The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising. They did the first studies in about 2008-10, and have continued running these studies ever since.

They even built a tool so that advertisers can run these studies, and get a sense for the incremental impact of their ad.

Google have a similar (less full-featured) system.

Really, it's the rest of the ecosystem that has much of the fraud, and I think that a lot of people in the industry are aware of this.

So the goal was to advertise advertising. A more scientific goal would be to see if there was an increase of in-store sales from internet advertising. Instead they were looking to design experiments that would show a positive effect, with the goal of giving advertisers a dashboard so they could run those experiments themselves.

I think you are misinterpreting what "do the experiments themselves" implies.

Certainly there is a JOIN with Google's or FB's data, but it can still happen entirely in a hosted sandbox with no data sharing necessary.

We've run Google's Local Campaigns, which are supposed to drive brick and mortar store visits, which they measure using GPS and "other signals". I checked with one of our most remote and least frequented stores, to see whether they could see any of the 100 daily visits that Google claimed to have generated, and they couldn't see a thing (avg daily visits were around 80 before during and after the campaign)

And the social stigma in science of being someone who tries to take down, discredit, or disprove your colleagues/superiors/ competitors theories is pretty substantial: IME there has historically almost been a taboo against attacking our speaking negatively about publications and your own sciences + faculties practices.

The saying of sciences advancing one funeral at a time doesn't exist because they're all such great skeptics and falsifiers, and current scientific practice is heavily biased towards positive findings and contains general publication biases.

indeed there's actually a LOT of common ground with advertising self-interest, since a lot of publication in science is effectively just advertising your brand...

This is a dangerous misconception to be spreading. It is not at all related to your other claims, namely:

> Sampling can skew results. Scientists are people too. We all have flaws.

These are of course correct statements. But they do not influence truth. They may well influence people's understanding of what the truth is, but that's different.

Same for a lighter, there are many factors involved, and playing with lighters that way was a party trick where I grew up.

We use truth as a concept every day as an approximation, but the universe is not bound to follow. Very unlikely things happen all the time.

And yes, when we put things that way it brings a lot of possible issues with sampling, processing, and measuring (and who’s doing the measuring). Some of these things would be harder to control for in a study of the effectiveness of advertising.