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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

#571

Post by nuclearnice1 »

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com

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

#572

Post by arsonaut »

ebay did the same years ago and found out that ads were relevant depending on the new/repeat cohort of visitors.

the ad market is looking a lot like the 2008 subprime market, lots of opacity, lack of accountability across all actors (Agency, platforms, customers). And if we consider how relevant is the ad money in making the internet able to run nowadays, this starting to be pretty concerning.

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

#573

Post by davidmurdoch »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #571
nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

> searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) Tried it. One ad. From ozontel.com

Same

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

#574

Post by pb7 »

nutanc wrote: post #570
pb7 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV. >More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be?…

"if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?" Apple is a common noun in the English language. So I would assume the first result to be Wikipedia or some site which gives the best details about apples. The second result could be Apple.com or whoever has applied for the keyword.

Thank you for answering. But that is inconsistent with what you said about your brand appearing first before any ads. In Apple’s case, are competitors allowed to bid on this keyword, since it is a common noun in English? Why or why not? I assume your brand is not a common word in the English language but what if it is in another language? As you can see, I can continue muddying the waters until it’s not so trivial to make a decision on these things — especially automatically.

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

#575

Post by bhouston »

Pxtl wrote: post #562
1f60c wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) DHH (of RoR and Basecamp fame) has been beating the drum about this for a while now.

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

I first ran my such Google Ad in 2005. And yeah our competitor at the time was pissed.

Google makes money with these so they allow it as long as the ad text does contain the trademark.

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

#576

Post by swiley »

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

We're probably not in your target market but most people here probably know anything marked with "ad" is very likely to contain malware and probably won't click it even if they think it goes where they want.

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

#577

Post by andrewflnr »

amelius wrote: post #314
toast0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the Pepsi Refresh Project of 2010. Where Pepsi redirected a sizable amount of ad budget (including super bowl ads) to community projects. They abandonded this strategy after a while because they lost market share. This is the biggest large scale test of advertising I'm aware of. But it probably doesn't apply to all products.

They only lost market share because everybody else was still using advertising. Therefore, this is not a test in favor of advertising (only in the prisoner's dilemma sense).

If you're running a company, "just stop being in a prisoner's dilemma" is not one of your options.

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

#578

Post by jariel »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #139
soared wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. P&G, Unilever, Cocacola, etc have never, not once in history, had a gung-ho C level exec who said "Screw it, I'm going to find out if our advertising works". And then either found it works and kept spending, or found out it doesn't work and saved literally billions of dollars. There is so much money at stake that could be either saved or generated, its simply not possible th…

Fortune 500 is a cesspool of insane inefficiency balanced by equally ~~insane rent seeking~~ insanely secure revenue. The sooner everyone understands this, the better.

The answer is not complicated, and the logic on this board is strained by people I think that don't work in marketing.

1) Advertising works.

2) Coke, a sugary drink, is largely kept alive by smart marketing, that involves mostly advertising in the end.

3) Much of advertising is quite wasteful, because it is a fuzzy instrument - but on the whole, good marketing works.

4) There is a lot of self-awareness in the industry on this, and no doubt, a lot of borderline fraudulent actions by participants willingly spending money they know doesn't work.

5) Ad networks will happily sell you ads that don't work, and look the other way when there are shenanigans.

The problem here in the thread, is that people are having a hard time grasping how all of these things can be true at the same time, but it's not that hard really.

That some ad spending turned out to be 'not useful' is 'not news' when everyone knows that easily 50% of ad spending is probably wasted, we usually just don't know which 50%.

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

#579

Post by seppin »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
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-…

> 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…

This is no industry with as much snake oil BS as adtech.

It also happens to be the sole form of revenue all of the largest tech firms enjoy.

No wonder there hasn't been a real audit.

Also, all those marketing execs buying all the ads would be out of a job too, so they aren't speak up either.

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

#580

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bsenftner wrote: post #523
rm999 wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2010s I worked in ad tech on a data science team, and one of the things we were pushing for was causal A/B testing; basically turn off a campaign's advertising to a % of people and correlate it with sales to measure ROI. As we were kicking this off I was at a conference chatting with an executive at another ad tech company. His response: "oh yeah I know a guy who tried that, he's not in the industry…

As a person with just shy of a stats graduate degree, the early 2010's were a nightmare of trying to get ad tech companies to grasp their incompetency. I met a dizzying number of slick talking frauds and became quite jaded.

Ok good, it wasn't just me being overly negative (because I usually am). I am not a stats grad, my math is weak, but it didn't look good to me, and I tried to get my employer to bring a stats specialist in to analyze. That got a cold response.
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