I do believe online advertising is a bit of a bubble right now. Lots of bullshit unprofitable VC-funded companies burn tons of money on advertising (more than what they'd ever earn from the potential customer) in an attempt to establish monopolies which in turn inflates the value of advertising companies.

Slap the word A.I. or ML in there are you are golden.

New platform, new opportunities. I have thrown money into ad's on various content suggestion platforms, Reddit, Quora, BuySellAds, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and a hell of a lot more.

TikTok is apparently incredible right now with conversions and pricing. It's all over the forums and the guru's are pumping it too. Give me some solid targeting options and viable metrics and you could probably wrangle some money out of me and many other marketers out there. I would say it's easy money if you can spin the ad network in a new way.

From a marketing pro's perspective you assume that because you have data - reach, impressions, est. click-through rates etc - that you can find a 'quick win' aka get rich rich quick.

So inevitably you try it, then you get some 'tips', then you read a marketing guru's success story, then you start getting ads for ebooks all of which have the best strategy and you really feel that you have no choice but to go for it. It's the FOMO/what if complex magnified by professional requirements to grow at all costs.

From now on I consider online advertising like gambling. You think you can win but the house always win's because you spend more money on A/B testing, copy edits and new keywords all of which create very few leads or deals. You always think you can win too, 8 years later I still go back to online ad's because I feel that there's just that juicy copy, design, content combo round the corner.