Because cable advertising sales reps take you out to lunch, give you box seat tickets to NFL games, and create all of your reports for you. Which is even easier.

Also, some people measure their self worth on the size of their company's ad budget. And those same people tend to have stupid amounts of money compared to their childhood peer groups.

So buying ads is like adding a set of metal balls to a truck hitch. Revenue was never the point.

Also, a lot of entrepreneurs have short attention spans and constantly change things out of fear, taking it from easy to do well to impossible to know.

What would you say is the best advertising for a small business or application to do?

What product or service is being sold, and to who?

Peer pressure and lack of confidence. It doesn’t really matter how obvious, in hindsight, or how wonderful some decision is. Moving against the tide or investing in something original scares the shit out of most people.

Look at all the biggest spenders in Advertising: most of them are all big brand advertisers where proving ROI is nearly impossible. In that type of environment, in the absence of a good ROI calculation, a lot of BS can prosper.

It's actually not easy, scientific thinking is easy to fake and hard to get right.

I hate that question so much.

If someone doesn’t ask, how will we learn from those with something to teach? I ask because I’m curious!

Sorry, it's not you, it's a pet peeve of mine. I used to collect ideas and there are so many things out there that no one seems to know about.

Whenever I tried to talk about them there's always someone who asks that question. It's a BS question though, because it presupposes that humans somehow always instantly adopt the great new thing, but history shows that we just don't.

(E.g. Marconi was called before US Congress to testify because they thought radio might be a scam.)

We have all kinds of awesome stuff that gets ignored. Or even simple obvious things that no one notices (Why do refrigerators have doors instead of drawers?)

Sorry for picking on you. Nothing personal. :-)

No sorry necessary! I did not take it personally.