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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

#251

Post by gnicholas »

I recently read Subprime Attention Crisis, [1] which talks about the ways in which advertising is opaque and may be leading to a bubble. In particular, the author draws parallels to the mortgage crisis of 2008. He doesn't say a catastrophic event is necessarily imminent or even inevitable (it could slowly deflate, either by design or by chance). But it has made me think that at some point there will be a tipping point and there will be a mass exodus from online advertising.

This will have big impacts on businesses like FB and Google, whose businesses have been designed around ad revenue. It would be interesting to envision what a social network would look like if they weren't incentivized to gather data about you for the purpose of advertising.

1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374538654?tag=macmillan-20

2 [video about same]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dlJ4sHfSk

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

#252

Post by walshemj »

isoprophlex wrote: post #102
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #50

You can A/B test ads pretty easily, and this is quite common. With some degree of statistical certainty, you can tell how one ad performs to another. You don't have control over your SEO results as well - but you can also measure against SEO traffic with a high degree of certainty. All big companies do this. Sure, you're never going to know exactly how many people you advertised to would have organically, eventually…

Did you actually read the linked tweets?! Uber turns off a shitload of ad spending, nothing bad happens to new user acquisitions. I'd say there are about a million better uses of a million dollars than just pissing them away on a scam.

Paying for crappy app installs on shady sites is not really advertising.

What they should have done was a proper hyperlocal SEO campaign like Firestone Gieco, and Mc Donalds do.

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

#253

Post by skinkestek »

Tell this to the poor scammy-dating-site-slash-mail-order-bride-site operator who has been sold 10+ years of impressions on me:

- an extremely happily married man

- with multiple small children

- in a rather conservative church

Sometime during the last two years they finally stopped advertising to me. I've always blamed their marketers - or Google for being so utterly incompetent as to not pick up any of the available, extremely strong signals sent out - including me reporting the ads as irrelevant on a number of occasions, but maybe I should blame it on incompetent middlemen?

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

#255

Post by throwaway201103 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #206
treis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively every restaurant in the US has to pay either PepsiCo or Coca Cola. Similarly, if you want to buy a non-alcoholic beverage at the grocery store it's mostly down to those two (with Dr. Pepper having a much smaller but still significant stake). Any competitor that emerges just gets bought up by one of the three. Apple's half of the phone Duopoly. Either you pay them or pay Google if you want a phone and want…

Yes. But in fairness I retracted rent sneaking as a combination of monopolization, bonafied rents, addiction, and just shear damn inertia contributes to the malaise. Calling it all "rent seeking" is not a hill I want to die one.

"Rent sneaking" is an interesting typo. Going to have to give some thought to how to use that term in appropriate context.

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

#256

Post by DanBC »

wasdfff wrote: post #217
thrav wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an interesting question there about when this form of advertising becomes obsolete. Uber is in a very different position than many other companies. Anyone who browses the internet with regularity is already aware of their existence and probably just needs the right set of circumstances to come together to make Uber useful to them. I suspect the results would be different if Uber were earlier in their adoption…

Likewise, I probably haven’t seen an ad for coca cola or kleenex in a while. Once a brand is ubiquitous to the point where soda becomes coke and tissues become kleenex in the lexicon, it feels like ad spend is wasted.

Coca Cola spends billions on ads.

8 million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg4Mq5EAEzw

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

#257

Post by walshemj »

adwww wrote: post #168
Nextgrid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Agency or client side?

I assure you the big brands CFO's take a huge amount of interest in what is spent on advertising.

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

#259

Post by jasode »

>Stopped [some] Spending on Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?

[Added "some" for clarity.]

Let me try to restate the author's article because he presents it in a confusing way.

The issue is that both Google and Facebook have "core ad tech" that works decently with proven ROI -- and they both have "additional ad tech inventory" (a.k.a the partners/affiliates) that's much lower quality:

Facebook "quality" ad placements on their core platforms with decent ROI:

- ads in Facebook Newsfeed

- ads in Instagram feed

The "questionable" ad placements with much lower (possibly zero) ROI:

- ads in Facebook Audience Network

(Here's an example screenshot in Facebook's Ads Manager to visualize the options above: https://storage.googleapis.com/website-production/uploads/20...)

Same concept applies to Google AdWords. The adwords clicks on "google.com" perform better than the ones coming from partner websites. The lower quality ad tech in partner networks has more bots, more scam websites, more fraud, more negatives, etc that reduce ROI.

Bottom line is... if you're buying digital ads, you need to understand exactly what type of clicks you're paying for and how it actually performs.

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