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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

#671

Post by utopcell »

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…

> 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 :)

Fact checking you: On Google, I see at most a single ad (on most refreshes for Ozonetel, on one occasion for something called dialpad, on some cases, no ad is shown) and then your website, whatever it may be. It would seem that you are trying to piggyback on this article's discussion to increase awareness of your brand, which is not cool.

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

#672

Post by sn_master »

DanBC wrote: post #270
sn_master wrote: post #182

Can someone explain the tweet for me please? I am really confused on what she's trying to say.

Uber were running ads, and some of them were appearing on Breitbart. There's a campaign called "sleeping giants" that looks at a company's corporate values, and looks at where that company is advertising, and asks whether that ad placement is compatible with the values. Breitbart has freedom to say what they like, but customers of Uber don't have to buy the megaphone. Uber tried to pull the ads from Breitbart. But th…

ah, so the investigation into the Brietbart campaign made them discover other things completely unrelated to Brietbart itself. Thanks!

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

#673

Post by 40four »

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

Ok you guys made me curious, so I tried to. I got Ozonetel at the top, zero ads! I win! :)

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

#676

Post by [deleted] »

soared wrote: post #99
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 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…

[deleted]

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

#677

Post by fomine3 »

soared wrote: post #668
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’…

But does it need dedicated datacenter? I wonder they just run different service instance rather than datacenter.

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

#679

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

jedberg wrote: post #223
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one can actually prove it has any ROI at all. That's a philosophical question of whether you consider statistics to be "proof". > No one is willing to run the experiments necessary. You're nuts if you think this is true. I assure you that companies in traditional industries (i.e., without venture capital) can and do run these experiments. The Uber story is about venture capital and its anti-market incentives, no…

Read the podcast transcript. An economist proposed turning off print ads in one market to find out if they mattered, and the head of marketing said he’d rather not know.

"Chief marketing officer of Unilever" isn't the guy running experiments, he's the guy that hires ad agencies and auditors that in turn have teams of data scientists running various experiments for Unilever.

I guess you could propose a conspiracy theory that all these people are conspiring to put together fake reports and data sets, but that sounds extremely unrealistic - ad agencies are essentially money-counting businesses like banks, and they take data security very seriously. (Because usually they'd be audited at every step.)

In short, smart people have already thought about these issues, and there isn't any inherent pro-advertising bias in industry, rather the opposite.

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

#680

Post by KirillPanov »

netsharc wrote: post #298
ggm wrote: post #237

For research we made ads which were grey, flat field, and basically said "please don't click on me" and we got astronomical numbers of clicks sometimes. Hmm...

But... reverse psychology works? Wouldn't people be curious what's behind the "curtain"?

A better test ad would be something that looks like an obscure website failure/error message, like "404 Ad Not Found 18afe4481".

Or even just a copy of the placeholder image $POPULAR_BROWSER uses when an link is broken.

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