You raise a good point. This phenomenon is well-documented for at least two decades now on Google search. It is common for brands to buy keywords for their own product. Why? If not, competitors will by the same keywords to direct customers away. As I understand, this has existed for more than 20 years and Google has never been sued for it (that I know). Maybe this is just part of a highly competitive online search market. To be clear: I am not saying that I like or agree with this market outcome as a consumer, but I am merely saying it has existed for a long time and gov't regulators don't seem to really care.

This is what I wonder… the author says that:

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“

But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.

It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.

It’s worse than that. If that employee isn’t standing in the waiting room, handing out coupons some other restaurant’s employee will be standing in the waiting room, handing out coupon for the restaurant next-door.

Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.

The term for this that I heard is:

> Advertising as inference not influence.

People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".

You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.

This reminds me of my dad's story about decades ago as a kid paperboy they had a contest get people to sign up and who ever had the most after a few months would win a bike. He smoked everyone. They were desperate to know how he got so many people to sign up but he refused to tell them.

His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.

This case is even worse than the restaurant parable, because in that one the customer is already pretty much guaranteed and the coupon will give them enhance satisfaction that makes them more likely to come back. In Godin’s case, the customer doesn’t get that $1 and may not even buy the book, they may e.g. just be looking for the page to read reviews or link it to someone else.