I understand your sentiment, but surely you realise that the entire ads industry has a lot of proven outcomes? All the millions/billions spent by customers isn’t done so blindly. There’s quite a bit of research on this topic - googling will give you a ton of results, and then a lot of hyped “ads don’t work” material too.

I spent six years in ad tech. I definitely realize that the industry has proven outcomes. My point is that these outcomes are not about what is called "incrementality" in the field, but about attributed clicks/sales (which could very well be a zero-sum game).

And so, if you google-scholar (not google) for "online advertising incrementality", you are left with (granted, excellent) work that shows that nothing has been proven yet and that it is a very hard problem [1].

And when customers of Google, Facebook and other ad tech companies ask them about incrementality, their answer is surprisingly quiet.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447548.3470819

PS: I don't make any hyped claim that ads don't work. I question this fact in a constructive way.

I’ve spent ~5 years in ad-tech, and I’m well aware that it is not irrefutably solved. But I would attribute that to measurement limitations, than actual conceptual problems. I’ve seen the impact ads can have for SMBs and MNCs alike across verticals.

Proving specific incrementality is rarely a concern from actual customers, unless they wanted to tighten their purse strings. Nobody questioned if actual incremental gains could be made - only whether there are diminishing returns for their increased spend.