My wife and I have a small life style business, selling a physical product. We make a nice daily profit using Meta ads. X dollars go in, X*A dollars come out, A > 1.0. When not running ads, it's just tumbleweeds.

I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.

In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.

I started listening to the podcast, but first they made me listen to several ads.

One was for a company that survives by selling ads - basically this was an ad selling ads! Given the title of the podcast, I assumed this was some sort of meta-joke, but evidently not.

So the sponsors of this podcast apparently believe that internet advertising works.

It works very well for the HUGE players who sell it, Google, Meta, Amazon and not many more.

It can help a small advertiser get a small number of customers to try out their offering.

It does not and will not create brands. If you disagree, please tell me about brands created by “Internet advertising” in the current century.

internet ads are largely a story of parasitic exchanges using information asymmetry to suck as much surplus out of the middle as possible.

https://june.kim/advertising-journey/

Why internet advertising won't work? Google and Meta got big based on selling ad online and they have been doing it for 10+ years.

If you know what you're doing and have lots of money to spend, you can get great returns on online advertising, especially because the platforms know how to target very specific niches of customers. But, most people don't know what they're doing and end up wasting their limited budget then conclude it doesn't work for them.

Many consumer brands as I mentioned elsewhere were built off online advertising to billions of dollars in revenues and valuations.

Advertising isn't just B2C, it's also B2B. The companies that make everything you buy (from the food you eat to the electrical wires you install in your walls) needs raw materials and machinery to produce anything. While there's trade shows and good ol' fashioned handshakes and whatnot, one of the main ways to sell B2B is just camp the top Google result spots by giving Google a lot of money to be the first result for the names of business inputs (or the names of your competitors, if you want to be cheeky).

When you hire a non-technical purchaser, when production line 13's full-body discombobulator breaks and the maintenance guy says "we need a new full-body discombobulator", the purchaser has no idea what a "full-body discombobulator" is or who makes it but they'll Google "full-body discombobulator" and they'll click [Buy Now] on whatever link shows up so that production line 13 can continue printing half a million bucks an hour.

Gymshark, Warby Parker, Casper, Liquid Death, Olipop.

Many 21st century consumer brands have been built by internet advertising. Seems like you do, based on your comment about your book, but in general I feel like many people who say stuff like the comment above don't actually work in marketing or startups, particularly non-tech physical goods based ones, or have even run their own ads on these platforms.

The goal of advertising is to hammer you with the same content again and again until your brain associates something with the product. Like shampoo associated with what you see everyday in the advertisement.

However in order to do this, whether you are selling or buying, you have to have the scale. And the scale of big players is now too big to compete.

And even if you do, your infrastructure will run on any of these big companies who can do anything to your traffic to keep their business and later pay fines for unethical practices that are minor compared to the profits.

That is sort of the inferred conclusion of the podcast, it is a bit of a racket by the big players.

Ground News?

Anyway, Google, Meta and Amazon don't sell the king of ads that make brands. But there exist branding ads on the internet.