That's an interesting point, and I definitely think that sponsoring an event attended by your target audience is a big step up from TV or billboards.
Now this gets heady: "People are willing to pay a premium for things they can track." Perhaps advertising vectors which are easily tracked, thus optimized, yield more valuable per dollar spent. If this is the case, demand for this inventory (Adwords, etc) increases. You would expect it to become more expensive by forces of the market. This is why you don't see people lined up to fill billboard inventory, especially in the last 10 years.
It is a chicken-egg problem in some ways, but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.
> but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.
Yeah. This makes /absolute/ sense if you are actually tracking what you want to track. (e.g. I think that when I buy adwords, most of the conversions are from people that had a good chance of buying from me from the organic results; I believe that people only buy from me if they've heard of me before; if my brand reputation, in their mind, is good enough.)
My theory is that most trackable advertising that exists now does not really track as well as you think it does.
If I'm right, then trackable advertising is overvalued (because the actions that are tracked are only peripherally related to the buying decision.) - of course, right now most people disagree with me.
Now this gets heady: "People are willing to pay a premium for things they can track." Perhaps advertising vectors which are easily tracked, thus optimized, yield more valuable per dollar spent. If this is the case, demand for this inventory (Adwords, etc) increases. You would expect it to become more expensive by forces of the market. This is why you don't see people lined up to fill billboard inventory, especially in the last 10 years.
It is a chicken-egg problem in some ways, but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.