Right, you won't buy a GHTESKJVFII even if it happens to be the best product

Absolutely not.

Early in my career I worked for a pharmaceutical giant as a statistician. One of the things we would work on was trying to determine how much the various advertising efforts the company did actually moved the needle. Every year was the same miserable experience. The company would spend millions and millions of dollars in various advertising channels. We would attempt to determine how effective it was, but the wayin which they advertised and the way we collected data made it very difficult to generate any kind of insight at all. We would make recommendations as to how to adjust execution moving forward to ensure we could reliably determine how much value we were getting out of these campaigns, all of which would be ignored. They would massage our findings to tell whatever story they needed and would do the same thing the next year.

The marketing division is its own organization, with their own incentives that don’t necessarily align with the broader company’s incentives. They also were heavily addicted to relying on external analytical consultants who could pump out all the slide decks and pie charts they wanted, which would inevitably show that the marketing was not only effective, but should be invested in more the following year.

That doesn't match the behavior I've observed from large corporations.

And as a provider of advertisement surfaces you have every incentive to oversell the reach of your surfaces.

VC firms batting at such a small rate.

"I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half."

That's the ideal, yes.

But the problem with marketing and advertising is that it's impossible to know if a campaign will be a hit - a flop - or the butt of jokes from an entire generation (e.g. New Coke, Jaguar 2025; or it may very well just work despite all the industry naysayers like Apple's translucent plastic look from 1998 - I/we felt no-one would ever buy an overpriced and non-expandable PC that looked like a kid's toy, or a loo-seat laptop.

...of course, what actually happens is the strongest personalities in the C-suite eschew what their MBA course taught them about trusting the experts below them in the org chart; instead they champion their own personal pet ideas, no matter how much predictable damage they'll do to the company's share-price, because they couldn't possibly be wrong; he is the CTO, after-all; very smart!

I doubt it is brand recognition and more an abstract kind of marketing you mean. Esoteric word of mouth.