Does click-through rate actually matter?
Ethan Decker Ethan Decker

Does click-through rate actually matter?

Did CTR correlate with ad recall? Nope. Less than 1%, in fact.

How about brand awareness? Nope. Or purchase intent? Nope nope. Both less than 1%.

But surely ROI? Ha. ROI had a -0.07% correlation with CTR. 😂😂😂

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Are there small brands with high “loyalty”?
Ethan Decker Ethan Decker

Are there small brands with high “loyalty”?

Like, are there brands with low household penetration but high buy rate?
The TL;DR: no. Not really. Like hardly ever. Like nearly never.
F’rinstance, Colgate is for sale around the world. But it’s in a different situation in each country.
Turns out, penetration moves in lock-step with buy rate. Like, really really tightly too.

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Running radio ads? Fix your brand linkage!
Ethan Decker Ethan Decker

Running radio ads? Fix your brand linkage!

If someone hears your ad on the radio, can they even say what brand it’s for?


System 1 Research & Radiocentre tested 131 radio ads in the UK.


Shockingly — I mean, it’s _right_after_the_ad_played_ — 40% of the ads had poor linkage.

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What happens when AI eats its own tail?
Ethan Decker Ethan Decker

What happens when AI eats its own tail?

The big LLMs (ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc.) are trained on massive piles of scraped “public” data.

(Btw: “Paging the Copyright Cops.” I mean, wtf!)

A couple of new studies show that when AI starts training itself on its own AI-generated output, results degrade until it’s just craptastic gobbledygook.

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Ethan Decker Ethan Decker

Is Advertising a “Tax on the Poor”?

Lucky for us, Antenna crunched the numbers for several streaming services that offer both ad-supported and premium ad-free options, including Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock. The data isn’t exhaustive, and it’s US-only. But their findings were compelling.

From how they see it, there are no significant demographic differences between premium ad-free subscribers and ad-supported ones. Not age, not ethnicity, and not income.

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