Re:As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @05:25AM
(#22864059)
> You might not like marketing, but it's silly for the conclusion to be "thus, the entire field is made of people who don't know what they are doing".
It's not silly. Personally, I believe just that. Just because marketers use "conversion rates, A/B tests, attribution, and a lot of other techniques", doesn't mean they actually "calculate the ROI of advertising". They may be - and I believe are - mostly bullshitting themselves. Attribution is a hard problem. Doing an A/B test correctly is a specialized skill that requires some understanding of statistics most people in the industry don't have. And even the tools don't help, as evidenced by the famous case of Optimizely designing their product in a way that made people do A/B tests wrong - and in the exactly wrong way that made them feel Optimizely is helping them[0].
You can't seriously claim that all these small companies are hiring top STEM grads to trace ad spend and verify the work of top STEM grads working in small ad agencies.
It's not silly. Personally, I believe just that. Just because marketers use "conversion rates, A/B tests, attribution, and a lot of other techniques", doesn't mean they actually "calculate the ROI of advertising". They may be - and I believe are - mostly bullshitting themselves. Attribution is a hard problem. Doing an A/B test correctly is a specialized skill that requires some understanding of statistics most people in the industry don't have. And even the tools don't help, as evidenced by the famous case of Optimizely designing their product in a way that made people do A/B tests wrong - and in the exactly wrong way that made them feel Optimizely is helping them[0].
You can't seriously claim that all these small companies are hiring top STEM grads to trace ad spend and verify the work of top STEM grads working in small ad agencies.
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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359