If it's not illegal it has to be utterly unethical

There's this one video sharing platform I visit and I noticed that out of 50 videos I watched 40 played the same advertisement. Granted, the ad was for a large insurance company with an unlimited advertising budget, so no big deal there, but I thought if it was an ad for a small business with a moderate budget it would deplete it in a hurry. I was thinking about running an ad with them myself, but now I am not sure. I actually saw another ad showing up again and again something like 20 out of 25 videos. You'd think they shouldn't show the same ad to the same IP address more than once or twice, I guess not.

P.S. My Saturday night rant.

 

I get shown retargeting ads on YT for Hostgator every time I watch a video because I visit Hostgator and the cookie is on my comp, but it's a complete waste of ad budget because I already have 2 HG accounts. Most of YT ads seem to be either "preaching to the choir" or a broadly random net cast, like your insurance one.

 

All in all it's a waste of time / money. I am guessing, but most people tune the ads out. Some companies run their ads for a show. It cracks my up when I see that one large supermarket chain playing their ads on TV. Like, seriously? We know what you are and we shop at your store like twice a week.

 

Advertising, in many cases, is less of a science and more of a religion because it is very, very difficult to measure concrete results from a campaign or even a series of "impression" campaigns. I recall when Mitch Kapor (who was the VP of Marketing for Lotus 123 which was one of the first business software applications) was quoted about his then crazy advertising budget of $1 million (back in the 1980/1990's timeframe that was an unheard of amount of marketing dollars in high tech) when he said: "I know that half my advertising campaign is working; I just do not know which half."

That said, many studies have been done about advertising and the consensus is that the average consumer does not really see or act on an advertisement until it has been viewed by them 8 times. That has been the mantra of print advertising sales reps since I started buying advertising back in the 1980's and I am sure that it has influenced digital advertising buying thinking, too. That is why you see ads on TV or on websites repeating themselves over and over. Recently, I was watching TV and the same ad repeated itself two more times within the same commercial break. Were they wasting their money that way or were they climbing the "8 views" mountain as quickly as possible?

Of course, as @sarahk points out, not all ads are about selling to new consumers. Many large brands use advertising to reinforce a recent purchase, but also to create cognitive dissonance for a buyer who recently bought something else. Another big reason major luxury brands advertise is to pump up their own employees. A great example of that was when Halliburton began running ads in the 2000's because they were being pilloried in the media due to then V.P. Cheney's previous relationship with them. Their ads were focused on the good things they did all around the world and were specifically intended to boost the morale of their own workforce.