As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.

As I see it, it is like gambling. If you pay for keywords of a rival brand and you get conversions from it to make it worth your while then you can keep paying for those keywords. So yes, it is a data driven decision.

However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.

I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.

In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.

Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.