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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#161

Post by mattkrause »

notional wrote: post #76
jedberg wrote: post #20

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…

Why does reddit have ads if all ads are a money pit? I understand you no longer work there, but ads started in 2009 I believe, so you perhaps had some input on this?

Owning the pit into which other people throw their money seems like it would be pretty lucrative.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#162

Post by saganus »

rm999 wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2010s I worked in ad tech on a data science team, and one of the things we were pushing for was causal A/B testing; basically turn off a campaign's advertising to a % of people and correlate it with sales to measure ROI. As we were kicking this off I was at a conference chatting with an executive at another ad tech company. His response: "oh yeah I know a guy who tried that, he's not in the industry…

I might be misunderstanding... but, negarive ROI? I.e, the more they spent on ads, the less sales they got?

Feels like a missed something, as that sounds... counterintuivie.

(Not in any way related to the ad industry so pardon my ignorance)

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#163

Post by jrpt »

misterbwong wrote: post #160

Having worked on the publisher side for most of my web dev career, I can say with confidence that most ad spend attribution is a load of crock. Sure people along the line claim to have attribution figured out but, coincidentally, they all attribute your spend to their "value add." The incentives of the current ad system and ad spend attribution for everyone along the chain from publisher => advertiser are all misalig…

Most companies either use a neutral third party attribution product or build their own system. They're not simply trusting the attribution stated by the companies along the line. I agree that those are all biased. I also believe many of the neutral and home grown attribution systems don't work very well.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#164

Post by ghaff »

mumblemumble wrote: post #140
soared wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. P&G, Unilever, Cocacola, etc have never, not once in history, had a gung-ho C level exec who said "Screw it, I'm going to find out if our advertising works". And then either found it works and kept spending, or found out it doesn't work and saved literally billions of dollars. There is so much money at stake that could be either saved or generated, its simply not possible th…

The trick isn't figuring out whether advertising in general influences people's behavior. The trick is in figuring out if any particular advertising campaign generated more profit than it cost to run. Also, there's one alternative that's often forgotten in these discussions: Perhaps game theory is at play. It may be, for example, that, across entire industries, advertising costs more money than it's worth. But that e…

I suspect that a similar dynamic can be in effect with many industry events. Everyone would collectively perhaps be better off with pulling out of or at least scaling back on big industry shows. But that doesn't mean it makes sense for just you to pull out. (And, certainly, your events team probably isn't going to push for scaling back.)

There's also a huge mutual back-scatching thing going on. I remember in a former life we wanted to pass on a big software vendor's user group show because, while we sort of needed their software for some important customers, we got very little traffic at this expensive event. Their CEO called our CEO and basically said to him "Be a pity if something happened to our partnership."

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#165

Post by hermitcrab »

hermitcrab wrote: post #157

Some time back I kept hearing how effective remarketing (aka retargetting / cyberstalking) was. So I did my own (small scale) A/B test and it didn't work for my small business. Fair enough. But the weird thing was that no-one else seemed to have done the same simple A/B test. Or, if they had, I couldn't find it. https://successfulsoftware.net/2014/12/23/remarketing-does-i... It is also widely quoted that you "have to…

I also looked into Twitter demographics back in 2014 and they were clearly bullshit as well:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2014/04/03/twitter-demographi...

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#166

Post by vb6sp6 »

st1x7 wrote: post #83
xyst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impending crash - time to short the entire ad tech industry.

I just don't want to lose the web along with the ad tech industry though.

The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#167

Post by tomaszs »

I don't know now, but some time ago Google consultants told me that I should create an ad that displays when someone searches for my brand name. It was very odd because without it, my page ranked obviously first for the brand name. It may be the case it looks good in ads reports to see paid conversion.

What definitely made me realize what ads are about was when I have installed user interaction tracking on my website. I was able to see what paid ads users was doing.

90% of the traffic was generating users that behaved like bots.

But there is a big marketing and a lot of money for everyone. No one really cares about results. You can find tons of articles how to optimise campaigns that are aimed at SMB.

But no one will mention most of such advice are for companies that spend tens of thousands of dollars per month. Otherwise there is too little data for ROAS or even CPC and CPM optimization. Comparison results for smaller campaigns are just not statistically signifant.

I must agree with the article it is all about perfect crime. No one , including clients, are not concerned about real results. It is like let's throw money into the fireplace and enjoy it is warmer.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#168

Post by adwww »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
jedberg wrote: post #20

There was a freakonomics podcast recently about advertising (online and traditional). No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. In the few cases of natural experiments, where ads got turned off for some people by accident, there was no change in buying behavior. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-1/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-…

> No one is willing to run the experiments necessary The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is. Running the experiment carries a significant risk of exposing that the advertising operations they're responsible for provide much less ROI than they pretend it does. The unwillingness of anyone to run such an experiment is already an answer. Why…

I used to work in this industry.

A small tech team investigated fraud on our platform and developed a system that was pretty robust at detecting and potentially shutting it down. But literally nobody was interested - even the people advertising don't want to know.

The people spending money are typically networks, media buyers, ad agencies, etc, far removed from the actual brand.

There are so many parties who want a slice of the brand's cash that they are all long past caring about whether the ad is being viewed by a human or not.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#169

Post by oli5679 »

This is pretty interesting study at Ebay.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20171/w201...

They tested the counterintuitive claims by performance marketers that 'brand' keywords (containing Ebay) had the highest ROI. They did an experiment and found that, contrary to attribution model, these Ebay keywords resulted in ZERO incremental sales, although they were clicked on by many people that purchased.

This resulted in cut of Ebay marketing budged by $100 mn.

There is now a big literature in economics looking at experiments and natural experiments, generally finding much smaller sales impact of advertising than claimed by industry participants, and genearlly -ive ROI.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20171/w201...

This Freakonomics episode is a nice overview.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#170

Post by ozim »

cbsmith wrote: post #97
polote wrote: post #15

That's what happen when you have too much money to spend and you don't take time to evaluate if money is well spent.

No, it's what happens when the objective is something different. The objective is often to get big ad views & audiences, not to drive performance.

... or deliver value to customers ...
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