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I doubt the ROI would be so high if organic results stood any chance.

The ROI on bribes is very high too, but we haven’t legalized those (officially).

> I doubt the ROI would be so high if organic results stood any chance.

This is just the same fallacy. In what world are people going to organically share ads for this company on their Facebook feeds? Who is going to Google the company name before they know about it?

Every business needs to proactively acquire customers.

Distribution and CAC are top of mind values for any growth business. It has been this way long before Google and Meta existed. Digital advertising actually makes it cheaper and easier than ever to acquire customers at scale.

Information can travel without people paying for it do so.

Ban most ads and everything will still work fine.

I would prefer a world that returned to the older '30 second blip (for the only) sponsor of the program' ad, which also seemed to be of the limited form: Here's Product X, it does Y, which makes your life better because Z. Informative, dry, stated by an announcer in a calm and not demanding way.

Sounds like ads will just get replaced with covert word of mouth enticements. Want to get people to know about your product? Send free samples to influencers. Maybe even fly them out to CES and put them in nice hotels so they can experience your product announcements/demos. All of this is "unpaid", of course.

this already happens

Assuming the influencers pay taxes, this doesn’t seem like something that can’t be addressed - we should be requiring influencers to prominently disclose incentives that could result in conflicts of interest.

A lot of people enter the company or product name into the browser's search field and reach their intended target through an ad at the top of the results. If they proceed to purchase something, does this count as a conversion? I think it does. Unlike traditional advertising, this didn't influence the customer's decision to buy at all.

> A lot of people enter the company or product name into the browser's search field

They had to already know the company name or product name to get there.

This doesn’t just happen. Spreading the name of the product and getting it to stick in people’s minds takes a lot of advertising budget, on the whole.

I'm concerned that companies spend their advertising budget on these redirects because those have the best metrics, instead of actually making the brand and its products more known.

CAC-LTV by itself is not a great long term strategy. But it can appear like one in the short term to investors.

So there is a plethora of companies happily dumping investor money into paid customer acquisition.

Blue Apron was a classic example of borderline fraudulent growth metrics and a cash grab IPO before the customer acquisition funnel collapsed.

> Every dollar you spend on advertising provides additional customers.

If you’re just taking these customers from competitors, the marginal utility can be pretty low.

e.g. If you consider a world where there are no ads for cars, people aren’t going to meaningfully lose out of the utility they get from cars, carmakers simply avoid the prisoner’s dilemma of having to advertise as much as the next manufacturer.

The world isn't zero sum, advertising grows the pie for all involved. One of the best examples would be the iphone when it was released. Even in your example category of cars Tesla and later Rivian/Lucid/BYD marketing was a game changer for electric vehicles.

Very few ads are for products where exact 1:1 competitors exist (though it's nonzero, maybe something like a commingled Amazon Basics widget).

My point is that advertising can grow the pie, but it doesn't necessarily do so, and even if advertising is net pie-growing, it can still shrink the pie in specific markets.

For a more on-the-nose example than the arms race between car manufacturers, consider cigarette ads. If the ads simply convert smokers between brands, then it's basically zero sum minus the cost of the ads. If the ads convert non-smokers, then the ads are of significant negative utility taking their externalities into account.

> Very few ads are for products where exact 1:1 competitors exist

Sure, but also, I'd contend that few purchases are made based on ads informing consumers of meaningful differences between products. The products could be 1:1 duplicates, and the ads could be identical.

e.g. I just turned off my ad-blocker and fired up YouTube, the first four ads I see:

1. An ad for a multivitamin. Zero mention of any differentiating feature from a generic multivitamin.

2. An ad for a grocery delivery service. Zero mention of any differentiating features from any other food delivery service. (This one was a bit wild to me - this is actually service I already know and use, I'd never seen advertising for them, and this ad didn't mention any of the reasons anyone would choose to use them.)

3. An ad for some predatory-looking debt-relief service. Maybe not predatory, but no information about why that debt-relief service would be better than any other debt relief service.

4. An ad for a jeans company. I actually had to google this one to figure out what it was even an ad for, the ad just featured shots of people hiking in mountains and dunking into icy lakes without any mention of clothing.

Most peoples budgets are zero sum.

Exactly, an a perfectly competitive industry, advertising just ends up eating all profit.

