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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

#911

Post by ksec »

jariel wrote: post #890
ksec wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Taste is associated with familiarity and comfort.

I respectfully disagree, I used to work in F&B industry. And product marketing and placement has absolutely no affect on how one think something taste is good or bad. It does however remind anyone next time the walk into store they should buy coke, which does affect sales number. But not taste difference.

My 7 years old nephew hasn't watched a single Coca Cola coke in his life time, but he prefer coke over Pepsi. While my friends daughter ( and her mum ) prefer Pepsi.

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

#912

Post by collyw »

somedude895 wrote: post #872
collyw wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One place where I worked spend a lot on ads, but they also hired some marketing people and a leads conversion person who seemed to be able to quantify how much return on investment they were getting from ads.

Thing is, everybody involved has an interest in making the numbers look good. And it's really easy to make them look good even without faking anything. Just omit the fact that you're counting post view leads, stretch the lookback window, etc

I think he did a bit more of an objective job than that. He compared platforms where we were advertising and I remember that Pinterest generally gave a far better return on investment (than Facebook, which was the main platform we used).

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

#913

Post by Ma8ee »

cortesoft wrote: post #342
Ma8ee wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the products are overpriced?

No, that the product is good enough that it makes enough money to afford expensive advertising. There is a really good essay about this that I re-read quite often: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

It only says that the margin on the sold products are high enough so they can afford expensive marketing. Does anyone seriously believe that the massive marketing for a product like Coca Cola is a sign that it is a high quality product?

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

#915

Post by chanmad29 »

edgyquant wrote: post #738
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, FB ads were worse than useless for my business, all they attracted was 90% fraud. Looking at what business Ozonetel is in (i.e. sales are directed towards business owners), I'm not suprised FB ads were also worthless for you. I get the sense FB ads are really only good for things a consumer might impulse buy (e.g. clothing, games, small gifts, etc.) but anything where the user is probably going to do som…

Facebook ads are the worst from a users perspective. I bought a floor mat through them once and for the next week all the ads were for floor mats. I just bought one I’m not interested in buying another. I bought a PC chair recently with my credit card, now I see a bunch of ads for PC chairs, again, I don’t need another one.

Don't use facebook but surprised how my spouse finds instagram ads super relevant and interesting enough to check them out almost 100% of the time. They are mostly fashion/travel related that she is interested in checking out,if not buying.

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

#916

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #856
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In display, at least. It's not massively common with either Google or Facebook (assuming you avoid their networks), which is part of the reason that both of them make so much money.

I don't think that's true, just that fraud is different on those platforms. I suspect it depends on how you define fraud but certainly if a platform tells me I'm bidding to show adverts to customers who match criteria X, then I expect them to match that criteria. Unfortunately, that's frequently not the case. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...

Your reference talks about a different set of entities, the information from most data brokers is inconsistent and often wrong (much like display).

Because they have first-party information, neither Google nor Facebook suffer as much from this problem (although the most common school attended on Facebook is Hogwarts, so obviously they're not perfect).

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

#917

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

joshspankit wrote: post #859
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, this is the problem. There is no centralised log of what people bought, which is what you'd need to actually fix this problem.

A good argument, but it happens on Amazon when the search, research, and purchase were all on Amazon.

Hmmm, that's really weird. It's probably an edge case that would be complicated to change in that case (never underestimate the power of inertia, especially in ML systems).

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

#918

Post by joshspankit »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #917
joshspankit wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good argument, but it happens on Amazon when the search, research, and purchase were all on Amazon.

Hmmm, that's really weird. It's probably an edge case that would be complicated to change in that case (never underestimate the power of inertia, especially in ML systems).

I feel like it might be almost trivially solved with a “buyer only needs one [for X months/years?]” property on the items.

It would likely have to be added by a human, but still: there are a relatively small number of items that people only need one of.

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

#919

Post by ehvatum »

ajit_singh wrote: post #685
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…

Great initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads. They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and pre…

> Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.

How the hell do I structure my empire so that it out-lasts my reign as obsessive good emperor? I am the one guy who can finally say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good person and a great VP of marketing, but you’ve done such a great job that you’re now just marketing yourself really and you’re fired.”

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

#920

Post by webmaven »

ogre_codes wrote: post #588
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?

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.

> 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.

One of the things I would like the antitrust investigations to dig into is Google's decision to make ads look more like search results, after a long-held principled stance of clear differentiation between the two.

IIRC, Google never did comment publicly on that particular design change.

I'm sure any internal discussions on the topic will be fascinating reading.

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