This is a rather unimpressive article. Yes, brand advertising is a disaster, just like it has always been. But to say that all digital advertising has unknown ROI is ridiculous. Digital direct response advertising allows very accurate ROI calculations. (Admittedly, a lot of advertisers are not applying the tools to their advantage. They call that the "Google stupid tax". Ditto these days on Facebook.) And direct response advertising is nothing new. Mail order guys were cleaning up by running early (expensive!) experiments that showed if they were going to go out of business. Oddly enough, when you have skin in the game, you follow the money much more closely. Who knew? The fact that golf course brand advertising deals don't pay off is not news. They never have much.
The bad news for digital direct response advertising is that the platforms are starting to remove the knobs that actually let people determine and optimize their ROI. Google is in the process of actively removing ad functionality and data that has, historically, been crucial to ad profitability. Google claims their machine learning can see much more of the data available, so "trust us." Perry Marshall, Google ads guru, has recently held several webinars about "Why Google is Objectively Evil."[0] Not pretty.
The bad news for digital direct response advertising is that the platforms are starting to remove the knobs that actually let people determine and optimize their ROI. Google is in the process of actively removing ad functionality and data that has, historically, been crucial to ad profitability. Google claims their machine learning can see much more of the data available, so "trust us." Perry Marshall, Google ads guru, has recently held several webinars about "Why Google is Objectively Evil."[0] Not pretty.
[0] https://www.perrymarshall.com/60-second/gama-replay/