads are used.

If you end up buying a ticket you found in skyscanner on the same device then they'll (often) attribute, or partially attribute, that sale to the ad view even if you didn't click (obviously only if you aren't adblocking or if they're getting around your blocking).

If this was part of a retargeting campaign it would probably be a good audience too.

I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram. I don't know about plane tickets, but his apartment was full of random shit he bought off his feed. Just alone he was probably covering the bandwidth cost of his entire town.

If you could find a few of these people, being a middle man for advertising campaigns targeting them would be one sleazy side business.

This is already a thing.

To be honest, any of the advertising schemes being dreamed up here in the comments section of HN are already a thing.

> I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram.

No lie, Insta knows what I want to buy before I know, and it’s very scary. I’m not an impulse buyer by any stretch of the imagination, but their advertising is some of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere on the internet.

That should not be surprising considering who owns them and how much data they have on us.

Instagram knows nothing about me, i saw the ads for the Canadian metal top the other day.

They are the modern version of home shopping network. They make a fortune out of lonely people buying random shit.

In europe casually flying somewhere is fun, cheap and very accessible if one works remote (or one can just go for a weekend). Not everyone plans things in advance.

I think I have clicked that kind of ad. The situation would have been, I was thinking of booking tickets to X, I don't want to pay more than Y, sure I'll click and see if your tickets are as cheap as you say.

More likely is misattribution.

Nope, we only did attribution if you clicked the ad and purchased on a device with the same facebook cookie within 24 hours. Our other ad services probably had misattribution errors and the instagram stuff still outperformed them by like 10x.

Offer me a great price to anywhere warm in winter and I'd be one of those impulse buys.

Mentally ill people do it. Manic episodes in particular lead to lots of impulsive buying of things like plane tickets. Algorithms can target their ads at people with mental illnesses and exploit them while giving companies plausible deniability. Algorithms can even predict when a manic episode is coming on.

If they have enough data on a person, data brokers can easily classify people by mental illness and deliver their information to those looking to target people with specific conditions like dementia. Not nearly enough oversight or regulation on this stuff.

I've never heard this theory before. I wonder how much prepper grear -- survival food, weapons, etc. -- was sold to people who were algorithmically detected to be clinically paranoid.

Law of shitty click through rates. https://www.google.com/amp/s/andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitt...

The best marketing comes from strong value props in an area people are open to hearing them. The magic of Facebook (and Google although now less so) is the ads are extremely relevant, to people who are open to hearing them.

The backlash against ads is because they work, when done properly.

> most people are becoming “sign blind”

It's to the point now that I sometime miss content that I skipped over because I thought it was an ad. The worst case of this is opening a news article about something that happened on video and all I want to do is watch the video. Is it the top video? Rarely, I scroll right past that and look for something in the body. More than half the time it's a video that's in a tweet (thankfully easy enough to pick out) but sometimes I have to look closer at what I dismissed as an ad to find out if it's what I'm looking for. What's infuriating is when I go back to the top video, hit play, sit through an ad, then I get some generic news or computer-generated-type reading/text of the article in video form.

> Older clients I work with in large industries don’t trust or click on any of it, and their company blue coat filters stop you if you accidentally do.

A small but significant proportion do click on any of it.

If that's your business plan, you should take a long hard look in the mirror though.

It also sounds like this person's startup is B2B, which has an entirely different set of advertising strategies than something consumer focused.

Anything that involves clicks (display, search, social) are typically not the most effective advertising tactics when your buying decision makers number so few, but that doesn't rule out other advertising activities.

B2B early stage companies selling a high ticket service/product need to be focused on sales activity.

Ads are a distraction. It's the seemingly easy way out but there's no way out of selling early stage.

You use ads in B2B to build leads, then you follow up with marketing/sales. Certainly you wont get a conversion with display ads, but on certain providers they can help feed into the start of your funnel.

I'm sure it can help in conjunction with sales. Of course it can augment other activity.

Maybe. I’ve seen some pretty sophisticated campaigns targeting my employer, from local NPR underwriting to print and event sponsorship, all targeting a half dozen individuals.

End of the day, the salesman and his relationships closed it. The marketing consultant made a lot of cash though.

That sort of account-based marketing is a different kettle of fish. It's only worthwhile if you're targeting big prospects who will spend enough money to offset the costs.

That said, ABM is increasingly popular for businesses where it makes sense. Why waste time and money filling the marketing funnel when you can identify preferred customers and invest in building a relationship with them.

