Why do advertising people persist in believing impossible things?

"When we worked in that very building, the then executive creative director of Digitas, Sav Evangelou, told us he spent most of his time trying to stop clients demanding banner ads. Like Alice, he couldn't make himself believe the impossible - that a digital display ad would produce any results worth having. The clients, however, believed they would, and insisted on buying them."

"Now, in a perfect storm, we hear wailing and gnashing of teeth because everyone's fired up an ad blocker on their browsers, while over in the blue corner the head of a large media agency has come clean (anonymously, so not all that clean) and admitted the whole digital ad thing's a vast waste of money, and going programmatic is 'polishing a turd.'"

Advertising often relies on optimistic or unrealistic beliefs that justify ineffective tactics. Clients frequently demand banner and digital display ads despite minimal measurable returns and microscopic response rates. Creative leaders and agency staff often push back but are overridden by client insistence and belief in brand benefits. Executives in media agencies criticize programmatic buying as refining poor inventory rather than solving core problems. The proliferation of intrusive and annoying digital ads drives widespread adoption of ad blockers. The cycle of weak metrics, client acceptance, and persistent bad creative undermines effectiveness and increases industry waste.

Read at The Drum