Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend • Hacker News Board

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

#881

Post by datagram » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #390

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.

I'm not entirely sure about that, at least not in all cases. I was recently in the market for a new mattress, so went to a mattress store and tried some out. Even though Tempur Pedic is all the rage with their insane ad spending, I was not all that impressed, and found a considerably cheaper mattress that felt much higher quality. Now, this may all be sales mumbo-jumbo, but the sales rep noted that a lot of people co…

I guess that's the thing; for a lot of industries, people aren't generally going to make a purchase without doing some amount of research. Maybe Tempur-Pedic was on their mind when they entered the store, but once they're in the store they're generally going to end up trying out several mattresses. I /love/ my mattress (and have said as much to friends), but I honestly couldn't tell you the brand off the top of my head; I just went to a store and picked whatever felt the best.

One could argue that Tempur-Pedic has to sell at a higher price point to make up for the money they spend on advertising.

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

#882

Post by mumblemumble » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 6:52 PM UTC

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

From somewhere in the warren of links to dang posts I traced out from there:

> I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN.

That one gets me, because I had previously assumed that downvoting for disagreement would be a standard Reddit thing, but that HN's community is supposed to strive toward a more "we're all mature adults here" kind of community standard.

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

#883

Post by mumblemumble » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #486

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…

The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.

> The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag.

I hope not. Some of the most informative, useful comments I've seen on Hacker News have taken the form of wild tangents.

I do see where you're going, though, that if "I agree" is sufficient cause for an upvote, then it's only reasonable that a vote in the opposite direction should be allowed to carry the opposite semantics.

It's just that, from a purely social standpoint, that's not actually how human beings typically think, feel, and react. Perhaps it could be that simple on the Vulcan version of Hacker News.

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

#884

Post by olyjohn » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

dockd wrote: post #878

diarrhea wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a Cortana feature? Nothing pops up for me (WIN key), and a search online reveals it seems liked to Cortana, which I seemed to have disabled.

Start typing "calculator" after pressing WIN.

Win+R - Type in "calc" hit enter. Works every time, not only when Windows search decides to work.

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

#885

Post by hardtke » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

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-…

Lewis and Rao published a meta-analysis of 25 large scale controlled advertising experiment [1]. Here's the abstract:

Twenty-five large field experiments with major U.S. retailers and brokerages, most reaching millions of customers and collectively representing $2.8 million in digital advertising expenditure, reveal that measuring the returns to advertising is difficult. The median confidence interval on return on investment is over 100 percentage points wide. Detailed sales data show that relative to the per capita cost of the advertising, individual-level sales are very volatile; a coefficient of variation of 10 is common. Hence, informative advertising experiments can easily require more than 10 million person-weeks, making experiments costly and potentially infeasible for many firms. Despite these unfavorable economics, randomized control trials represent progress by injecting new, unbiased information into the market. The inference challenges revealed in the field experiments also show that selection bias, due to the targeted nature of advertising, is a crippling concern for widely employed observational methods.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/4/1941/191...

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

#886

Post by swyx » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

diarrhea wrote: post #745

This is now at 700 comments, and no one is talking about the math in the Twitter "thread". Found no mention in the Twitter replies either. Is it just me or is the math hilariously off? [0]: "10% of $150M is $15M". Correct, but do we need a screenshot of a calculator for that, let alone Google? (why do people rely on an internet connection and Google for this?) [1]: Talking about "2/3", but putting in "0.75". So which…

I want to give her the credit of making some sort of dramatic point, but yeah it felt a little condescending.

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

#887

Post by swyx » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #283

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-…

I work in digital marketing and this episode made me want to tear my ears off. First of all, they didn't differentiate between display or PPC advertising. PPC you only pay if the user actually engaged with the ad. Nearly all of the anecdotes they used where about online display advertising - a known crock. And we absolutely run experiments all the time! In fact, we tie our ad spend directly to conversions. If anythin…

since you work in the industry - how about your opinion on the Uber case in the original post? that is PPC.

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

#888

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

diarrhea wrote: post #745

This is now at 700 comments, and no one is talking about the math in the Twitter "thread". Found no mention in the Twitter replies either. Is it just me or is the math hilariously off? [0]: "10% of $150M is $15M". Correct, but do we need a screenshot of a calculator for that, let alone Google? (why do people rely on an internet connection and Google for this?) [1]: Talking about "2/3", but putting in "0.75". So which…

Edward Tufte seems to be here on earth to suffer for some offense in a previous lifetime. To know how badly statistics get abused, to be able to describe it, and be heard by a fraction of people who can't manage to fix the problem either.

No wonder he fucked off to a farm to concentrate on sculptures.

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

#889

Post by maccard » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #832

MisterTea wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(why do people rely on an internet connection and Google for this?) Because most computers lack a copy of bc in /bin.

You think if every computer had bc in /bin, or the equivalent, most people wouldn't still be using Google for math? It's not the lack of tooling, it's the lack of knowing how to quickly get to the tooling. For most people, especially non-technical, Win+"calc"+enter is not intuitive. Ctrl+T+$formula+enter is . That's the difference.

Win+calc+enter searches being for a calculator on my workstation, Win+cal+enter opens a calendar, and Win+calc+enter works fine for me! Yay!

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

#890

Post by jariel » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #814

jariel wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 industr…

Agree with most, >2) Coke, a sugary drink, is largely kept alive by smart marketing, that involves mostly advertising in the end. Not sure I agree. I haven't seen any Coke Cola Ads for years, not online digital Ads and I rarely consume any traditional media. But I will still buy Coke Cola every once in a while. They are also on all of the convenience store with decent positional shelf space or visual merchandising. S…

Your personal situation doesn't represent the market, moreover, you spent 20 years watching coke ads growing up and having coke, it's impossible to tell how that affected you.

You saw 1000 'product placements' for coke without being aware of it in films other things. Taste is associated with familiarity and comfort.