Technology

To be honest, it's only the smartest people in the ad industry that even talk about this big picture stuff.

My favorite version of the discussion was referring to shitty advertisers as the equivalent of polluters destroying the ecosystem.

And you see it over and over. Mobile banner ads when they first came out had a 15% CTR. Fifteen percent.

That's insane.

But within a year of using them for irrelevant and crappy ads with lousy landing pages those numbers dropped dramatically and by now they average around 0.4-0.8%.

What both most advertisers and consumers typically don't understand about advertising is that at its foundation, it's something that's intrinsically motivated for users.

When you know about a great product, you tell people about it.

When you hear about a great product for something you are in market for, you pay more attention to find out more.

That's the natural inclination.

It's just not the case in practice because for a century companies have tried to exploit that tendency to grab attention when they don't actually deserve it, to lie about their products, and to generally poison the ecosystem beyond repair.

And it's a prisoner's dilemma, as the few companies that would like to be more responsible with their ad content and placement have competitors who throw caution to the wind and mess it up for everyone.

In practice, almost no one really thinks about the long term consequences of doing stupid shit with advertising that will cause consumers to ignore most of their future efforts. And you typically see a consistent small percentage of the overall advertising reach that converts (and the secret about this small percent is it's mostly the portion of the population that's highly suggestible that's being taken advantage of).