yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:

famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'

'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.

so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.

but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.

so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.

the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.

this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.

large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.

the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.

there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.

sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.

but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.

the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.

im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.

the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.

companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.

It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.

so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.

it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.

our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.

So the gigantic incumbents with retail distribution being inefficient makes sense to me. What about the long tail of D2C brands that live on Meta ads? AFAIK, they live and die by their ROAS. I would have to believe that these companies just don't really exist to buy that Meta ads are a "con".