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Lemmy advertising model - thoughts
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I think about 95% of ad campaigns are no more effective than just listing the product and the price. Maybe 5% are creative or well targeted enough to actually influence some purchases.
Problem is the people in a position to evaluate effective advertising are mostly the same group that gets paid by to create advertising. There's no one running around to businesses trying to sell them on the idea that advertisements aren't all that effective and they could just save their money on much simpler communications. Plus we indoctrinate hoards of 'marketing' graduates into the cult of advertising every year. There's a critical mass of people that just uncritically embrace the idea that modern advertising is the only way to sell a product, and many of their careers depend on that remaining a widely accepted idea.
Don’t these people ever study the effectiveness of different types of advertising? In physics, chemistry and biology you need evidence to support a belief. Otherwise, it’s just a questionable hypothesis.
I think they probably do study the effectiveness to a degree, but there's no structure or incentive for peer review in marketing research. So their methods are likely tuned to find whatever they think will convince their clients to spend more on advertising.
If they find a simple $1000 newspaper ad is just as effective as a a $100K television ad, they can just say "Our research has found that $100K TV ads are effective."
But businesses don’t have an infinite supply of money, now do they? Making smart business decisions means spending as little as possible and getting as much as possible in return. It’s in the best interests of the business owner to spend money on efficient advertising instead of wasteful advertising.
Absolutely. But most businesses don't have the wherewithal to hire impartial analysts and statisticians to evaluate the effectiveness of their ad buys. They have to rely on a combination of intuition, customer feedback, but mostly on outside advertising professionals, and those professionals have every incentive to maintain the impression that spending more on advertising it the best decision.
You are absolutely right. There’s clearly a conflict of interest. I also have a feeling that companies buying advertising services don’t really know what they’re buying, what they’re supposed to get, what they could be getting in the best case scenario etc.