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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

#581

Post by vkou »

saagarjha wrote: post #397
ABeeSea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. Companies do the experiments. They just don’t publish the results. Why would they? The idea that Amazon doesn’t know the ROI on their ad/marketing spend is laughable.

But then why do they keep doing laughably bad advertising?

Because 50% of advertising spend is wasted, but it's hard to figure out which 50%.

If you're doing an $XY,000 ad campaign, it's a waste of your time and money to figure out which 50% it is.

If you're doing a $XY,000,000 ad campaign, you employ people whose job it is to figure out which 50% it is. The thing is, you usually don't go ahead and pay them to blog about it.

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

#582

Post by moonraker »

For anyone super interested in this topic (and the potential ramifications for Big Tech and society), Tim Hwang (former global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google) wrote a wonderfully in-depth book about this. See the link below: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651

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

#584

Post by Daho0n »

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,…

A system to advertise how good FB's ad system is, built by FB who we know have fudged their numbers before? That isn't proof of anything.

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

#586

Post by notatoad »

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.

There's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product.

Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.

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

#587

Post by wtn »

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

I saw Dialpad

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

#588

Post by ogre_codes »

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?

When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

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

#589

Post by nojito »

johnrgrace wrote: post #187

I 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…

This a flawed way to measure ad spend and roi.

eBay tried what you did and noticed that revenue increase didn’t warrant the ad spending costs required to do so.

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

#590

Post by Daho0n »

mschuster91 wrote: post #392
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coca Cola sells water with flavouring and quite astonishing amounts of sugar. Apple sells nice devices made by what might as well be slave labour. Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. The criticisms of individual campaigns here are missing the point. It's not about micro ad spend, but the perception of value and manipulation of behaviour created by the…

> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all . "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather…

>A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years

This shows that you are just spreading FUD. A Windows machine is no slower after 10 years than it is the day you bought it. Sure you might have added so much software-crap that the software runs slow (which is easily fixed) but the hardware is exactly as fast after 10 years as Apple hardware is. Do you think Apple builds their hardware out of magic and unicorns?

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