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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

#351

Post by Ericson2314 »

strictnein wrote: post #318
Ericson2314 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Advertising is a terrible zero-sum industry that just distorts market activity. It has little place in capitalism or any other system. Exceptions: - New products deserve some advertising. I would handle that like the patent system. Demonstrate your product is sufficiently different, and get access to some attention economy time slice. Some may say, well what about competition with existing products to bring dow…

Centrally planned economy that also controls speech, based on the patent system. This seems like quite the recipe for success.

Start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa. I don't think this will slippery slope if well done:

- I choose the TV channel, website, etc. to visit, but public space I might have to walk through because it's the only option - In that public space it may be impossible not to see the adds - sight lines in public spaces are public property

Now, one may ask "what about paying someone to verbally advertise in public space". I think that should remain legal, because that does seem like a slippery slope. I'm willing to risk that society won't collapse so far that that highly inefficient form of advertising became cheap enough with destitute surplus labor.

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

#352

Post by wdr1 »

The use of the "fraud" here is curious, as I don't think it's what's most advertisers would use. "Waste" would be a better word.

Fraud generally indicates a bad actor or something the advertiser was unaware of. Claiming to run my ads on the New York Times and instead running them small blogs would fraud.

On the other hand, if I chose to run my ads for wedding dresses on ESPN.com, they would be very effective (they'd have a lot of waste), but that's not really fraud. I made a bad decision.

I read the Uber comments as 2/3rds of their spend was waste, not fraud. That still seems a surprisingly high number, although I wonder how much of it was upper- or mid-funnel, which is notoriously harder to measure.

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

#353

Post by tehlike »

objclxt wrote: post #304
julienfr112 wrote: post #258

There is also one agent problem : manager status is linked to headcount or/and budget. As a head of marketing, you have no interested at all at reducing your ad budget, quite the opposite !

That’s a rather naive way of looking at how corporations work. If you’re the head of marketing and go to the CFO and say “hey, we found a way to get the exact same results we currently get but at half the cost” you can bet you will be rewarded for it.

Headcount is a sad driver for promotions, so managers are not really incentivize to do it. Only the good ones would try to keep the team lean and fast.

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

#354

Post by ggm »

netsharc wrote: post #298
ggm wrote: post #237

For research we made ads which were grey, flat field, and basically said "please don't click on me" and we got astronomical numbers of clicks sometimes. Hmm...

But... reverse psychology works? Wouldn't people be curious what's behind the "curtain"?

Yea, there's some of that.

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

#355

Post by eksabajt »

This related article is excellent – "The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising" by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

> Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing.

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

#356

Post by mgraczyk »

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-…

This is completely false. Large advertising platforms have many A/B tests that show significant differences in consumer behavior between groups that receive different ad treatments.

Ads might be less efficient than some believe, but it's super easy to see that they "work", and advertising platforms do it constantly.

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

#357

Post by pessimizer »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #84
dllthomas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't someone jump at an opportunity to prove the thing/service they provide actually works, unless they were unsure about it themselves? Because everyone is already acting like they know it works, so the only way that experiment can change things is in a way that's bad for the person in question. In that situation, they should (from a local, selfish perspective) be resisting even if they're awfully sure it…

Facebook's ad research team have run a lot of experiments. The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising. They did the first studies in about 2008-10, and have continued running these studies ever since. They even built a tool so that advertisers can run these studies, and get a sense for the incremental impact of their ad. Google have a similar (less full-featured) system. Really,…

> The goal was to demonstrate an impact of in-store sales from internet advertising.

So the goal was to advertise advertising. A more scientific goal would be to see if there was an increase of in-store sales from internet advertising. Instead they were looking to design experiments that would show a positive effect, with the goal of giving advertisers a dashboard so they could run those experiments themselves.

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

#359

Post by pydry »

bigdict wrote: post #327
ericol wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon. I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.

I agree, I remember reading an article or a comment explaining this phenomenon on HN, with examples. Nevertheless it would be interesting if the idea of digital ads being ineffective snowballed to the point where it became like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and led to the demise of large companies that we think of as "giants" or "monopolies".

Or a coordinated "strike" by major ad spenders.

I'll bet that a lot of ad spend is zero sum. They'd probably rather share profits than boost google's.

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