And as a provider of advertisement surfaces you have every incentive to oversell the reach of your surfaces.

That doesn't match the behavior I've observed from large corporations.

VC firms batting at such a small rate.

"I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half."

That's the ideal, yes.

But the problem with marketing and advertising is that it's impossible to know if a campaign will be a hit - a flop - or the butt of jokes from an entire generation (e.g. New Coke, Jaguar 2025; or it may very well just work despite all the industry naysayers like Apple's translucent plastic look from 1998 - I/we felt no-one would ever buy an overpriced and non-expandable PC that looked like a kid's toy, or a loo-seat laptop.

...of course, what actually happens is the strongest personalities in the C-suite eschew what their MBA course taught them about trusting the experts below them in the org chart; instead they champion their own personal pet ideas, no matter how much predictable damage they'll do to the company's share-price, because they couldn't possibly be wrong; he is the CTO, after-all; very smart!

Absolutely not.

Early in my career I worked for a pharmaceutical giant as a statistician. One of the things we would work on was trying to determine how much the various advertising efforts the company did actually moved the needle. Every year was the same miserable experience. The company would spend millions and millions of dollars in various advertising channels. We would attempt to determine how effective it was, but the wayin which they advertised and the way we collected data made it very difficult to generate any kind of insight at all. We would make recommendations as to how to adjust execution moving forward to ensure we could reliably determine how much value we were getting out of these campaigns, all of which would be ignored. They would massage our findings to tell whatever story they needed and would do the same thing the next year.

The marketing division is its own organization, with their own incentives that don’t necessarily align with the broader company’s incentives. They also were heavily addicted to relying on external analytical consultants who could pump out all the slide decks and pie charts they wanted, which would inevitably show that the marketing was not only effective, but should be invested in more the following year.

Right, you won't buy a GHTESKJVFII even if it happens to be the best product

"They" being the companies that sell advertisements and the marketing departments whose budgets are contingent on the fiction that advertisements create value, yes.

I doubt it is brand recognition and more an abstract kind of marketing you mean. Esoteric word of mouth.

That's missing the point, or supporting it. That is brand recognition/knowledge and not a factor in decision making. Knowing three tire brands doesn't tell you if i would buy any of them because of their ads. Personally i never bought tires, mine just are whatever "Mercedes Original" branded ones the car comes with. If i had the need to buy new ones i would get some recommendations. I would not go "I'll buy X because i saw the name a few times". It's hard to think of any buying decisions i make where ads could matter. When i buy a phone i decide based on features with the highest priority being that it runs GrapheneOS. When i go shopping for clothes i don't look at the brands at all, and i avoid any pieces with visible branding on it. I can't think of a point in my live where i picked some product because i saw it or the brand in an ad. The subconscious part is so hard to measure and disprove but it is just as hard to prove it works as advertised. Ads might make you remember a name, but i am questioning how much that affects my buying decisions, especially when it makes me trust the brand less when they have to fill every ad slot for people to even talk about them.

fwiw, while I can mention firestone, bf goodrich, more michelin, what I actually did on my last tires is drive to the tire shop and go whatever les schwab sells in-house. Promotion and distribution need not be confined to the internet. I saw the tire shop while driving, so I guess you could point out they have a business sign.

The NHL does it. Watch a televised hockey game, and the ads that the venue has sold on the dasher boards are electronically replaced by ads that the broadcaster has sold. Sometimes when there's a different camera angle you briefly see the ads that are really there.