this looks like self-promotional piece by some uber-woke, far left organization trying to 'cancel' conservative voices.
Flagged.
Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
661–670 of 933 posts
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#662I remember reading about ad-fraud on HN. I can't find the post, but they were talking about "ad attribution" and how the ad-world has items that may have some statistical meaning, but it gets lost in the sales pitch. They ended their post by talking about how the bottom will eventually fall out of from under the ad-world in a matter of time. Uber finding this out the hard way doesn't surprise me.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#663Wow, Twitter is such a horrible way of telling an important story.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#664A root cause of this is an overreliance on Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) models, instead of true incrementality experiments:
https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/lower-ad-fraud-will-be-a...
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#665We 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
You still see ads on Google?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. This is entirely false. I work in adtech, and almost all companies run experiments in order to optimize their ad spend (everything from Ad A vs Ad B, to Ad vs No Ad, to Channel A vs Channel B, and more). This isn't to say that advertising always produces ROI. Quite often, experiments will be run that will show a cer…
That's great, thanks for your experience, but can't comment on the argument provided? Isn't it possible that these experiments you talk about are fatally flawed? I have serious doubts that a company can run and do well designed statistical experiments when academic experts are plagued by p-hacking and other foot guns.
I'm not sure what argument you're referring to? I quoted two claims from the parent comment and refuted those based off of industry experience.
> I have serious doubts that a company can run and do well designed statistical experiments when academic experts are plagued by p-hacking and other foot guns.
By "company" are you referring to individual advertisers or digital advertising platforms? Why do you doubt that either are incapable of running well-designed experiments? It's in both parties best interest to spend ad dollars as efficiently as possible.
While it's certainly possible that every one of the 100 million+ ad experiments ran over the past decade have been fatally flawed, it's highly unlikely. I guess the alternative scenario is that digital advertising is one giant hoax being kept secret by the millions of employees who work in the industry, but given how easily tech news leaks, this also seems extremely improbable.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What I think should be made illegal is that Google (and others) is essentially collecting another toll even when users enter in the brand name of the target business in the first place. That is: 1. User types CompanyFoo (whose real URL is www.companyfoo.com) into their address bar, which lands them on Google (because Google owns Chrome and pays billions for the privilege on other browsers). 2. Since Google will sell…
What do you expect should happen? The browser should automatically load the first google search result? Google should prevent companies bidding on their own name? Or that they should make bidding on their own name free?
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#668Earlier 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…
> Google had a clean-room data center specifically for pepsi/frito. Why?
My company provided sales data from stores to a specific team on google that compares it to users who’d been advertised to. This team didn’t want my company to influence results, and didn’t want YouTube to influence results.
More complicated since there are multiple device graphs/etc in play, but effectively tens/hundreds of millions of dollars at play and no one trusted anyone. The largest thing at risk was YouTube’s ad revenue.
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great, thanks for your experience, but can't comment on the argument provided? Isn't it possible that these experiments you talk about are fatally flawed? I have serious doubts that a company can run and do well designed statistical experiments when academic experts are plagued by p-hacking and other foot guns.
IMO large social media platforms are actually much more capable of running these experiments than academics. (Disclaimer: I work on ads at one of these companies). Platforms can accurately determine who engaged with an ad (basic logging on their sites), they have infrastructure to create statistically balanced ad experiments, and can also accurately determine whether a conversion happened (either through a conversion…
I think the difference from academic studies that fail to replicate is less about capability and more about the fact that experimentation in adtech is fundamentally straightforward and occurs under far more idealized conditions - those you mentioned, plus massive sample sizes and easy iteration - than most academic research.
Of course, this just reinforces your point that experimentation in adtech is largely not subject to the same issues that have fueled the replication crisis in academia.
(I'm a data scientist but not in adtech.)
Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that a lot of times they act like they are the trademarked brand in the ad to trick the user. This is unethical and should be illegal.
That not only should be illegal, it is. Using somebody else's trademark in a way that could decieve a customer into thinking your product is theirs is like the definition of infringement. But from what I've seen, the vast majority of ads that incorporate a competitors trademark are not doing that, and making it very clear they are advertising an alternative to the trademark being referenced.
This seems like a positive thing imo. A lot of adverts are formatted as "Tired of x? Check out Y!". I see no way this is infringement and its a net benefit to the world since it shows people new things without tricking them.