You know, I do online marketing and buy a lot of ads - YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Adwords, Bing, banner space on websites...etc. A shit ton of people click on ads and buy things.
What surprises me is that many people - who have bought things after hearing about them from GASP advertising - will say stuff like, "Who buys the stuff on the ads?!" the answer is, YOU do.
What people tend to do is look at an ad that doesn't interest them, doesn't fit their demographic, or doesn't apply to them in the moment and think, "Who the fuck buys this shit."
But if they're hungry and see an awesome food ad for a spot down the street with a grand opening special, or they are looking for a new protein powder and see a new brand pop up on their screen with X% off the first purchase and free shipping, or they're trying to figure out how to bring their brick and mortar business into eCommerce and see an ad to sign up for a free online webinar, then regularly about 5% to 25% (sometimes more ) will click on the ads. And, about 2% to 10% of those who click, will purchase the product/service/subscription.
Advertising is about relevancy.
The best online advertising is still email marketing - people who volunteer their email to you in exchange for valuable (free) information, and who are properly sent valuable offers and information regularly, convert the highest into long-term sales.
People scoff at this too, but the best OFFLINE advertising is still direct mail. Direct mail still works amazingly. Surprisingly for many is that, because of the Internet, direct mail works even better. People get less mail now (and less junk mail) so they tend to pay more attention to it.
Mail is typically opened by the person in any house to makes the decisions - the man/woman paying the bills.
Not only that, mail can provide valuable offers that prompt recipients to go online in order to take advantage of offers, which ads to the ability to track conversions even better.
Conversions through mail are at about 2% to 8% and make companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
So, when people say, "Oh - I didn't think anybody 'fell' for that" it's silly, because everybody buys based on advertising. If not them, then someone else who referenced it, and THEY learned about it through advertising.
The only reason people get surprised that certain ads in certain places work so well, is because it didn't apply to them at the time.