is a great piece by Ken Auletta: The New Pitch. Subtitle: Do ads still work? The bigger question, hinted at about halfway through, is “can advertising agencies effectively isolate the variables required to accurately measure effectiveness?” When TV was run by local affiliates and there were generally only local offerings on the newsstand in addition to a few national publications, it was easy to run an ad in, say, Cleveland and use sales figures from Detroit as the control group. In an advertising-saturated world, though, one wonders what kind of assumptions-gymnastics a marketer has to engage in to demonstrate that a piece really was effective.
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