- Calling performance marketing platforms a scam (repeatedly, both in the title and in the narrative) doesn't explain how those same performance marketing platforms are carrying the majority of traffic acquisition in most of the B2C companies that went public this year (and practically all of the DTC ones). Calling into question the accuracy of measurement is one thing. Calling it a scam is wrong and designed to rank on HN rather than to be reflective of the true value of those platforms.
- As I pointed out in my original post, all you have to do is use incrementality studies and 98% of the criticism instantly goes away. Rand implies that you have to do your own studies (by eg, following Avinash Kaushik's methodology) which is 100% wrong - Facebook will do them for you if you reach a certain spend limit, or 3rd parties will as well with no spend limits. Also, from experience, this really becomes an issue once you spend meaningful amounts on two platforms at the same time. His rant on this subject has an iota of truth and a whole lot of sensationalism mixed together, and overall leads to wrong conslusions.
- He conflates "paid search" with "all performance marketing platforms", including "paid social." It would have been helpful to point out that the challenges with branded terms are entirely isolated to paid search and have nothing to do with paid social.
- My favorite sensationalist tactic: frame a strong accusation as a question. This way you get the clicks, but you can still cover your ass by linking to resources that with enough research would allow the reader to answer the question with a "No." But in lieu of that research, the implication is that the answer is a "Yes." You'll see this tactic used by less reputative media sources, and I was disappointed to see Rand do the same.
I could go on but hopefully this will suffice.
My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data.
Your other points I think relate to scale. No advice can be universal, and if you read the article as absolutist, your take makes sense. If you read it as "hey, your mix is likely wrong", a lot of the criticism fades.
I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. The Lego movie example is a really good one. I think it is probably good this happened, as a lot of creativity was performative (how do I win an ad award/impress my peers) and not about increasing sales, but we've perhaps shifted the balance too far, and there is likely some areas with good ROS that are now better bets.
Ecommerce example: every year the CPMs go up and your paid margin goes down. But every year you have a larger email list, so the balance of paid to unpaid shifts.
General example: every year you get more of the late-stage employees who care less and less about your company. But every year you can afford to pay for more layers of management, which will keep an eye on the underperformers.
This list goes on and on... The headwinds are driven by external forces, whereas the tailwinds end up working out based on your specific execution of the opportunities that present themselves to you. This is where an experienced operational team can make a huge difference.
> I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing.
You absolutely cannot rely on performance marketing forever. It's a shot in the arm until you have reached enough [fill in whatever you wnat] so that you can leverage that momentum to reach the escape velocity. So it's not good forever, but it's a great catalyst.
So FB, who earns on my spending, offers me to measure for me whether my spending makes sense for me. Why would FB ever tell me to spend less? Don't they like money?
There's literally a team at Facebook (Marketing Science), part of who's job is to tell advertisers what actually works and often, this can lead to them telling advertisers to spend less.
And this is an incredibly smart business strategy in that FB know (from experiments et al) that their platform works, and if they can show incrementality, then advertisers will invest more in the platform.
In game theory terms, it's a good strategy for a repeated game, which advertising definitely is.
Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term strategy, or do you think instead it might be better to report out the most accurate results possible?
Long-term strategy? https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-allowed-fraud-hacke...
That's not really an argument. You wish that a responsible/public company wouldn't do that but we have seen much dumber behavior.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
1. P&G didn't turn off that spend, it shifted it to other marketing platforms.
2. Chase didn't change its marketing spend, it just concentrated it from 400k sites to 5k sites.
3. Uber found out that their agency was committing fraud and AFAIK the case is still being litigated.
I hate being that guy, but check the links. Those reporters really must have an agenda or something (or are just struggling to get the clicks, so they need to make a story out of nothing).
However, if you are a new entrant/small business this is not the case, because nobody has ever heard of you.