The problem is that it's a zero-sum game for a large part. People are hopefully not going to buy more medecine because of pharmacy ads. So the excessive spend on ads is driving up costs for everybody, and causing insane profits for a handful of companies.

I have no solution to offer though. Just thinking out loud... what effects would a limit on advertisement budgets relative to total expenditures have? That would force companies to spend their money mostly on actually creating value for the customer, instead of just selling the hell out of a mediocre offering.. ?

it surprises me how many people simply don't get the point. they say "they make more money this way, so it's ok". no big picture at all.

What big picture? Can you elaborate, or just snide drive-by criticisms?

I mean I understand that a lot of people in this comment section wish ads didn’t exist and that everyone just automatically knew about relevant products and services without ads, but it all reads like utopian fantasy stuff.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.

Right, but the unprecedented control of the public discourse on the internet by just a couple megacorps PREVENTS businesses from promoting themselves, unless they pay through the nose for the privilege. This destroys small competitors by design and leads to more and more monopolization of every industry, which is an absolute nightmare scenario for everyone involved in the economy but a tiny handful of people.

Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1]

And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...

All these hyperscalers do is control the internet and suck money from companies that actually add value via that control. I can name on one hand the amount of successful products GOOGLE has natively launched (without acquisition). This predatory behavior has the opposite effect on the economy you're claiming here.

Is there RoI for this advertising spend or isn't there? If there is, what are we talking about here? If there isn't, then why would people spend on something not giving a positive RoI?

We're talking about it because quantifiable variables aren't the only aspects of reality that matter. If a company does something profitable but it makes everyone but them worse off, there's an argument they shouldn't be allowed to do it.

I'm baffled that so many people think advertising is a recent invention.

Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date?

We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations.

Advertising isn't new.

I didn't mean to imply it was a recent invention. However, the almost total centralization of advertising in a few companies on the internet IS new. Their parasitism and malevolent monopolistic omnipotence is pretty obvious to anyone who runs any kind of business with an internet presence. This severely inflates advertising costs and transfers profit that should be going to businesses who actually add value to companies that simply exploit their control of the platforms. Competition being introduced into this space, which at this point is only possible via government force, would make advertising cheaper and bring more exposure to companies and their products, which I fail to see as anything but a good thing for the economy.

I guess a lot of people feel that if they didn’t have the ability to know about all relevant products and services, the quality of their lives wouldn’t suffer.

I had this exact epiphany when I ran a side business selling niche widgets. Every dollar I spent on Facebook ads returned me $5 in revenue (at 40% margin) and it wasn't obvious how much I could spend before that stopped being true.

This is very correct, the only thing I as an engineer care about is that we rigorously optimize our spend to get the best possible CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) It’s an incredibly hard problem and has many variables, that’s why the platforms charge what they do, they allow you to work with these variables in a somewhat approachable way.

That misses the point though. Google and Meta have designed systems which capture nearly the entire surplus. In a non-monopolistic environment you'd expect somebody to be willing to step in at a bit less than Google's rates and offer the same outcomes.

The parent comment did a sneaky thing and gave the advertising budget then pivoted into rants about Google and Meta. They never actually said “All of this money goes to Google and Meta”. It was just expected that on HN everyone would assume as much because that’s what everyone is familiar with.

In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.

What's the spending distribution for pharma ads? Hypothetically, if $35 million out of $40 goes to Google and Meta, OP is still right.

> In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.

Having worked adjacent to ads... yes, there is more than social media ads. But the amount of everything not social media has massively shrunk!

Local newspapers are effectively dead except for local businesses (and even these are reducing their spend - especially the food delivery services fully rely on Uber, Just Eat etc) and so is radio, and even TV has been hit hard. You got newspapers and broadcast stations getting hit left and right, sliding into bankruptcy and/or being bought up by larger companies for pennies on the dollar. The fact that all across the Western world government/citizen funded public broadcasts are under attack makes it even worse, the diversity of media and, most importantly, the amount of people holding government accountable is collapsing as we speak [1].

Globally, Google, Amazon and Meta suck up over half of the global ad spend and it's not going to look better [2].

[1] https://lizfarmer.substack.com/p/how-the-decline-of-local-ne...

[2] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/global-ad-spend-rise-fast...

They have all the control and no competition. The time for breaking these companies up or hamstringing them at least a little bit is many years past due.

The problem is that monopolies are extremely profitable and are as "American as apple pie," despite the prevailing healthy competition myth that goes alongside it.