I'm not in the advertising industry, so my knowledge is quite limited. But TV adds do work. Are you in the US? "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza, Papa Johns." I even know what Papa John looks like. Then there's the surveys they send out to consumers like "Which of these brands have you heard of?" and that kind of stuff. They can loosely extrapolate advertising penetration with that information.

There's always going to be some portion of advertising that is ineffective. Not everyone is going to see every commercial or read every piece of junk mail (junk mail being the bottom end of traditional effectiveness, I think, but they have these coupon envelopes that have local small businesses and I'm pretty sure those are quite effective).

As far as TV/Radio, they have lead in and lead out commercials. Those commercials closest to the content are most valuable.

> Speaking of, by far the most popular "videos" on YouTube are music videos.

Totally agree here. I've never tried to advertise on YouTube (or most media, for that matter, not my industry), but smaller niche channels seem to be good at picking up their own sponsors and advertisers. Similar to how some radio shows do live reads of advertising material. The "My Pillow Guy" buys a lot of these, same with Sherri's Berries.