The story of Uber who knew the truth that he threw away 10 billion yen advertising expenses to the drain (2024)

The world of digital advertising, which displays ads on websites and apps, is becoming more and more complex, andit is sometimes pointed out that the supply chain is opaque and 'almost fraudulent'. Uber, which is famous for its ride-hailing and food delivery services, once fell into a situation where ``the performance did not change even if we reduced the advertising costs we were paying by two-thirds,'' said a specialist in brand protection in digital marketing. Compiled by Nandini Jammi , the house.

createsend.com/t/d-7426D8509B0D40372540EF23F30FEDED
http://createsend.com/t/d-7426D8509B0D40372540EF23F30FEDED

Mr. Jammi seems to have had the opportunity to talk with Uber's former marketing director Kevin Frisch via LinkedIn, and at that time Uber blocked Breitbart News Network, an American online news site. He heard about an anecdote that happened.

In 2017, it was pointed out that ``Uber is trying to disperse the demonstration against President Trump's immigration policy,' ' triggered a movement called `` #DeleteUber '' to urge Uber's account deletion. Jammi, a former leader of the Sleeping Giants , a human rights group that persuades companies to remove ads from conservative news outlets such as Breitbart, was campaigning against Uber in support of '#DeleteUber' at the time. It seems that Mr. Frisch was an unpleasant existence and thought that he wanted to be hit by a bus.

Uber has since removed Breitbart from advertising, but for some reason Uber's ads continued to appear on Breitbart. Regarding this point, Sleeping Giants sent a message directly to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's Twitter account, and Kalanick said to Frisch, 'Oh my God, haven't you dealt with it yet?' I asked.

Frisch, who had instructed all vendors to block Breitbart, was suspicious of this situation and found that one of the vendors was not blocking ads. I immediately blocked it, but at the time of blocking, 10% of the total advertising cost of 150 million dollars (about 15 billion yen) was consumed.

In the case of Uber's ads, advertising costs were generated when clicked , so although it was a mistake, Mr. Frisch thought that the consumption of this amount of advertising costs should lead to an increase in new customers. However, it turned out that there was no change in performance at all even after spending 15 million dollars (1.5 billion yen).

When Mr. Frisch audited, ``Where did the $ 15 million disappear?'', suspicious behavior was observed, such as logging in to Uber two seconds after the user clicked the advertisem*nt from the log . Since a human user wouldn't do this, we suspected that the vendor was using a bot to click on the ad and consume the ad dollars. When Mr. Frisch conducted an experiment to stop two-thirds of advertising expenses to ascertain the truth, the performance did not change. It turned out that over $100 million in ad spend was wasted on bots.

In recent years, there are many companies that use targeted advertising via ad networks and DSPs , but Uber says that ``performance did not change even if we reduced two-thirds of the advertising costs we were actually paying.'' There are also cases like Uber should have been able to reduce the cost spent for the achieved growth / acquisition goal to one tenth, after that Mr. Frisch reduced the advertising cost to 50 million dollars (about 5 billion yen), advertising Mr. Jammi spells that the shape of the campaign has also changed significantly.