I do marketing and advertising for a living.
I've managed campaigns where we could put a dollar into an ad, follow what happened to that dollar, and see whether it turned into a lead, a customer, revenue, or nothing at all. I've worked with businesses that needed more customers and didn't have the luxury of waiting around for someone to discover them. I've also watched businesses waste money on ads because they skipped the harder questions about who they were trying to reach, what they were offering, and why anyone should care.
So when I talk about the problems with advertising, I'm not coming at it from the position that advertising is inherently bad.
Quite the opposite.
Advertising has done some remarkably useful things for businesses and consumers. Before we get into the tracking, targeting, data collection and other things that make people understandably uncomfortable, it's worth remembering why advertising became such an important part of the economy in the first place.
1. Advertising gave businesses a way to find customers they couldn't reach on their own
For a long time, a business was largely limited by geography and visibility.
You opened a store. You put up a sign. You bought an ad in the local paper. Maybe you sent some mail. If you had a bigger budget, you bought more space or better placement.
That wasn't necessarily a bad system, but it favored businesses that already had money, physical locations, distribution, or access to large audiences.
Digital advertising changed the playing field, for better or worse.
A small business can now put an offer in front of a very specific group of people without buying an entire newspaper, television station or billboard. A startup can find people who have never heard of it. A niche business can reach a niche audience that would have been practically impossible to find through traditional media.
Why does that matter? Because good products don't automatically find customers. Sometimes the customer simply needs to know you exist. And that, for the most part, is typically the first stag
2. Advertising made discovery part of the customer experience
We tend to think of advertising as something that gets in the way of what we actually want to do.
Honestly, sometimes it does. But sometimes an ad introduces us to something we genuinely wanted and didn't know existed.
That's one of the reasons search advertising was such an important shift. Someone searches for a product, service or answer, and businesses can show up at the exact moment that need exists.
But discovery doesn't only happen through search.
You might see a restaurant you've never heard of. A software product that solves a problem you've been dealing with for months. A local business offering something you didn't realize was available nearby.
I've clicked plenty of ads in my life. (And sometimes, lots of rage clicking BWAHAHAHA)
Not because I was tricked into doing it, but because the ad happened to be useful to me or the people I worked with or helped in their business.
That's an important distinction that gets lost when we talk about advertising as if every impression is an interruption.
3. Advertising made marketing measurable
In my opinion, this might be one of the biggest changes of all.
Traditional advertising could tell you that you bought a television spot, a newspaper ad or a billboard. You could estimate how many people might have seen it. You could conduct research afterward and make some educated guesses about what happened.
Digital advertising started giving marketers a feedback loop!
Think about it. Marketers could now answer (for the most part):
- Who saw the ad?
- Who clicked?
- Who came back?
- Who bought?
- How much did they spend?
- Did they buy again?
That changed the job and ultimately the entire marketing function. Marketing teams could move from “I think this worked” toward “here's what happened.”
It also created an entirely new problem, which we'll get to later: once something becomes measurable, people start optimizing the measurement.
Still, the original idea was incredibly useful. And for businesses that couldn't afford to throw money at vague awareness, being able to connect marketing activity to customer behavior was a major step forward.
4. Advertising lowered the cost of finding a very specific audience
There's an old problem in advertising that marketers have always understood: If you're selling something to everybody, you're probably paying to reach a lot of people who don't want it.
What digital advertising did was make niche audiences much more accessible.
- A company selling accounting software doesn't need to advertise to everyone who watches television.
- A local Polish market doesn't need to reach everyone in an entire metropolitan area.
- A company selling industrial equipment doesn't need millions of impressions.
The ability to narrow the audience can make advertising economically viable for businesses that would have struggled with traditional mass media.
And there's another side to that: consumers don't necessarily benefit from seeing fewer ads. They can benefit from seeing fewer irrelevant ads.
And that's the difference: relevancy.
5. Advertising helps pay for a lot of things we expect to get for free
A lot of the internet business model is built around advertising. Think about it:
Search. Social media. News. Video. Weather. Maps. Content. A ridiculous number of websites you visit without ever pulling out your wallet.
Advertising helps subsidize those services. That doesn't make every advertising practice acceptable, and it certainly doesn't mean consumers should have to surrender unlimited amounts of personal information in exchange for using the internet.
But the economic relationship is real.
We didn't accidentally end up with a digital economy where somebody pays for everything. Advertising became one of the mechanisms that allowed companies to offer services to millions or billions of people without charging each person directly.
The Federal Trade Commission's research into targeted advertising makes the tradeoff pretty clear: better targeting can benefit advertisers and consumers, but achieving that targeting can require collecting and using more personal data.
And that's really where I think this gets more complicated. Advertising solved a lot of problems:
- It helped businesses find customers
- It helped customers discover products.
- It helped customers discover products.
- It made marketing more measurable.
- It made niche businesses more viable.
- It helped finance much of the digital world we've become accustomed to using.
Those are not small accomplishments, but it also produced another problem: we marketers got very, very good at it.
Once marketers could measure everything, we started measuring more. And once platforms could target people, they started looking for better signals. And once advertisers could buy attention, the question became how cheaply and consistently they could buy it. And once the technology could collect more information about a person, someone eventually asked the inevitable question:
“What else can we use this data for?”
That's where the good story starts to get a little less comfortable.
And that's where we're going next.
Part 2: The Bad. 🙁
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