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Comment by istinetz | Hacker News Reader

> The basic premise is simple: company X spends money on ads, then turns those ads off and finds that the revenue does not change. Then the conclusion is made that ads don't work. On the surface, it seems like sound logic

It is sound logic.

OP repeatedly clarifies that not all ad spend is bad, that it's just for his specific case.

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The logical conclusion is that THOSE ads don’t work, not that ads don’t work in general.

I am no fan of digital advertising, but there is a lot of variation on ad platform, targeting, ad content, ad space etc that will make a massive difference in effectiveness of the dollars spent.

It could be that those ads created some sort of brand awareness and that the downside might not be realized for quite some time. I'm not saying that that is the case here, but it could be another interesting thing to investigate, although it wouldn't really be easy to objectively measure.

Indeed, brand advertising is a thing - specifically to reenforce and make that brand "brighter" or have more strength in the person's psyche, so it stays familiar. The concept of advertising at its foundation is often taught that you must distribute the value of the spend over say 10 months, e.g. you're primed for that long and/or may act on the ad you saw 10 months prior.

Patek Philippe knows a thing or two about this. It's been years since I've seen their ads, but I still remember them.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/untold-story-patek-philipp...

>The logical conclusion is that THOSE ads don’t work, not that ads don’t work in general.

Did you get to the second sentence of my two sentence post? Because it is literally exactly what you're saying.

My take is that advertising may work globally, in that if any advertising occurs it may have an effect, but each player is a fringe in the advertising market and may have their tide lifted simply by domain awareness of advertiser topics.

Ad effectiveness for specific brands may be complete bunk. But advertising effectiveness for a product space may do well to raise awareness.

There are several companies I am a regular customer of which I found via advertisements. If they stopped their ad spend, their revenue might not go down (I know I would keep buying), but if they never had ads to begin with, I wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on their products, nor would I have recommended their products to my friends. One ad click generated several repeat customers and thousands in revenue over the span of three years - that's a good return on investment, one your analytics probably doesn't capture, and one which you certainly wouldn't notice if you stopped your ad spend.

And that's the rub, isn't it? Advertising absolutely can work, but the numbers can be very deceiving, to the point that I'd bet most companies cannot say with any degree of certainty that their advertisements drives new sales, much less provide hard numbers on how effective their ad spend is.

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