I'm very curious if you work in advertising/adtech, otherwise your "take" is no different than the ones you're criticizing.
I have worked on the data side of a pretty wide range of roles across the marketing/adtech spectrum for over a decade and think their is a lot of good reason to be skeptical of the claims of the advertising world.
Tim Hwang is also an insider in this industry and wrote an entire book (The Subprime Attention Crisis) on the issues with the current state of advertising. I work in a very different area from Tim (he's legal) but I can tell you that book almost bored me with how obvious all of his complaints where.
> It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?
I've seen the data that many of these companies don't. As many others have said, simply dismissing advertising as a "scam" is too extreme, however there are a lot of really big issues in the industry and extreme skepticism of the advertising industry is well warranted.
The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen. This same logic could be falsely applied to the pre-2008 financial crisis "if these ratings are so wrong then why are so many experts putting so much money in them?"
Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.
I work in advertising and know how the sausage is made. However I don't have equity in an ad agency, I don't profit off of promoting advertising. I participate in these conversations to help people understand. Also because they often piss me off.
> The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen.
The financial crisis was about companies making money, which they love to do. Advertising ad spend is about companies spending money, which they hate to do. Unless someone can explain why everyone wants to subsidize advertising agencies and ad platforms.
> Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.
Skeptical of what, exactly? If you use 3rd party impression and click tracking tools, attribution modeling software, and statistically significant testing, I am genuinely confused as to what there is to be skeptical of.
I think the people who say they know "how the sausage is made" and still hold skepticism of "the whole system" are maybe not as knowledgeable as they may think.
In good faith, I am definitely skeptical of a few things. Whether ad platforms are really trying to prevent spam. How 3rd party DSP audiences are built and why they think people are ok with using them having no idea how they are made. Whether or not apps and devices really are spying on people. Whether people are aware of what "privacy" means from an advertising perspective.
But I'm not skeptical about the users that come to my site or which marketing efforts are working or not working.
> The financial crisis was about companies making money, which they love to do. Advertising ad spend is about companies spending money, which they hate to do. Unless someone can explain why everyone wants to subsidize advertising agencies and ad platforms.
Advertising is certainly in the interest of the ad agencies, and the employees of companies whose job is to either manage outside advertising or develop/execute advertising in-house. It's possible there could be a company with a lean team of advertisers, doing just the type of work that makes sense. But within any organization, leaders want to have larger teams because it is seen as a marker of respect. It also allows a leader to command a higher salary.
I don't know if these forces are sufficient to have spun the entire advertising industry out of nothing. But I do know that there are significant forces looking to build up advertising both inside and outside of companies.
I have worked on the data side of a pretty wide range of roles across the marketing/adtech spectrum for over a decade and think their is a lot of good reason to be skeptical of the claims of the advertising world.
Tim Hwang is also an insider in this industry and wrote an entire book (The Subprime Attention Crisis) on the issues with the current state of advertising. I work in a very different area from Tim (he's legal) but I can tell you that book almost bored me with how obvious all of his complaints where.
> It's not that these companies love throwing their money away. Maybe there's just something they know that you don't?
I've seen the data that many of these companies don't. As many others have said, simply dismissing advertising as a "scam" is too extreme, however there are a lot of really big issues in the industry and extreme skepticism of the advertising industry is well warranted.
The reasoning of "if the system is fundamentally broken, then why are so many people participating in it?" is easily dismissed with any of the major financial crises we've seen. This same logic could be falsely applied to the pre-2008 financial crisis "if these ratings are so wrong then why are so many experts putting so much money in them?"
Personally I don't know anyone who works on the "how the sausage is made" side of advertising that isn't at least somewhat skeptical of the whole system.