> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

That would probably target dog enthusiasts or dog hobbyists or dog fanatics, which are all subsets of dog owners.

I think that one of the things that makes social media ad targeting so attractive to advertisers is that they can target the dog owners, instead of just the enthusiasts/hobbyists/fanatics.

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety.

But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach?

> No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.

What? Sure, they have campaigns running for awareness, recall, perception.

But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

Only google et al cares about scalability, everyone else cares about results. Only google needs to sell ads without any knowledge about the product or audience, this scales extremely well but leads to poor results.

> But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

When is the best time to sell the brand? When your flagship is a year old and still costs as much as on launch day and when the competition has surpassed you? Hardly.

People that has enough interest to use a dog-forum has too much knowledge of quality to buy things that a company advertises. They will know already what works for their dog and does not listen to advertising in the normal sense. They might however listen to bloggers that has been payed to talk about brands.

If you buy ads, you want them displayed to the non-fanatics that is not influenced by experience and vulnerable to brand exposure.

As long as the algorithms are close to or better than this model why would they bother? One is all automated and the other is a lot of work dealing with individual websites (even if it is just a matter of manual targeting settings)

I'd say they are much much worse, but they are scalable and cheaper so that kind of makes up for it.

But the only one who cares is the middleman. They are the only ones that benefit from the scale.

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Give me a list of dog community site to target 1 millions dog owners.

Now tell me how expensive it would be to show ads on theses websites.

Plenty of dog owners are on Facebook, much easier to target 1 millions dog owner there instead.

Did I forget to mentions that it's for a dog shop in Montreal? Good luck!