Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ...

I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.

What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.

yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:

famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'

'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.

so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.

but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.

so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.

the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.

this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.

large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.

the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.

there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.

sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.

but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.

the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.

im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.

the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.

companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.

It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.

so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.

it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.

our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.

It's complicated.

SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.

For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.

Why's it hard to believe? Look around you at how belligerently foolish, irrational, inefficient, dysfunctional, and confidently wrong every large organization acts. Marketing departments confidently report that their marketing campaigns work, because to report otherwise would be to have their budget slashed to zero. Ad networks confidently report that the ads you buy are effective, because to report otherwise would destroy their companies. Ads are just a tax on the consumer which result in no improvement to any product whatsoever, a pure rent-seeking middleman, an intellectual landlord, a red queen's race, a dead weight on the economy, and, of course, a trillion-dollar industry, because we live in hell.