Agree in general but you can also construct a quick Account-Based Marketing approach using the input data that you use to construct a prospect list. Outsource the actual campaign and you can have that run in parallel to your sales work.

Agreed. The more SMB your product is the closer the chance ads will work, but further up the size and ACV scale and you are simply wasting your time until you become a brand name in your domain.

would you say so called "influencer" / "creator" marketing is more valuable nowadays as a result? Getting people behind you who have a trusted audience seems like the only way to combat this problem, I just don't know that its a serviceable business per se?

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that people are actually "influenced" by influencers. I have never trusted anyone and anything. When it comes to spend MY MONEY I do my own research, period.

Yeah but if you like Shaq and he tweets “hey this basketball is the best one I tried” then some fraction of his followers will just trust Shaq on the theory he wouldn’t hurt his reputation. Why not buy the Shaq ball?

because his last 80 products were kind of shit

Because he hasn't played in years and whatever ball he used was the official nba ball at the time. Most people would buy the official ball not a random ball.

If you are talking shoes then people will buy to be associated with that player.

Because he ads that basketball because he is being payed to do so.

Your time and mental effort are limited. And your own research is not that effective in areas you have little working experience.

In my experience a lot of older people (40+) increasingly rely on advice/influencers to drive their product decisions.

Thats a wonderful thing but I think you know its quite rare.

Influencing is nothing new though the medium change has allowed for a preponderance of people to become influencers to smaller and smaller networks, we've always relied on proxy information if only on where to start research.

It applied to the clothes we choose, the movies of which we might consume the trailers and then reject, the research we do. The universe of awesomeness and crap which we create as a species is multitudes larger than any person could just navigate via pure first order research.

We all need signposts. While I abhor marketing and think hard about how to avoid or reduce its impact on me, its just not fully avoidable.

That's because you have the antibodies. The people who closely follow influencers and who do not realize what the influencers are doing to them, lack those antibodies. This is a sad time to be a person who browses the internet without any jadedness or paranoia.

>I have never trusted anyone and anything. When it comes to spend MY MONEY I do my own research, period.

...so you're "influenced" by whatever sources you research, which means, having reached any conclusion at all, you trust at least some of them.

I trust my judgement based on all the information I have gathered. Then I check with friends and people that I trust, certainly not the random dude on youtube that ads the best blender 2022.

What does your research consist of? When Steve from GamersNexus posts a video of him benchmarking a bunch of different cases with temperature gauges and the exact same internal hardware and workloads to tell me which one cools the best, I can try to independently reproduce those results myself, but that requires purchasing all of the cases, so there is no gain there. If he turns out to have been lying, I lost the money anyway.

I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not. Assuming it's not, unless your "own research" consists of actually buying a wide swath of competing products and testing them against each other, then at some point you are indeed relying on "influencers", whether those influencers are Consumer Reports, Amazon reviews, your parents/neighbors/friends, etc.

I might trust Consumer Reports, parents/neighbors/friends but not some random dude on youtube...

When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are. You get a feel for who is a normal Joe that gained an audience because of their passion for a topic and who is just someone following trends trying to gain follower just to gain followers. You also get an idea of whether or not they really know what a vpn is.

If I see a product I've never heard of before advertised to me by someone I trust to some degree, I'll check it out. I almost never buy because I have years of shields built up to stop myself from buying crap at the drop if a hat, but there are occasions where I will buy if I like the product enough after researching it. Those times are rare, though.

I don't watch videos from most people who could be described as "influencers", though. Mostly small creators who have an interesting take on something and are passionate about it.

When you watch people for cumulative hours, you get an idea of who they are.

And you get an idea of their tastes & whether or not you share the same tastes. Back in the day, if Siskel & Ebert gave a film two thumbs up, I would probably go see it. Not because they were on the TV, not because of some credentials they may or may not have had, but because over time, I've found out that I generally liked the films they gave two thumbs up, and life is too short to "do my own research" on all the movies playing this weekend.

Of course, this doesn't mean I would go out and buy a car if they were in the commercial for it, but I might have thought about getting a movie related product they hawked (microwavable popcorn? Special edition VHS/DVD? I dunno...).

Regarding doing own research I think this approach works for many products that are cheap to purchase. But, this approach fails badly when you have to purchase items that are expensive and one time purchase. How do I pick good washing machine? I can only purchase washing machine, or chimney, or smart TV only 1 time, so I can't do research unless I am determined to burn money.

I do agree with influences. These guys can sway people and make people to purchase ersatz product and has ability to do shenanigans.I think people should be cognizant while watching "influencers".

