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Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
461–470 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's comparing one type of ad or channel to another. But none of them test "no ads" vs "ads".
Some of the A/B tests I have analyzed are exactly "no ads" vs "ads"
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm genuinely shocked at how many people think advertising doesn't work. Just because it doesn't make a person consciously stand up and say, "I want a Snickers" does not mean the ad didn't work. Like, honestly, are there people here suggesting viral ads don't work? Or don't understand the point of Coke or Mercedes Benz ads are for? Coke establishes themselves as the defacto soda. There is no other soda, or if they ar…
I understand the point but the MB example could be off the mark. According to their site [1] they sold more than 2 M cars in 2019. Luxury yes, at least a bit, but a pretty large club. Maybe Ferrari and similar brands? But they do a different kind of advertising. [1] https://www.daimler.com/investors/key-figures/markets/
I don't think they meant that it's a private club.
Personally, I think it's less about luxury and more about value signalling. Having a Mercedes says that you're comfortable financially, and they're "dignified". I'm not saying it's true, but it's what their marketing generally implies. Luxury is generally just a dog whistle for value signalling merchandise.
Ferrari does different value signalling. They imply wealth because of the cars performance, and they're generally a much more obvious signal. They're usually a bold color like red in the ads, and the body styles are distinctive. You could miss a Mercedes in a group of sedans; you're not going to miss the Ferrari.
The private club brand, to me, is Rolls Royce. I would guess because I never see ads (and rarely see them in person), so my only references are pop culture where they're associated with the ultra wealthy.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. That's a philosophical question of whether you consider statistics to be "proof". > No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. You're nuts if you think this is true. I assure you that companies in traditional industries (i.e., without venture capital) can and do run these experiments. The Uber story is about venture capital and its anti-market incentives, no…
Read the podcast transcript. An economist proposed turning off print ads in one market to find out if they mattered, and the head of marketing said he’d rather not know.
Only because the head of marketing realized it would expose his past misjudgments - not because he didn't realize it would actually be a good thing for the company. You'll see this type of behavior in every department - people trying to cover up their mistakes.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
yep, but it is mostly those parts I want back. I can almldt live fine with: - programming blogs that doesn't have ads - Wikipedia - three or four online newspapers/websites that I pay for anyway. - HN - all the old stuff: web rings and enthusiast web sites - I'd probably miss stackoverflow but I use that site less and less these days anyways. Most of the rest can burn and we'd maybe be better off. At least search res…
Wikipedia is constantly running ads. They're just "charity" donation ads so you don't think of them as such, but turn on the TV and you'll notice that charities advertise themselves to get donations all the time. It doesn't make it not advertising. As for HN, how long have you been using it? Are you aware it's ad supported? Some stories are ads, usually for hiring.
> Are you aware it's ad supported?
This is 100% wrong. HN is paid for by YCombinator. Yes, some of the posts are hiring posts, but no one is paying for those.
What pays for HN is the success of the startups that YC invested in.
> Wikipedia is constantly running ads.
This is wrong too. They only run ads in November. The rest of the time the site is 100% ad free.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstand what advertisers are trying to achieve. It's about Brand Awareness. They just want their brand out there and seen. Even click-throughs aren't as important as they once were. Coca-Cola still advertise when they probably don't need to.
I understand the distinction between advertising and building brand awareness. It doesn't sound like Uber was doing the latter. It also doesn't take away that if you're advertising to an audience who'd have come to you anyway, you're wasting your money.
Brand awareness must also be maintained, just like human relationships! How often do you tell a loved-one that you love them? Is once enough, because going by your stance, since you've told them already once before you shouldn't need to do it again!
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, even FB "audience network" ads suck and are fraud ridden. Newsfeed is a fundamentally great format for ads.
However I have not logged into FB in six months because the actual content in my newsfeed is so toxic. I wonder if this will cause things to change, although it seems unlikely.
I last logged into FB in 2017... never going back.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are pretty easy to measure on Google or FB with their "lift study" tools and a conversion pixel. The lift tools will let you create a holdout group of X% of people who should be targeted by your ad. They won't see the ad, but you can still measure the rate at which they convert on your site. Then, you can compare that conversion rate to the rate of people who actually saw/clicked the ad. Conversion pixels are n…
> They won't see the ad, but you can still measure the rate at which they convert on your site. This sounds like such an assumption. There's no guarantee that any one person will ever "convert" on your site. That's such an ugly carrot that FB/G are dangling in front of you. "If you spend enough money with us, we'll eventually show your ad to someone that will absolutely buy your product. Pinky swear, just keep puttin…
Let me explain it a little differently with a hypothetical scenario.
You set up an ad campaign with an audience of 100k people who are already on your mailing list.
You set up a conversion pixel and run the ads. Let's say that Google's tools say that 10% of people who saw the ad converted. That's incredible! But considering that they were already on your mailing list, maybe they were going to buy anyways - or maybe your TV ad is actually what convinced them to buy.
You test for this by creating a holdout group from that 100k. Let's say 5k people. These are people that could have seen your ad, but we're intentionally not going to show it to them. We'll still use the conversion pixel's measurement functionality on them, and we see that 8% of those 5k people buy your product.
Now, we have a clearer picture - the Google ads drive 2% more conversions for your audience - or people on your mailing list who see an ad on Google are 25% more likely to convert than those who don't.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#469Because most advertising is not effective on a 1:1 basis. The clean, direct conversion funnel is in most industries and sectors a complete myth. Advertising is about awareness. All good marketing is long-term. Digital advertising has been sold (by overzealous marketers) as magical 1:1 sales machines. It is almost always not that. This is the hardest thing to convey to clients. Clients want a promise and a guarantee o…
That sounds like a religion: You don't know exactly what you get, there are no guarantees but if you really believe in it (and pay your marketing church tax) you'll probably end up in CTR heaven.
If you meet ad agency people, you will definitely get that cult-like vibe from them. There's a definite slimey feeling to any of their conversations regarding work. I overheard 2 people from different agencies trying to one-up each other with their stories of how much of their client's money they spent on ridiculousness. It wasn't about how they could save their client money and then spend it in other areas. One person I met that worked in ad tech and I told him the efforts with extensions/private mode/vpn/etc to block as much of ad tech as possible. He was totally aghast that people would go to that much effort to block their "harmless" tech. Yet another Kool-aid drinker. I have a feeling chatting with any G/FB employee would be similar.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I suspect the HN sentiment comes from a common feeling among techies that they are somehow immune to influence from advertising, combined with a high adoption rate of ad blockers. I don't believe this at all. The reason I am skeptical of the effectiveness of advertising is despite engaging with dozens of people over the years, I have never had a single person provide me with convincing evidence that it works. Inste…
I manage advertising spend for a small technology company. We spend in the 10's of thousands per month on Google and Facebook.
We can measure customer acquisition cost and we do using normal tools like Google Analytics.
We've had days where we pause our campaigns, and we get fewer new customers that day. We've had platforms pause for a period of time because of some issue, and we get fewer new customers over that period of time.
It's one data point. I'm aware of plenty of other companies with similar results to what we see.