That's not the point of brand advertising though. The point is to hammer the consumer with a brand over and over again until they KNOW that's the brand for them and go out and seek it on their own. Think Coke, Ford, etc. Facebook has terrible click-through rates, so if they're going to make money from advertising, it'll probably be this way.

That was not the point being argued here. He stated that web ads cannot be measured any more efficiently than any other form of advertising, and I provided evidence on how they can.

You're probably right about that being the only form of ad they can monetize, though. The question then becomes when do companies spend as much in that space as they do on tv, if ever?

That doesn't measure what brand advertising wants to measure, though. If one ad gets 16 clickthroughs that result in 4 transactions, that ad is inferior to one that gets 0 clickthroughs but results in 8 sales when customers actually go to the store.

Brand advertising works because most consumers rely on a recognition heuristic when faced with the dozens of products in a store. They'll buy products they recognize, even if they have no personal experience with the product. You don't go out and buy an All-New Mercedes Benz immediately because you saw it on TV - but when it comes time to buy a car, you're far more likely to buy it because of all the associations that its name & image bring up. You can't measure this with any existing web metrics - it may be years before customers actually go out and make a purchase.

Right, that is how brand advertising works. But given the structure of the web, you can get an estimation of how effective it is by how users respond to it (clicks).

Put yourself in the position of an ad exec who has $n dollars to spend on his campaign and has to present to a superior how effective it was. If he has a web ad placement, the execs in charge of the money are going to immediately query him on what they got out of it (how much traffic they got from it). Adsense has spoiled companies into being far more demanding on number metrics on effectiveness. I can't think of 1 flash ad, branding or not, that does not have the option to click and learn more about the product. They are measuring the ad resonance, transaction driven or not.

The fact of the matter is, companies want a return on their web ads they can quantify. They measure using stuff like this: http://www.vizu.com/

When they don't get it, branded or not, they leave: http://mdurwin.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/corporations-leave-s...