Print ads have worked for centuries.

Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

> Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

Have you compared the ROI between the two? Why would anyone bother with print ads at all if this was the case?

> Have you compared the ROI between the two? Why would anyone bother with print ads at all if this was the case

They mostly don't, hence why businesses dependent on print ads have had to radically reinvent themselves or die.

> Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

In what way could they possibly work 1000 times (or, ignoring the hyperbole) 10x or even 2x better?

They don’t magically grant consumers more money to spend on goods and services.

It’s a zero-sum game in which companies compete in advertising budgets, instead of producing better cheaper products.

Print ads are not targeted--they can only be targeted to the text they accompany. This means that the vast majority of their viewers are completely uninterested in the ad, while a viewer who might be interested in an ad that shows in another print item, does not see that ad because they do not subscribe to that print item. Digitization allows for ads to be switched on-the-fly, so no matter that media you consume, you see ads relevant to you. This vastly increases the success rate of the ads. It doesn't seem like much, because even targeted ads have an incredibly low success rate, but there's a huge difference between 0.0001% and 0.01%.

> Print ads are not targeted--they can only be targeted to the text they accompany. This means that the vast majority of their viewers are completely uninterested in the ad

So if I'm reading a review of a new car for example, and there's a full page ad for the new Ford Focus alongside it, I'm not going to be interested? Seems more relevant than constantly being bombarded with ads for mattresses after buying one 6 months ago.

But do they need to?

No, not really. All they need to know is the source of their traffic and how well it's converting. That source isn't paying for itself? Cut it and divert the budget to one that is.

Does advertising needs to exist at all? Do businesses need to exist at all? Does economy needs to exist?

There're issues with current state of online advertising, but when was last time humanity said "improving this would be a great business, but you know what - we don't want it to be better"?

> There're issues with current state of online advertising, but when was last time humanity said "improving this would be a great business, but you know what - we don't want it to be better"?

When you externalize costs like this anything is easy to justify, I will ask a different way: should we be reconsidering forcing the costs of adtech's growth in to an engaged panopticon on to society? Do ads need to be 1000 times more efficient (and profitable, if Alphabet and Facebook's quarterly reports are to be believed) if they have so many external costs which the ecosystem is simply unfit to solve itself?

Personally, I only ever go to Harbor Freight when they send out mailers- not because I can't spend money other times, but because their mailers are such a constant thing that it doesn't make sense to buy it not on sale.