The "problem" with SEO and adwords consultants is that the good ones would be working for the most lucrative verticals: insurance, consumer finance, medical lawsuits, etc.

If your small SaaS business can afford to hire them, then they aren't worth hiring.

You can say that about literally anything and have it be false. Simply because someone/some company is amazing at what they do, does not mean they are priced out of reach or otherwise unavailable.

Indeed. Paid advertising has been a busted flush for many years now.

I'm still not sure the theoretical consultants you've listed would be "good" as such. They'll just have a massive budget they can use to blow the competition away.

I'll rephrase it as: The "good ones" would be working in a completely different field where their talent actually provides some value to the world.

As someone who manages digital media for a living and has done so with very large sums of money with measurable revenue attached to that spend, I'd invite you to share what makes your experience so concrete as to enable you to attempt to discredit an entire industry with a wave of your hand.

I'll be the first to say that measuring the incremental impact of advertising is often very challenging for a variety of technical and business reasons. That does not mean it doesn't work.

there's a difference between correlation and causation, and if you can't measure/explain a direct cause-effect relationship then for technically oriented people your proposition loses credibility.

But that's my point. Often times you CAN very easily measure direct cause-effect relationships between ads and revenue. When you get into brand advertising territory it gets a bit murkier because of the data and modeling involved, but you can definitely determine this in many cases.

Where it doesn't work is when you have inexperienced people spending an amount insufficient to properly measure results, not implementing conversion tracking properly, using poor targeting, etc. Of course that's going to fail.

And I'll note that there are VERY technically-oriented people in the industry who seem to have no problem feeling confident that advertising works for them.

My problem is simply with people who have had a few bad experiences writing off an entire industry. All I'm asking is for a bit more evidence for such a sweeping accusation, which I think is more than a fair ask.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"