I’m continually haunted by a fear that online advertising is a bubble propped up by fraud and willful blindness, and that when it eventually pops it’s going to destroy all our careers.
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
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
I have noticed the same thing over the last four or five months. I’ve been curious if a voting ring has sprung up on HN or maybe a COVID impacted demographic suddenly has a lot of time to patrol the site, or if it’s something else. It would be really interesting to have some anonymized voting data to analyze and see how downvotes map to accounts, geography, and economic trends over time. Though voting data must be re…
There are whole bureaus setup offshore to scan sites and down vote or flag anything they deem negative to their clients . . .
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web existed before the adtech industry. It will live after it.
As a smoking crater maybe. The web was orders of magnitude smaller before the adtech.
The web was small because it wasn't filled with ads, blogspam, clickbait, etc. So much stuff out there is just pure garbage.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#454There 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.
This is incorrect.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#455You 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.
Literally lighting them on fire in a cold office to help provide some BTUs would’ve been a better use of that money, since at least that would offset spending somewhere else.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#456I’m continually haunted by a fear that online advertising is a bubble propped up by fraud and willful blindness, and that when it eventually pops it’s going to destroy all our careers.
So think about how many ads you've clicked through in your lifetime on the internet.
Honestly, I'm with you. I have no idea who's using the ads other than logrolling robots.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is creeping pretty close to the legal definition of fraud. But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today. edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
> " edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true. " It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're boring. "I knew this years ago, look how my cynicism is superior to your naievite" is a boring comment to read. You could explain why you think this is any closer to fraud compared to selling anything else and claiming it's the best in its class,…
Ehhh, get off my lawn, arsehole.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#458Together with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective? EDIT: Tweaked the wording regarding the alleged "coordinated takedown" as a reaction to a comment.
> it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on.
Oh please let it be so, even though it's just a wild ass guess. Ad "tech" has ruined the internet (only slightly hyperbolic). Oh to be able to recover the "innocence" of the late 90s internet. Maybe I should just stop browsing so I can spend more time yelling at the kids to get of my lawn
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#459I have this suspicion that mobile ads have way weaker effect than claimed. No-one in adtech has any interest in finding out. Marketers don't want to lose budgets or importance either. So a lot of money is wasted on annoying people. How sad.
I think the problem is that the overwhelming majority of digital ad formats just don’t work. Does anyone who works in digital ad tech genuinely believe that these formats work? I have been here for the last ten years and have come to believe they do not, certainly not comparable like traditional linear TV or print in their heydays. There are exceptions. I think Google search ad works so well it’s eating the product.…
Digital advertising is super effective for mobile ftp games. It is not a question if they work, it’s a question if the game can earn enough to justify the cost. Companies in that space have a super smart team of economists and data scientist constantly checking when a mobile app is worth advertising.
Someone in this thread said no one has proved to them that digital ads are ever worth it. My experience is that when they are you don’t want to advertise it to potential competitors or the people who carry your ads.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#460I work at a fortune 50 company, a top 10 advertizer. We have a universal holdout poplation that NEVER recieves any directed/targeted marketing that serves as a control group for many marketing programs. Further in more mass areas there are direct A/B tests that go on. There is a very strong awareness of campaigns that are measurable with ROI's and other programs that are general branding that you can see the impacts…
Measuring as spend ROI is standard practice on any large scale ad campaign. The trick about having a holdout population is a neat twist. It boggles my mind when HN commenters start claiming that measuring ad campaigns is impossible or that ads are universally ineffective. Anyone who has spent time working with large ad campaigns should know the tools and methods used to measure these things. I suspect the HN sentimen…
Every campaign has TWO holdouts. First, the universal holdout who gets nothing from any campaign, and a second additional holdout who doesn't get a specific campaign but gets other campaigns. We have an entire group of people designing the holdout matrix to make sure they are sound and don't cross over. That's the elementry school version of things.
The graduate level stuff we run is using decioning engines with adaptive models down to EACH email, switching up not just offers but also ad copy, images, time of delivery etc. that drive VERY complex holdout matrix's which can limit the number of things we can test at once.
One of the executive decisions is when or if the drop customers out of holdout populations. Usually keep the holdout going for X period of time as a standard practice, but if a campaign is showing very strong response we might drop half the holdout if we can still make a read on campaign. We have a formal notice of decision that is published when this happens. Holdouts have alot of opportunity cost, but finance doesn't see those numbers.
Some of the digital exhaust from our primrary product can be used to solve marketing attribution issues for major brands in an area that has until now lacked attribution. Our product beta is just hitting the market.