That kind of statement is how you spot someone who doesn't know what advertising is for.

Advertising is either branding or targeted marketing.

Branding is reaching as big an audience as possible in the hope they might become your target market.

Targeted marketing is reaching the part of your audience that you know want to buy your stuff.

For example... A travel client I worked with

They spent €5000 a month on paid ads and made on average €35000 in profit directly from those ads.

A customer would then go on to spend another €100 in ancillaries making them on average another €10500 in profit.

They made 9.1 times what they spent.

Reaching a million people is great but don’t make the mistake of not understanding why people pay for ads.

Usually Ads speed up some kind of sales or lead generation process.

Branding is a different thing.

The goal for branding and targeted marketing is totally different. Therefore the #data you measure is different.

If you wanted to reach 1 million people using paid ads you wouldn't have to spend “absolute fortune”.

It would cost you of course but if you use organic channels it isn't free either.

“My posts reached a million people” might have taken someone a year, posting every day.

Maybe 365 hours a year? Let's say the person charges €100 an hour?

€36500.

A branding campaign with that budget could reach the same amount of people in a week.

That's the point of advertising.