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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

#711

Post by ARandomerDude »

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

But we all tried it. So that was either a mistake or pretty good advertisement from the op.

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

#712

Post by Nextgrid »

ghaff wrote: post #375
joe_the_user wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the "advertising doesn't matter" argument is that there are situations where advertising absolutely matters - when a company is just starting out and there's no way they can get organic referrals, when the public is unaware of their existence, etc. Moreover, most companies started small at some point so advertising and maintaining advertising made sense up to a point. And if we look at those companies…

Furthermore, many of the people who say they hate advertising also hate PR and other sort of marketing campaigns. So presumably their theory is that people should build something and just hope people will discover them somehow.

> Furthermore, many of the people who say they hate advertising also hate PR and other sort of marketing campaigns. So presumably their theory is that people should build something and just hope people will discover them somehow.

Could it be that people simply don't like being interrupted and having their time wasted, whether it's by ads, marketing or PR? Just because you have a business to grow shouldn't give you the right to waste my time.

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

#713

Post by UpsilonAlpha »

johnsoft wrote: post #541
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are not fair comparisons. Eminem and the Avengers have already established identities. Music cannot even compare to movies due to the sheer quantity of modern musicians. There are plenty of fantastic (IMO) bands out there that release music without advertising and they get nowhere.

As for movies, Avengers got to where they are today through lots and lots of advertising.

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

#714

Post by Grustaf »

dannyw wrote: post #627
nl wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. Google search ads are rarely malicious - Google does a pretty good screening them.

I disagree. When searching for crypto related terms, more often than not I see phishing sites as ads than legitimate ads.

That is inevitable since 99% of crypto sites are scams...

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

#715

Post by Grustaf »

swiley wrote: post #576
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.

Google ads are just links to sites, there’s absolutely no malware.

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

#716

Post by perfmode »

qeternity wrote: post #207
kmeisthax wrote: post #43

I think a lot of this was already obvious to slightly-savvy mobile app users. Look at pretty much any free-with-ads app; a majority of the ads are going to be ads for other free-with-ads apps, many of which you already have installed. The thing is, outside of the Internet most ad spend is for marketing ubiquity, not direct response. You don't really buy, say, TV advertising with the expectation of getting so many cli…

I suppose this is true in the same sense that the purpose of life is to waste oxygen.

this confirms the previous post if you subscribe to the idea that the purpose of advertising is to waste oxygen

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

#717

Post by benjam47 »

alacombe wrote: post #302
qeternity wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A negative ROI just implies that the ratio of benefit/cost is less than one. If I incur a cost/investment of $100 but it creates value of $200 then I have an ROI of 100%. If this same expenditure instead only produced $80 value then I would have -20% ROI as in the value I’m realizing from my investment is 20% less than the cost of the investment.

Ratio can't be negative, they can either be above of below 1. What you are talking about is "$benefit - $cost", not "$benefit / cost".

Ratio can't be negative, but ROI can. Positive ROI is the percentage of the ratio being 1 or higher. Negative ROI is the percentage of the ratio being less than 1.

Or, from a "common sense" perspective, if I spent $1000 on advertising, and earned $100 in revenue from that investment, my ROI is definitely negative.

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

#718

Post by Nextgrid »

cbsmith wrote: post #77
cortesoft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of traditional advertising IS pretty much to waste money, similar to how the point of a peacock's tail feathers are to waste resources... it is a signal to potential partners (business or romantic) that they are so capable they can waste resources. It is a signal of bonafides.

It's also an important signal to consumers.

The problem is that it is no longer true with online ads. The barrier to entry in online ads is non-existent and thus seeing an ad for a product should not be considered a trust signal (if anything, it should be the opposite) unlike on TV or print where the price of such ads works as an effective filter.

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

#719

Post by masonic »

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,…

Heh. Just today, FB served me an ad claiming to be Macy's and talking about their closeout specials, accompanied by dozens of mourning comments. It was all phony.

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

#720

Post by masonic »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #245
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 advertising in some form certainly works. If you can determine that approach "A" that everybody is doing is actually a waste of money but approach "B" is effective, then you can develop services around approach "B" and market them based on these findings.

Advertising that does not actually reach the claimed consumer, by definition, cannot possibly work.
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