I wish more companies would try to find out the actual value of advertising and targeting. And it probably won't be as good as FB and GOOG would like us to believe.
BTW, there was a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio which talked about this eBay experiment
Something for the HN crowd that goes beyond articles:
A HBR article[0] which talks about an experiment that eBay did testing if digital ads are effective and the paper that the actual study[1] produced.
This is a look at what a $200k Youtube ad buy will generate for a fictitious brand with 0 prior marketing efforts. Display advertising is so hard (if not impossible for many verticals) to get right.
BTW, there was a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio which talked about this eBay experiment
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/