I see a lot of criticism of his particular angle of attack, but not much consideration of another possibility: YouTube ads may just not work very well. Maybe most ads don't really work very well. Maybe the vast majority of the money spent on advertising has been, in fact, wasted, and as we get better and better at tracking the results, we get better and better visibility on the fact that advertising just doesn't work very well.
The problem being that the people who made it their profession, really don't like that idea, and thus it is not in their interest to see this fact.
Dealing with ads is one of my professions. And I would be the first to admit that it’s full of waste and fraud and misleading information and people trying to spin things positive. In many situations, it doesn’t work.
The thing is that often it does work, and this business seems the type that probably has a least a few moves they could make with positive ROI.
What’s driving everyone nuts is he’s doing all this work and analysis but seems unwilling to stop making the most obvious basic rookie mistakes. Repeatedly.
You call it a possibility then end with saying "fact".
What's more likely: That this company with a tiny budget had no idea what it was doing, or that a 12-figure industry with 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet is all fake?
Advertising is a core driver of every successful company and there are 100s of petabytes of data generated everyday proving it works. Even without any fancy analytics, measuring that every dollar spent returns more than a dollar in sales is about as simple as it gets.
This company's problem is that they need to learn how to do it right.
The problem being that the people who made it their profession, really don't like that idea, and thus it is not in their interest to see this fact.