It's amazing how many businesses seem to completely not understand the concept of advertising. It doesn't matter where your clients say they heard about you. It doesn't matter how many people actually clicked on your ad. Advertising is about name recognition.
And it works. It's just not very easy to directly measure its effects on a small scale.
It's one thing for a couple of guys running a pizza place not to grasp this concept, but for a large corporation like GM, it's simply preposterous.
I do not know why you would say that GM does not grasp this, can you explain? GM does lots of impression-based ads all over the Internet which is all about name recognition so they seem to understand what that is about. Do you know something more about why they are saying Facebook is ineffective that I have not read in the media? If any companies in the world should know how to evaluate advertising effectiveness I would expect it to be the auto manufacturers (and car insurance companies who also advertise their faces off).
Advertising isn't about name recognition. It is about getting more people to buy more of your stuff and name recognition may or may not lead to more people buying more of your stuff. If you can't directly tie it to more people buying more stuff than you are selling faith in the power of name recognition. No business is likely to long base purchasing decisions upon faith.
And it works. It's just not very easy to directly measure its effects on a small scale.
It's one thing for a couple of guys running a pizza place not to grasp this concept, but for a large corporation like GM, it's simply preposterous.