The thing about advertising is that pretty much every bit of data that could tell us if it works or not is produced entirely by the same industry that has an overwhelming incentive to tell us that it does work.
I am not even saying that it never works, more that advertising’s primary purpose is to sell advertising to companies and if that advertising works or not is a distant secondary goal at best as long as those companies have no way to prove it doesn’t.
It very likely works on some types of products while being completely useless on others. And even where it works it very likely has a distribution from extremely bad ads for a given product or service to very effective ones for the same product.
The thing about advertising is that pretty much every bit of data that could tell us if it works or not is produced entirely by the same industry that has an overwhelming incentive to tell us that it does work.
I am not even saying that it never works, more that advertising’s primary purpose is to sell advertising to companies and if that advertising works or not is a distant secondary goal at best as long as those companies have no way to prove it doesn’t.
It very likely works on some types of products while being completely useless on others. And even where it works it very likely has a distribution from extremely bad ads for a given product or service to very effective ones for the same product.