According to Michelle Greenwald, the CEO of Catalyzing Innovation, a global, cross-sector innovation hub, for advertising to be "effective," it must be:

• Memorable;
• Resonate with consumers by ringing true and delivering a personally meaningful message, even if the brand has a huge target audience like Nike's;
• Communicate how the product or service fits into consumers' lives or work to make them better, more productive, happier, and more fulfilled;
• Stand for values above and beyond the product or service itself;
• Be inextricably linked to the brand, so the ad won't be attributed to a competitor.

But most of the ads we see on 'Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Real Ads' and 'Advertisements that look like sh*tposts' fulfill just the first requirement.

Greenwald thinks that great ad campaigns are often founded on deep psychological insights. The messages, delivered in novel and thought-provoking ways, increase the odds they'll be shared virally by brand fans, who further add credibility and awareness.

Furthermore, great campaigns help brands avoid being commoditized and compete only on price. They increase loyalty and good will, and can encourage purchases across more items within the brand umbrella too.

Lately, 'Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Real Ads' and 'Advertisements that look like sh*tposts' have been featuring a lot of online campaigns. Which is understandable, considering that 2021 was great for digital marketing.

As work, play and shopping shifted online during the covid-19 pandemic, internet advertising boomed. In America, for example, spending rose by 38%, to $211bn, compared with average annual growth of 21% in the preceding five years.

Social media firms such as Pinterest and Snap at times hit triple-digit year-on-year quarterly revenue growth.

Even giants such as Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta (Facebook’s and Instagram’s), which receive a third and a fifth of the world’s digital-ad dollars, respectively, clocked rates of 50%.

But 2022 is a different story. On July 21st, Snap reported that its sales grew by 13%, year on year, in the second quarter, its most anemic ever. In a letter to investors, its execs confessed that so far this quarter revenue was "approximately flat." The market was spooked, and the company’s share price fell by almost 40%.

The next day, Twitter, which also depends on advertising, reported that its revenue had fallen slightly in the three months to June, compared with last year.

These numbers triggered concern about the health of online advertising, dragging down the share prices of the biggest industry names.

On July 26th, Alphabet duly disclosed Snap-like quarterly sales growth of 13%, down from 62% in the same period last year. That was less terrible than expected (its market value rose by 8% on the news) but still pretty bad (it remains a bit below what it had been before the Snap bombshell). A day later, Meta said that its revenue declined for the first time, by 1% year on year.

Upstart challengers like Snap are the most exposed — when marketing budgets get trimmed, advertisers tend to stick to what they know, and they know Google search much better than they do Snap's experiments with augmented reality. The big firms also boast larger and more diverse audiences; Meta serves 10m advertisers globally, compared with Snap’s estimated 1m or less. That protects them somewhat from softening demand. Somewhat, but not entirely.

For years, big ad-sellers shrugged off blips in the broader economy, as many customers came to see online ads as a virtual shopfront that needed to be maintained even in tough times—often at the expense of other ad spending. That has left ever fewer non-digital ad dollars available to be diverted online. In a pinch, advertisers may now, therefore, need to take an axe to their digital billboards. However, I don't think that 'Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Real Ads' and 'Advertisements that look like sh*tposts' will run out of content any time soon.