> Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling.

A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be.

And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of money are poured into creating ads and getting ad space, much of which does very little in the getting you to buy sense.

By this measure, advertising is generally very inefficient. Large input for small output. The traditional way to make this more efficient is to increase the value of the output: things like movement of digital billboards (even just rotating through a series of ads) to draw the eye and overcome lack of noticing it among miles of billboards. There's another way: decrease the cost of the input. If I can get the same output—people don't see the ads (bad placement) or people don't remember the product/brand (bad stickiness)—by not using human creatives and using genAI to make my ads, I've improved efficiency.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make advertising more effective or more efficient as an industry and does flood the market with slop, but that's not any individual's goal.

The people who are creating ads that don't work, despite getting paid, are in Bullshit Jobs (in the David Graeber sense). Replacing bullshit jobs with genAI, where the output doesn't seem to really matter anyway. It would be great if people/companies didn't commission or pay to place ads that don't work, but since they do, they might as well spend the least amount possible on creating the content. The value of the input then approaches the (low) value of the output. No one is going to remember the ad anyway, it impacts no buying decision, why bother spending to make it good?

I think a lot of advertising is extremely effective in that it implants the brand in your subconscious through repetition and familiarity. I would much rather go to a local sandwich shop that a Subway, and I've been to a Subway maybe 10 times in my entire life, not once in over 15 years, and am not especially impressed by what I got for the money, and yet every time I go past a Subway my brain immediately goes "ooh look a Subway" and I have to almost deliberately go "no, walk on" to myself.

Which lines up with the rest of what you say that if it's just about hammering the recognition into your grey matter, it's not especially important if the hammer is gold plated.