Have you never read something on here, then checked it out? What if paul graham recommends it?

I guarantee people have influence over you, just not the hipster influencers you are thinking of.

Where do you do your research?

Absolutely. I still subconsciously reach for NordVPN because of how good internet historian is at plugging it. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiccjfD_3pHAp-f3aNlf94BXW...

Internet Historian made better content for his Nord ads than many creators make for their main content.

Trust is the biggest thing missing from most forms of advertisement. I know I will gladly check out a product that a YouTuber I enjoy recommends, but banner ads/prerolls/TV ads/etc feel like a scam reel.

This is huge. There's a YouTuber I've been following for a stupidly long time, and if he recommends something, or even is sponsored by someone, I'll check them out. Same thing with acoup.blog - if there's a book recommendation there, I'll check it out in a heartbeat. Why? Because they've spent a long time developing trust with their audience. The YouTuber has been absolutely brutal about products, and has been extremely open about how people have tried to influence him one way or another when he's doing reviews. The author of acoup.blog has similarly put a lot of work in establishing his bonafides, so when he says a work is good or important, I know what he means by that.

There's a fun model I built once upon the level of monetization versus trust building activities a given YouTuber/influencer should do maximize monetization over any given time period. You can model the decay in audience trust per monetization.

I trust YouTubers (or whatever celebrity) even less than banner ads.

I know a pharmacist on Instagram that quit being a pharmacist and started hawking health supplements in between semi useful posts, mixing bullshit with truth and trashing the credibility of their qualifications.

I'll trust a product that a youtuber I like organically recommends. But I'd still not trust anything they "recommend" in a sponsored ad slot.

The only way you can (legally) pay for the former as a business is indirectly, via investing money into making a decent product rather than advertising.

I have clicked on more banner ads (though few) about products I didn't know about, than I would ever be swayed by an "influencer", which is the new term for celebrity shill.

Pop ups, however, have made me NOT buy products I would have otherwise be interested in, lol. But I'm a spiteful person.

EDIT: I take some of that back, maybe. I do look at car experts on YouTube, and listen to their opinion. I guess they might be considered "Influencers". I was wrong.

I think that depends a lot on how that marketing is actually done. Just having an influencer read an ad text or insert a prerecorded segment feels just as annoying as regular ads, sometimes even more as there is no Skip-button or adBlock that can make it go away quickly.

Actual products reviews, even when they are not all positiv, on the other side I find extremely effective. Same for behind-the-scenes video that show you how a product is made and tested. As what an ad should ideally do is really just show me that the product exist and what it can do. That's all I care about and that's what most regular ads completely fail at.

Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.

Trust is important, but you don't just gain that by having popular influencer read your lies, you gain that by not lying in the first place. Few companies seem to realize that.

That said, I am a sample size of one and other people will make purchase decisions differently.

>Even if I go hunting for the actual websites of a product, they never contain the information I am looking for. I find it completely ridiculous how bad most ads are in that regard. I don't even expect much, size, photos from all angles, photos of stuff that's in the box. Really basic stuff. Most Youtuber's will include that in their unboxing and product reviews, companies very rarely do.

This! It's all about the basics!

> there is no Skip-button or adBlock that can make [sponsorship segments] go away quickly.

There is! https://sponsor.ajay.app/

It depends. I play MTG Arena. There's a slew of overlay apps that give you access to extraneous information. Best advertising dollars I've seen spent are Jim Davis's plugs of Untapped.gg. Not only is he using the app himself, he raves about it all the time. He's worth every penny they pay him. Tossing money blindly at influencers just because they have a following is not a good strategy, you still have to validate that it's a proper way of getting the right eyeballs on your product.

Channel fit is a huge thing, if you are trying to sell a large ticket item like web servers via banners you are wasting your money, if you are trying to sell dog beds with banner ads on a pet forum you will be very profitable.

I was looking up vintage race car prices recently (like the kind I'd only dream of affording) and saw a banner ad for an individual selling a collection of his. I clicked the ad thinking it would lead me to a website and it was just a phone number that my phone asked if I wanted to call! No info on what cars he had for sale, just his personal phone number. I wonder if he's ever made a sale through those ads. I considered calling to see what would happen but it was 3am

I actually don’t remember in my 25+ years on the internet to have ever clicked one of those ads. Now they are more invasive, as they appears masked as legit content - reddit, fb, instagram, and video games they force me to see ads.

I was so disappointed when apps added ads on the iPhone to ger money! Such a scam.

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