I actively avoid products I see mass market advertising for. It’s a useful heuristic, if you see a YouTube advertising campaign you can basically guarantee the product is poor value for the money. That extends to basically all name brand products like soap.
Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.
I too use the metric of seeing a YouTube sponsor or ad usually means it's bad.
I was actually interested in some of those privacy/info removal services but after doing research found those to - as you said - lack value for the money.
If a product needs to pay people to talk about it, it must not have organic buzz and popularity. Think VPNs sponsoring YouTubers, or those cheap wireless earbuds from a small brand. I wouldn't trust their quality.
Exactly why I do not own any Apple or Google products or have any subscription services. Advertise to me products I can not actually own or control for myself and I hate you.
Genuinely wondering as I would love to say what you did in your first sentence: what devices do you use? Are the Asian built phones better, or do you use a smartphone at all?
It’s an economic argument. The product could be fit for purpose, ie Nord VPN could work just fine.
However when you’re advertising a VPN on a cooking channel the cost per customer is quite high so they need to recuperate that high cost by charging extra. This is more true the longer the advertising campaign runs and the less a channel is related to the product, each of which drive up new customer acquisitions costs.
Obviously it’s not a perfect predictor, but it doesn’t need to be.
I see where you're coming from. I feel it's more like: you've never heard of a product. All of a sudden every YouTuber is shilling raycon earbuds.
Well that's the only place I ever hear of them. They all say they're great! I've never seen them or had anyone else attest to it except ads that all came out of nowhere. Seems like a play to make big moves in the headphone market. They sure did spend a lot on marketing, I hope enough went to design to make em actually good.
Now, I don't own any raycons because as I said seeing this behavior makes me skeptical of the product.
Meanwhile the main headphones I use I've never seen an ad for once. A friend recommend the m50x's when we were djing. I tested em and loved em. After getting them I notice they are basically an industry standard for audio which is my work. I suspect the quality product with savvy ads in appropriate places lead to this situation. No doubt in audio magazines audio technica runs ads.
When every YouTuber has done an incogni, nord, raid shadow legends, or a few others, I have to suspect they spent more on marketing than they did their product which makes me think(and has been shown a few times) that these products kinda suck.
Marketing overall doesn’t need to be effective marketing to me. It really depends on the product and strategy, YouTube can sell anything other options need to be product specific.
Being the value option is enabled by lower advertising spend but it also needs less advertising spend because it doesn’t look overpriced in comparison. PR firms for example may be able to get a few articles written quietly pushing your product. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html However spending 100x as much doesn’t get you 100x as many articles. Diminishing returns hit hard and YouTube or other mass market advertisers is low on that list.
Companies can employ multiple strategies, Lexis and Toyota are car brands under the same entity targeting essentially completely different customers bases with two completely independent advertising budgets.
Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.