During the 2010s, Facebook found a few answers to this problem. First, it invested heavily in developing metrics to convince advertisers that its advertisements were valuable even though people weren’t clicking on them. A well-funded “Measurement and Insights” Department endeavored to prove that Facebook was creating brand awareness, even without conscious notice of ads, let alone clicks. Its head, Brad Smallwood, would tell advertisers that “99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw but did not interact with ads,” claiming to prove “that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.” In this way, Facebook left much of the hard selling to Google, or The Huffington Post, while itself posing as heir to the MacManus tradition of branding.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1008