As an example, look at TikTok. They spent insane amounts of money on FB ads to get as many installs as possible, but I'd suspect that they don't do this anymore because they've got enough brand equity that it doesn't make as much financial sense.
Unsurprisingly, those people are wrong and marketing works.
I do think things are better in some sense today. But it is a hungry beast, marketing. Oh, and lies and statistics.
You would have these very complete theories of how search engine ranking worked - completely disconnected from reality and unburdened by any actual knowledge. If there was ever a cargo cult, SEO was it.
I still cringe when people say that they have "done SEO" on their site while I'm in the room. It is kind of like telling their mechanic they've sacrificed a goat so their car will get better mileage.
Content strategy, keyword research, Search Console integration, site speed improvements, local search business profiles -- all of these contribute to SEO. It's unwieldy to talk about them all, so sometimes people can use a shorthand.
I'd always give the same advice. Don't try to outsmart the search engine, focus on quality and consistency over time. That will always reward you in the long run. Try to game the search engine and you will find yourself in a weapons race you can't sustain over time. If you find exploitable tactics to get better ranking than you deserve, sooner or later you'll probably be pushed down the ranking. And this is really important if you're successful enough to have something to lose.
Some of what people label SEO is just "make good web sites", and that indeed works. But some of it is just pure rubbish. And making a good website isn't just "doing SEO" - it is making a good website. And a lot of people don't.
Which is why I can't take people seriously when they present it as some singular task they have completed.
Interesting article
1. "industry" is moving away from last touch attribution (pretty much what Rand complains about)
2. "Incrementality strives to identify the causal event of a conversion,"
The way to identify the causal action seems to be :
errr ... that's difficult
It's a surprise to see a vendor have a clear explanation on their site however - and it's worth quoting i think
>>> Incrementality testing creates an experiment that systematically withholds media channel exposure to a representative subset of users (the control group) while maintaining normal media channel exposure to the broader user set (the test group). If the control group is both sizable enough to be statistically significant and selected at random such that they are broadly representative of the user base, then the media channel’s incremental contribution can be determined by the difference in business outcome (conversion, revenue, profitability, etc.) between the test and control groups.
But after reading this article, it finally dawned on me. He makes imperfect conclusions in everything he touches, it's just that in some fields those conclusions can be more easily proved to be wrong than in others. SEO is the perfect field where a polished presenter can get away with imperfect conclusions for years - trust me, I know, I made a living for years in this field, and I am very familiar with the nature of this work. Most of the time, you have no idea what the black box really does, and instead you're just trying to guess what might have happened. Most importantly, there are many ways to skin a cat in SEO, and just because your approach is net positive doesn't mean that you truly are delivering the global maximum (or that the net positive gain was ROI positive). In short, it's impossible to know who's right and who's wrong, and Rand's videos convinced me that he's right, but I am no longer sure. I just rewatched one of them, and can easily see how his conclusions are just... opinions.
While we may or may never find out if his SEO opinions were the global maximum, we can quantifiably demonstrate that his opinions on content marketing are not solid. This whole essay he wrote can be replaced with "hey performance marketers, don't trust the platform numbers and instead do your incrementality studies." Platforms like Facebook will give you those for free if you reach a certain spend level, and you can also get them from 3rd party providers like measured.com. In other words, if you're a performance marketer and you're not conducting incrementality studies, then you're very early in your career and are not following the best practices. Simple as that - no need to extrapolate from there and reach all sorts of additional conclusions (which is obviously a pattern in Rand's behavior) - calling into question a perfectly investable marketing channel, conflating the needs of a public company with everyone else's needs, using words like scam, etc.
I am really disappointed to have to write this, but you would have been better off not reading this article. If Rand is really advocating that the majority of entrepreneurs should follow his advice and focus on PR instead of performance marketing, then perhaps an honest thing to ask would be - how is that working out for his own company? AFAIK, SparkToro is nowhere close to replicating the growth of his previous company, which is honestly disappointing for someone with such a huge reach and name recognition.