Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by johnsoft » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #366

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-…

Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on over 2000 screens with nearly no advertising. Because the production company could not find a distributor, they spent their ad money on renting the screens for a week, with the hope that some people would randomly see it and word of mouth would spread, leading t…

So the movie was bad, and people didn't go see it? Doesn't seem related to advertising.

Eminem released his last two albums without even announcing them. Word of mouth got them both to #1 on the charts.

If you tried that same movie experiment with something like Avengers, I bet the results would look a lot closer to Kamikaze than Delgo.

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

#542

Post by aaronmdjones » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #537

nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

    why do they not go directly to your site but
    instead search for it on a general search engine?

Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in?

My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

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

#543

Post by kergonath » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

accountofme wrote: post #532

coliveira wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, scientists for example also have their whole careers based on the truth of some theories that they use. However, they're willing to put them to proof in different ways. The reason they do so is that they have a high degree of confidence that these theories are true. This cannot be said of people doing advertisement.

Truth is relative. Sampling can skew results. Scientists are people too. We all have flaws.

Truth is an unhelpful concept anyway (in science at least). What’s more useful is the likelihood to get a given result from a given experiment and the ability to make predictions.

And yes, when we put things that way it brings a lot of possible issues with sampling, processing, and measuring (and who’s doing the measuring). Some of these things would be harder to control for in a study of the effectiveness of advertising.

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

#544

Post by pb7 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

aaronmdjones wrote: post #542

pb7 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in? My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

Sounds like a pretty valuable service that connects you to the things you are looking for. Why do you feel entitled to get this for free?

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

#545

Post by nutanc » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #537

nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone.

"If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?"

It's because now mostly people(including me) search for a brand we know and click on the site. Mainly we type in the address bar(without .com) and press enter. The default search engine brings up the list and we click.

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

#546

Post by pests » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #537

nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

Normal users don't type domains, they type where they want to go into the address bar. my aunt will type "google" into chromes url bae to bring up the classic google search page she knows, and then will continue to type something like "jcpenney" into that box.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #59

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by kergonath » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

hertzrat wrote: post #535

accountofme wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth is relative. Sampling can skew results. Scientists are people too. We all have flaws.

If you really believe truth is relative, walk to the grocery store tomorrow without wearing clothes and convince yourself that it will be fine. Or run a lighter under your hand - maybe it won’t burn today? Of course you wouldn’t to those things though because, at the end of the day, we rely on truth for everything we do. We just don’t always know what it is. Relativism is not the same as “it’s hard to figure out beca…

Are you implying that the probability of someone going to a store named and getting out of it without harm is zero? There’s plenty of photographic and video evidence of the contrary. Probably not the best example.

Same for a lighter, there are many factors involved, and playing with lighters that way was a party trick where I grew up.

We use truth as a concept every day as an approximation, but the universe is not bound to follow. Very unlikely things happen all the time.

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

#549

Post by LeifCarrotson » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #537

nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

One justification might be that it creates an environment where everyone but the ad provider loses.

If, hypothetically, Google was more pervasive than it already is, and made their ads more intrusive until consumers overwhelmongly clicked the highest priced ad for a given keyword, and Exotel bought the Ozonetel keyword, Ozonetel would have no choice but to buy ads for its own name. They could also buy ads for the Exotel keyword. The two could get stuck in a bidding war, wastefully sending money to Google when the optimal thing would be to just send users to the site they're trying to reach.

We're long past the point where you should expect users to try to guess domain names and to pretend that Google is just another general-purpose search engine. That universe could be nice but we don't live in it.

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

#550

Post by Reebz » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #332

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really, really not true. Advertising lift has been well studied, especially in metastudies spanning hundreds of digital campaigns across Facebook and Google. These are independent academic metastudies, with hundreds of millions of impression data samples. Positive lift in the range of 0-20% is very common, and many statistical aspects of causal inference on ad impacts are well understood. Negative lift and fl…

Did you read the transcript the for episode and the associated links and notes? They back up their claims with studies of their own as well as metanalysis.

I did, and I think there's a lot of p-hacking going on. Leading with TV advertising is disingenuous at best.

The ebay example twists the concept of user acquisition (new customers) and purchases (new or old customers). It is a common tactic to buy advertisements defensively, for example, if you're a product manager, and have determined that some of your user base are more transactional rather than frequent.

Another pet peeve I have is how they conflate direct response advertising and marketing.