So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.
For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.
i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.
so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.
I cannot describe the disgust I feel seeing my employer's logo on a fucking F1 car.
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.
Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?