> Similarly, this law provides a litmus test as to the difference between advertising and information. When you are marketing with useful information, then CTRs stay high. Advertising that’s just novelty and noise wrapped in a new marketing channel has a limited shelf life.
As a not-a-marketing/ad-person, if more ads contained useful information and less emotional pandering to whatever/whoever they think I am, I'd be more likely to look at and click on them. That, and not actively surveilling me...
Compared to the median person we have a much more engineering focused mindset, we have incomparably deeper technical knowledge and skill in computer programming and are far more willing to read.
That means that things that work well to target us may not work well for the average person. I finally understood this after thinking way to many times "why would anybody be stupid enough to do X" when it turns out the answer is lots of people.
Is it not common knowledge that clickthrough rates for online ads are execrable? I recall a discussion here a bit ago about ad tracking and it seemed like a lot of commenters thought that knowing how well an ad worked was as easy as taking the tracking ID of the click that brought the buyer to the seller's site and looking up which ad it was and where it ran.
But clickthrough rates are so bad that they are effectively useless for even for so-called useful ads that nobody with any sophistication cares about that metric. Pretty much the only thing that adtech talks about is CPI now.
This is also the same thinking for why so many random companies have blogs with marginally relevant keyword-specific content written by people with little domain expertise (e.g. contract content writers)
My point was that to informative about a product you need to know the person you are advertising to. First of all because you need to choose the product that he might be interested about.
As a not-a-marketing/ad-person, if more ads contained useful information and less emotional pandering to whatever/whoever they think I am, I'd be more likely to look at and click on them. That, and not actively surveilling me...