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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

#641

Post by srtjstjsj »

porknubbins wrote: post #553
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?

As a practical matter, search is how 99% of everyone gets to everything. Even if the browser fills in http:// for me so I can just type a name to get a complete URL why would I risk misspelling or mis-domaining a URL and possibly getting a fake or time wasting similarly named site? It doesn’t really matter whether the apple wiki or apple.com comes first because there is no chance I will confuse the two (unlike, say c…

If you trust Google more than your browser and your own self, surely they deserve to make money off the hard work they put in to earn your trust.

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

#642

Post by pnw_hazor »

aaron695 wrote: post #502
pnw_hazor wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

> 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. What safe-harbor carve-out existed 30 years ago for advertising that another industry might have wanted something similar on?

Lying to consumers. Puffery is the legal term of art.

The "reasoning" allowing advertising/advertisers to lie is that it is assumed consumers do not believe it.

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

#643

Post by srtjstjsj »

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-…

You are conflating value of the marginal ad with value of any ads at all.

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

#644

Post by rofrol »

Akababa wrote: post #629
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

ozontel.com doesn't exist. Is that a typo or did a competitor really buy ads to a nonexistent domain?

ozonetel.com

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

#645

Post by pnw_hazor »

aidenn0 wrote: post #512
pnw_hazor wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

It is not fraud to distract from evidence that your product might not work. It is fraud to claim your product works if it doesn't. Therefore ad companies are not going to try to prove that their product doesn't work.

Common law fraud is hard to prove in the US.

All of the elements listed below must be proven. However, some of the comments here describe behavior that comes pretty close.

(1) a representation of fact; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) the representer’s knowledge of its falsity or ignorance of its truth; (5) the representer’s intent that it should be acted upon by the person in the manner reasonably contemplated; (6) the injured party’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the injured party’s reliance on its truth; (8) the injured party’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the injured party’s consequent and proximate injury.

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

#646

Post by rukshn »

I’m not saying Facebook, or online advertising is perfect, I have not run Google ads because most of my audience hangs out on Facebook and Instagram.

I have been running Facebook and Instagram ads for 2 years now for my small business, and what we do is we hyper target the audience, from their age, sex (the business appeals more towards female demographic), to their schools and job (people who work at an office or get a higher income is more likely to purchase)

From this hyper targeting we are able to generate a good amount of sales, sometimes more sales than we can handle.

And since we didn’t do any advertising during the pandemic, we can really see the difference our advertising makes.

I believe these companies maybe targeting a broader audience which maybe diluting the quality to a point where there is no difference between the organic reach and paid advertising reach

(A broader audience may expose your ad to fake accounts, bot accounts) etc.

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

#647

Post by srtjstjsj »

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-…

You are conflating value of the marginal ad with value of any ads at all, and also exaggerating what those articles say

One of them said tracking cookies only boosted conversion 4%, and another said P&G did better with some traditional media advertising than some digital advertising.

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

#648

Post by pnw_hazor »

ascar wrote: post #515
imdsm wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly. It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around h…

I also always thought that downvoting should be reserved for low quality comments, but I had been corrected and even dang said: Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN. [1] I don't really like it, but it has always been the case on HN. The question is if the community voting behavior has actually changed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666145

Downvoting for disagreement is okay? That is new to me. Well okay then. I will proceed accordingly.

Thanks.

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

#649

Post by rlayton2 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #635
joeblau wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I saw Ozonetel Alternative - Dialpad® Official Site... So Dialpad. Pretty sneaky Dialpad lol

It's not sneaky to compete in a marketplace.

I'd argue it is sneaky to put the competitor's name first, as most people will click quickly to move on to the website.

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

#650

Post by TriNetra »

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…

> For ex, one ad network launched “battery saver” style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone.

> When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves.

Isn't above an example of a criminal intent of deliberate fraud?

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