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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

#521

Post by jtsiskin »

dylan604 wrote: post #480
earthboundkid wrote: post #262

The only sane way to do advertising is to do what’s done on TV: you buy a time slot based on estimated impressions and then a third party auditor (Nielsen) uses surveys to get a better after the fact number. Doing sales based on server traffic is just pointless. You get what you pay for (a server moving bits around), and not a damn thing more.

Are Nielsen surveys still a thing? Every single device that displays a video signal to you has been tracking what you watch since way before ad tech became a thing. The companies collecting that data then profit from that collection. As an anecdote, I have AT&T Gigaverse. I primarily only watch recorded material on the DVR, and only watch sporting events live. However, once I'm done watching a signal from my "cable b…

This is probably a waste of electricity?

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

#522

Post by nutanc »

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 competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

In our early days we used to be scared and bid for it.Lost a lot of money doing that. Then we talked about it and stopped. Again, no change in customer acquisition. Turns out, customers scroll down the ads and still click on our website.

Are our competitors getting some of our traffic?

Of course.

But my business is not built on the assumption that people will not find my competitors. Its built on the fact that people will explore options and try to find the best fit for them. So its ok.

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

#523

Post by bsenftner »

rm999 wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2010s I worked in ad tech on a data science team, and one of the things we were pushing for was causal A/B testing; basically turn off a campaign's advertising to a % of people and correlate it with sales to measure ROI. As we were kicking this off I was at a conference chatting with an executive at another ad tech company. His response: "oh yeah I know a guy who tried that, he's not in the industry…

As a person with just shy of a stats graduate degree, the early 2010's were a nightmare of trying to get ad tech companies to grasp their incompetency. I met a dizzying number of slick talking frauds and became quite jaded.

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

#524

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

It's a subset of the misunderstanding of "meritocracy" that defines it as "how well you can do at a narrowly-defined task" as opposed to the practical definition of "How many people know how well you do at a narrowly-defined task."

Our industry is shot-through with idealists who believe meritocracy should be the former, when in reality it's always been the latter (and always will be, unless someone can invent omniscient humans).

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

#525

Post by dang »

ericol wrote: post #321
bigdict wrote: post #297

Together with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 it might appear like there's a coordinated takedown of ad tech companies going on. Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective? EDIT: Tweaked the wording regarding the alleged "coordinated takedown" as a reaction to a comment.

I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon. I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.

Yes, this was just a standard follow-up [1] and we did the standard counter-follow-up, which is to merge the threads.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...

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

#526

Post by shadowgovt »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #215
kortilla wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Coca Cola rent seeking? How about Apple? I suspect you aren’t using that term correctly but maybe I’m missing something.

Coca Cola sells water with flavouring and quite astonishing amounts of sugar. Apple sells nice devices made by what might as well be slave labour. Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. The criticisms of individual campaigns here are missing the point. It's not about micro ad spend, but the perception of value and manipulation of behaviour created by the…

This analysis excludes glossy packaging and status signalling from the inherent superiority, when (in terms of overall market value) they're part of the superiority.

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

#527

Post by nkozyra »

syshum wrote: post #264
walshemj wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agency or client side? I assure you the big brands CFO's take a huge amount of interest in what is spent on advertising.

In my experience the Sales and Marketing teams of any large company have the loosest restrictions on how they account for their spending. Other dept;s like IT have to justify every penny, but Sales and Marketing not sooo much

I think there's a very loose belief that sales is how money is made, while they people that build and test products are pure expense.

I've seen it not just in the phenomenon you describe, but also in layoffs and restructurings.

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

#528

Post by shadowgovt »

megameter wrote: post #496
mschuster91 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are propped up - actually maintained - by huge and vastly expensive brand management strategies. In the case of Coca Cola, I agree - in the case of Apple, not at all . "Keyboardgate" aside, their products are vastly superior to the competition in build quality and life time. A typical Windows laptop is unusable after two, three years (almost all are made from plastic which breaks or looks extremely ugly rather…

Apple isn't repairable. Apple devices have high prices simply because of the brand ecosystem. Old Thinkpads use commodity parts - but they command good prices because they are repairable. Marketing the new thing is what Apple does. It is good at it. That is not the entire spectrum of customer value.

Thinkpads are pretty much the worst form factor for a laptop that doesn't transition into "toy" space.

Source: forced to use one daily. If I could get a Mac laptop running Linux but with the input smarts of the Apple trackpad and keyboard, I would in a heartbeat.

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

#529

Post by hertzrat »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
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-…

> 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…

> The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is.

Any large company could invest in some experimentation, whether their marketing directors want it or not. It makes sense that at least a few do but just don’t publish the results

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

#530

Post by ghaff »

shadowgovt wrote: post #524
ghaff wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a subset of the misunderstanding of "meritocracy" that defines it as "how well you can do at a narrowly-defined task" as opposed to the practical definition of "How many people know how well you do at a narrowly-defined task." Our industry is shot-through with idealists who believe meritocracy should be the former, when in reality it's always been the latter (and always will be, unless someone can invent omnisci…

Well, and arguably, "How many people know how well you do at a set of tasks that are broadly relevant to them."
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